Unless the plugins you are merging have incompatibilities with one another, the order in which you merge them matters little. You only care about order if you are trying to preserve the formIDs or overrides. Since that merged plugin has yet to be loaded into your game, the matter in which you merge in those other plugins does not really matter as far as I can tell. If you are concerned about conflicts, you can copy the records over in TES4Edit, so that you can see the conflicts if they are there.

Okay, now I'm confused. Yes, I'm trying to preserve formIDs.

So the only way to preserve formIDs is to merge Mod1 + Mod2, save it, do a clean save and load it into the game. The merge 3 with 1&2, and go through the entire clean save process again, then again with 4 and then again with 5 and so on up to 27?

Or, in the alternative, just start a new game.

~ Dani ~

No. Simply remove all of the plugins you have merged (or plan to merge)--you can merge them whenever you want, all of them at the same time--save your game without them installed--the clean save--and load the merged plugin. Where is this merge one-by-one thing coming from? Also, what do you mean by preserving FormIDs? You are not updating an existing merge (that has already been loaded into your game), so there are no FormIDs to be preserved...

From your first post in this thread today. Quote: "You lose your items because of changed Form IDs, not RefIDs. That is why I put all of that emphasis on merging on top of merged plugins, to avoid form ID changes when updating."

I'm merging a group of armor mods. My character has some of the assets those mods add to the game. She is physically wearing them. If I do a clean save, she'll lose them, because once I remove all the original plugins, this stuff will be gone.

I was just trying to prevent that from happening.

Thanks for your help.

~ Dani ~

50 plus posts.
Really?
http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes4Mod:Mod_Merging
Go from there GothGirl

You can load merge that mod with #1 priority, and clean save the rest of the mods, while simply pointing that armor plugin's save masterlist entry to the merged plugin, and hopefully that will work out.

Thanks for the tip, but as my mother used to say, "Smaller bites, Dani." I think I'm going to wait on the huge 30 mod merge and focus on smaller merges thatI know are safe, from your list and others. Besides, I need to sort out that list of armor mods and see how many of them I'm actually going to use. For now, I just removed one of my personal mods, which puts me at the 255 mod limit.

I'm going to look for small, safer groups to merge, while I read up on merging and try to understand the process.

Thanks again for your help.

~ Dani ~

Okay, two days later and I just wanted to note that everything worked out fine.

I went back and read through the information TES Wiki info and TomLong's page, and I read through the thread posted by Psymon. I took my time and merge a couple of mods at a time, preserving the load order whenever possible by using the sequence numbering TESGecko. Maybe I didn't need to do that, but better safe than sorry. I tested everything and it worked nicely.

I finally completed the 27 armor mods and I merged all 5 Progress .esps - which gave me enough room to add that patches for Better Cities and Unique Landscapes. I have some other "item" mods I'm going to download, one at a time, merging as I go.

Currently, I have 244 esps (per Wrye Bash) and I've merged 32. I'm still nervous about merging scripted mods, etc., so I may have more questions (sorry, just trying to learn). I'm going to put that off until absolutely necessary.

Now some questions about what to merge next:

CM Companions. I know TomLong told me to be careful merging companion mods with different scripts. Right now, I'm only using CM Companions and several esps added by players (two here, six here, another dozen). All rely upon CM Companions .esm and .esp. (e.g. same masters). Can I merge these into one companion file?

The MMM "removal" files. No Beholden, No Swarms, etc. Can I merge these together?

Can I merge any of the FCOM files ('cause there's a bunch)?

Any other suggestions on files people general merge? (I know you say "game tweaks" but what kind of game tweaks? By definition, all mods are "game tweaks").

As always, thanks for your help.

~ Dan ~

Hi,

I've just skimmed this thread and I don't believe this question has been answered, sorry if I'm wrong.

I'm pretty certain the increased speed of everyone in the game is a feature of Realistic Fatigue. It's mentioned in the Readme but I can't remember the rationale for the speed increase. It's easily adjustable in the ini anyway.

Hope this helps.