Newbie seeks to lightly edit .esp or two

[akmatov]

As a long time enjoyer of Oblivion and its many wonderful mods, I have just recently loaded up FO3 and ventured into the Wasteland. As expected, you modders have been busy improving things, sometimes improving things a lot!

 

As a totally ignorant player type person focused on playing, I have seen at least two mods I'd like to tweak just a little. For example, I picked up an excellent night vision mod, Nightvision Goggles - Powered by antistar. However, I really think he set it up to eat batteries at a vastly overly fast rate. All I wanted to do was change the maximum battery duration from 60 seconds to 300 seconds, which seemed far more reasonable to me, a matter of taste. So I used Notepad and went in and did a Search & Replace in the .esp, changing each instance of 60 (all of which seems related to battery duration) to 300. The result was that FO3 would not load - I would go to a black screen with the music playing. Go back and overwrite the .esp with the original and all is fine. Huge impact, I was surprised; I had expected the mod to be messed up if I made an error, not the basic load sequence.

 

Additionally, I'd like to look at some of the damage values for weapons/ammunition and maybe adjust them a bit, to my guess as to relative damage.

 

Could someone point me in the right direction to some info on really basic .esp editing? I certainly don't have the skills, or probably patience, to create a mod, but I'd like to do a little light tweaking just for me.

 

Thanks

[BadPenney]

Could someone point me in the right direction to some info on really basic .esp editing?

I recommend downloading the Garden of Eden Creation Kit if you haven't already. It is free and it has a Help function as a pull down menu that will link to FO3 wiki. I've never used Notepad for editing anything for an .esp except a readme file.

[akmatov]

Thanks, I'll do that.

 

Occasionally, with .xml I have had success tweaking things a little, but obviously this is something different. Just thought I might get away with an easy tweak. :)

[pkleiss]

Once you get the GECK and patch it to v1.5, you'll need to load that mod you are talking about. Then you are going to have to locate the script that goverrns the use of the battery with the glasses and modify it to last longer. If that mod is an ESM, then you won't be able to save your modifications to it. You will have to save them into a new file/mod that will need to load after the glasses one. If you get FO3Edit and read up in the manual for it, you will be able to change the ESM into an ESP and, thus, be able to save your changes to the original mod. The GECK can be quite daunting when one first opens it up and takes a look. I would reccomend looking at the My First vault Tutorial to get an idea of what is possible to start.