GrantSP

I have found the automatic assigning of categories to be a bit flaky. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Haven't really put too much attention to it as really that sort of thing is best done on a "user preferred" basis. If you get all your mods assigned as you like it it is a simple thing to keep track of newly installed mods and assign them as you see fit. Likewise with the meta.ini files. Sometimes they get their details right from Nexus, sometimes they don't. In the scheme of things I would rate those sort of issues really low for attention by Tannin, MO's creator.

Your Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini should be in there.

Clarification. @Akezhar is the creator of 'Living Takes Time' not FISS. Apologies if my post didn't make that clear.

Did you clear out the settings files in your DocumentsMy GamesSkyrim folder?

From what you have posted here I think it is safe to say you have a fairly logical and clinical mind, one capable of merging and bashing patches. I would say though that you might be over-reaching a bit. If you have never done this sort of thing before it's best to take things a bit at a time. You know the proverb: Question - How do you eat an elephant?Answer - One bite at a time.When I started to mod, and I am by no means proficient at it, I started with small, minor edits and tested these. Only after getting those right did I next move onto adding more mods. It may, in the long run, prove more beneficial for you to strip back your mod list and add in each 'tricky' set of mods one at a time. I can see you are already using some good tools to assist you, like the Merge Plugins Script. Keep in mind though that that tool is just that, a tool. It can not do for you anything that you are unaware of. If you don't know why certain mods need to have certain records merged then having that done automatically won't really help you, in the long run. This probably doesn't sound like the answer you want but in my experience if you break large problems down into small ones and tackle each one in turn, pretty soon you have no problem and you will be well equipped to tackle the next set of problems. I should clarify this by saying this is directed to your 3rd (listed as 4th) point. CTD's and ENB settings are those sort of problem that getting answers from others is invaluable, and I think you are being provided with some great advice here about that. I don't use ENBs so I can't offer anything further. One thing I will say about the 'Overwrite' folder. Whenever you run a tool that places files in it, you will need to decide if they need to made into a mod or can be discarded. So, for example, if you run FNIS to create the FNIS patch you need to use the right-click "Create Mod" option. The same thing applies for any other tool that generates files in this folder. Now, if you leave that folder populated with temporary things such as TES5Edit backups, these will also be added into whatever *.esp you have just made. Therefore it is imperative that you empty this folder before doing any editing. Think of it as a 'temp' folder. Generally files that are placed into it can be discarded if all you are doing is playing Skyrim. If, however, you have been doing ANY modding type of activity, the files generated need to be placed either into a new plugin or overwrite an existing plugin.

There are two things that should be mentioned here I feel. FISS is already added to Living Takes Time. @Akezhar has said he is discontinuing work on it so any further edits will need to be taken up by someone else.I agree though, it does look like an interesting mod.

I have never used NMM so excuse me if I miss something that is specific to that program. As far as MO is concerned there are a few locations that you will need to look at. The actual location of Mod Organizer is dependent on where you installed it, either in your 'Program Files' or as a sub-directory of your game's folder. The downloads are not surprisingly in "downloads", these are the archives from Nexus or where ever you got them, and the actual installed mods are folders, named after the archives, in "mods". If you copy all your archives from NMM into the downloads folder of MO and then start the program, the 'Downloads' tab on thr right-hand side will have all those files listed but with a red yield icon. Right-clicking on each file and selecting 'Query Info' will fill out the details about version number, endorsement status, any extra information about the mod etc. This means instead of seeing just: ModName-11111-v0.1beta.zip or something similar It will say Awesome Weapon Mod version 0.1 beta (Main 0.1 beta) with a tooltip that shows an extra information that exists. "Will it help with filling out the categories?" No. But the categories supplied don't exactly match with the Nexus ones anyway. Probably because MO handles Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout3 & FalloutNV which all have slightly different categories on the Nexus. The main ones are the same but there are enough changes to make it matter. Truthfully, categories as they exist in MO, are purely a user preference thing anyway. It makes no difference to how the mods are installed, sorted or otherwise managed. They are just to assist you in grouping certain mods together and are used in the 'Filter' option to the lower left of the left-hand pane.

You could try setting up profiles based on what mods you want installed. The only proviso here is if ANY mod exists in more than one profile and is setup differently in each, e.g. a bashed patch or an esp created by an external tool like a ReProccer, then that file will be incorrect. So, if all the mods you want for your 'weather' setup are stand alone files with nothing custom generated, you could create a "Weather" profile and when you select that all those files will be loaded, ordered and enabled correctly. I do this for simple things like a "Magic user" setup that has mods to enhance magic or I have a "Khajiit" profile that has, what I consider, specific mods that apply to just khajiits.

