OK, pretty clear thanks and, by the sound of it, one more reason to be very glad for the existence of Wrye Mash which reliably automates this for the non-CS deft user.

A question of clarification - in the first case - does the process work just like that for multiples - mod1 + mod2 + mod3 + mod4 + mod5 etc - or do they need to be merged in sequentially, one at a time?

Secondly, let's assume I have no idea which level lists are affected by which mods, a situation which is pretty general I reckon, what is the safest 'best practice'? [And assuming further that this new player is best staying away from much tinkering in the CS for a week or so yet.]
Would it be:
- in TESTool, generate merged objects.esp for the mods to be merged
- in Wrye Mash, select the mods and merged objects.esp
- generate Mashed lists.esp
- open the TESCS and launch it with mods to be merged + merged objects + Mashed lists
- merge these together
- [edit] clean the merged mod

And if so, would that not be a sensible way to merge mods on a routine basis, just in case?

Edit:content

Hello,

You can merge in one time as many (or as much? I think I should really have listen better to my english teachers ) mods as you want.
You just need to create the 'merged leveld lists esp' for all the mods you want to merge, then merge them all together with the TESCS.

That's what I always do when I want to merge mods. If the merged objects and merged leveled lists mods are not useful for merging some mods together, it won't be a problem if they are used. The final merged mods will be exactly the same as if you didn't use them. So if you want to be sure to have a safe merging, you should always do that.

Bjam

No problem. I should have listened to my English teachers too (that would be my mother, grammar Dictator). She thinks I should still listen to her all the time.
So, you can merge as many mods at one time as you want.




Wow, that's incredibly helpful. Okay. One (perhaps obvious) footnote: I presume the last step would be to clean the merged mod, because merging creates those extra cells out in the ocean or wherever?

Hello,

Thank you for correcting my mistakes. :embarrased:

Yes, of course.
Edit:

Do we have the same mother? Or are they all the same? :shrug:
Oh... I guess that's what a good mother should do...

Bjam

Sorry for the delay, I had to go back in the hospital for a few days again. I had two surgerys in two days. Whew! That was an ordeal.

Cool! Since no one objects, I'll just get started on this.

I won't be able to work all out on it due to having medical appointments and radiation and chemo treatments on top of work, but I should still be able to progress fairly quickly on getting the first draft done.

With all the info already provided here, I will block out a basic tut and present it for y'all to examine and critique.

Then we'll start getting the kinks worked out of it and polishing it.


Thankyou all for offering to help, and for entrusting me with this quest.

:)


Nav

Hey, two days is nothing on a big ship. Look after your health as that is much more important. You have my continued good wishes for that.
The rest sounds good . . . as and when. Shout when you need some assaistance. Looks like there are enough of us interested in this to make help fairly readily available.

Meanwhile, we'll just keep posting questions for the experts to answer and you to include, si?

Couppla things folk contributing to this may want to give some thought to. No urgency but doing so may save some wheel-spinning down the road.

1. First is, what format(s)? Don't really want to see Eveeran_Knight get all finished only to have someone say it needs to be something else that is more useful, usable, pretty etc . . .
Relates a bit to #2.

2. Where is it going? See the discussion over here - http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=527008&hl=, only because it informs what we might want to do with this one. Me, I'm for getting it sorted out, using it for a couppla weeks so it gets some 'peer review' from folk, revising as necessary and then distributing it as widely as possible for download and/or use in people's tut forums, with a version number and a free-use statement on it . . . but that's me and someone else may have a better idea for other good reasons?

Hello,

I think an html page could be the best choice: allows links to useful tools / screenshots

It is a good way to make the tutorial. The most difficult could be to track all the different versions, but I don't think that there will be a lot.

Bjam

Alrighty, so let's say this forthcoming tutorial has made me very brave about dabbling in the CS and I have a new, very valuable 'shiny' that I want to place into the game world but I wish to have it 'drop' only very rarely. Based on what has been explained above, I can achieve that rarity in a variety of ways that lower the probabilities of the shiny appearing:

1. specify that the item will drop only at several = to the PC level; not at any <= to the PC level

2. place the item in a levelled list with many different other items (lower value); lots of alchemical ingredients, misc items, cheap armour and weapons etc - many items

3. increase the count of the other different items in the list; many item1, item1, item1 etc

4. using the 'chance none' box, select a very high value - say, 98 and there will be a 2% chance that the item will appear

5. place the 'shiny' in only one levelled list inside another levelled list that contained many other lists, any of which could roll when the upper level list executes.

