I was merely emphasising the parts of your words that my comment related to. It is common practice to mark in bold the words a person's comment is relating to, rather than simply stripping out every word not relevant to the following comment.

Yes and no, stat restore and No more annoying messages are pretty close to each other at the bottem of the load order, however spell delete is almost at the top of the load order. So does it matter if these three are merged where I load them?

EDIT: Is it actually safe to merge these mods, i've never done this before.

LOD95-

1. test each mod for how they function and make sure they function as intended.

2. open just those mods in tes4edit and run the apply filter feature.

Look to see if there are any red entries in the various directories of these mods. (my bet is that there are none and everything is white).

That is a good indication that they are safe to merge - as they don't conflict with each other.

3. then run them again with full load order and see if they conflict with any other active mod and if they need to load after another mod in order to win a conflict to maintain their functionality.

Again my bet is that those mods don't conflict much with anything; however, since 2/3 of the mods in question load low then make the merged mod load low.

4. merge the mods and test for functionality - do they work as they did if not merged?

Keep the originals around (not necessarily in data folder) if you later find a problem so that you can test functionality both with merged product and with individual mods.

read through this and past threads for the special care to be taken for cell and worldspace edits. This wont be have that kind of problem. Game tweaks are some of the safest things to merge. I made two mods that I've added to slowly over the months: game tweaks early and game tweaks late. You can see what kind of mods get merged into each version and what I do to test each prior to and after merging.

Thanks a bunch! I am going to try this

I've done a lot of reading about merging these past two days and I feel like I can give it a better shot (I dont think my previous attempt at merging went perfectly well.. )
Though I do have a really simple question that I cant understand...

Why must we merge mods in Gecko?!?!
As an example.. (Purely hypothetical, but very relevant)
Lets say I have a UL which revamps a specific area, and I also have a mod which dumps the entrence to a cave there. The mods arent compatible, and the cave is now floating 6 foot off of the floor. So I get a patch for it. All this patch does is raise the ground to the caves level, so it is no longer floating.

What is stopping me from opening the TESCS, loading Oblivion.esm, the UL.esp and the patch.esp and setting the UL.esp as my active file. Cant I litteraly just save the .esp now? Making UL.esp have a raised floor in the first place, and then just delete the patch??

In my mind that should work for all kinds of things.
A real example would be with 'Let there be darkness'. I have to use an extra .esp ''Mehrunes Razor compatibility'' with it since I use that official DLC. Whats stopping me loading Oblivion.esm, Let there be darkness, Mehrunes Razor and the compatibility patch into the CS and then save. Could I now get rid of all of them except Oblivion.esm and Let there be darkness?
Why not?

If your comfortable with the CS then use it. It is able to do much more than Gecko or even edit in certain circumstances.

I'm not comfortable with it and don't see myself diving into it.

I have used tes4edit to merge the changes of a patch into a mod.

Case in point - for Bartholm to be used with UL Panther River it is best to use the Bartholm-Panther river patch which edits very very little. So, what I did was load UL Panther River and that patch into tes4edit then copied and pasted the changes from the patch over to the UL mod itself. Now that UL works great with Bartholm.

Loading the UL and its patch into the CS won't simply cause the land to save into the UL mod. You have to do something to initiate the edit first. Usually nudging the landscape would do it. If you're talking purely about landscape editing, yes, this will work, and it will allow you to remove the patch mod once done. The problem lies with what happens when the UL gets updated for some reason down the road. You'd have to do the work all over again.

The razor problem is a bit more complicated because what you're doing requires editing cells in the razor plugin. You'd need to first ESMify Razor, then load everything into the CS. When you go to make your edits with Let There be Darkness as the active plugin, it will now become dependent on the razor plugin. If you never plan to upgrade to a new version of LTBD then you're fine. But as soon as you do you lose your edits and have to do all that over again. You can't get rid of Razor because that would break the dependency you just established. Besides, you'd lose the data from the DLC that way.

This is why patch files are in fact useful - they do the work but don't get torched when the mods they modify get updated. Merging needs to be done with more care than other things. And while the CS does have a merging function, it's a piece of junk that more often breaks things instead of fixing them. This is why Gecko is the preferred tool for the job.

Hold on that won't work. With the UL active, its land height edits will override the patch ESP, thus the land height will remain at the same height which leaves the cave six feet in the air. Instead, you should use TES4Edit to remove the land record from the ESP, then copy as override the land record from the patch into the UL ESP. This will make the patch redundant (until the UL gets an update, as pointed out by Arthmoor, at which point you'd need to repeat this with the new version of the UL).



Arthmoor meant ESMify in the above sentence.

Er, yeah. What he said.

In general though it's just not worth the level of hassle to merge landscape mods like this. There are other types of mods that will respond better and present fewer issues.

Okay guys thanks for clearing that up for me, I think I understand better why Gecko is needed.
I have another question but regarding dependancies.
If I have modA which is dependant on ModB, can I use Tes4Edit to remove that dependancy without any problems as long both as ModA and ModB continue to load into my game?

Also, I am most interested in merging the mods which are a part of the same package, but have three or four different versions you must use depending on wheter you have SI/any other speicific DLC. As such, these mods almost always seem to load together in blocks. Bearing this in mind, could someone please confirm that there wont anything wrong with creating a merged mod with multiple dependancies. (As I understand it, Load order is the only issue that can arise, yeah?)

EDIT
Last I just wanted confrimation on this - If I have a clean mod and a clean patch for that mod, and I want to merge the patch into the mod - I should always first convert the original .esp to an .esm - then use 'Merge to master' and convert it back into an .esp afterwads.
Thats correct, yes?

