Allright, for those of who have been living under a rock, Morrowind's Construction set comes with a command that will combine mods into one mod. It's called Combine Loaded Plugins, found under file.

Now, I'm having some issues with it. As any modern Morrowind player does, I've downloaded a bunch of mods. However, for simplicity's sake, I used the command so I have one mod loaded into the game (and for easier editing of content of said mod. It's not enough for me to download and put it in, I gotta monkey around with it a bit as well.)

Now, my problem is that certain aspects of the vanilla content are... off. For instance, Bayln Omaril's house has his corpse, and his tipped-over chair, thrown silverware, etc., while he's standing outside and said tipped-over chair is also as if nothing has happened.

Basically, it's displaying the "before" and "after" versions of Mephala's quest at the same time. And I've tracked it down to the combined mod as the root cause.

Here's where I'm left scratching my head. All the seperate mods, when loaded as seperate mods, will not cause this (and, presumably, other vanilla content problems) to happen. Yet when I put all of those mods together as one mega-mod, those problems pop up. And this is without me doing any further modifications in the mega-mod.

Yeah, I know the answer is probably "don't combine them into one mod, stupid," but does anyone know why this happens and methods to avoid/minimize the risk of it happening?

For those wondering, I have about 80 mods that are included within this mega-mod.

don't try combining more than 2 at once
don't try combining them if you don't know exactly what they are doing
try http://planetelderscrolls.gamespy.com/View.php?view=Utilities.Detail&id=78, it may work sometimes

If the problems only come about when you merge the mods like this, I can only presume that the problem is related to load order.

If 2 mods conflict, the last mod to load (the most recently modified) will overwrite any changes from the mod that loaded before it. My guess would be that after merging the plugins, the load order was messed up, resulting in some problems.

Of course, ideally it shouldn't be a case of "I'll have the changes from this mod OR that one", but apparently Bethesda weren't able to merge multiple changes that affect the same object, only choose the latest one; this is why, by the looks of things, the "smartmerger" program that abot posted may be a better option.

Can't tell if Smartmerger worked or not since the output file generally causes a crash whenever I try to start a new or saved game. I'm guessing it failed- badly.

At any rate, what are the general rules on using the Combine Loaded Plugins command? Is it what Abot said? And if so, can I get around the "2 mods" thing by, say, combining 4 mods into 2 and then into 1?

I think it really depends on the mods. Personally I see no harm in merging 50 small, totally unrelated mods, as long as it's done right (whether or not the CS will do it right, I have no idea, but I don't see any problems with the theory).

You might want to check out http://gmml.pbworks.com/w/page/5990237/MergeMods.

Allright, the problem seems to be with the Combine Loaded Plugins command itself.

I've done several mini-compiled mods (based on their rough category- changes to vanilla armor, new armor, misc. mods, and body/race mods) and ALL FOUR of these mods caused the same issue. So unless all four passed a critical mod number threshold (above 10 or so), the number of mods combined don't really matter, it's the fact that I'm combining them.

So, does anyone know how many mods Morrowind can tolerate before it becomes unstable?

Well if you want to be sure, you could always try your idea of merging 2 at a time? But that's probably a bit of a pain...



Define unstable, hehe... Morrowind isn't really stable at the best of times.
Nonetheless, I've heard of people running hundreds of plugins without problems, so I don't think there's really a limit, or certainly not one to be concerned about.

Right.

Well, just merged two extremely minor mods together (the two Ten Pace Boots fix- one's for the pair in Morrowind, the other is for the pair that appears in Tribunal's museum. Basically, one is for Morrowind, and the other is a seperate add-on to the first for those who have Tribunal.)

Still happened. Apparently, my system or Morrowind doesn't like having more than one mod being merged on it. So, there's basically no real fix for it.

Well, thanks for the help. Looks like the only way I can do what I want is by, erm, creating a seperate plugin "patch" that will store the changes I want in the other mods, and not compiling. Hopefully, Morrowind won't throw a fit...

--EDIT--

Looks like the combined plugins is NOT the problem! Apparently, one or more of the .esps are. And since the problems only occur on a new game... yeah, it's gonna be one of THOSE deals of systematically removing .esps until I hit the right one. I'll start by removing all of the mods I like the least...

It's the presence of mods that's causing the errors! I can't tell which mod is causing the problems- it must be most or all of them. That means that the Combine Loaded Plugins command isn't the problem, it's probably the game itself running on this system.

Only way to solve them is to go in and literally fix every bug I know about... gonna be fun. Only good news about that is that it's a very short list.

Strange... can you post your mod list?

Are you testing this merged mod with a new game?

Yep.