Seeker17281

Hi Mator, thanks for the support and the great work you do on your tools. I spent yesterday acting on your reply, your itemized points led me to a aha moment that in hindsight, I had no idea it was staring me right in the face. Those masters were missing because they had been deactivated when I built a bashed patch and I completely overlooked checking them before running the smash utility. I also yanked out the other smashed patches and put them in a new folder to hold backup files, though I'm pretty sure that can be done away with in the future as I get better at adding/subtracting files from the patch. Right now I prefer to have a backup in case I do something stupid or hasty. As a side note, I ran most of yesterday with this new rebuilt smash patch and did not use a bashed patch at all, I didn't have a single CTD or hangup in a full 9 hour play session testing the patch and the new mods. All the mods and the game performed as expected with leveled items and whatnot, never had a session run so well. Next up is to tackle merging mods but from what I understand, I have to make my MO2 a portable install and since I'm only 89 mods I think I still got some time to figure that out. Again, thanks for the reply and all you do for us

I'm running into a strange issue that I'm sure is user error, but sadly I can't figure out where I'm going wrong. I created a smashed patch for a profile that had great success, game was stable and only had a very rare CTD which a tweak to load order seems to have solved entirely. Played for about 15 hours of content before deciding to add in a few more mods. I usually only add in 5 or less new mods at a time to keep troubleshooting simple. In MO2 I had everything on the left checked prior to activating Matorsmash which included all the old mods along with the new ones I wanted to test out from within MO2. Upon loading, Mator shows me my mod list, of which several are deactivated by default, based on what I've seen in tuts I activate all of them, then go through and manually deactivate the following: FNISFNIS SpellsDual Sheath Redux PatchDual SHeath ReduxBashed PatchAfter confirming my selection, in the next section I highlight everything, starting with Skyrim's esm based on reading a most recent reddit post that suggested I choose everything and then hit the green button, using the resulting patch. I like to name my patches as per GP's videos so that I can keep track of when I'm testing a new mod collection. I.E. I have smash-charactername-v1,v2, ect. On my first time adding a few new mods I went through the above process, tossed out the old smash-patch and replaced it with the new one containing the new mods and things were fine, no flags in MO2's Plugin panel. Pretty much it was a choose all, unselect the above 5 mods, hit green button. Now however I'm repeatedly getting a error message I can't seem to sort out why it's happening. I've attempted this several times now, being careful with my choices, double checking as I go, yet each and every time the resulting smashpatch when it's activated as a mod and put into the plugin panel in MO2, gives me a caution flag that says masters are missing. These are the same masters that when I started to build the patch initially, were deactivated by default and I had specifically manually activated. When i check within the Mator utility to see specifically if those masters are present it says they are. But wheni check the mod containing the smashpatch in MO2 I get the message that masters are missing. Then I thought ok fine, maybe these are deselected to avoid problems, and by choosing them I'm causing some reality breach that is preventing those masters from being included, so this time I don't choose the ones that load up deactivated, include the 5 mods mentioned above as deactive, hit build and the result is the same, MO2 says the patch is missing masters. In case this matters, currently there are two seperate "smash mods" in my mod folder, these are the Smashpatch 1 (the patch that doesn't have the new mods with it's smashing and is stable) and it is not checked.Smashpatch 2 (the patch that does have the new mods added in being tested) and it is checked with files from the overwrite.If I check Smashpatch 2, it has the exclamation flag, if I check both smashpatch 1 is fine, but smashpatch 2 shows the same flag. I have run the game and tested the handful of new mods and everything works as it should, but that flag in MO2 keeps reminding me something's wrong. I've run the game with just smashpatch 1, just smashpatch 2, and with smashpatch 1 & 2 at the same time, I am embarrased to say i see no difference. All the mods are functional, but knowing how arcane Skyrim can be with save game corruption and whatnot, I've decided to come here and get myself straightened out by more knowledgeable folks than me. Your time and help will be greatly appreciated, TIA.

So it's been a few/couple days and wanted to let you both know that after fair bit of study and practice, I am seeing the virtues of the Overwrite folder. I'm sure I'm only grasping a portion of it's use, as I am continuing to discover new things as I use and experiment with MO2. I have to say that my initial hunch that this would be worthy of my time to study and get past the growing pains of was spot on. I've since come to absolutely love the profiles abilities and the fact that after I build my mod library that I can have test profiles, character profiles with specific mods enabled, and so on. My next challenges will be to figure out how to make use of Mator Smash and merging mods. I've tried to do a Mator Smash twice now, but I keep missing something as lighting modss were off or some other mods weren't working correctly like they did under a bashed patch. Totally different topic of course but just wanted to say your assistance with clearing the topic of Overwrite had paid solid dividends. So wanted to express another big thank you for the pointers and replies

Hi Shadriss, thank's for the recommendation, going to take a look and study the STEP guide. Also thanks for pointing out title/name difference, otherwise I'd have thought your name was 'High King' Finally, big thank you for mentioning SSEEdit cache particulars, that lifted a big confuser for me. @Greg, thanks for the clarification, definitely helping me make progress on how to use the Overwrite folder, between you and Shadriss my understanding leapt way further ahead than it has otherwise.

