Vortex not asking to set rules for overwriting

[Meruline]

RESOLVED - texture mods including meshes will gain automatic priority over texture mods without meshes if there were previously no modded meshes installed for them (so only vanilla meshes existed), and this is why you may not be prompted to set rules for conflicting texture mods

 

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Hi guys,

 

I am having the following issue:

 

Vortex will sometimes quietly overwrite files without prompting me to set rules for them. I am having this issue only with these mods:

 

- 3D Cooking by mathy79

- 3D Furniture by mathy79

- High Quality Food and Ingredients by DarShonDo (there is no way I am going to bother DarShonDo, but still listing it here because it used to be the only mod I had this problem with.)

 

I have mods for noble furniture and food items that I would like to keep, but they are overwritten by the above. When I look into my Vortex and try to set rules for that, the involved mods do not appear as conflicting at all. I then manually delete all the noble furniture in 3D furniture, for example, and finally my other noble furniture mod comes through. This is messy and time consuming, and more often than not, individual objects break in the process (having only a mesh with no textures, or using vanilla textures despite better textures being installed in another mod, etc).

 

Why does setting rules work for all my other mods, but not these three? Does anyone have an idea? Are the files saved or packaged in a different way that requires an extra step that I am not aware of? I would really like to keep them, they look so good.

 

Edit: typo

Edited December 18, 2021 by Meruline

[Guest deleted34304850]

if there are conflicts - you can use vortex to specify that 3d cooking should load before noble furniture - that way, the contents of noble furniture will "win" the conflict and be present in your game.

i'd suggest you set rules using load before/load after to give you what you want.

[Zanderat]

Loose files always overwrite BSA'a. No conflict will show files that are packed in BSA's. and loose files./ You can extract the BSA is question if needed.

[Meruline]

Thank you, Zanderat, for understanding what I mean. I will check whether the affected mods are using BSA archives.

 

Edit: Sadly, the mods overwritten (Vanilla Table Replacer, Enhanced Noble Furniture, Crusty Loaves, Retexture for Bread) don't use BSA archives. So that's not it.

 

I found that 3D Furniture and 3D Cooking play nice with other mods, SMIM, High Poly Project, Rudy HQ Misc, and some mods by Gamwich remain unaffected. So I have considered that the fault could lie in the mods being overwritten. But then, what are the odds that those were all affected by the same two mods, and by no others? It must be an unhappy interaction between the two. :sad:

Edited December 18, 2021 by Meruline

[Meruline]

I managed to resolve some of the issues by replacing some mesh files with vanilla meshes in 3D cooking. Another workaround is to tell 3D cooking to load before SMIM or High Poly Project. Then I go on and tell SMIM and High Poly Project to load before Crusty Loaves and Bread Retexture. The end result is that I get the textures from the last. So... I think because SMIM and HPP provide meshes, I was able to use the textures. ._.

 

I am beginning to suspect that it all has something to do with there being no meshes for the textures I had been wanting to use, so the game moved on to the textures there were meshes for. Since I never replaced the meshes of noble furniture before (because noble furniture is very sharp and angular, so SMIM or HPP had no reason to touch it), there was no conflict reported when I added noble furniture meshes for the first time, and then the game automatically loaded the related textures from the same mod. ._. Duh.

 

Maybe it would help if Vortex reported conflicts with Skyrim.esm, too, and let us choose to keep vanilla assets, but I suppose that would be the pinnacle of laziness.

Edited December 18, 2021 by Meruline

[showler]

Textures are loaded according to a file path embedded in the mesh. If you install a table replacer, with mesh and textures, and also a table retexture, with just textures, the table retexture won't work unless the textures use the exact same file path as the replacer.

 

That would explain the lack of file conflict notifications.

[Meruline]

Yea, it finally dawned on me. :) Took some time. I have often heard from more experienced mod users that it is nowadays too easy to install a mod, so new users don't really learn it from the ground up (and hence make silly mistakes). This mesh-texture overwriting issue is such a thing. I ever only had three mods with that issue, in the past year since playing Skyrim for the first time, however, so all is good. Thanks for helping!