Master Cleaning and xEdit arguments

[z929669]

7 hours ago, Mercury71 said:

Any opinions about the AE when it comes to cleaning? Loot tells me 41 of the "mods" need cleaning.

It's not advised to clean them, since it will almost certainly break some things. I personally think that some of these references were left in the plugins to prevent save-game issues when users enable/disable some of them. Like the vanilla masters, these don't appear to cause any specific issues, AFAIK.

I have been tempted to clean them myself just to see if there is any +/- impact, but I just don't feel like hassling with it 41x.

[Mercury71]

48 minutes ago, z929669 said:

It's not advised to clean them, since it will almost certainly break some things. I personally think that some of these references were left in the plugins to prevent save-game issues when users enable/disable some of them. Like the vanilla masters, these don't appear to cause any specific issues, AFAIK.

I have been tempted to clean them myself just to see if there is any +/- impact, but I just don't feel like hassling with it 41x.

I am of the same opinon. This topic will continue to divide the community tough. Today someone put up a batch plugin for MO2 that cleans automatic, so for any that are interested in this topic it might be fun to follow the discussion there. (for those that want to clean them this batch might be a good "no hassle" solution)

[z929669]

Sounds like a reasonable solution. I'm inclined to wait to see results for people doing this cleaning to determine if it causes/eliminates issues. If it has no impact and these are benign ITMs, we will probably not include the process in our guides.

[z929669]

19 hours ago, sheson said:

snip/

Message about deleted references are statements of facts.
Cleaning is a prerequisite before generating LOD. https://tes5edit.github.io/docs/7-mod-cleaning-and-error-checking.html

Update, DLC and CC plugins change between game updates and there are older mods/plugins out there that have not been made with the (future) changes / additions of plugins in mind.
If a guide wants to skip the simple and save process of cleaning to save a few minutes time in a setup that takes hours / days, then it should provide a patch that fixes such problems and other issues in the load order.
If you believe warning and error messages are noise, I suggest to simply fix the cause of the problem nonetheless. Incidentally taking care of known problems - regardless of how mundane they seem - helps greatly with stability and troubleshooting later on.

Want to chime in on this point.

Step helped to popularize the "cleaning of vanilla plugins" a long time ago by adding it to our guides. Prior to the advent of the xEdit auto script, this was tedious to explain and support, since it only needs to be done very rarely (on certain game updates). Lots of users had trouble with that and still do even with the script. It turns out it isn't necessary and cleaning some of the vanilla files can break the game in some cases. See this topic for our recent discussion on this and why we decided to eliminate it.

With the SAE update, cleaning 'vanilla' masters is no simple 2-minute task. You must spend hours cleaning 40+ masters. It's just not necessary, and the support headaches for those that make a mistake are huge (lots of opportunity for mistakes in simple file management alone, due to the sheer number of iterations).

We DO advise and instruct to clean any mod reporting ITM/UDR in LOOT ... but not vanilla plugins any longer.

Given that vanilla masters will never be fixed at the source ( ), it's a moot point to report those errors, and I agree that it only adds noise and confusion for both user and developer. Do as you see fit, but reporting them on every run is redundant, IMO.

[sheson]

On 2/4/2022 at 5:31 PM, z929669 said:

Want to chime in on this point.

Step helped to popularize the "cleaning of vanilla plugins" a long time ago by adding it to our guides. Prior to the advent of the xEdit auto script, this was tedious to explain and support, since it only needs to be done very rarely (on certain game updates). Lots of users had trouble with that and still do even with the script. It turns out it isn't necessary and cleaning some of the vanilla files can break the game in some cases. See this topic for our recent discussion on this and why we decided to eliminate it.

With the SAE update, cleaning 'vanilla' masters is no simple 2-minute task. You must spend hours cleaning 40+ masters. It's just not necessary, and the support headaches for those that make a mistake are huge (lots of opportunity for mistakes in simple file management alone, due to the sheer number of iterations).

We DO advise and instruct to clean any mod reporting ITM/UDR in LOOT ... but not vanilla plugins any longer.

