Hello John.Moonsugar-

I'm going to cross post a few questions and point out a few things that came about in this thread: http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1184424-q-cleaning-mods-with-tespcd/

Hopefully I'm not coming across as impatient - I just wanted to make sure that this stuff gets posted in the official thread too - and perhaps you only monitor the threads you are tending to. First off after much help from RMWChaos and Pinkertonius I got the latest version of this working and doing so with a bat file I can drag and drop into.

I rarely am around the Morrowind forums having spent most of my time and stars in the Oblivion/Fallout3 forums, but I got the bug to finally mod Morrowind the right way - having tried twice in the past and giving up in frustration. A few concerns about cleaning mods and the function of this I wanted to point out. With Oblivion there is a lot of documentation of how and what to clean from esm and esp - most collected here: http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/TES4Edit_Cleaning_Guide Is there anything equivalent to that for cleaning Morrowind mods? A break down of what kinds of records should be cleaned. I get that duplicates are not a good thing and those get cleaned as well in the Oblivion/Fallout games. Forgive me if these questions seem kind of noobish - I'm just not that knowledgeable about modding this game.

One kind of record considered more important to clean in Oblivion/Fallout though is the deletions. So say a modder deletes an item (rock or tree) - not a big deal unless a later loading mod tries to reference that same record. What is done in Oblivion/Fallout is to set these records to disabled and burried underground so that the records still exist and can be accessed by later loading mods. At the minimum doing this helps prevents ctd on game exit and in other cases I've heard claims that it directly helps prevent in game ctd. Does this get addressed in the cleaning procedures offered here or with other tools for morrowind?

Next as it is in the other games the general idea is to clean masters and then clean the mods that are dependent on the masters in that order. Does that matter as much here - is there a logic to what order mods should be cleaned in?

This brings me to a question after cleaning a bunch of mods I recalled that the DLC of Oblivion do need cleaning, so I decided to check out Tribunal and Bloodmoon esm to see what would happen if I cleaned. http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1184424-q-cleaning-mods-with-tespcd/page__view__findpost__p__17588255 a lot of duplicates, which I assume are from Morrowind.esm. So I'm wondering if anyone has any opinions if this is a good idea to clean these. Then if so I wonder if that really matters to the mods I've already cleaned or if I should start again?

With Oblivion implicit masters to mods are those that may depend on accessing an esm or esp but do not have them as masters that are required (they will load anyway) - often though they are just edits to a mod so that conflicting data is not present such that it creates and issue with the mod it patches (implicit patching) - so when cleaning and a mod does not have as a master the esm that it claims to patch - do you think it necessary to have that mod in the data folder too?

It seems that so far a cleaning failing because of a missing master and a cleaning not needed looks the same in the log. This means that if you did not have the master loaded it could very easily look as though a plugin did not need cleaning when in fact it does. I'd suggest having the log print out a warning that a cleaning was aborted due to missing master.

As you may know with tes4edit - to clean a mod with it you first have to load it and edit will then load any masters it needs. Then the cleaning is a two step process (one for each step: clean duplicates, undelete and disable deletions). So perhaps if a GUI ever gets done - something to consider. I really like the GUI suggestions that Fliggerty Posted 2 years ago. Just putting my vote in - if ever if gets done.

And this deserves to get done.

Thank you for creating what you have - much appreciation.

John, I've just decided to try tes3cmd, and am getting the same problem ("Not a plain file") as a user, above. Here's the syntax (and yes, it appears there is an extra space between the first two words of the actual .esm):

tes3cmd clean "Clean The Lost Artifacts of Morrowind.esm"

CLEANING "Clean The Lost Artifacts of Morrowind.esm" ...
FATAL ERROR <>: Not a plain file
" at script/tes3cmd line 4739

What differs here from the situation DarkSCR encountered is that tes3cmd is already in my Morrowind/data files directory, as is the .esm. I'm running WinXP, SP2, and using the latest version of tes3cmd. Anything you can suggest?

.

I'd like to expand on the above. It appears tes3cmd refuses to recognize any .esp I use for cleaning. This is typically what I get:

tes3cmd clean balm*.esp

CLEANING: "Balmora Council Club.esp" ...
Loading master: morrowind.esm
ERROR: Balmora Council Club.esp: FATAL ERROR: Balmora Council Club.esp: no plugin specified!
" at script/tes3cmd line 4702

I tried repeatedly entering the entire mod name. Finally, I used only part of it as above, and as you can see, tes3cmd recognizes the mod, despite my use of *. However, it doesn't consider it a plugin. The same is true of all my active plugins. Not sure why. Any ideas? I'm running on WinXP, tes3cmd is in my data files directory, and just to be sure, I also added it to my path statement.