If you want ALL your files to show the default categories then close down MO and do as GSDFan instructed. If you only want SOME files to revert to default then do as I suggest. Keep in mind, deleting categories.dat doesn't change the assignment of a category for a specific mod IF the category you changed it to exists in the default list. e.g. ModA has the default category assignment of 'Visuals' but you assign it 'Overhauls' (also in the default). If you delete the *.dat file ModA will still have the same assignment since the 'Categories' haven't changed. If, on the other hand, you give a new category of 'Awesomeness' deleting the *.dat file will make a change because that category doesn't exist anymore. Categories.dat is the listing of categories for ALL mods. If you want to change the category outside of MO then you need to look to the meta.ini file in the installed mod's folder. Each mod has one of these and in it is a line like: category="11," In this case 11 = 'Items'

You could just look at the Nexus page for the mods in question and then change the categories to what is set there. Nexus displays the categories for each mod with a link just under each mod name.

I've got three profiles running on my setup, default and two specialised ones. The only papyrus logs anywhere in my computer are located: "...DocumentsMy GamesSkyrimLogsScript"

If, like me you have limited download amounts, you could always copy over the archives into the 'downloads' folder of MO and then just 'Query Info' and have them setup quickly that way. Then you would need to 'install' them into MO ready for play. Especially if you have mods like texture overhauls that can amount into 100's of Mb then not having to re-download them is an asset. As @hishutup said, mods have a habit of disappearing from Nexus so working with your local copies is fine.

hmm... now I'm confused. I removed the arguments "-laaexe .FalloutMO.exe" from the executables dialog and now it runs just fine. My confusion though stems from the belief that that argument needed to be there to enable the Large Address Aware flag for FalloutNV. Is that not the case? If it isn't needed then why is there provision to add that as an argument? Not that the game is struggling at the moment but isn't it now just the same as running the vanilla exe? It was so much simpler when I could just patch the exe and be done with it. Ah well, Steam is a valuable tool I guess and they need to keep check on who's doing what to their code in game.

Curious. So you have no issues with the 4Gb patch and NVSE plugins? Do you mind pasting here what your executable configs are? ie. where Steam, FalloutNV, MO and the MO executable for FNV4Gb. I just tried again and it is only when I run it via MO that the 4Gb patch throws the error.

@GSDFan No. I was trying to get the 4Gb fix to work but whenever I tried to add a NVSE plugin mod to my load order the MO launcher would fail and give me an error message: "There is already an instance of Fallout:New Vegas running.". I've just reverted to the default Fallout exe, for the time being. The truth is I am only partly getting into setting up FalloutNV, Skyrim is still taking priority. After spending a few years playing and modding Civ V I wanted a break from that and just recently purchased both Skyrim & FalloutNV as a sort of sabbatical from 'turn-based strategies'. Glad I did, All the Bethesda games are looking really good on my computer. I last played Oblivion on my other game system and it struggled. Now everything looks fantastic. That's all beside the point though, sorry, got sidetracked.

That is quite interesting. Although at the moment I don't use these tools and have no need to get them to run via MO, I might be able to offer a small bit of advice. From those screenshots of the source code, and your idea as a fix, it looks like I may have an alternative? It looks like the output directories are hard-coded, and thus MO's VFS throws a curveball at the program. If you where to change those to user-defined variables, perhaps set at runtime by the user, then the program would have somewhere to send the output. Not exactly sure how that code might look, my coding is very rusty, but I was always told variables are always better than hard-coding. Of course I may be completely wrong, in which case feel free to disregard everything I just said. ;)

Ok, with the exception of FOOK (I'll look at that installation after playing FalloutNV for a while), everything is installed and working as you would expect. The only changes I made to the above installation steps are: Instead or oHUD I have the three original mods. (I'll need to look into this more as I still have two more plugins in my load than I need.) After everything was done I needed to re-install DarnUI to fix the "Not in the start menu" problem.I take it the empty menu folders generated in the overwrite folder after each start are from UIO?

ninja'd Ahh... I see you are referring to the UIO version. Yeah all up to date. Those latter postings were without UIO as I wanted to see if the bare minimum would display before using that to add in the other UI stuff. Thanks for that. Now I know where my setup stands I'll give the other stuff a crack.

