FrozenStorm

Sorry to necro this but I was wondering about the same thing as OP and stumbled on this thread. Is there a particular reason to create a bashed patch before LODGen? Does it actually affect the LODGen process? Or is this just to avoid spending the 1-2 hours on LODGen only to find out the bashed patch doesn't work? Also, I'm assuming the same idea applies to a merged patch, where STEP's CR patches handle everything for STEP plugins, but we should still make our own if we add our own mods with conflicts?

By the way, when the instructions say "outside the game and MO virtual file structure", I'm guessing this also excludes writing directly to the Overwrite folder?

Thanks. I searched through the mods and no files in other mod folders seem to have been modified by the LODGen, and the Steam verification completed successfully. So I'll hold off on reinstalling things for the time being, but I've fixed the executable output flag now.

I'm following the STEP 1.0.0 guide for SSE and I'm currently on the LODGen step. However, I forgot to set the -o flag for the xLODGen executable, so it generated the files in the game folder (default behaviour). As expected this made the files appear in the Overwrite folder, which I then moved to a new mod in MO2. However, both the STEP guide and this forum urge us not to use the default behaviour (i.e. generating in the game folder) for VFS-based mod managers (like MO2). What is the reason for this? Did I inadvertently overwrite some other files? Will I need to reinstall all the landscape & texture mods from STEP that could have an effect on LOD generation? I am currently verifying the vanilla files with Steam's "Verify integrity of local files" to ensure none of the vanilla files were overwritten. I ask also because not having this restriction would significantly ease the workflow of these tools (especially with MO2's "Create files in mod instead of overwrite" feature in the executable setup) for future runs (whenever I add new LOD-altering mods, such as Elysium Estate for instance).