Best way to merge plugins in a TTW/FNV

[AngelofDeAtH]

Hi there, after looking around on the internet for a while with varying success, I thought coming here for answers would warrant the best results. So as the title says I am looking for the method of merging plugins for TTW (and FNV aswell). I know the programs like zMerge and Merge Plugin are capable of this, but in my researching (and some personal experience) I found some saying that it would just cause problems. I am already creeping at the 255 limit that Mod Fix gives, so any help is much appreciated.

[RoyBatty]

That many mods is just a disaster area, no amount of merging can fix such a mess. Zmerge and whatever are not very good with games older than Skyrim and not recommended.

[MrPainting]

@Roybatty, Congratulations, you have just used the "Stack Overflow Deflection". Entirely avoiding answering the actual question, and simply stating that the question operates against best practices, and should be avoided. This answer helps *literally* nobody.

@AngelofDeAtH: Using those programs to merge mods will likely create problems. The only way I have found to get around this is to become familiar with xEdit, and learn how to manually check that a Merged mod is doing what you think it is doing. For script heavy mods, this process is... Tedious. I would recommend that you avoid trying to merge mods that rely on heavy scripting all together.

Fundamentally, what you are doing is going to rely on a fair amount of trial and error. If you are not already using Mod Organizer, that's a good place to start. What you have to do, and this is genuinely the only way to accomplish this, is install one or two mods, check xEdit to make sure they don't need cleaning or override something important, and then load the game and make use of the console to see if they had the intended effect. A lot of places on this site say that LOOT doesn't work for TTW, and this isn't exactly wrong, but it glosses over the fact that, setup properly, LOOT can be just as valuable a tool for TTW as it is for Skyrim, but it must be setup properly.

If you are not already familiar with this process from Skyrim, I *strongly* recommend starting there first. Learn what you are doing with that game, and then come back to the older titles. Skyrim's engine isn't exactly stable, but as you look at the older titles, the engine gets less stable/organized as you look further back.

TTW is, by its very nature, an incredibly clever hack. A lot of mods that work with base FNV/FO3 just flat out do nothing, or cause massive instability in a TTW mod setup. In order to get these working, you have to be willing to invest the time into learning how these mods do what they do, at least on a surface level, and what needs to change in order to incorporate them into a TTW pack without massive problems. A prime example of this are Body Mods. If you look at the "Incompatible Mods" page in this forum, there is a line towards the bottom of the post that reads

Armor overhauls - this includes NCR Overhaul, Legion Overhauls, Book of Steel (without patches), Spice of Life, and any other armor/outfit overhaul. Any of these will require extensive patching. Ones which use body replacers are not compatible period.

Now, I can personally attest to getting these sorts of mods working in a TTW setup without too much hassle, but very little about the process is "Plug and Play". If you don't already have some idea what you are doing with these programs, or haven't used them before on the (generally) more stable later titles, this process is going to be a frustrating, up-hill battle from the very start. That's not to say that it can't be done, but rather that the Already-Steep learning curve of this process is made much more-so by so much of the tooling being made for later games.

If you want to learn this process for Skyrim, and get a better understanding of the kind of effort this kind of modding setup would require, I recommend looking into Lexy's LOTD SE Pack (lexyslotd.com). That pack is a trial by fire, but if you get it working, you will have learned most of what you need to know to begin working on a large TTW pack. Don't get me wrong, the pack is great, and the guide is incredibly detailed, it simply has a lot of moving parts, and many highly specific instructions that require constant attention in order to get truly "Functional". I use that guide as the base for most of my Skyrim packs, and as of writing, my Skyrim pack has ~4000 mods in it, never crashes, in which I have invested several hundred hours of play time.

[AngelofDeAtH]

I do have a basic understanding of xEdit, but I do always want to learn ways of making the game run as smooth as possible (especially considering the amount of mods I like using). I just ended up using zMerge, and while I haven't run into problems as of yet (with minimal testing), I'm sure that could change at anytime. So I appreciate the resources! And also look forward to using this in my first modded Skyrim playthrough, much appreciated!

[RoyBatty]

@Roybatty, Congratulations, you have just used the "Stack Overflow Deflection". Entirely avoiding answering the actual question, and simply stating that the question operates against best practices, and should be avoided. This answer helps *literally* nobody.

No, my comment was meant to save him the trouble of trying to fix the unfixable and start over and learn what to do which he obviously already knows from his post. Congratulations on providing a completely useless answer to validate an idea he had which is fundamentally unable to be completed with any level of success. So congratulations on not only insulting me, but trying to answer a blanket question that has no easy answer or solution, again which the poster already knows.

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