So, I've made a mod that lets me craft food. In the mod I have a bunch of leveled lists into which I've loaded raw ingredients (beef, mutton, board meat etc into Raw Meats, apple and watermelon into Fruits, etc). It's Cobl dependent and works perfectly with Vanilla and Cobl ingredients. I can make recipes and use those recipes to make new food dishes.

I want to have a Wrye Bash "filter" patch to allow ingredients from other mods to be used in the food creation recipes that the player makes. The same sort of thing that's already included with Cobl to load mod added foods to it's dinner plate, and the same thing that Item Interchange does.

So I do this:

• ESMify my mod with Bash
  
• ESMify the mod I want to add items from, lets say MoreVegetables.esp
  
• load them both in the CS (and by default, Oblivion.esm and Cobl.esm are included as they're the masters for my mod)
  
• add the items from MoreVegetables to the leveled lists in my mod
  
• click okay on the leveled list windows
  
• click save - the CS crashes here.

I've tried it with lots of mods (MMM, Elsweyr, Diverse Water Life, Qarl's Harvest, and more), both individually and all at once. Same thing - the CS always crashes upon save and the resulting esp has a bad header and no utilities or the CS will load it.

Can anyone help? Do the masters need to be in a specific order to make a deisolated patch? Do I need to put my lists into a proper ESM master and build my mod around it? It there an easy way to use TES4Edit to move stuff into levelled lists? I mainly use TES4Edit for cleaning, and for looking at mods and checking overrides... I've never used it to create a patch.

I would imagine that you should NOT esmify your mod, i.e. the mod you want to update. The rest of the incantation looks appropriate.

I esmify my mod because I'm making a new mod, a patch that will be dependent upon it and other mods. The masters for the new patch will be Oblivion.esm, Cobl.esm, MyMod.esp, and lots of other ESMs abd... you get the idea. This patch will be filtered into the bashed patch, and the magic of Wrye Bash will let people use whichever combo of mods they want and the leveled lists of my mod will contain the appropriate items from their source mods.

At least, that's the theory. :banghead:

Assuming you're normally able to make esp files from scratch (there's a Vista bug where you can't), your problem is most likely that you haven't made an exterior edit to a vanilla cell.

Do this - before you go change anything else, pick some random exterior cell in Tamriel, and move the Z axis on a tree very slightly. Then go make all your edits. It should then work.

You can later remove that edit with TES4Edit, but you'll need to do something like it every time you want to edit and save your patch.

Yes, that bug is extremely annoying.

Ah ha! I knew there had to be something obscure and esoteric that I didn't know about the process. Thanks much.

Is there someplace where all these little bugs are documented? I had a look on the TESTCSWiki but didn't find anything applicable.

Oh, and I just had a look at your Prayer Idles mod.... I love immersive stuff like that. Nice work!

Glad you like the prayer idles.

I had thought I originally read about that bug in the Wiki tutorial, but I just read it again and it wasn't there, so I probably learned about it on the forums somewhere. I couldn't now tell you where though.

The only other thing that I'm aware of that you'll need to watch out for with the ESMify thing is to remember to de-ESMify everything before you go to test in-game. It won't irrevocably destroy anything, but you can wind up with strange stuff happening. Also make good and totally sure BEFORE you load up your mod in the CS that all its parents have been ESMified, or it will wipe out all of the mastering you did, and you will be VERY sad.

Beyond that you should be good as far as ESMifying goes. I can't really speak to the leveled list merge bit of what you're doing.

Yep, I know about that part, and it's well documented in the http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/De-Isolation_Tutorial.

And I'm happy to report that your advice worked perfectly, and I can now make recipes using leopard meat from MMM and coconuts from Elsweyr and whatever else my heart desires. Woot! :woot: