Incorrect plants growing in garden?

[FendisKhan]

After some preliminary testing, I'm finding the following errors when planting in my garden:

• Elves Ears (ElvesEars 00034D31) -> Pumpkin Vine (i.e., planting Elves Ears produces Pumpkin Vine)
• Frost Mirriam (FrostMirriam 00034D32) -> Domica Redwort
• Hanging Moss (HangingMoss 00057F91)-> Tomato Plant
• Nirnroot (Nirnroot 00059B86)-> Ash Yam
• Saltrice (CACO_Saltrice 01CCA116)-> Hanging Moss
• Wormwood Leaves (CACO_Wormwood_SF 69A1013F) -> Aloe Vera
• Garlic (Garlic 00034D22)-> Fire Fern

I'll try deselecting various mods (I'm using all Step suggestions) and share any additional findings.

[FendisKhan]

When I disabled CACO (and related patches), none of the listed items were available to be planted in the garden.

[Mousetick]

1 hour ago, FendisKhan said:

After some preliminary testing, I'm finding the following errors when planting in my garden:

There are conflicts between Hearthfire Extended and CACO, which could cause this behavior if they are incorrectly patched. This should normally be patched by the STEP CACO Patch, but perhaps it's bugged - I'm speculating, I haven't looked at it. Have you installed and activated the STEP CACO Patch?

If you know how to use xEdit, you can modify the STEP CACO Patch or create your own patch on top, and edit these 2 records:

03008246 <flPlanterPlantedFlora>
03008247 <flPlanterPlantableItem>

The CACO version should override everything and "win" on both records. HearthFire Extended version should be "lost". As illustrated below for one of the 2 records:

1 hour ago, FendisKhan said:

When I disabled CACO (and related patches), none of the listed items were available to be planted in the garden.

That's expected, as the ability to plant these items is a specific feature of CACO. In vanilla, only a very small subset of items can be planted.

[FendisKhan]

21 minutes ago, Mousetick said:

Have you installed and activated the STEP CACO Patch?

Yes. But I'll try making the edits you suggested.

[z929669]

7 hours ago, Mousetick said:

There are conflicts between Hearthfire Extended and CACO, which could cause this behavior if they are incorrectly patched. This should normally be patched by the STEP CACO Patch, but perhaps it's bugged - I'm speculating, I haven't looked at it. Have you installed and activated the STEP CACO Patch?

If you know how to use xEdit, you can modify the STEP CACO Patch or create your own patch on top, and edit these 2 records:

03008246 <flPlanterPlantedFlora>
03008247 <flPlanterPlantableItem>

The CACO version should override everything and "win" on both records. HearthFire Extended version should be "lost". As illustrated below for one of the 2 records:

That's expected, as the ability to plant these items is a specific feature of CACO. In vanilla, only a very small subset of items can be planted.

Were merging these records in the Step patch, and this seems correct to allow for growing everything supported by the mods included.

[Mousetick]

15 minutes ago, z929669 said:

Were merging these records in the Step patch, and this seems correct to allow for growing everything supported by the mods included.

If you merge them the way shown in your screenshots, this will create the issue the OP reported.

The 2 lists are defined separately but are actually intrinsically linked and their contents must match 1-to-1 in the same order:

• flPlanterPlantableItem contains the list of items that can be planted from the player's inventory (eg. Nirnroot ingredient).
• flPlanterPlantedFlora contains the list of items that are actually planted in the soil and are harvestable later (eg. Nirnroot tree).

The game uses the first table to restrict the list of stuff that can be planted. Then it uses the second table to determine which harvestable to plant based on the ingredient or food chosen in the player's inventory, from the first table. Both work together like a lookup table or a key/value pair table, but since these data structures don't exist in plugins, it's split into separate "parallel" lists. Both tables must contain the same number of entries: the plantable item and the corresponding harvestable item must be at the same position in both tables.

xEdit tries to be helpful by showing the common entries in flPlanterPlantableItem between HFE and CACO, but its guidance should not be followed in that case. If correct merging were to be done, each HFE entry should be listed first, before all the CACO entries, to match the entries merged in flPlanterPlantedFlora.

However there is actually no need to merge HFE and CACO, as CACO already includes all items added by HFE. So merging them would result in duplicate entries, some using HFE harvestables, other using CACO harvestables.

CACO, if used with HFE, should completely win and HFE entries should be discarded/ignored, so that only CACO stuff is used.

Hope this helps.

 

[FendisKhan]

On 7/28/2023 at 8:13 PM, Mousetick said:

However there is actually no need to merge HFE and CACO, as CACO already includes all items added by HFE...

CACO, if used with HFE, should completely win and HFE entries should be discarded/ignored, so that only CACO stuff is used.

This worked. I modified the Step Patch - CACO to eliminate all the changes that applied only to HFE entries. Those changes appeared redundant with entries introduced by CACO, with the exception of Jarrin Root.

[z929669]

11 minutes ago, FendisKhan said:

This worked. I modified the Step Patch - CACO to eliminate all the changes that applied only to HFE entries. Those changes appeared redundant with entries introduced by CACO, with the exception of Jarrin Root.

I've made the same correction on my end. This makes more sense now since the list order of the formIDs under those two records are linked as Mousetick explained previously.

The update will be live soon-ish.

[DoubleYou]

Formlists are special, similar to leveled lists in some ways. Often you'll see mods make their own "variants" of things under a custom formid, which may be similar/identical to another mod's variant, which then requires special care.

[Mousetick]

Yeah sorry I forgot about Jarrin Root which is only provided by HFE. Personally I chose to discard it.

HFE's plantable/harvestable version of Jarrin Root is kind of a cheat, IMO. Jarrin Root is a unique item in vanilla, there is only one sample obtained normally via a DB quest throughout the entire game. See UESP article for more info. If the player chooses to plant the sample, thanks to HFE, they can have an infinite supply of the ingredient which can then be used to make crazy overpowered poisons.

It's a more "immersive" way to get multiple copies of the item than using console commands, but it's still a cheat.