AWP3RATOR Posted February 1, 2018 Share Posted February 1, 2018 I installed Vortex today, migrated from MO2, enabled my load order and was fairly happy with testing the software. I noticed that my used HDD space jumped up considerably, and I just assumed that it was due to the copying of files from MO2 to Vortex. Upon further inspection, I noticed that my Fallout 4 Data directory has had all of the mods I enabled installed directly to it. All the folders, files. esps. archives, everything. I was under the impression that Vortex would behave like MO2 and not touch the data directory at all? Am I mistaken or did I make a blunder of some kind on the paths during install? I'm now going to have to clean out the data directory.... at least they all have a date of today whereas the previous newest files were from Nov. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
octodecoy Posted February 1, 2018 Share Posted February 1, 2018 I was under the impression that it would not use the MO VFS system. Thought I remember Tannin saying that it would not. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DuskDweller Posted February 1, 2018 Share Posted February 1, 2018 Those are not the real files, what you see there are hardlinked files, they're just references to the real ones. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AWP3RATOR Posted February 1, 2018 Author Share Posted February 1, 2018 I'll have to investigate it a bit further when I try again, this time on a clean/disposable FO4 directory. I cleaned them all out - bu they were taking up take a lot of space, ~108GB. They didn't appear to be references only. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Thallassa Posted February 1, 2018 Share Posted February 1, 2018 Mods have three states, uninstalled, disabled, and enabled. Uninstalled means that the archive is in Vortex's downloads folder, but vortex hasn't done anything with it yet. Disabled means that Vortex has unzipped the mod to its Mods folder. (You can configure exactly where you want these folders to be under settings > Mods). Enabled means that Vortex will place hardlinks in the game's mod folder (for BGS games, /Data). These hardlinks behave exactly like the file was really there. Any change to either file will be detected by Vortex.The process of placing hardlinks into the data folder is called "deployment". By default vortex deploys automatically whenever you enable a mod. You can set it to not deploy until you tell it to. Therefore, by default, you would enable the mod, make these overwrite changes, and Vortex would then re-deploy. Or you can tell it not to deploy, install a bunch of mods and configure overwrites, then deploy all at once. Deployment is when it detects if there has been any changes to the mod files either in the mod folder or in the data folder. Windows will show hardlinks as taking up the full file space. However according to documentation they're not actually taking up that space. I think this article explains it fairly clearly: https://devtidbits.com/2009/09/07/windows-file-junctions-symbolic-links-and-hard-links/ there are many other articles about this as well if you want more information, but most of it is at a too high level for me to understand easily. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
DuskDweller Posted February 1, 2018 Share Posted February 1, 2018 If you look at the reported HD free space in the explorer "This PC" window you'll notice it didn't go down. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AWP3RATOR Posted February 2, 2018 Author Share Posted February 2, 2018 If you look at the reported HD free space in the explorer "This PC" window you'll notice it didn't go down.I was looking at "this PC" and it was considerably down after the install. My mod order is quiet extensive, around 108GB of file space. A very noticeable difference on between ~40GB vanilla FO4 and ~150 GB Vortex FO4. But like i said in the OP, I could have fouled up the initial pathing settings making my "mod" space the actual game folder, but I'm fairly sure I didn't. However what I'm most concerned with was the way NMM worked (and why I stopped using it) - NMM alters the game folder and vortex does too (in any way). I'll continue to evaluate it in a standalone copy, but I still prefer MO's virtual folders and ability to manually sort the mod overrides and load order. Loot is nice, but as others have posted (not the point of this thread), I'm an advanced user and prefer not to curate a dependency order in LOOT. I'd rather curate and trim my actual mods and LO directly. Tannin notes that this "need" is likely an edge case, and I wholeheartedly agree - I'm in the minority :smile: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Qwinn Posted February 2, 2018 Share Posted February 2, 2018 (edited) Installing mods will use up room on C: as normal, but -enabling- them, the step that appears to add the files to Data, appears to increase the size of the Data folder (this is apparently an illusion) but actually only uses up a tiny amount on C:. That's the results of my tests with Skyrim SE anyway. Edited February 2, 2018 by Qwinn Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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