Hi Dragonborn, thanks for answering. First, the explanation of the role of the Overwrite folder finally makes sense, a holding spot that requires a human to make another decision with it's contents and putting said contents into the right place. I bookmarked this so that I can copy your procedure for the cleaned master esms in the future and it led me to doing a experiment. I loaded up MO2, used SSEEdit to clean the Update esm and noticed 2 things as I went through the process. The ITMs weren't there this time. After finishing, I looked in my Common\SSE\Data folder and the Update esm showed a timestamp of having been modified at the time I ran SSEEdit.So basically, those are the cleaned versions and I can actually delete the mods with the red x's. That was quite comforting and satisfying to know. I should've thought of doing this sooner now that I look back, but ah well, use and learn. Now my current understanding is that whatever is in Overwrite is the original mod being configured/adjusted for use in my build and now I have to make a mod tuned for my build and put it to use by adding it to my mod load. If I may, I'd like to run by you a scenario to see if I'm understanding what you're saying and learned what to do going forward with a example: I downloaded "Beyond Skyrim-Bruma SE" and "Beyond Skyrim DLC Intergration Patch" installed the first, then the second and upon prompting merged the patch into the first, it's name in the mod panel is "Beyond Skyrim-Bruma SE". Then cleaning the "BSHeartland.esm" had the results land in my Overwrite, now I need to take those and specify where they go. Upon opening it in Explorer I found 3 files in "SSEEdit Cache" folder that I'm assuming are the now cleaned "Beyond Skyrim-Bruma SE" with all the associations needed to be functional. This set of 3 files are what I'm supposed to make a mod out of, so I right click the folder in Overwrite, select create mod, name it say "BS-Bruma-Clean" and when it finishes, I'm supposed to drop this "mod" into the installed mod folder "Beyond Skyrim-Bruma SE". Is that correct? Or do I in this case, take those 3 files and just move them without making a mod of them, into the folder of "Beyond Skyrim-Bruma SE"?

Hi A sincere apology in advance to anyone who is going to wade through this post. First let me say that I appreciate you taking the time to make sense of my babble and were we in each other's physical company I'd buy you a coffee and donut just for the effort. Secondly I'm being thick here, I'm normally reasonably quick on the uptake, but this overwrite for some reason just doesn't click with me and is tossing all kinds of anxiety triggers my way. I'm hoping some wise soul here can crack through my duncery and give me an aha. I'm new to MO2 and though I've come to see it's potential, there have been some growing pains I've clawed my way through. I'm of middling modding experience, mostly with NMM, Wyre Bash and OBMM. But while I like what I see in MO2, I'm having a really tough time wrapping my head around this darn Overwrite folder. I've read about an even dozen posts of what it does from various sites and I still don't understand how to properly use it. In addition, many of the tuts and videos I've found pertain to MO1 and while there are no doubt similarities, because this unfamiliar ground if the dots aren't in a direct line I don't see the relevance. I'm following the TUCO guide and so far I've gotten to the point where I have installed the utilities, cleaned the base esms, have SKSE running and up to the first 5 created mods installed before creating my first bashed patch. During all this in my MO2's window there are 4 greyed out mods with red X's saying These are the cleaned ESMs from Update->Dragonborn cleaned in SSEEdit. When the first one landed in overwrite I went looking for what to do, finding a post that said to make a mod out of them, drag them into the mod list, done. But the end result is they're faded and have big fat red Xs! According to Michael from Gamer Poet his video says a red X means the mod contains no recognizable data and can be safely deleted, but my burning questions are; This is what SEEEdit tossed into the Overwrite as the cleaned esms yes?Aren't they supposed to replace the base ESM's? If yes, it doesn't make sense to throw away what you just cleaned and keep the dirty base does it?Am I missing the obvious, the big fat red X is MO2 saying "Hey ya big Dummy, delete these and stop worrying because I already did my cyber-fu on those ESMs!"? I left them in, but listened to Michael with no check mark in their boxes and did a test run of the game in Helgen till the prisoner gets his hands unbound; the game ran very smoothly. I told myself not activating them is probably the right thing to do and kept going. So I installed a few more things and since nothing was landing in the overwrite I managed to ignore it. I'm sure you can see what's coming. I got to the point where TUCO says to download the Beyond Skyrim: Bruma files and clean one of them. I hit one 'uh-oh' right away after the base and it's patch were being installing where I was asked if I wanted to replace the original with the update, merge it, or delete the original. My cat gave me a firm meow when I asked if I should merge and so I chose merge. Is that what one usually does with a base mod and then a patch? Then I went to clean the specified file and as you can guess, that landed it in the Overwrite again with an accompanying face-palm. Neither Google nor the search function on these boards yielded results that I could set my compass by. So risking shame and embarrassment, I decided to post my journey thus far and having brought any reader up to speed on where I'm at, hoping I can finally 'get it' with someone's help; So what is the standard thing to do with a file that lands in the Overwrite? Do I drop them into the original mod's folders that's installed on the left pane? Do I create a brand new mod with the contents from the Overwrite, activate it instead and not use the already installed one of the same name?If so do I delete the original and use the files from the Overwrite? If I leave both and activate just the one from Overwrite, doesn't that count against the total mod count?What is the thing(s) to fundamentally understand about the overwrite as a good general rule to live by with stuff that lands in it?Hopefully my story and it's questions weren't too demanding of one's patience, I look forward to being educated and it allowing me once more to roam the land of Skyrim.

