Quick question. I'm working on a clothing mod right now and it has gotten to be 312 MB with a compressed size of 132 MB. Is this to big by itself or should I try to split it up, say with the Shivering Isle content being a separate mod. The first one could be a stand-alone while the other need the first (the Shivering Isle Trader is in the Basemant of my building)

I also noticed that some of the places that sell stuff in the IC have 2 vendor boxes. Is that a good idea? Do things load faster in game that way? Any help is appreciated.

Elora Q

I have mods bigger than that. My only rule of thumb advice I can give you is to have everything in a single folder structure and not randomly strewn all over the Data folder.
For example:

/Data/Meshes/WillieSea/AncientTowers
/Data/Meshes/WillieSea/ClockOfCyrodiil
/Data/Meshes/WillieSea/AssassinTripwires

The last name is the name of the mod, prefixed with my userID name. This way, all your stuff is in one folder structure and not messing up the players data folder.

The same goes with the Textures folder, Sounds folder and any of the other folders.

/Data/Textures/WillieSea/AncientTowers

Thanks, WillieSea. I have my folders named where they can be easily picked out and under as few folders as possible. I do have separate folders within the mesh and texture files under the mod name then EQ attached to those various folders.
What about the double vendor chests? Does that help any?
Thanks again for the quick comeback.

Elora Q

Don't think it really makes any difference if it is loading 15 items from one chest and 15 from another or 30 from the same chest it still has to load the same number of items ! --- the Main reason I can think of for 2 chests is if one is respawning and the other isn't or perhaps 2 different people worked on adding to that NPCs inventory in different ways and each added their own vendor chest since they were working separately instead of together. When adding to a vendor in an .esp it is probably best to add a new chest so those items do not get overwritten by another .esp that loads later if you are adding them to a vanilla vendor though !

I'd always add a new chest to an existing vendor, rather than edit the one(s) they have, or else as JDFan points out, any other mod that edits them could wipe out your changes.

IIRC the reason that some vendors are given multiple chests is that the developers made a "Alchemy vendor chest" and a "Food Vendor chest" and if a merchant sells both they just give them both chests instead of creating a third combo one just for them. Sometimes that's a "base level" container, plus a "Special stuff" one of the same type of goods, I.e all other vendors sell the the base items, but this is a vendor who has extra items for sale. If you're adding things to multiple vendors, you might want to use the same scheme of merchant containers for your items.

I see what you guys are saying. I went back and took a look at the second chest on some of them and they only had a single piece in the box, so they were that special stuff you talked about. I guess I will just keep each vendor with one box. Thanks everyone. My mod is at that 95% mark where I think I'm finished then I find something else to fix. I'm in the never ending 5% right now :ahhh: Soon though.