Beths Modding System 101

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Tuesday, 27 September 2011 19:01

Written by Giskard

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It is wise for a modder and a player to try and understand where Beth are coming from and go with the flow. If you try and swim up stream, your going to land your self in world of hurt.

That is what happens with this mod cleaning and dirty mod advice, the entire system ignores which direction Bethesdas river is flowing in and tries to force it to flow in a different direction.

What makes it worse, it expects you players to be expert modders to get things working whilst demonstrating those telling people to do this do not even understand how Beths own modding system is designed to work.

No wonder 10,000s of threads exist, full of users crying for help with mod lists having followed that advice.

When you swim down stream and go with the flow, things are much easier for you.

For example not using 2 conflicting mods. Remove 1 and use the other if their is a problem. If there is not a problem, just load the one you want to dominate your game last.

Go with the flow, let Beths own system block the common parts that cause most of the crashing. Leaving you to sort out only the issues that remain.

When you try and patch a mod, or clean a mod or merge mods, your forcing Beths river to go in a very unnatural direction, effectively disabling all the safety measures beths system employs to keep your game stable and enjoyable.

Bethesdas Big Secret

The big secret people seem to look directly at and never see is a simple one.

Bethesdas entire mod system is a conflict based system.

Mods work by conflicting with the original game, mods loaded last block content  other mods loaded ealier in the mod list and thus prevent serious issues that would have arisen of both mods run fully in the same game.

You can see what happens when you by pass beths system can be seen by looking in any one of the 10,000+ threads about bash patch and merging mod lists. For those guys have abandoned the official system because tool makers think they know better. Yet the stable game remains a myth to them and 50 steps to a crash free game guides do not seem to help.

If you recognise this as the way things work and it works that way for a very important reason, you understand that this is actually a system that prevents crashing most of the time and allows you to enjoy your game.

It also teaches us modders where the boundaries are, from that point on we know where the no go zones are and can start to master the play ground beth gave us.

Only when you try and override Beths system with bash patches and other things, do you negate the system Beth created that keeps your game stable and enjoyable. Effectively turning off all the safety measures to force something to happen that the game does not allow by default.

Taking Advantage of the Big Secret

The reason why my mods work together and so well is because I have long since recognised how the system Beth gave us works and I have learned how to exploit it.

The play ground appears to be small and limiting until you nosey around and learn now to exploit it properly. Assuming your looking at the play ground and not the big high walls around it that is. If you fail to pay attention to the area your allowed to work in, your never going to see it for what it is, which is an opportunity.

For example I often create conflicts so they become "ON and OFF" switches for features in my mods.

Mod A blocks Mod B = Turn a feature on.

Mod B is not blocked = turn a feature off.

That sort of thing, only I do it with a little more style than that :)

You players can do the same thing with your mod lists when the modder who made your mods knows all this and builds his mod so they play nicely with other mods. A Master of the play ground can do some clever things with mods at this point but a very simple example the CUO potions mod, if you run that before any body elses potion mod, you will not only get my potion mod, but the other guys potions too.

You will see a conflict if you use tools but that conflict is part of the solution that lets both mods work. Remove it, clean it out and you lose this feature.

That is how most of CUO works, it is an excellent example of what can be done when you have explored the boundaries of beths modding and master it.

Conclusion

When you see the system and know how it works, when you know that conflicts are vital part of the system at every level, you start to see the boundries that mark the edges of this play ground.

All you do then is accept those are the no go zones and focus on attention on what works rather than what does not work. Before long you will find your self master of that play ground, capable of achieving the impossible.

Let me explain how the limits we face by following bethesdas system do not actually hold us back but act as a kind of fire wall preventing harm to our games.

Beths official modding tool, known as the construction set and GECK make the ESPs that are our mods. But there is a hardcoded rule that says one ESP cannot talk to another ESP. So one mod cannot tell another mod what is going on.

This stops a lot of save game corruption from taking place when mods are added and removed on the fly from your games or not installed correctly.

That is a boundary we cannot cross, it marks the north edge wall of our play ground and Beth say if you try and cross it, your going to hurt your self. So we respect that and avoid crossing the wall because we know it dangerous because Beth told us.

So we turn our attention back to the play ground and look for ways to do the same thing. Whilst playing in the nice safe play ground we spot a default stone that all mods can see even though they cannot speak to each directly. So we move the stone 2 feet to left.

All other mods can see that stone has moved so we have found a way to communicate between ESPS. We have done the impossible and because we stayed within the play ground and followed the rules rather than trying to rewrite rules laid down by a professional developer, we did not do anything dangerous.

We have mastered the environment bethesda gave us.

Of course some idiot mods cleaner then comes along and sees we moved a harmless stone and calls it a dirty edit and undoes the edit, effectively breaking our mods, corrupting your saved games whilst telling everybody they are experts and know what they are talking about.

Act of vandalism ruins the hard work we put in, yet it proves they are not experts, they did not understand the rules of the play ground.

Well done idiots.

From a players perfective, it can be as simple as knowing Janix's "Fighters Guild United" works great with my "Fighters Guild Contacts" mod. Until somebody moves something using a patch or clean something and stops them working together.

Thats a real example btw, try both mods together, you will love it.

Of course some mods will always conflict but in those cases you just chose 1 and dump the other. That is Beths way of saying these mods are too dangerous to work together, do not even try to use them both at the same time.

Only a fool ignores a warning from the official game developer after that hardcoded limits in to their games designed to keep our games nice and stable. 

But that is exactly what all many of those tools try and do, that is why over 10,000 threads exist, containing nothing by players crying for help after following the advice to bash patch and merge their games.

They are paying the prices for not learning the rules of the play ground.

And they will never reap the rewards that us masters reap when we spend a lot of time in the play ground studying it.

Whether your a player of modder, try things beths way, trust the system beth gave us, do not try using tools that deliberately by pass safety features and you will be fine.

The Cyrodiil Upgrade is the most complicated set of mods ever made for the Elder Scrolls yet they are a breeze to install and use because the rules of playground were never broken.

Think about that.

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