Hi Greg; Thanks for the added suggestion for LOOT, I haven't seen anything yet to point that out, I'll be sure to make use of that. I agree it's a temporary solution, so I'll be keeping an eye on xedit's development and see if anything pops up there. For the time being I'm going to try to become more familiar with MO2's use and build a test run for a skyrim build for SSE, been a couple of years since I stomped through the snows of Skyrim.

Posting a follow up to this issue, a bit longish to read but I wanted to be thorough in case anyone else winds up having a problem similar to mine and this account is of some assistance. I’m not one of these bright jewels that can look at programs and figure much out about them without a lot of research into tutorials or readmes, and if the particular issue isn’t warned about it’ll blindside me like it did here. However after 20 some hours of googling up forum posts addressing all kinds of xedit issues I started to have this nagging feeling that my clue was in that last line of xedit’s error message. Xedit was looking for inis in a place that didn’t correspond to where the “My Games†folder is on my system. Why would it do that? I’m assuming because the author told it to, and guessed that’s because its set up like this for most people, just not me. Why? So as of this writing, I have no idea where Win10 normally defaults the “My Games†folders to, but on my rig under the AppData\Local\Temp there wasn’t a “My Games†folder to be found. The error code that Xedit kept tossing at me nagged me to try to do something to make it happy. So I went into C:\Users\XXXX\Documents\My Games\Skyrim Special Edition and copied the Skyrim Special Edition folder containing the inis generated from launching the game, Then I went into C:\Users\XXXX\AppData\Local\Temp, created a folder named “My Gamesâ€, opened it and pasted the copy of “Skyrim Special Edition†from the other location. Restarted my systemLoaded up MO2, started Xedit and suddenly the welcome screen says hi and is eager to get to work. I don’t particularly like this and consider it a make shift patch to the problem, hopefully the team behind xedit will in the near future allow one to select where xedit will find the ini’s it’s looking for rather than making a assumption of where it should be.

I realized I left out something in the above that may be of some relevance. If I'm just reaching then someone more knowledgeable should feel free to correct me. I upgraded my main PC after saving up for it during the year, buying a new mobo/gfx card/cpu/ram. I'm pretty tech savvy when it comes to hardware and have been building my own computers for 30+ years now. You'll note I didn't mention any hard drive upgrades, that's because I was going to use all my hard drives from my previous configuration, I have a 500gb SSD as my OS drive, a 2TB WD Black as my Steam-game-hobby drive, and 2 4TB HDDs for everything else. Later this year I intend to upgrade the drives, but for now this is my storage from the previous rig's setup. My rig ran on Win7 because when I opted into the free upgrade to Win10 I had nothing but problems and quickly grew disgusted with it, especially as I had to do a complete reformat of my OS drive to get back into Win7 and haven't looked back. Unfortunately the Asus 390 prime mobo I was so proud of doesn't like Win7, I was caught unawares of the fact that the 370 gen boards require Win10 for full functionality, otherwise all those nifty usb ports are dead. I spent a full week trying to get around this barrier doing all kinds of recommended fixes but nothing worked, eventually I caved and tried a upgrade install of Win 10 but that created a new set of problems that made the system fairly unstable. I realized that my only sensible solution was to reformat my OS drive and do a clean install of Win10, that eliminated almost all of the problems I had encountered from attempting the upgrade option and I had to concede, Win10 didn't have the issues it once had. (It has other "features" I dislike but that's another story). Prior to the upgrade of my hardware, I had backed up all the contents of the "My Documents" folder and stored it on my game drive, thus when I had to do a clean install of Win10 once I was certain it was stable, I copied the contents of that My Documents folder into the user folder of my new Win 10 OS. The point of mentioning this is I have great respect for the authors of these utilities, not just for the utility but the service they give the community. I kept asking myself why is xedit looking in the AppData\Local\Temp folder? All my game files are in the User\Document folder which is the default location I've been using for years now. It occurred to me that this might be the new default of Win10 and that by dropping the My Games folder into the document folder, I'm not doing it the way Win10 intended. Am I on to something here or is this just the lost ramblings of the ignorant?

