Hello. I was looking for a companion to help me around the wasteland and Sydney Follower caught my attention. If she doesn't crash FO3 when used with MMM then she is the right follower for me. The instructions for installing her calls for me to "Run FO3Masterupdate to esm-ify all of your plugins." This frightens and angers me. Does this mean it will turn the .esp files into .esm files? This would certainly complicate my use of mods in ways in couldn't anticipate, right?

It flips the flag for the esp and they are read as an esm.

I don't use it and I use mods that say it is required ... that is during the very odd times that I get tired of Oblivion and my 100 steam games to play this.

Just try it without and I bet it works.

You don't need to run Masterupdate to use Sydney. There should be a second esp in your download named Sydney Follower-Load Order Fix.esp. Put that one at the bottom of your load order and go play.

It might help if you understand what the Master Update process does, and how esp plugins work differently than esms

Basically when an esp plugin wants to change something in the base game, it either adds a new object, or has an object that shares it's ID with something in one of it's master files. Since the ID is the same as the one in the master, only the one loaded last is used. This is called an override.

ESMs cannot normally do overrides. If they add something that shares the same FormID, you get a collision error. EXCEPT if you have what's known as an ONAM record. Basically this is a small record in the header of the file that tells Fallout "This ID is overwritten in this file"

What Master Update does is search through all your files for things that are overridden, and then changes the files into esms and writes a valid ONAM table.

It's usefulness has been blown way out of proportion, but it is useful in that if you have a file that does not have correct ID's and Master Files set, you can get problems. BAsically, if a file supposedly "needs" Master Updating, then what it REALLY needs is someone to fix it before releasing it instead of expecting people to use an autofixer when they download it.

Sydney Follower requires nothing of the sort. Just make sure you have Load Order Fixer in the same kind of positioning that you normally put your merging files.