How exactly does the Oblivion load order work?

[dingdongdummy909]

I mean from a technical standpoint - how does the game engine determine what order to load plugins, and what do mod managers change to achieve the desired load order?

 

Also, is this even the right section?

[DrakeTheDragon]

Pretty much the right place I'd say.

 

From all I know load order in Oblivion is only maintained by Last Modified date of the ESP/ESM files, while ESMs will always go before any ESPs, of course.

 

That's why your own custom plugins will always be out-of-place in your load order when you edit them in the CS and save, as they'll be newer than all others after this and thus at the very end of your load order, and you'll need to move them back into their proper place again each time.

 

Oblivion actually is pretty fixated on everything "file date". File date always trumps everything else. The file dates of the BSA files can even prevent Archive Invalidation and all replacement resources from working easily. Thus those all-too-recently dated BSA files coming from Steam are always a bother unless properly fixed.

 

Somebody correct me where I'm wrong, and if I'm wrong that is.

[Striker879]

I'm with Drake on this ... file date is all the game cares about, with one caveat. With replacer mods (mods that change something in the vanilla game but don't use an ESP file to achieve their change) install order is King. There can only be one female fur cuirass in the game without an ESP.

[IkeCoast]

That is correct, when you use an external tool (BOSS or OBMM or WB) to sort your load order, what the tool does is change the date of the files to match cronologically the load order you have set. This is why every time you make some change to an esp, it always goes to the bottom of the list. Wrye Bash has a function, "Lock the load order", to prevent this.

 

Cheers!