Merge patch and bashed patch

[EclipseScythe]

Hello, I recently got into modding Skyrim on a laptop and Ive ran into a subject Im a little hazy about. Ive tried to research merge patches and bashed patches and would like to see if I have it right and would like to ask a few questions. As I understand a merge patch is a collection of mods together so it counts as one plug-in so you can have more mods than the plug-in limit allows and a bashed patch is used to make mods work together. So a few questions I have are

 

1. How many merged patches do you use? More than one? Do you try to keep it organized by only putting similar mods into one patch such as all audio mods in one and all graphic/texture mods in another?

 

2. When do you make these different patches? Im just now starting to put my load order together and so Im not sure if I need to make them as I begin or after I reach a certain milestone?

 

3. When I run LOOT on the few mods I have some show bash tags, do I need to deal with those now or am I able to download and test mods without worrying about those at the moment?

[Algabar]

Hi,

 

1. No merged patches at all - although I got around 500 plugins in my loadorder. IMHO, merging mods is a somewhat outdated appproach. Merged mods may not work as intended. You may also break dependencies with merges (e.g. if you merge a file and later realize, that some other mod depends on a plugin you merged). Also, updating merges (e.g. if there's an updated version of a mod) is quite difficult, often it's in fact impossible without breaking your save games. Nowadays, you don't really need merges to save load order slots any more. The current solution are "light" files, that don't count towards the 254 plugins limit. Here's some more info.

 

2. A bashed patch (and that's the only one you really need) should be made after your load order is finalized. OFC you can already create bashed patches "in between", but you should definitely make a new one / update the existing one once you got your final load order.

 

3. As an end user, you can savely ignore these bash tags. If you need, you can set custom rules in LOOT (or in Vortex, if you're using that - it also relies on the sorting algorithms of LOOT).

[EclipseScythe]

Thank you very much for replying. Glad I asked before learning an outdated method and thank you very much for the link, Ill definitely be reading up on that. Glad to know I dont need to worry about patching or bash tags until after I have made a more substantial load order.