Editing Oblivion.esm

[Myst42]

Hi everyone

This is a very technical question and I ask it in hope someone who sees it knows an answer

 

I want to edit Oblivion.esm file... personal tweaking

I know the risk of it and how many tweakings could cause a broken game

But I know what I'm doing and I don't intend to edit anything game breaking.

I know it should work, I've don it before on other master files and I know a bit of the mechanics of the game.

 

Problem is Oblivion.esm wont load as active file in the CS

 

First I tried:

Wrye Bash: Copy Oblivion.esm, to Oblivion.esp

Esp file is tweakable as active file and should be loaded just fine

CS froze up

 

Then I tried

Downloading CS Extender here at Nexus, installing everything, CS Extender opened just fine

CS Extender can load esm files as active, selected Oblivion.esm

CS Extender froze up

Tried the esp copy method again and nothing changed

 

Any Idea how can I load Oblivion.esm... or esp copy of it?

 

Thks in advance

[eric31415]

You don't edit the .esm itself. The changes are saved as .esp files, which overwrite the .esm ingame. Just run the CS, check the Oblivion.esm(not as active file). Now make any change you want, and save the plugin. When you activate it in your load order, the changes you made will appear ingame.

[Myst42]

Yeah... thank you for replying. But I already know how to make an esp and I've already made a lot of them, and I even know how to make and edit other esm files

But I reeeally need to edit Oblivion.esm file this time...

 

Could I?

[eric31415]

To the best of my knowledge, you cannot edit the main .esm directly. But even if you could, that would be a very bad idea. That is the resource pack that all your installed mods use. You run a strong risk of making your game incompatible with mods made on any other copy.

 

Perhaps if I had a better idea of exactly what you are trying to do...

[Myst42]

To tell the truth it's more of an obsession.

I know that's the game's core file and some things should not be edited

But I don't plan on changing anything, I just want to add content to it

I edit most of my mods, and as what I'm doing is add new content, I hardly think any other thing would be incompatible with it. The base content would be untouched

The only way an incompatibility occurred is if I build a mod using the extra features and somehow the modified Oblivion.esm went lost and the old one was there

 

It's for some finishing touches on my personal "cosmetic" compilation, including hairs eyes and racial fixes.

It is made of Oblivion.esm as base, another file in esm format containing all the extra modded content, and any esp file that uses these, I have one for all base races, 4 I built on top for replacing Argonians, Dremora, Khajiit and Orcs and my custom race packs are also built on the first two esm files

 

But this time I wanted to add a few items on the base file instead of ones that exist based on it

I don't want a plugin changing that, I could do that, but I want to have extra plugins at minimum and keep certain order of things

 

I totally know what I'm doing with edition

And even if by some strange reason my plan went wrong, I'm also smart enough to have a backup

 

It's just I can't get the thing to load

 

And I've heard it can be done and has been done before for things like total conversions

It's a very simple thing what I want but it'd give me experience and peace of knowing everything I have is correctly ordered.

Edited August 29, 2013 by ElAlquimista

[eric31415]

I have obviously never tried this, but if the CS won't let you edit the esm, you may be able to make a plugin that adds the items, then merge that plugin with the esm using tes4edit. Probably have to espify the esm for merging.

 

You have made me curious, please keep updated.

[Lanceor]

AMong it's many, many features and bugfixes, Construction Set Extender will let you (attempt to) directly edit Oblivion.esm. Good luck with getting it all loaded into RAM btw - even a 50 MB esm would constantly crash the CS, so I don't like your chances loading a 271 MB one. :wink:

[Myst42]

There goes my little attempt...

I think I give up

 

I tried CC Extender before, and it does let you attempt to edit Oblivion.esm

Even has a achievement for doing so, "fearless" :laugh:

 

But the same thing happened, it froze up

 

Also a few days ago I tried to use tes4gecko for merging

It froze up upon loading Oblivion.esm in 75% every single time

 

I cant get how to merge tings using tes4edit, all I get, is options for cleaning files from unused data

 

Anyway, I just wanted to attempt because of obsession, order and experimenting.

Thought it was a good idea of an experiment to see how that worked, but it's apparently impossible to load it

 

Don't know if it's just my PC, maybe in some other one will work... but I cant do it right now

[Lanceor]

It's not your PC - I can only load 4%. :tongue: As I mentioned, even with a 50 MB active file, the CS was using close to 2 GB of RAM (the limit for 32 bit programs) and was crashing every 15 minutes. Files set as "Active" reserve a LOT more memory than ones that are merely loaded as a master.

 

I think the esp merge method would be the only practical one... and do make backups. :wink:

[eric31415]

My bad, tes4gecko is the tool for merging Oblivion mods.

 

If you are using a 64 bit os, try setting the LAA flag on the gecko exe. to try to get around the ram issue.