TES5edit question...merged patch?

[jasonstory44]

Hi guys...curious if TES5edit is developed to a point where making merged patches is a good idea?  Do you guys do it with your mods or is it best to wait?

 

Thanks Jason

[alividlife]

I would do it.  It merges and lets you fine tune some of the data in your mods that Wrye Bash can't currently do.  But then again, I don't know how much more stable your game is going to be. 

 

Here is the guy who is part of the team that recoded TES4edit for Skyrim, in the video he describes his thoughts and feelings on making a merged patch.  And he also demonstrates how to create one.  He also has some other INVALUABLE videos on a plethora of awesome information. 

 

Definitely take notice of mods that have "out of order subrecords" warnings.  I would go as far to say, to just bite the bullet-- and not use an awesome incredible mod, just because it has that issue.

 

Don't try and merge VMAD data!  It can totally mess up your game, giving rocks and trees NPC data and I guess all other types of wacky stuff.  I personally can't wait for TES5edit 3.0.28, which I guess, functionality for VMAD data will be added, along with a couple other things. 

 

If you are going to have both a merged patch, and a bashed patch, don't forget to delete the Leveled Item records from your merged patch.

[Kelmych]

I was a regular user of TES4Gecko for Oblivion which created merged patches. It looks like it will be a while before TES5Gecko adds this capability; there hasn't been a lot of activity on the associated Dark Creations forum for TES5Gecko. In the meantime the only tool for merging patches is TES5Edit, and alivedlife provided some pointers to guidance on how to do this.

[jasonstory44]

Thanks guys.  Really appreciate the guidance!!!!

[Kelmych]

MTichenor, the author of the SkyRealism mods, has written an excellent short tutorial with screenshots on using TES5Edit to merge multiple mods including mods with Form IDs. Now that TES5Edit supports VMAD records (Papyrus scripts), most of the mods that make sense to merge can be merged. The procedures in this tutorial allow merging of many of the less complex mods that would be useful to merge when you need to to reduce the number of esps to add a new mod or two. We might want to ask if we could include this tutorial in one of the STEP guides.

 

Note that there can be some complexities if you are merging mods with complex large data structures as discussed a bit in the official forum here.

 

This should probably be split to a different thread, but I think should add a section in one of the guides to list useful videos. Many users (but not all) absorb information better when it is in a video. There are many excellent videos about using the tools created by the Skyrim mod community. The one referenced by alividlife is one such video as is the well-known Gopher video on cleaning mods with TES5Edit. The videos by Sharlikran listed here are also very useful.