Sorry if the question was answered already but the search engine didn't return an answer :
Why does the custom hair appear well as long as I use an .esp but is replaced by bald if I convert the .esp to a .esm ?
Sometimes a NPC is bald but another with the same hair will show it correctly in game. Very annoying and irritating, isn't it ?
The mod is growing very large and I need to convert the shared resources to an .esm and divide the mod itself in several small .esp
Is there a way to fix this issue ?

By the way,I know it is not the best place to ask this, but is there a limit to the number of possible savegames ? Is there a way to reset the save counter to restart at save#001 ? ( Autosave works fine but CTD when trying to save manually after the counter reaches save#684, even when there are only 20 files in the saves folder)

Not really sure why the custom hair does that as I've only had limited experience with using custom addons to this point. Perhaps you might have to leave only the custom hair part in an .esp and move the rest to .esm.
Bald (if I remember correctly) isn't the default hair for either gender, for any race that I can think of, so maybe the issue is a problem with the hair mesh itself and not actually getting replaced with a bald hair, but not being rendered at all?

There are known issues with excessive number of savegames, especially if you have the GOTY version of the game. I can personally attest to the fact that the game gets buggy when either the savegame number gets too high, or you have too many actual saves in memory. I usually nuke all saves but the one I want to start at, load it, then go into the save dialog and remove it, exit the save dialog and then re-enter it and make a new save. That usually returns the save number to 1 for me.

Thanks Bonedog. It wortks for the saves. I never had the idea to delete the autosave before and it seems to retain the number of the last hardsave.


For the hair yes, they are bald, not the default hair. But if it is a mesh issue, why does it work fine in the .esp and only appears when converted to an .esm ?
As hair is one of the resources I'd like to share between several esp I'd prefer to make them part of the esm.

Well, to me it sounds like an intermittent rendering issue. If like you say some NPCs will show the hair and others will be bald (not an actual bald hair, but your hair UNrendered, which will display bald as that's what's underneath) then it's hard to think it could be anything else really. Sounds like you were juggling savegames while working on your mod at the same time (I do that a lot), so I have to ask.. have you tried setting it all to .esm and then starting a new game from the very beginning? If you do that and don't see these missing hairs on the NPCs, then the problem's nearly guaranteed to be a result of testing with a contaminated savegame. I keep 1 save from right after you leave vault 101 just for this purpose, because I know from past bad experiences that juggling modding and progressive savegames can lead to issues, even if you suspect all your saves are error free. If the problem persists then I would probably try using a different hair mesh, replacing all of the "sometimes invisible" ones with it, just to see if the new mesh survives being converted to .esm and if it also has the same problems. It's more legwork for sure, but could provide valuable info as to whether or not it's that particular hair that doesn't want to be .esm, or if it's all custom ones that don't like being .esm. I've seen random stuff like this happen before, but for me it's always been due to a bad savegame, so I really don't have a definitive answer for ya. If nothing else, perhaps shooting a PM to Ashara might get you the great answer, she's very good.