Merged Patches

[Fonkin]

Still haven't played Skyrim yet, having too much fund modding before I play.  Thanks again to this wonderful community of modders for making Skyrim absolutely beautiful.

 

In my wanderings, I came across this article and if I understand it correctly, this is a merged patch created in TES5Edit versus a Bashed Patch as instructed by the STEP project.

 

It's totally possible I missed a step, I've gone through the entire process 3 times now and have found one thing I missed here or there along they way.  If I missed it, my apologies for the post.  If not, should I create a Merged Patch for the STEP install and if so, where would I place it?  Or would it supersede the Bashed Patch created by following the STEP instructions?

[Kelmych]

The first sentence in the referenced article is wrong, at least in 2017 (vs. 2014 when it was written). Bashed Patches include a lot more changes than just merges of the leveled lists, even in Skyrim where the patch capabilities are limited. The development team has been working on adding changes so the Skyrim version of WB will eventually handle the bash tags in the bashed patch section of the WB Advanced Readme.

 

I haven't found the TES5Edit merged patch that useful in Skyrim since there is no equivalent to the bash tags that can control which mod's objects will "win". The TES5Edit merged patch in Skyrim is more comprehensive than the bashed patch, but I find it takes a lot of editing of the patch plugin so the correct version of the objects are selected. The TES5Edit Merged patch is described in the FNVEdit Training Manual; the manual hasn't been updated for Skyrim.

 

You would typically use one or the other but not both unless you are willing to do a fair amount of editing to the TES5Edit merged patch to eliminate the conflicts with the bashed patch.

[Fonkin]

Kelymych,

 

Thank you for a very comprehensive answer.  Really nice to have great folks like you running about to help us newbs make informed decisions.    This is great and current information.