So, I have noticed, in large projects containing lots of art assets, the modders will usually self contain these in a "Data" file. Examples of this I can think of are Tamriel Rebuilt, Province: Cyrodiil, Skyrim: Home of The Nords, and Greater Dwemer Ruins.

The obvious upside to this method is that modders who wish to use these assets for their mods can do so without being dependent on the mod itself, and also not have to repack the resources in their mod themselves, something that can be an issue if the assets are updated later by the mod which added them in the first place.

The downside I can think of, is that this is a bit impractical in my workflow. For Stros M'Kai and MaDW, I am often adding new assets as a regular part of my process. With MaDW, I have a separate "MaDW Data.esm" which contains all the new meshes I've made for the mod. The issue I have with this is that every time I want to add something, I have to open up the plugin version of the file, add in the new assets, save, then convert it back to an .esm in Enchanted Editor, and finally reopen my main "MaDW Sheogorad" plugin and continue working.

If I simply skipped making a separate "Data" file then I could simply add the files directly into the plugin when I open it. Obviously this would be a problem because of what I mentioned above; other modders wouldn't have easy access to my assets.

That being said, would there be any way to ignore the data plugin step, but then, in the end, when I release the mod, split the assets into a "Data" plugin like mentioned above? This would be much easier to do that having a separate data plugin.

Thanks in advance!