Changing Races: Long Term Effects??

[p4ck3tl055]

I've got a save where the character (A Bosmer) has completed the "intro" and a few additional things (Killing the first dragon, meeting the Greybeards, cleared the Ivarstead Barrow).  I want to take that save (by copying the MO profile to a new one) and turn that character into another character (A Breton) and continue from there.  The idea is to not have to replay all of the intro stuff that I have been through a dozen+ times but still have both characters be viable for long term play.

 

My mod setup started with SR:LE and has grown a bit - it include SkyRE for example.  Because of my mod setup I know that I can use RaceMenu to alter anything about a character, including the race.  With SkyRe, I can add a "Potion of Respec" and refund allocated perks.  And I can use the console to move/alter the levels of skills should I wish.

 

The good news is that, for the most part, the two characters would have started very similarly, build wise.  However the initial allocation of skill levels (those assigned when choosing a race) and the long term effect on the copied/altered save are what bothers me.

 

Does anyone know if the process would lead to corruption?  If so is there anything I can do to "clean up" after the copy/alteration?

[EntropyZ]

An easy and painless way to to change race while keeping progress, stats, etc. Is to use the "changerace" command in the console with the race editorid that you wish to use. After that use "showracemenu" to edit the body, face and everything else, but don't select another race though the racemenu or else you will lose the stats that you had before.

 

If you want to start with clean stats (initial) meant for the new race, change the race through the command "showracemenu" and continue to edit as you would normally.

 

Short answer is: The save game will be running fine with the changes you make to the race and stats, just make sure not to introduce invalid values when editing through console.

 

The long answer:

 

 

There is no real way to know if your save game will be changed for the worse because there was never any kind of method to study/debug/observe this without spending a lot of time by playing and opening the save game with reader/editor software, so no luck there.

 

Also there would be no point in cleaning something in tes5 format save game, probably because the data is simply overwritten with new values. I don't think there can be any data written concerning races that don't belong in the save game while having it completely intact and capable of loading within the game, somebody prove me wrong. Although the game engine has been known to be unpredictable at times. Unfortunately, debugging a save game is extremely limited.

 

In my personal experience I haven't found a single problem while changing race and playing as I normally would. I do try to avoid changing from and to custom races because once a save game has been made with a particular set of mods, that data will most likely be permanently marked on it. Even after you remove all possible traces of a mod there are stability issues to consider, this applies to most mods although there are exceptions where you can simply safely remove a mod without thinking twice before doing so.

 

Edited May 28, 2015 by EntropyZ