DoubleYou

Let me put it this way: If MO imports Dawnguard, say, and leaves a mod that modifies Dawnguard with a BSA in the real data directory, the mod's assets will be overwritten by Dawnguard. Therefore, Tannin not only should import all mods from data, but also must in order to maintain compatibility in some cases. Certainly, in a perfect world where all users leave their data directory clean, this wouldn't be necessary, but Skyrim isn't Utopia.

Ah! I'm working a full-time job now since it's summer, so I might not be so fast as ye.

As it stands, I do not like it. The stretching is a problem for me.

Gemling is superior, and I'd recommend we accept it over Improved Gemstone. Sure, the handle edits on the Diamond claw are marvelous on IG, but the improvement of the stones on Gemling almost make you forget about that.

Totally a no-brainer improvement.

The note on the STEP guide says to clean mods indicated by BOSS (or LOOT, for that matter). Yes, clean it.

Marked for Testing. Seeing as we've already tested this mod, it makes sense to mark this for testing. I've looked at these in-game, and I like it. If we use it, I'd say we should use the whole mod, in order to keep continuity of style. I think it probably would be for Extended, however, as it deviates from the vanilla style.

A good argument for not treating the Unofficial Patches special would be: What if the Unofficial Patches change form, and Tannin is gone, and we have it hardcoded to treat the Unofficial Patches differently? None of us would desire that to happen.

I will say that Mod Organizer is definitely faster dealing with BSAs than loose files. I had the HRDLC extracted and optimized and whenever I'd check them, it would almost freeze MO before it got it all done. With it in a BSA, it was instantaneous. I have never observed this affecting in-game performance, however. I also think that speed is practically a mute argument in this debate.

I tested the wolves myself, and it is difficult to say which is better. Realistic Wolves seems to have more diversity than AOS, but who is to say diversity is better?

Dunno if we helped Unofficial Dragonborn Patch fix a bug or not, but the changelog for 2.0.4 now mentions dunprogressivecombatscript, which means that is no longer a problem if you use Unofficial Dragonborn Patch.

The only ones I'm not sure I'm okay with are the Riften ones and the farmhouse ones. I'll have to look at these in game.

Which is why I like my solution. Allow an area for BSA custom sorting within a small, controlled place in the Archives tab. This will allow future similar problems to be simply dragged and dropped into the correct order. If you stop developing Mod Organizer, we can tell users what order the BSAs should be sorted in this place, and the need for this should be quite small. It would only need to be so for mods interleaved within unofficial content, which currently only applies to three mods: Unofficial Skyrim Patch, Unofficial Dawnguard Patch, and Unofficial Hearthfires Patch, but in future might include others. The problem with automatic DLC detection and addition to the modlist is that the normal user won't, unless they read currently nonexistent instruction, interleave the Unofficial Patches with the DLC at the top of their modlist. They've had enough issues sorting the Unofficial Patches in the past. The method Tannin suggests sounds like a feasible solution for the know-nothing modder. However, it would seem to me that this could add a great deal of volatility to the order of conflicts. You would almost have to add an "ignore sort order" button and a "lock mod order" button for the mods where this would mess up conflict resolution (I'm pretty sure there would be cases of this). I still like my idea better, and it looks easier to me.

Well the tool is a 500 error, so it definitely isn't up to date.

@Tannin I think we have other options. I suggest you allow BSAs to be dropped into the "data" BSA grouping, with a large warning prompt, and allow users to order them there, like somewhat how you did before. Hardcode the Unofficial Patch BSAs to go into the correct order, cause a warning to pop up if a user tries to arrange these in a different order. This should effectively eliminate the current problems, keep MO BSA management, and allow a workaround for later situations that might have a similar problem.

I'm liking the screens on Windhelm, but I don't like the Solitude ones.

You got something else besides optimized textures in your STD folder! There should only be textures, and you got scripts, interface, meshes, everything! No wonder that was the problem. You must have unpacked all your BSAs into there, and they must be overwriting parts of SkyUI or something.

This is an issue with the beta version. It should be solved in the next release: https://issue.tannin.eu/tbg/modorganizer/issues/630 Does an unticked, plugin-loaded BSA take precedence over a ticked BSA, breaking the clean layering of mods in MO? Or will the ticked BSA win the conflict?

According to OP, it is accepted for 2.2.9 Extended. As to tweaks, don't know. I know for myself I had to customize these values to remove z-fighting on moutains that were most annoying.

What I need to know and am not 100% sure on is something I mentioned earlier. Will a ticked BSA be overwritten by an unticked, plugin-loaded BSA in Mod Organizer? That is the one thing I don't know. Could somebody do a simple test? It would be optimal if I'm wrong about that. If a ticked BSA can overwrite an unticked, plugin-loaded BSA, then it is a simple matter of unticking the Unofficial patches and DLC BSAs in the Archives tab, no re-arranging whatsoever. As to my potential problems list, I'm merely listing all the files that are subverted with Mod Organizer's ticked BSA behavior that could potentially be issues, which coincidentally are all the files overwritten by the DLCs from patches loaded earlier. The ramifications outside Mod Organizer are limited only to fixes that potentially could have been overwritten by the DLCs after the switch to false-flagged esp ordering and are most likely non-issues for the Unofficial Patch team, but still worth investigating.