Yes, as long as the dependency isn't actually needed. Right-click on the dependent mod, and choose "Clean Masters". This will remove any masters it doesn't need.
But if it does need the master, then manually removing the dependency will break things (open Heading record, see list of masters, right-click remove master). Don't do this! Don't manually remove a master even if it is safe to do so, the program won't do it right. The "Clean Masters" option is set up to correctly handle a master-removal and is the only way you should attempt to remove masters with TES4Edit.



No one can confirm that. It entirely depends on the ESPs in question. Yes, it is fine for one ESP to have a number of masters, but will it be okay for what you create? Maybe not.

So then.. how exactly would you define a mod needing a master? If something has a master it never even used, why would it be there in the first place?

Also after selecting 'Clean masters' I didnt get any confirmation popups telling me I did something, it just bolded the mod. Thats normal, right?

A mod needs a master if the dependent mod references the master. If it doesn't contain any references to the master, then the master will be removed when you run "Clean Masters". Why would it have an uneeded master? Two possible reasons that I can think of:
1) The CS. It's bugged. It does things it shouldn't do, such as assigning any loaded ESMs or ESMified ESPs as master to the active ESP upon save, even if the active ESP doesn't reference these ESMs or ESMified ESPs.
2) A mod might once have had a genuine dependency, which no longer exists.



Yes, that's normal. If a master is removed, then the text lines will turn bold. Best move now is to save and exit, then reload the ESP in TES4Edit.

Brilliant, thanks for the clarification! That really clears things up for me.
I'll see what I can do from here..

EDIT:
Yay! I converted LTBD Cyrodiil + SI.esp to an .esm, then merged first the LTBD KOTN.esp into the master, and then the Mehrunes one, converted back to .esp and it went perfect. That was far far more simple than I thought it would be.
Though that was a very simple merge.. now i'm on to bigger and better things!

Me again.
I have a question about copy/pasting the changes in mods which was mentioned earlier in the thread.

I'm currently attempting to merge The Lost Spires with The Lord Spires Delayer patch so that I have just the one .esp but it doesnt give me the quest the second I start the game.

Obviously I cannot just merge the two .esps together because the patch is dependant on the original and I would end up with a mod dependant on itself.
Neither can I remove the patches dependancy on the original because it directly references something in the lost spires.

So how can I use tes4edit to directly copy the changes that the patch makes into the original? (It only makes very, very few changes)
Thanks!

That's a little difficult to answer without having the Lost Spires ESPs to hand...

Where the Delayer ESP is editing records from the LS ESP, you can click-drag the entries in the record on the right into the record on the left. This will turn yellow lines green (green is good here).
You cannot do this for some parts of script records, quest records, or dialogue topic records.
Where the Delayer ESP contains new records, you would need to copy as new into the LS ESP, then change referencing records for the Delayer record to point to the newly created record in the LS ESP.

Depending upon exactly what the Delayer ESP contains, this is either exceedingly easy, or exceedingly messy to carry out if you don't know what you're doing.

Erm...
That was insanely easy! I litterally click-dragged two parts that were orange to the left and everything was green!!
I'ma go test it. Thanks

EDIT: Yep, its worked. :lmao:
So why is it that sometimes this does not work? How will I know it has failed due to that? Some angry error message?

TES4Edit cannot edit scripts. So if the Delayer ESP had made changes to scripts in the LS ESP (and quest records contain scripts) then you would not have been able to drag them across. Sometimes copy as override will transfer a script successfully, but sometimes this gives an error and only transfers part of the record.

So it all depends on how the Delayer was designed. Clearly this one was a nice simple one, but the creator might have used scripts and quests and things to do it all. The LS Delayer adds in a player level requirement doesn't it? That would simply be the addition of a condition into the initial quest record, most likely, and thus as you say, just a case of dragging the requirement across.

Do check however to make absolutely sure that there aren't any other records in the Delayer ESP that aren't overriding records!

Okay so now i'm slightly confused. The LS delayer .Esp only made two changes. If I expand it to look in tes4edit I can see it makes one script change (aaarevealscript) and one worldspace edit in ''LeyawiinWorld''. So if it made a script change... why was I able to just click and drag across without any errors?
Urgh.

Without seeing the ESP myself (and I can't as my home internet doesn't work, and here at work I'm not allowed to download files like mods) I can't say. But any script edits made within TES4Edit should require that you then load the ESP in the CS and recompile the script. Did you test the edited ESP in a clean environment? This means a save which has NEVER had the Lost Spires ESP active in it.

EDIT
And I forgot to mention, TES4Edit would still allow you to make such an edit, I just wouldn't expect the script to run in-game.

TES4Edit will allow you to edit the source code of a script, you can't compile it though.

However, you can drag an already compiled script from one side of the window to the other and it will run in game just fine. I've done this plenty of times and it works properly. You only run into the assertion error bug if you're trying to copy dialogue or quest stages that contain result scripts. Regular script records don't have that problem.

So the LS delayer is an easy drag-n-drop fix, as is the TOTF delayer. The GT Aesgaard delayer can't be done right now with t4e because of the assertion errors.

Good to hear that the TOTF one will be just as easy! (I am moving onto that soon )
As for GT Aesgaard, I think i'll just run two copies of the Cs at once then manually edit the plugin according to what the delayer did. That should take a little longer but work just fine, I suppose.

Quick question, merging mods which have ini files, good or bad? And if it's possible, will they automatically and only use the default settings, or can u still use the ini file the change it as you see fit?

That can be done - within limits I'm sure.

I've merged all the extra Progress esp each with their own ini into one esp.

Good or bad depends on what the mods do. Whatever the outcome of that, yes, the merged file will still be able to use the ini as normal.