Yep. definitely something screwy with the oHUD package. I just downloaded the three separate mods, iHUD, aHUD & Primary Needs. Using FOMM I activated all three and allowed them to update the xml files as needed. Exited FOMM and created a mod I called 'Gopher's UI mods' from the files in the overwrite folder and activated it from within MO. Started the game and everything is on screen and can be toggled, moved or otherwise fiddled with. The upshot for me is: while the oHUD package was formulated to reduce three mods down to one, installing those three in FOMM and creating one mod in MO does exactly the same thing. Using FOMM though does go against my previously stated stance of reducing the necessity of extra tools during installation. I guess I need to fetch myself a couple of helpings of humble pie. EDIT: Idiot. It doesn't do the same thing at all. Only one mod installed but there are still the three separate plugins in the load order.

Which mod are you referring to? All the mods are freshly downloaded. Just to test a theory I downloaded Primary Needs and installed that. Everything shows perfectly and all elements are visible both on the HUD and in the MCM. Something is screwy with Gopher's combo mod. At least it is when I do it. ;(

I thought I would strip this down to the bare minimum and investigate, so this is where I'm at. All mods removed and only trying to get the 'Extra elements' from oHUD to show and be functional. Install DarnUINV. This is easy to do manually from MO and everything displays as expected with no error messages. Install MCM. As you point out this must be done from FOMM as the start_menu.xml from Darn needs to be read and modified to display properly. Activate it from FOMM and then create a mod from the 'Overwrite' folder within MO. Perfect. All elements still showing correctly. Install oHUD. This is where the errors are. Either from MO alone or by using FOMM to activate it, none of the 'Extra elements' are shown. The MCM pages for that part of the mod show all the options ticked but I can't untick them or even force MCM to show those elements. The pages themselves appear to accept input. The colour of the specific elements change to highlighted and there is the audible feedback upon clicking but nothing happens. The 'Extra HUD -- Show/Move page has all the options checked but input is impossible. The iHUD : Extra HUD pages do allow input but nothing shows on screen. So with just three mods install, DarnUI, MCM & oHUD, none of the extra elements such as the clock, resistances, primary needs, encumberance, etc. are visible. I just noticed another user has also posted the same thing on the oHUD Nexus page. May I ask, are you using the FalloutNV Ultimate Edition? I can't see how that would make a difference but I am looking for anything different between our setups at this stage.

Glad you got it all sorted.

hmm... I thought I would give this method a try since my attempts to do it without using FOMM left me without two very important aspects: 1) none of the items from iHUD's Extras, such as the resistances, clock, etc. were showing up and the MCM page for those things show everything selected but I am unable to make changes to those things or show them so as to move them. 2) depending on where I set those mods in my MO priority, DarnUi shows as being active in the HUD but not in the start menu and needing to be repaired for MCM to appear correctly. The actual DarnUI changes to fonts etc. are all there, just the DarnUI option in the menu. So... I tried this method, except for the parts about the mods I don't have, like JIP mods or FOOK. I will look at using those later. Followed every step as described and the end result is exactly the same as it was before. The main change now is no matter how I reorder them, Darn is always out of whack. To be clear I deleted all the "installed" mods in MO so as to start from a clean vanilla base. DarnUI by itself works fine with no errors. Moving step-by-step through this gives me, as far as I can see, exactly the same result as not using FOMM. Unfortunately both ways don't give me the full package.

hmm... I think you still are misunderstanding the interface. Not to worry, that will come. 1) MO doesn't know which texture is better, all it 'knows' is which texture will be used. If you install a couple of mods that change the same things it is up to you to decide which mod gets the gig! 2) Reordering can be done by left-clicking on the name, or any part of the highlighted mod, and dragging it to a new location. You will see a black line and black triangular cursor to the left showing where the mod will be placed. Or by slow left-clicking twice next to the priority number and then typing the new value. 3) Endorsing those mods has no bearing on MO showing the conflict status. The 'heart' icon simply shares the 'Flags' column with the 'lightning' icons. If there is no 'conflict' shown that simply means that mod doesn't change existing items, hence no conflict. Typically mods that introduce new stuff will be free of those flags. 4) Any mod you install from outside Nexus wont be able to have the endorse status changed, that is purely a Nexus arrangement and has no bearing on how the mods run or are handled by MO. If you haven't already, familiarise yourself with the UI by reading the MO wiki put together by the good folk here in the S.T.E.P. forum.

There isn't any need to install or run xEdit from the Program Files folder tree. Best bet is to install all the tools you want into a directory away from there. I have a separate directory under my C:Games folder where my non-Steam game are installed. All the xEdit tools, TES5Edit, etc. run perfectly fine and can look to your registry to locate the installations of your games. Also, are you sure you installed the Merge plugin correctly? If you copied the archive contents as they are found it means three new files and a new folder, "MP", with a Java executable and the dictionary.txt inside it. These should be inside your Edit Scripts folder. Just checking. Sometimes the simple things are overlooked. No sleight against you intended. ;)