As much as I love some of the DLC (Fighter's Stronghold, Knights of the Nine, Spell Tomes are some of my favorites), I get annoyed with having so many plugin files lying around, so I have two questions:

1. Can I merge the DLC into one plugin (for my personal use only) to reduce clutter.

2. I also was wondering if I could fix a few things that bother me, like fix the ridiculous item scaling in the DLC (i.e.- make it so quest rewards are always at their strongest level), and if so, would I need to make a seperate plugin (like the Unofficial Oblivion Official mods patch), or could i include my changes into the merged plugin?

1. Yeah, you can do anything for your personal use.

2. Yep, you could change things whilst merging them into one plugin

Do be aware that if you merge them, you lose anything you've received from them since the formIDs will have changed.

Should I do it before I begin the guest that DLC (except spell tomes) usually have or after I finish all the quests?

Before, yes. Well, before you start any of the quests. I don't mean like start as in the quest starts and you get the letters, I mean like you go and buy anything or do anything related to the quests.
After is bad because you will end up with a bunch of missing stuff. Even worse if you stored any items in any of the homes, because they will vanish when the cell does.
Unless you have a reason to do it after(such as wanting to do it all again, or get more scrolls from the Razor questline, or more nirnroot from the mods), do it before.

Before you start.

If you finish the quest, merge the mod and play again, you'll get the pop up from the beginning again. And you'll lose all items from the mod and all your items that you have put in container from that mod.

You simply press the report button and write your request to the moderators.



Thank you both for your answers. When I saw Arthmoor's reply I was interested do know if that's was possible.
Let say I did merged the DLC's into a single esp can I create an unique id for these items, which is are included in those mods?

You won't need to bother. The merged product will have everything it should, but if you've already completed one, you'll lose EVERYTHING that DLC gave you and you'll have to do it all over again.

So this is something you should really only do if you're starting a new game or if you've done nothing significant in any of them.

You'll also need to take into consideration things like the UOMP patches and the SM Refurbish mods. You won't have the proper setup in place for any of that to work right anymore unless you've merged THOSE into the individual DLCs FIRST. It's a complex enough process with enough points of failure that I personally don't recommend doing something like this.

If you think this is something you'll ever release, you have to make it a separate mod that uses the DLC as a master file. Otherwise, if it's just personal, you can merge it or do pretty much whatever you want. I've always had problems editing the DLCs directly, though - not sure why. Probably ignorance on my part.

Thanks Arthmoor. So you mean that I should exclude the UOMP pacthes and the SM Refurbish mods?
Maybe also exclude the mods which are depended of these esp files?

What I did was somewhat less complicated and preserves the ability for other mods to mod the DLCs. I used Gecko to do a "merge to master" on each UOMP into its parent DLC. That eliminated the slots being taken up by each individual UOMP plugin, but left the original DLCs intact and preserved progress my characters have made in them. SM Plugin Refirbished has an ESP which is a complete merge already, so that eliminated even more slots. So I have each DLC+UOMP plugin, and one SM Plugin Refurbish file. Saved a whole wad of slots that way and didn't break anything.

Merging the actual DLCs together is simply not recommended. Partly for patch purposes, partly because of the progress you'd lose, and partly because load order issues would crop up that you couldn't resolve. Especially for FCOM players who apparently (for reasons I can't figure out) need to move Knights.esp around as they play.

Please tell me if I'm are correct on this. An example, could be this merged "UOP, Thieves Den - DLC" into the "Thieves Den - DLC" plugin if I use Gecko?

Yes, using the "merge to master" function of Gecko, not the normal merge. Be sure to use Bash to espify the DLC after you do this, Gecko will have turned on the ESM flag.

Just to confirm an earlier post, yes, this project is for my personal use only, though if anyone else wants to follow the below instructions for their own use, feel free, as I managed to do this using only Oblivion Mod Manager and the TESCS.

1. Combine ALL the DLC and SI .esp into one esp. It will be about 3.5 MB, which is normal (some of the data in the esps is duplicate and is removed). Name it whatever you like.

2. Extract the contents of the .bsas from all the DLC/SI into your data folder.

3. Repackage all that material into a new .bsa named EXACTLY what your combined .esp is. This will take awhile, so grab some coffee and watch the news while you wait (seriously, it took me about 3-5 minutes)

4. MOVE, don't delete the extracted files somewhere temporarily (for testing purposes), leaving your new esp and bsa.

5. Test your new files ingame. If no textures look purple and the quests begin and progress normally, you have suceeded.

6. ADDITIONAL STEP FOR PERFORMANCE: For those wanting to squeeze performance into your new bsa, install the unofficial patches BEFORE all the above steps and copy all the installed Data Folder files to another location, then uninstall the patches. Then, once you do step 2, copy everything back to your data files folder, overwriting anything it says it will overwrite.

For further performance, you can also reduce all normal map files to 2 x 2 size (like Bomrets DeNormal Mapper mod) before recompiling your new BSA, for some more performance gain (this will mildly impact graphics quality). Also, you can use PyFFI to optimize all the meshes for even more performance.

I have tested all the above and thus far have found no errors. Make sure to follow these steps precisely, especially the part about unpacking the BSA DIRECTLY into the Oblivion Data files folder. Elsewhere will cause mesh/texture errors during repackaging.

P.S.- This should also allow the new .esp to be modified (keep a backup around though!), but this remains untested.

Thanks Arthmoor, I really appreciate this. :twirl: