Reply to Greg about load orders

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Category: Giskard's Blog

Last Updated on Monday, 07 May 2012 08:04

Written by Giskard

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I am going to reply here to Gregs email about load orders since it may help other people.

Programs like Boss tend to give out a lot of bad advice to players and that usually leads to modders like me having to clean up their mess when things stop working and the players turn to me for bug fixes for issues my original mods do not have. Which is why i do not use boss or trust the team who make it. They create more problems than they solve.

People should be encouraging modders to make mods that have no load order specific requirements, mods that can work at any point in the load order regardless of the type of mod it is. But tools like Boss and those who use it encourage modders not to care about such things, which is why so many conflicts occur.

For example, given the choice between editing a dog in the game or copying it and editing the copy, most people edit the default dog and create a problem that needs BOSS to sort out. I encourage people to think twice about doing that and to always look at making something custom to their mod to avoid load order issues. Which is why my load order doc opened your eyes to some problems.

Steam Workshop has a good system involving BSAs and ESP files that makes it easy to block, override or delete content. But certain things like texture and mesh replacers can be installed loose, safely and cause very few problems, these usually do edit the defaults so only one of these mods should be used at a time.

Unfortunately the other types of mods are down to the modder and whether he chooses to be lazy and edit the defaults or does it properly and copies the item he wishes to edit first and then uses the copy. There is no way to know if a modder does that but if a modder is seen to do that once, the chances are he is like me and does that as standard.

The guy who made Midas Magic works this way for example, it does not matter what mod he makes, you know he has a safe way of working. Once you find a modder that does work that way, you should be fairly safe using his stuff, but the rest is hit and miss because far too many people use BOSS as a reason to not design mods properly. So I am afraid as long as people encourage folk to use Boss to get around these problems, there is no incentive for modders to learn to make mods properly.

As for house mods, these are the most basic form of mods and should rarely conflict with other mods, when a house mod does it usually means it was made without thought or consideration of other mods. Sometimes because the modder is a noob and just didnt know about it, and some times because the modder did not care.

Most house mods will work find with other house mods installed but beware it is classic noobie territory and noobies do make some mistakes. All you can do is report the issues to the modder and allow them to learn from those mistakes.

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