Apologies in advance if this turns out to be a stupid question - but I'm trying to wrap my mind around starting to mod.

I am working on a mod that adds a bunch of new NPCs from custom races that I will download. Let's say there will be 5 new races I want to use.

What would be the best way to integrate those race mods into mine? From my basic understanding, I think I could have two realistic options:

1. Manually create the new races by hand in my mod. I would just create a new race for each and utilize the meshes and textures, hair, eyes, etc from the race mods
This seems the easiest to me (albeit with a lot of manual data entry). My only concern is that let's say while manually creating a race called XYZ, I didn't add a racial ability. Then I create an NPC of race XYZ in my mod. Then later on down the road, I decided to use the actual XYZ.esp from the race mod in my load order. Would anything "bad" happen? Would my NPC in my mod get the racial ability from the actual XYZ.esp if that mod is loaded later? Or would there be, in effect, two different races in game - the one I created w/o racial ability and the one from the race mod with the racial ability?

2. Merge the race mods together and then convert to an .esm file. Then make my mod depend on that .esm and start creating the NPCs in my mod. Do I have the general concept of this down right?

Thanks in advance for humoring me in my probable misunderstandings of how all this works.

First things first, you should get permission from those people who made these races to re-use them or add them into some sort of combination mod.

As far as the actual act goes, if it's only for NPCs, a good way is to either find a .esm which contains those base races (or get permission to compile your own from scratch containing just the base races) which is used by the .esp which has the NPCs defined. Deisolation is a better option, but can be a bit tough to manage. As you are only concerned about making NPCs of those races, you shouldn't bother with any thing related to racial abilities since these would need to be manually added to every new NPC. You should also make these races non-playable so that there is no chance of duplications. As people would likely need to download the original mods which make up these races for the textures and such, the chance of duplication is high. Most importantly though, for anything you define in the CS, you should use a unique form name containing a prefix which is unique to yourself (which is why just merging the mods is not a good idea).

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

Noted on the permissions - will definitely do that.

So to be even more generic - let's say I was creating 5 new races myself. I should create all of them in one new .esp and convert to an .esm. Then I would just make my new .esp (and then any futher ones I want to create) dependent on that .esm. Do I have that correct?

Thanks again

I would say that would depend on what sorts of usage you wanted for that mod. The reason why a .esm might be preferred as opposed to just having everything in a .esp is that it could be used by others who are in a similar situation to what you are in, and might be appreciated. If however, you see nobody else using those races, it's best to just toss it all within the same .esp and just ignore the possibility of using a .esm.

Thanks again for your insight - appreciated

I know these people have given you their two cents worth on the subject, which is a good idea, but just to answer your original question if you do want to simply merge them:

1: Open data and check all of them, choose no active file.

2: Click File > Tools > Combine Loaded Plugins.

3: Save it like any other file.

There, all done.

Vince H -

Thanks for the suggestion - I tried it and it worked like a charm.

Question though - if it's that easy in the Construction Set, why do tools like TES4Gecko exist? Is it just that the CS is limited in functionality when merging?

TES4Gecko does other things... But yes, the CS is also limited.

When merging, there is however the problem of forms being named the same, so while it saves you time initially, if you don't want this race mod to conflict with other mods that might have this race, you would still need to go through and change all the form names.