Haptly

THANK YOU, zilav. I knew I was missing something big and obvious. Let me see if I can get this to work. Everyone else, thanks for the tips, but the above link is apparently how BethSoft updates the main ESM files, so it ought to work. *whew*

Thank you. I have Tes5Edit, and I've tried using it to merge the ESP and ESM. But when I used the "Deep copy as override into..." option, the resulting .ESP is invalid -- references in the master ESM forms to child ESP stuff don't work. Furthermore, using the "Deep copy as override into..." requires you to change all the Form IDs in both files. I can't do that -- I have other plug-ins that need the Form IDs to remain stable.

So I have a master file EpicRestoration.esm. It has two child plugins for DLC, EpicRestorationDawnguard.esp and EpicRestorationDragonborn.esp. Those both depend on the ESM master. And it all works! These versions are just groovy. I wanted to make changes to the master, though. So I started a new plugin file, EpicRestoration2.1.esp, and made my changes there. I now want to merge the ESP into the existing ESM. It is very important that the Form IDs in EpicRestoration.ESM do not change, because they need to stay the same for the DLC child plugins to keep working. I want to override existing forms in the ESM with the versions in the 2.1 ESP, and I want to add the new forms in the 2.1 ESP to the ESM. Is that even possible? Tes5edit can let you merge plugins, but that doesn't work when the plugins already have a parent/child relationship (references from the child to the parent get messed up in the resulting merged ESP.) There is apparently a tool called tesv-snip that lets you copy-and-paste forms from one file to another, but basically everywhere says that tool is out-of-date, unsupported, not to be used, etc. So it doesn't seem worth the download. Also, for future reference, is it possible to convert the ESM back into an ESP, edit that ESP, then convert it back to a master? Would doing that have spared me this dilemma? Thanks in advance, -Haptly

Well, GetID just returns the "hidden" ID column of the alias in the quest alias screen. But, thanks for the all the pointers. I could probably use an inventory filter to do it, but the sorting doesn't work that way right now so it'd be a pain to test out. And anyway, players haven't complained so I'm probably not going to touch it. But thanks for the suggestions. :)

Thanks for the reply. I already released the mod, actually, and just told players to be careful about quest items. If they complain I'll try to fix it, otherwise I guess I'll just live with it. Thanks again. :)

I'm making an autosort spell that picks eight containers in your house, then sorts your inventory into those eight containers. It remembers which eight it picked, and you can override its choices by sneaking when you cast the spell. It's all working great, but I'd like it to not remove quest items from the player's inventory. Is it possible to detect whether a Form is a quest item using Papyrus? I couldn't figure out how to do it, and it's the last thing preventing me from releasing the mod. Thanks in advance. :)