6. various combinations of the strategies #1-5 above - should be about ten or so permutations there.



In general terms, is that about right as far as strategies to adopt to achieve rarity?
Are there others that I have missed?

If I can get this straight, I will edit this post to reflect any corrections, thanks.

Hello,


It can be a good way, however, if the player is not exactly at the right level when he looks for the item (i.e. when he opens a barrel, or a chest...), he'll never get it. So you should be very careful if you decide to do this.

Probably one of the best way, just put a lot of cheap items with one powerful item in a list, so this powerful item will have a very low chance to appear.

It is nearly the same as 2. What really counts is the number of high level item and the level of low level item, not what the low level items are. For example, if list 1 have 4 identical cheap food and 1 diamond, you'll have 25% of getting the diamond. If the list 2 contains 4 differents cheap food and one diamond, you'll also have 25% chance of getting the diamond.

The problem if you do this is that there are 98% chance that you get nothing, whereas with the way you descvribe above, you'll have at least a few cheap items in the container.

you can make one list called 'food', which contains 3 types of lists: one 'cheap food', one 'medium food' and one 'great food'. Then you put for example the 'cheap food' list 10 times in the 'food' list, the 'medium food', 3 times, and the 'great food' only once. If you do this, you'll have a lot of chance of getting cheap food, and a very low chance of getting great food. Of course, you can combine this with the 'chance none' to make the great food harder to find. And you'll have to play with the levels at which each items in each list can appear. So you can get a very low chance to have the best irem at very low level, but it won't be impossible, and at the opposite, you'll have a greater chance of getting the best item when you're at a high level, but without making the cheap item impossible to get.

I think that you've covered all the different possibilities. The hardest part when you make a levelled list is to know what you want to get, not to make it. For example, do you want to get a few of the best item at a low level, or non at all? Do you want still some possibilities to have cheap item at high level or not? At a high level, do you want the best item appearing nearly everytime, or only more frequently than at low level, but with the low level items that keep their chance to be the most frequent appearing items?
When you exactly what you want to get in your levelled list, you have really done the biggest part of the work.

Those were not correction, maybe just some 'precision'.

Bjam

Wow, this is all very nice :goodjob:
Wish I'd seen this thread before.

One thing I'd like to add, but I could be wrong about it and would like to know if I am, is that if you use TESTool and it's resequencer to merge lists any duplicate items in a list will be ignored.

example:
Your list contains
1 iron dagger
1 iron axe
3 steel sword
3 steel sword
3 steel axe

When you merge your plugins lists together the two level 3 steel swords will be turned into 1 steel sword to look like this:

1 iron dagger
1 iron axe
3 steel sword
3 steel axe

So if you're trying to add a slew of items, or creatures, and make it all random, you do not want to put a dozen of the same item in a list, at the same level, to try and make it more likely to be picked by the game. I've seen this done before, and I'm sure I've done it before. It's sloppy, and the creative use of multiple lists inside of lists will help you more.

Can anyone conferm if I'm wrong or not about this?

Has this actually been confirmed to be a true 'per cent' value? In my own experience experimenting with LL's, the 'Chance None' doesn't always work perfectly. I'd put 90% Chance None, slap five units of the LL in a crate, and I'd still get 3 or 4 items most of the time. I started to suspect that the chance is out of 255, or something like that, but I couldn't reliably confirm that (on my slow computer, it's difficult to do extensive testing).

I found that the best way to tweak the chances was to use the lists-within-a-list method, possibly with some empty lists thrown in for a better chance of getting nothing.

Thanks, Daedin Roxer, that's very useful to know.

I am hoping someoene will post the answer to your true 'per cent' value question.

Meanwhile, blockhead has confirmed here - http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=556049 - that: Also good to know. The test thread and test plugin download are here - http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=558079&st=0&gopid=8075792&#entry8075792 - should you wish to check it out yourself. Thanks, blockhead.

Looks like we are still waiting on expert opinion on the true 'per cent' value question.

