Hello there

I have been modding for quite a while now, but I'm still not sure about updating scripted mods.

I read somewhere that there isn't something like a "clean save" when updating mods. (By clean save I mean: disable the mod in your loadorder, load a save in which the mod was still active, make a save with the mod no longer in your load order) I have done all that is possible to prevent this from happening in my current playthrough.

I guess when someone mentions: "Make a "clean save" when updating." Then I might be better off by doing 1 of the following things:

• Continue my current save with the old version of the mod, without updating to the newest version.
• Update to the newest version and start a new game.

But under no circumstances do the "clean save" thing. Is that right?

However, a while back I updated 2 mods (OBIS and RealisticRoomRentalsBasic), no "clean save" needed accourding to the authors. But there were some scripts that got changed. The names of the scripts got altered as well. Which caused my papyrus log to generate the following error: "Unable to get type X referenced by the save game. Objects of this type will not be loaded."

I know papyrus logs are not always to be taken too seriously. But I'm still a bit paranoid. The authors said it would be safe to just update those 2 mods, but I still get the papyrus warning mentioned above. When I get those kind of papyrus warnings, should I be worried and start a new game?

At the moment, I don't get too many CTDs, though. But I'm worried I will, though, at a later time, when I will have spend a lot of time into the save.

Thanks in advance

Kind regards

~Sac~

Correct. That's about the fastest way to bork your game there is.

It also makes little sense when an author tells you to "clean save" for an update since that will cause any progress made in the mod to be lost.

If they needed to change the names, the best way to have done that would have been to compile a stub for the old scripts with no code in it, then provide the replacement scripts.

Most times this shouldn't be necesary though. Updates CAN be done on existing scripts if you know how to handle it.

For instance, adding a new property will always work. So will removing an existing one. The game will adjust to this properly in all cases. The logs will notify you when a propery is missing but it'll simply tell you that's being skipped now and the warning will not come up again.

Where the snags come in is if an existing property needs to have its value changed. The game will not update those at all unless another script is written to force that to happen for an update. Changing property values is one of the reasons the unofficial patches have a retroactive update system in place. Without this, you'd continue to get the old broken behavior from quite a number of things we've fixed. A couple of my other mods, like Live Another Life, use the same system as well when it becomes necessary to change a property on an existing save.

So you just need to be mindful of the possibility that a mod's update includes property value changes. Otherwise it should be safe to update on the go.