GMST cleaning from downloaded mods

[dalongbao]

I'd appreciate any help on this. I'm new to modding anything and I'm struggling to get my mind around the terms and keep finding inconsistent advice from various sources.

 

I've been searching around for few days now for information on GMSTs. I've managed to figure out that they are game settings, Tribunal and Bloodmoon added new GMSTs that Morrowind didn't have so if you go and make a mod with only Morrowind as the parent, then you'll end up having "dirty" GMSTs in place of what should be there from Bloodmoon and Tribunal settings.

 

I've found at least a partial list of GMST values (http://wiki.theassimilationlab.com/mmw/GMST_Contamination). Does anyone have a more complete list?

 

My concern is making sure the mods I download don't have "dirty" GMSTs. I've read that TEStool, tes3cmd, among others are recommended to clean a mod. However, I've also read that sometimes a mod will change a GMST on purpose. I wouldn't want to use a cleaning tool and have it reset an intended change!

 

It lists sTeleportDisabled as having a GMST Value of "Teleportation magic does not work here." The entries for Tribunal and Bloodmoon are blank. So since they are blank, that means they are by default "dirty" values? Other GMSTs have different values: iWereWolfBounty goes from 10000 to 1000 on the supposed "dirty" column to "Bloodmoon" column.

 

Some of the mods I have downloaded have the values in "GMST Value" instead of either "Tribunal" or "Bloodmoon." Should I just change these values, or do I need to do something else? Example: "sMagicFabricantID" is set to "Fabricant" in a mod that has only morrowind.esm as parent but is set to "Fabricant_summon" in other mods with Tribunal as parent. If load both of these mods when I play, what happens? Do the correct values get set or does it use whatever settings are present in the last loaded plugin?

 

 

EDIT: upon further investigation into the settings with morrowind.esm, tribunal.esm, and bloodmoon.esm loaded, I've found that the tribunal settings are corrected when tribunal and bloodmoon are both loaded but the bloodmoon settings are not corrected. Only way to get correct bloodmoon settings is to load morrowind and bloodmoon but then of course the tribunal settings are not correct.

Edited February 26, 2019 by dalongbao

[Oblivionaddicted]

When a mod has dirty GMST your mod cleaner will show 65 altered GMST's, if a modder willingly edits GMST's only the modified ones will appear edited.

Edited March 9, 2019 by Oblivionaddicted

[Dragon32]

Yep, what Oblivionaddicted says: using TESTool or tes3cmd to clean your mods is safe. If a mod has intentionally changed one of the "evil" GMSTs then those mods will leave the value as is. They'll only clean out mods with the "evil" GMST values.

[Oblivionaddicted]

I always use Morrowind enchanted editor to fix the evil GMST's issue.

[dalongbao]

Thanks for the help guys. I ended up downloading a copy of GMST Fix. Some of my confusion ended up coming from the fact that loading up all three main game esm's to play resulted in some of the GMSTs still having incorrect or non-sensible values. So the advice I see online of "just make sure you load one or both expansions with your esp in the construction set" is incorrect as you will not guarantee yourself the correct GMST values in your plugin.

 

It does indeed seem to be the case that the GMST values the game uses are whatever is set in the last loaded plugin (you can set the load order easily using Wrye Mash and changing the "date modified" to later times for later in load order). So using something like GMST Fix is the easiest solution I can find to guarantee correct values at play every time. GMST Fix was not especially easy to find, so for anyone else, you can make your own using by opening the CS with all three main game esm files. Then go into the Gamplay->Settings... and find the entries listed in the table in my first post on this thread. The values you want are the ones in the expansion's columns. Where there are entries for both expansions, choose whichever makes sense to you. Then go to save and save as a new plug-in which you will then set the modified date to some far off year so it is always loaded last.

 

Also affecting my game was the load order of the expansions which needs to be Tribunal and then Bloodmoon, as bloodmoon has more GMST setting info than tribunal. However, this will set some things like the "sMaxSale" (the button on barter screens to ask for the max the seller has) to "Max Sale" instead of the more appropriate "Seller Max." So just make sure your values in your GMST Fix esp match the table's values.

 

Cleaning esp's with TES3cmd is what I've also taken to doing. It's nice cause it removes some extra baggage from files but it doesn't help with the incorrect GMST values from being set by the expansions - which is why I use GMST Fix.

 

Now if I can just figure out why organic containers aren't respawning consistently every iMonthsToRespawn...so far it seems like I can't be too close to the container, but distance doesn't guarantee a respawn.

[leonardo2]

TESTool are not safe as it is known to cause more harm than fixing, but TESTool are probably the only tool that can safely create a MergedObjects.esp.

 

However, there is another tool that's very easy to use to get rid of dirty GMST in no time and that's Yacoby's escog.

 

Which also allow to manually remove any listed GMST in escog, but one should know what one is doing otherwise the actual mod could be broken. I know one mod that can easily be broken and that's Melian's Teleport mod.

[Dragon32]

TESTool are not safe as it is known to cause more harm than fixing

<snip>

Don't make blanket statements that aren't true.

 

TESTool's Merged Dialogues (and so its Just Fix It!) function breaks quests. That should not be used.

 

TESTool's Clean Plugins can break a very, very small number of mods. That can be avoided by enabling both "Restricted dialog cleaning" and "Restricted cell cleaning" in TESTool's options menu.

 

TESTool's Merge Leveled Lists function resequences the levelled lists it creates. Use aerelorn's Leveled List Resequencer to fix that. Or use Wrye Mash's Mashed Lists or tes3cmd's Multipatch instead.

 

It's other features, and there's a lot, can be used with impunity.

 

I avoid manual cleaning of GMSTs as I haven't devoted the neurons to remembering what are the default values and so I don't know when there's an intentional change. But remembering that dull stuff is exactly what a cleaning program, like TESTool or tes3cmd, is consistently excellent at.

Edited February 28, 2019 by Dragon32