Given that vanilla masters will never be fixed at the source ( ), it's a moot point to report those errors, and I agree that it only adds noise and confusion for both user and developer. Do as you see fit, but reporting them on every run is redundant, IMO.

Users not following or using bad instructions breaks games. Cleaning is safe and fixing known sources of problems in the load order is good modding practice.

Deleted references are a known cause of CTD. Especially when not cleaning the paid mods since they are now the uncertainty what the DLCs were back then when they came out for Skyrim. There are mods made before they came out, unaware of the changes made in the vanilla files or the paid mods or a mod author does not have them. BTW, I checked, I spend 20 minutes to manually clean 41 CC plugins initially. The last update did not change any paid mods. The update before that changed 4 paid mods of which 3 needed to be cleaned, which took me 2 minutes. Just saying...

A fixed load order with known mods and plugins based on a guide is probably fine until it is customized - until a user installs this one mod from 1 years ago.

If a guide does not instruct users to clean a plugin, I suggest to provide the cleaned plugin for download.

DynDOLOD is a multipurpose tool. In cases like this, it does not know if a problem requires action or not, it does not know if the current load order accidentally happens to be "safe" or not and if a reported issue requires action or not. Hence the nicely sorted summary with the explanations.

This is off topic.

[z929669]

2 hours ago, sheson said:

Users not following or using bad instructions breaks games. Cleaning is safe and fixing known sources of problems in the load order is good modding practice.

Deleted references are a known cause of CTD. Especially when not cleaning the paid mods since they are now the uncertainty what the DLCs were back then when they came out for Skyrim. There are mods made before they came out, unaware of the changes made in the vanilla files or the paid mods or a mod author does not have them. BTW, I checked, I spend 20 minutes to clean 41 CC plugins initially. The last update did not change any paid mods. The update before that changed 4 paid mods of which 3 needed to be cleaned, which took me 2 minutes. Just saying...

A fixed load order with known mods and plugins based on a guide is probably fine until it is customized - until a user installs this one mod from 1 years ago.

If a guide does not instruct users to clean a plugin, I suggest to provide the cleaned plugin for download or create a patch that overwrites the deleted references with UDRs. Maybe that should/could be part of the unofficial patches.

DynDOLOD is a multipurpose tool. In cases like this, it does not know if a problem requires action or not, it does not know if the current load order accidentally happens to be "safe" or not and if a reported issue requires action or not. Hence the nicely sorted summary with the explanations.

This is off topic.

Indeed OT for your thread. I wanted to give you a chance to reply within the context of that topic before moving these. Fixed that by moving them here.

I do like the idea of providing the cleaned vanilla masters. Providing the cleaned vanilla plugin files is on a slippery slope with respect to rights, particularly for paid DLC content. I like even better the idea of the USSEP and USCCCP (or whatever the acronym for that one) patching out these issues.

Again, we provide cleaning instructions in our guides but no longer as a specific step for users to execute. We also do explicitly mention that mods should be cleaned if LOOT indicates as much. I just thought @Mousetick was onto something when he mentioned xEdit errors for vanilla plugins in DynDOLOD logs. Around here, we tend to ignore and look past them in the DynDOLOD logs, but users are often concerned by them. If I had an option to ignore them in the output, I would use it just to be rid of the noise so that I can focus more on 'new' issues.

Thanks for the clarity though. I don't altogether disagree with you.

[Mousetick]

27 minutes ago, z929669 said:

If I had an option to ignore them in the output, I would use it just to be rid of the noise so that I can focus more on 'new' issues.

That was exactly my thought too. The interesting 'Deleted references' warnings are drowned among the numerous vanilla masters.

My comment specifically referred to the base SSE game vanilla masters (namely Skyrim.esm, Dawnguard.esm, Dragonborn.esm, HearthFires.esm and Update.esm), but sheson's response generalized the issue to CC modules and mods. It looked like the discussion would immediately devolve into one of those "should the vanilla masters be cleaned" endless debates, so I bailed out 

An "advanced" option to whitelist some masters in DynDOLOD.ini, off or empty by default, would indeed be nice.