I'm still no expert on merging so I thought I'd ask the forum for advice. I'd like to use a number of the quest delayers in this mod http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25859 and The Lost Spires delayer from this mod http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=25946. Now I ran out of esp slots long ago so I thought I might merge these.

Question for the experts: Is this a good idea or a bad one?



Thanks for any help
zedas

Its generally a great idea, I have merged many item/clothing mods in order to save space in my mod list with no known issues so far. Just be conscious of any conflict warning messages that come up in TES4Gecko during the merging process. Your delayers should all work fine since they affect completely different quests.

EDIT: But wait, most of these are mergeable in Wrye Bash if you have it, so they don't contribute to your total mod count limit...

Ahh. I was thinking merging in Gecko. I haven't checked them in Wrye Bash yet. If they're all green then I guess I'm good to go.

Aside: What's the file limit in the data directory? I think I remeber seeing a post saying that Oblivion conks out around 400.

I think the limit is 255(or around there) active mods(.esm/.esp) and 300-400 mods including inactive(yes apparently oblivion scans even inactive esp and crash if you have too much...)

For the first limit there is Wrye Bash and merging(if a module is green in Wrye Bash it's ok to merge it generally(exceptions with NoMerge tagged ones)).
For the 2nd limit Wrye Bash has an auto-ghosting feature that will rename all inactive/merged mod and add .ghost to them so that Oblivion doesn't scan them.

The limit is 254 not including your Oblivion.esm which is already there in vanilla

Ahh. I thought the data directory limit might have been in reference to total files contained. I have 343 files and 16 directories with about 10 more esp's on the docket.

As an FYI, data directory limit for me is *exactly* 400 ESP + ESM + BSA files. No other files matter.

If I add those up and they are 400 or > then after playing just a few minutes I will see missing landscape, meshes/textures dissapear, AI goes wonkey, sky turns purple and/or the game crashes shortly afterwards.

If I remove one ESP or ESM or BSA file, so I am at 399, then everything works fine. Doesn't matter which one. Big, small, complex, simple... its purely the total count. I merge many mods BSA files together using OBMM to work around this.

This is all discussed in another thread, search for "thrashing" or something like that.