How do I merge plugins with F03edit?

[Nadin]

How do I merge plugins with F03edit?

[niccolo]

O.o I expected a larger post. I'm not sure why.

 

Anyhoo, it's pretty simple. You fire up FO3Edit and let it do it's thing until it's finished. If it finishes early because of an error, fix that error first; keep doing this until it goes all the way through.

 

Then, right click on the panel on the left and select "create merged patch". Choose a name and press start. Give it a minute or so - or until the list on the right has listed all of your ESMs and ESPs - and then press [CTRL]+ to save it.

[rickerhk]

If you want to merge two plugins together, use FO3Plugin - it works great. It's a real pain with FO3Edit.

If your question was about making a merged patch, then niccolo answered your question.

[Nadin]

F03plugin usually works great, but it's giving me some bull**** error about a missing audio file, so I'm going to try F03edit.

And it's merging two plugins, not patches.

[HugePinball]

What is the error exactly? (Include a screenshot if necessary.)

 

I could easily be wrong, but I don't think there's a quick and simple way to merge plugins with FO3Edit. If at least one of your two plugins is not too large or complex, you probably can merge one into the other by using "Copy as new record into..." on whole groups and/or individual records, or by drag-n-drop when comparing records of the same type, but it's likely you'll still have to do some more work fixing things by hand to get everything right.

 

You could also try using TESsnip (under Tools in FOMM). For the purpose of merging plugins, I think this is better than FO3Edit (but not as good as FO3Plugin). At the moment I don't have a good place to point to for a decent guide or documentation for this though.

[joey2176]

FO3 Edit Manual explains in detail the process of merging two plug-ins.

 

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8629

[Nadin]

Thank you.

[HugePinball]

FO3 Edit Manual explains in detail the process of merging two plug-ins.

Are you referring to more than the "Merging a Plug-in into another Plug-in or Master" section (section 6.4, begins on page 70 in the pdf version)? Because I just read over that again and it leaves out some important steps. It details the process of using "Deep copy as override into..." to copy records from one plugin into another, but as an override copy, that leaves you with the source plugin as a master file in the destination plugin. That section stops there and doesn't mention this as a problem, but of course it is because at this point you'd still need any original plugins from which you copied records, present in your load order. Ultimately you don't want overrides of your source plugins' records, so you'd need to take further steps - steps that are not necessarily simple, unless there is an automated process I'm not familiar with.

[Nadin]

I was wondering about that. Any better guides?

[HugePinball]

We can wait for someone to tell us otherwise, but I suspect not.

 

As I asked above, what exactly is the error you were getting with FO3Plugin? Most likely that's gonna be something simple, then you can go back to using FO3Plugin's "Merge Plugins" option, which in most cases is all you need and takes seconds to use.