Load order and so on....

[Battlestar1965]

Hi,

havn't looked at Vortex for a couple years and was wondering if anything changed since....i don't know ...5 years?. My main complain about Vortex back in the days was that you couldn't manage your mod load order and plugin load order manually, meaning dragging by hand. You needed to create rules for that. Looking at the Vortex wiki (https://github.com/Nexus-Mods/Vortex/wiki/MODDINGWIKI-Users-General-Managing-your-Load-Order) this still seems to be the case. Creating rules for a setup with about 1600 mods and 1200 plugins is simply not feasible. So is this still the case (managing your load orders) or has it or will it change?

[ChemBoy1]

I have 1500+ mod setups for FO4 and Skyrim in Vortex. Does just fine.

You can disable LOOT to do plugin LO manually if you like. File load order only matters if there are conflicts, and setting rules there works great for me. 

[7531Leonidas]

Vortex's LOOT routines and conflict resolution has correctly handled all but a handful of over 2500 mods in my list.  There were only one or two that had to have a rule defined for them, IIRC.

[Battlestar1965]

I never use Loot... no, never is wrong. I used it years ago, but these days I prefer to check that everything is OK in XEdit regarding the load order.

[7531Leonidas]

Well, xEdit is how I confirm that LOOT inside Vortex does the right things, that is how I found that I needed to make changes in those handful of mods.  Unfortunately, it was quite awhile ago, and dragging to another mod was the way it was done.  I wish that there was a way to right-click on an individual mod in the dependencies column, and select 'Set Rule', and then be able to pick the other mod from a dropdown, at least.

You can use the 'Manage Rules' menu item at the top of the 'Mods' tab to change rules already established, but I don't know of a way to create a rule using it.  Maybe someone else has seen something obviously simple that I have missed.  If that is the case, then I hope that they happen by and chime in!

[Battlestar1965]

But you actually answered my question...it is not possible to just drag and drop the plugins by hand to a new position in the load order, like you can do in MO2. You need to create rules. As we both Know, not every conflict can be resolved by changing the load order postion of one or another plugin, sometimes you just need to create a patch for your specific load order problem. But to create rules for big load orders (I mean someting in the hundreds or thousends of plugins)  is just not feasible. So i guess Vortex is fine for users of "Collections", where the load order already is defined, or for smaller modded setups, where ist doesn't matter much. But Vortex is not for the serious modder who wants to do BIG changes to the look, behaviour...every aspect of the game. 

[showler]

You can disable auto-sorting and assign a specific mod index number to any mod you want.

[Tannin42]

23 hours ago, Battlestar1965 said:

But you actually answered my question...it is not possible to just drag and drop the plugins by hand to a new position in the load order, like you can do in MO2. You need to create rules. As we both Know, not every conflict can be resolved by changing the load order postion of one or another plugin, sometimes you just need to create a patch for your specific load order problem. But to create rules for big load orders (I mean someting in the hundreds or thousends of plugins)  is just not feasible. So i guess Vortex is fine for users of "Collections", where the load order already is defined, or for smaller modded setups, where ist doesn't matter much. But Vortex is not for the serious modder who wants to do BIG changes to the look, behaviour...every aspect of the game. 

The point is that almost all of the time the order of plugins either doesn't matter at all or there is an objectively correct order between two plugins (one order works, one order breaks stuff).

The Vortex approach forces the order (masterlist) when there is an objectively correct case and leaves all others unset so you can assign them yourself if you want. But even in a very large load order you probably wont have more than a handful of pairings where the order matters and is up to taste.
That is entirely feasible. Even though admittedly the UI for assigning rules is - not great - if you're using it a lot you're almost certainly doing it wrong by controlling load order that has no effect on the game.