The curious case of Vortex's endless purging

[insomnious]

Hi there!

First of all, apologies if any users are experiencing a lot of purging - the more mods you have then the more likely you are to be experiencing this. This annoyance with Vortex purging all the time is nearly always down to file conflicts that were never known before we added better conflict detection between mod types. Previously, only conflicts between mods of the same type were being checked.

Mod types are Vortex's way of deciding what folder to deploy that mod into. If a mod has no type specifically set, then the default will be used which varies between games but is commonly the /Mods or /Data folder within the game's folder.  Some of the mod types that are found in most games are 'Engine Injector' and 'ENB', both of these deploy directly to where the game's executable is located.

In Vortex, when a deployment is started, it checks to see if any rules and overrides have changed (see below). If it does, then it purges first before deploy so that there aren't any leftover files around that could get in the way of the new rules. If you had 2 mods that deployed normally, and then you added a rule for a file not to deploy anymore, the safest way is to purge everything and then deploy with the new rules.

How to find conflicts

You may have a notification under the bell icon in the top right of Vortex that will give you a list of mods that are conflicting. These conflicting mods are ignored during deployment until the conflict is resolved (see below)

If there isn't a notification, conflicts can still be found by:

1. Press Manage Rules on the Mods toolbar and all conflicting mods will be shown. From that dialog, Use Suggestions can be used as that will work in most cases but not all.
   
   
    
2. Looking through the Dependencies column in the Mods table and finding the Lightning Bolt icons. This is Red if there is an unresolved conflict involving that specific mod and if clicked, will open the Mod Rules dialog (see below).
   
   
    
3. If you have a large number of mods, this column can be filtered by using the dropdown and choosing 'Unresolved'.
   
   
    

How to resolve a conflict

Dealing with mod conflicts can be done in a number of ways depending on the desired outcome and what control you want to have on the contents of the mod. They are:

1. Disable one of the conflicting mods
2. The Mod Rules dialog is accessed via the lightning bolt icon on the Mods table. The icon will be red if a conflict is detected and will allow you to set which of the conflicting mods is deployed before or after the other. Whichever mod is deployed last is the one that the game will be able to read. Once you've set a rule, you can then use the File Override dialog for more granular resolution of the conflict if required.
3. The File Override dialog is accessed by clicking on the link in the Mod Rules dialog that shows how many specific files are conflicting within the mod itself. This dialog allows you to choose which mod you'd like to use for the conflicting file so you don't have to disable an entire mod if only a small part of it is conflicting. This dialog can also be accessed from the Mods table directly by clicking the exclamation mark (!) icon.

Important for large mod environments

Large mod environments can become very intertwined from a rules perspective and whenever mods are installed\enabled\disabled etc. Vortex must recalculate the conflicts and will need to purge before next deployment if new conflicts are discovered. This calculation and purging can take more time than you realise depending on how many files the mods contains. It can vary from less than a second for a few files or up to a minute for several mods with 1,000 files each. 

By default, Vortex is configured to auto deploy when mods are enabled. This is best disabled when dealing with large modding environments so you can resolve all conflicts before Vortex tries to deploy (and purge beforehand in some cases).

This can be disabled in Settings > Interface, at the bottom under Automation

I hope that this helps to clarify what's happening behind the scenes. We are working on ways for Vortex to be clearer when certain conflicts are going to cause the purge behaviour. Please get in touch if things still aren't solved and any specific bugs can be raised via GitHub Issues.  

Thanks,

insomnious

[PedroUR]

Thanks a lot , but it doesn't help, i have no unresolved conflicts, and and i have always disabled the Auto-deploy feature... and this thing is purging each single movement i made, enabling, disabling, installing, reinstalling, even if i change a rule!! it is really annoying!! please help with this, i always try to defend Vortex every time i see people saying that Vortex is the retard brother of MO2