It seem possible that , for personal reasons, Eveeran_Knight might be unable to complete this as he originally thought?

Anyone else with the requisite knowledge interested in pulling this together and filling a pretty big hole in the tutorial bucket?

Ok! Noobie input!

Well! Not really a noobie as I've been playing Morrowind since it first came out; however, I'm not a modder and know very little about the CS; but, I am very interested in merging mod lists so that they work better, rather than just clicking them in an order with the last mod being clicked gets-the-worm.

All of the above comments, (I read all of them) made my head spin with what you could do by doing this, this, this, and that, that, and that. What I got is that the CS is not very user friendly for someone that doesn't have a Masters Degree in Math, Computer Programing, and Computer Sciences. Maybe there would need to be some other Master's Degrees thrown in for good measure as-well, I don't know? And that's the whole issue, I don't know.

But, this thread is greatly appreciated in the desire to actually present this, for people that only want to play this marvelous game with all the marvelous mods available with as much ease as possible. After all, I am sure that those who make/create mods do not do so only for the benefit of their peers. I shall assume that the greater number of people that enjoy these mods is the ideal goal of every modder. That everyone here is taking/making this effort to do this very thing confirms this assumption.

I've also noticed that the majority of people on this forum, actually take the time to help people with "dumb" questions. This is very comforting for those of us without Masters Degrees. (My Joke!)

So what "kind" of input can I add to this? Well! Trying to understand the CS is out (for me anyway). I can understand Testool and "merge list" function as it's fairly straightforward; but, then it breaks down and becomes complicated as it doesn't always have the desired effect. The merging dialogue is not game friendly, and many times the merge objects, lose items that dissappear, ingame.

I think that the best solution is Wry Mash; however, I have yet to figure out how it merges? I think that this program, and that thread on it seems the most promising, especially since my past experience with it has given me confidence in it's inate abilities to preserve game stability when every thing else failed. Including some of the "dumb" things that I did with the game. Lol.

I hope that this thread isn't given up on or lost as I believe that the majority of Morrowind players really need it and your help!

Keep On Truckin'

Bump?

Lemme get this straight .. I'm not very good at statistic ._.

Chance none is done once .. every item in the list have equal chance of appearing based on whats left from that percent? What I mean is, if there is 1 item in the list, and chance none = 20, that item have 80% chance appearing .. and if there's 2 items, then each item have 40% chance to appear?

Question, let say I have 1 NPC ... and I want him to sell 2 random items .. How do I set his LL so that he
a) have 1 item to sell at least;
B) have both items to sell;
c) sometimes have no items to sell at all.
d) combination of all 3 above.

Answer:
a) put those random items on 1 list, chance none = 0
B) have 2 LL; LL1 and LL2 .. put LL2 twice in LL1 and assign LL1 to the NPC. Chance none = 0
c) same with (a) but set chance none to something else > 0
d) same as (B). chance none > 0

Am I right? or way off? I *think* (B) and (d) is waaaaaaaaaay off @_@ ... but I really wanted the answer for (d)

Okay, I think I have a decent handle on what the leveled lists do. I'm learning the hard way. But I have a question, How do you add multiple items in a leveled list, for instance.
Arrows- How do you make more than 1 show up in a leveled list?

I understand how to do it in a container "20" in the count column, or "-20" for a merchant container.

BUMP for Miran.

Just a bump to keep this from disappearing. Can anybody but this into a tutorial format?

That was the original hope and there was a volunteer at one time, subsequently unable to complete it for pressing personal reasons.
Point is, if someone was willing to do this, it's up for grabs and would be helpful it seems.

Unfortunately, you cannot add multiple items in a levelled list (like 20 arrows), this feature was added into Oblivion though.
Makes adding marksmen ammo annoying as loot.

I've got lots of experience with levelled lists (they are not actually that difficult), so I'm happy to answer questions put here, but I don't have time for making a tutorial.

Thanks, PirateLord, answering questions is itself a big help. :thumbsup:


Also, cross-referencing to several resources on scripting and levelled lists:

http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Tes3Mod:Leveled_Lists

http://www.gamesas.com/bgsforums/index.php?showtopic=825711, a recent ES mod forum thread

Anyone with tutorial building skills who is willing to do this?