Is it possible to protect mod folders (in MO2's left pane) from any edits?

[Sacralletius]

As a mod author, I've had an issue when making patches for mods, using MO2.
When editing a mod, MO2 will edit the original mod files in the left pane. In most cases, this is not really an issue, and I can manually copy them in another folder to prevent this.
However, with certain tools/CK functions, it sometimes edits files in mod folders without telling me which ones, which often leads to a lot of extra work having track down any edited files in the mod folders and reinstalling said mod.
Is there a way to set mod folders as "protected" and have all of their potential edits go into overwrite, instead of editing the files within the mods folder, so I can keep my mod folders pristine?

[Mousetick]

I guess you're referring to files such as scripts, facegen data or voice files? Not that I know of.

FWIW, I use this workaround to "protect" original mod files that are overwritten in-place by tools launched from MO2: I pack the originals into a BSA, and the generated loose files end up in the tool's output folder configured in MO2 (Overwrite by default). This only works for files that can be packed into BSA, though.

Alternatively, you could try to flag the mod folders as readonly in Windows Explorer, but I don't know if this would work well with MO2. It might trigger errors rather than fall back to the output folder. Also setting protection in a different place than MO2 would be confusing in the long run I think.

[Sacralletius]

Quote

I guess you're referring to files such as scripts, facegen data or voice files? Not that I know of.

That's unfortunate.

Especially when using tools like Nemesis, it loves to edit existing behavior files and has had me reinstall several mods to recover the original files. I haven't found any other ways to deal with it. It kinda sucks, as without Nemesis, I'm missing out on a lot of mods. But that's probably unavoidable. Hopefully MO2 will at some point have a protected mod folders feature.

[Mousetick]

I don't use Nemesis and I'm not familiar with it. Looking at its source code on github, it apparently has a -stage= command-line option to specify an output path. If this option is not specified, it defaults to Skyrim's Data directory.

So logically if you were to specify an absolute path, such as for example ‑stage=C:\Nemesis_Output, outside of the Skyrim Data folder tree, all files written by Nemesis should end up there and not be detected by MO2 as overwriting any existing mod file. Then you'd have to copy or move the output into MO2's managed mods tree.

If this works you could then try to point it directly to a MO2 specific mod folder, such as for example ‑stage="C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\ModOrganizer\Skyrim Special Edition\profiles\myprofile\mods\Nemesis Output", so that it's still outside of the Skyrim Data folder tree but it's magically managed by MO2 without it knowing.

As I said, I don't use Nemesis. I won't be held responsible if your PC crashes and burns, or if all your mods are trashed, as a result of these experiments

* Don't copy/paste my examples: I used non-breaking hyphens which wouldn't be recognized as valid command-line options.

** It'd probably be a good idea to create the (mod) folders before using them in the command-line option.