Merged and Batch Patches and why not...Leveled Lists.

[furankuchan]

Hello All. My name is Frank and... I... am... a... Modder....

Ok so I have watched all of Gopher's vid's and quite a few others and I have about 100 mods going. I then found out about Skyrim Immersive Creatures and that's where my troubles started. When I activated the mod I got invisible monsters and purple axes with no Giant wielding it. Then I started doing some research and in my studies I am hearing about a MERGED PATCH...a BATCHED PATCH
and A LEVELED LIST. I do not understand this stuff and what it does and how to use it and everything about it. People out there talk for hours about the proper way to pronounce the word LICH...but I can hardly find any info on this that is easy to understand. Does anyone have any suggestions or help on where to look or would someone like to personally help me I will pay you...Thanks in advance to all who help my 5 year old son and I are grateful.

Furankuchan

[ripple]

There are many types of 'leveled lists', which are used to 'scale' the quality of items that can be found in a container, what type of monsters will spawn, or what type of gears will appear on an NPC, depending on the level of the player ('level scaling'). The most common occurrence of 'leveled list' conflicts is when different custom item mods edit a number of leveled lists in order to distribute those custom items to randomly spawned NPCs. For example, many weapon mods will edit default game leveled lists used by bandit NPC types, so that the mod added weapons will spawn on bandit NPCs. But since those mods all edit the same leveled lists used by the bandit NPC types, they all conflict.

 

Such conflicts are easily resolved by using a utility that will automatically merge the conflicting leveled lists into a dynamically generated compatibility patch. The utility in question is Wrye Bash for Skyrim. Wrye Bash allows modders to 'bash tag' their mods with specific 'keywords' to let the utility know whether their leveled list edits contain additions, removals, and/or replacements to those lists. Once the user sets up Wrye Bash, it's basically a 3 step process to generate a Bashed Patch.

 

The merged patch does something similar, but is not as 'intelligent' in its merging process. The merged patch will merge more record types than what Wrye Bash can, but ideally the merged patch needs to be edited post-generation by someone who can read and interpreting plugin records in TES5Edit, because it will sometimes merge records that are not intended to be merged. As Sharlikran has stated in the past, the merged patch is not intended to replace the Bashed Patch. The merged patch is very useful for generating custom compatibility patches by intermediate and advanced users who will edit those patches post-generation, but it should not be used if what you need is to generate a leveled lists compatibility patch (because Wrye Bash can do that much better).

[myztikrice]

Your problem with Immersive Creatures is that you're not installing the 5.1 files first or doing so incorrectly. You have to install 5.1 which includes a BSA file and then if you choose the v6 RC files.

 

The game spawns items and enemies by looking at a list of items/enemies to spawn called a leveled list. If you have A and B in the leveled list, and a mod adds C, normally the list would be replaced with just C, but using a bashed patch would allow A, B, and C to be in the list.