I'm of what I would say "middling" experience with modding. I've used TESV and TES4 a fair bit in the past with my most recent game of Oblivion seeing the most amount of use of the utility. So basically I'm not completely ignorant and have some experience with how essential utilities such as Xedit, Wyre and mod organizers are. Recently I upgraded my rig and was more or less forced into Win10 from Win7 (long story, not worth going into) and I'm constantly encountering little gotchas from Win10 with many of my programs with this possibly being another example. Anyway, here is the issue, after making the move from NMM to MO2 and deciding to give SkyrimSE a try I'm building a modded game following TUCO's guide. Right off the bat, I'm running into issues because I can't clean the Beth esm's at all, in fact I can't clean anything with either TESV or SSEEdit for their respective games, I keep getting this error mesage. SSEEdit 4.0.1 (40732B8C) starting session 2019-01-24 17:48:01 Using Skyrim Special Edition Data Path: E:\steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data\ Using Backup Path: E:\steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data\SSEEdit Backups\ Using Scripts Path: E:\MO2 SSE\SSEEdit 4.0.1\Edit Scripts\ Using Cache Path: E:\steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim Special Edition\Data\SSEEdit Cache\ Using ini: C:\Users\Fherrit Den\AppData\Local\Temp\My Games\Skyrim Special Edition\Skyrim.ini Fatal: Could not find ini In case the above isn't enough, below is my best recollection of this situation's evolution; After comparing mod organizers I decided on MO2, downloaded the installer version, created a MO2 folder on my Game drive (E) and dropped the executable there. Launched it and MO2 defaulted to install into my user/local/appdata drive. Not too keen on it being on my system SSD, I like to keep my pc gaming all on a 2 TB HDD purposed for Steam and related utilities. I hunted for a solution found Gamer Poet's series and followed it's suggestions closely. From within xedit I told it to set the base directory to my Game drive "E:\MO2 SSE", and based on my understanding of the video, left the rest at %BASE_DIR%/Downloads, etc. Then I extracted xedit 4.0.1 and dropped the extrracted folder into the same folder as MO2, meaning that xedit sits in it's own folder within the MO2 folder. (GP's videos said it doesn't matter where you drop xedit so assuming that's not a issue). I followed this up with launching the game from both the SkyrimLauncher and the Skyrim.exe based on previous experience of needing to generate ini's, set my display preferences and exited the game without playing it. I checked the my games folder within my documents on my system drive and noted that both ini's were present. Fired up MO2, configured it to access my Nexus account, opened up the modify executables tool and entered the following (my entry in italics): Title: SSEEdit Binary: E:\MO2 SSE\SSEEdit 4.0.1\SSEEdit.exe Start in: E\MO2 SSE Arguments: -SSE That done I listened to the far more knowledgable than me and wanted to clean my Bethesda esms, unfortunately each time I get the above message. During this past week of banging my head against this wall I've attempted the following: When in doubt, uninstall/reinstall. Uninstalled both SkyrimSE, MO2 and xedit. Reinstalled everything with fresh downloads. No change.Dug deeper, uninstalled MO2 again, ripping all traces of it. Downloaded and installed the archived version of MO2, set my folder structures as above, reinstalled xedit with the same configuration as detailed by GP and got the same error message.Ripped out the archived version, made sure all traces of MO2 was gone from my system and reinstalled the executable version and left everything at default settings in my app data folder. Xedit still failed to run.Since leaving everything in appdata did nothing, I ripped MO2 out again, reinstalled to my original folder on my E drive, meticulously followed GP's guide again. This time I gave the entire folder of "MO2 SSE" full control permission via the securities tab and set all child folders to have the same. I then went into Win10's Defender and granted the folder exclusion status from the choices available When that didn't change anything I specified SSEEdit.exe to the list of exclusions, again to no fixing the crash. Finally, I looked at the file path the error code is pointing at (or what I believe it to be doing) and have to confess first off, annoyed that it's even looking at AppData since I specifically pointed MO2 at a folder of my choosing. But looking inside it under Users\Fherrit Den\AppData\Local\Temp there is no "My Games\Skyrim Special Edition\Skyrim.ini" to be found and I have no clue why it would expect such to be there. However i can find those inis in C:\Users\Fherrit Den\Documents\My Games\Skyrim Special Edition. If it's going to the AppData\Temp by mistake, I have zero idea why or how to point it elsewhere. So that's all i can think of that might be of use, if anyone could help I'd deeply appreciate it.