This would NOT be caused by BSAs loading incorrectly and is indeed correct Unofficial patch behavior. It's just a simple matter of the housing mod you mention not expecting the Unofficial patch to be adding a pot.

@Z The thing about Cleaned Bethesda ESMs is neither here nor there. I could put that at the bottom of my load order and I'd be fine. It only contains the cleaned Bethesda ESMs, none of the BSAs. The only conflicts they have is replacing the vanilla ESMs with the cleaned versions, and I would even be fine putting them at the very bottom of my modlist. I see what you are saying as that is confusing, however, the net effect will be zero. Probably best to have a separate mod for each cleaned ESM and put them in absolute logical order like this: Cleaned Update ESM STD Distant Decal Fix Unofficial Skyrim Patch Dawnguard DLC Cleaned Dawnguard ESM Dawnguard Optimized Textures Unofficial Dawnguard Patch Hearthfires DLC Cleaned Hearthfires ESM Hearthfires Optimized Textures Unofficial Hearthfire Patch Dragonborn DLC Cleaned Dragonborn ESM Dragonborn Optimized Textures Unofficial Dragonborn Patch HRDLC1 HRDLC2 HRDLC3 Unofficial High Resolution Patch

I'm pretty sure that was 2.2.8...

I know that Kelmych ;) I was asking the OP since it sounded like he had the optimized textures in BSA format if he had used DDSopt to create the BSA, as Skyrim has issues loading some DDSopt BSAs.

The whole problem is caused by the fact that the Unofficial Patches must have there BSAs loaded between the official DLC BSAs. Before the false-flagged plugin change, there was no issue, because no mod needed to be placed in such a position. I actually had theorized this could be an issue and was going to test this awhile ago, but never got around to it, and so it now has only become apparent to us once we saw the issues. That's why initially I had a note on a place in the wiki to uncheck the Unofficial Patch BSAs, but retracted because I had not actually tested to see if this was a real problem. Currently my setup has the unofficial patches at the very top of my modlist, so it looks like this: STD Distant Decal Fix Unofficial Skyrim Patch Dawnguard DLC Dawnguard Optimized Textures Unofficial Dawnguard Patch Hearthfires DLC Hearthfires Optimized Textures Unofficial Hearthfire Patch Dragonborn DLC Dragonborn Optimized Textures Unofficial Dragonborn Patch Cleaned Bethesda ESMs HRDLC1 HRDLC2 HRDLC3 Unofficial High Resolution Patch This fixes the following potential issues (some of which have been confirmed) with the old setup: Between Unofficial Skyrim Patch and Dawnguard... [*]textures/actors/character/facegendata/facetint/skyrim.esm/0001367c.dds (confirmed here) [*]textures/actors/character/facegendata/facetint/skyrim.esm/000132aa.dds [*]scripts/wealiasscript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dawnguard Patch) [*]scripts/qf_tg05_00021551.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dawnguard Patch) [*]scripts/qf_da04_0002d512.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dawnguard Patch) [*]scripts/playerwerewolfcuresconcescript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dawnguard Patch) [*]scripts/playervampirequestscript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dawnguard Patch) [*]scripts/nightmothercoffinscript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dawnguard Patch) [*]scripts/fxdwarvenspiderscript.pex [*]meshes/actors/character/facegendata/facegeom/skyrim.esm/0001367c.nif (confirmed here) [*]meshes/actors/character/facegendata/facegeom/skyrim.esm/000132aa.nif Between Unofficial Skyrim Patch and Hearthfire... [*]scripts/relationshipmarriagespousehousescript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Hearthfire Patch) [*]scripts/qf_relationshipmarriagefin_00021382.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Hearthfire Patch) [*]scripts/qf_housepurchase_000a7b33.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Hearthfire Patch) [*]scripts/playersleepquestscript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Hearthfire Patch) [*]scripts/mannequinactivatorscript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Hearthfire Patch) [*]scripts/carriagesystemscript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Hearthfire Patch) Between Unofficial Skyrim Patch and Dragonborn... [*]scripts/dunprogressivecombatscript.pex [*]scripts/dragonactorscript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dragonborn Patch) [*]scripts/default2stateactivator.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dragonborn Patch) [*]scripts/da04questscript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dragonborn Patch) Between Unofficial Hearthfire Patch and Dragonborn... [*]scripts/byohrelationshipadoptableaccessor.pex Between Unofficial Dawnguard Patch and Dragonborn... [*]scripts/da04questscript.pex (not a problem if the user also uses Unofficial Dragonborn Patch) This is a seriously large number of potential problems. The ones that aren't covered by the corresponding unofficial patch are the ones most problematic. One thing I wonder is: does the Unofficial Patch team know about all of these? Some of these are worth looking into for the users who are NOT subverting BSA order, and since they are doing it by hand, do they know about these file differences?