[GUIDE] Manual Cleaning Skyrim Master Files

[Deleted133263User]

Cleaning the Official Master ESMs

NOTE : This guide is now out of date - I dont have any Bethesda games installed anymore, and xEdit has changed greatly since I last had it installed.
Anyone wishes to re-do this guide on a new page bringing it up to date .. Crack on :D

This guide assumes using TES5Edit on Skyrim Nexus,
Or SSEEdit on Skyrim SE Nexus


Due to this guide being dual purpose ( For Skyrim and Skyrim SE ) for the rest of this guide I will refer to both tools as xEdit.
Screenshots of tools used may be one or the other, or older versions, which does not matter, the images are only to illustrate the method / options used.

Why Clean the Master Files ?

Firstly because the masters have entries that are identical to the same records in Skyrim.esm or other DLC esms'. They exist because Bethesda may have looked at something in the CK and an unneeded entry was auto included in the plugin even though the item was not altered in any way. The Official Creation Kits are notoriously buggy and randomly create dirty / wild edits, often when the author of the plugin is completely unaware. Wherever that plugin is placed in your load order its records overwrite all the conflicting records from plugins loaded before it ( the rule of one ) resetting the settings back to the values contained in the Official Bethesda DLC. It won't cause crashes, it just changes the values of plugins loaded before it. Which can alter mods that you have for Weapon Damage, Armor, Lighting, Food Effects and so on. The masters are very early in your load order but there is potential for a mod to be made as a fake.esm, and placed among them, and so ITMs in a later loading master may cause problems for that mods esm. Chance is remote that a master will affect another master, and this procedure is best used on all of your mods plugins, but cleaning everything of ITMs ( Identical to Master records ) causes no harm, is more optimal giving the game less to process in your load order, and so it is best to get rid of these completely unnecessary dirty edits.

The Second reason is that Bethesda chose to delete some things that are in the Official DLC. Any mods loaded with references to deleted records from the Official Bethesda DLC will cause your game to crash. This problem particularly affects older mods ( especially mods that were made before newer official patches were released, with more deleted references the old mod did not anticipate - It will also become problematic for the Skyrim Special Edition community where old Original Skyrim mods are being converted to SSE, and Bethesda have deleted even more records from the plugins before they released the newer plugins for that version of the game ). xEdit can restore and properly assign values to these records that will disable them and still allow mods to access them. This is done using the "Undelete and Disable References" option.

For further explanations of why it is still recommended to clean the games masters .. Read on from this post,
Zilav and Arthmoor, most valued technical and vastly experienced modding authors, weigh in on the subject.

The following mostly apply to mod authors, but worth knowing about for mod users too :

xEdit will also report when a mod has Deleted NavMeshes as part of the report from Automatic cleaning. Like deleted references, any mod that references a deleted NavMesh will cause Skyrim to Crash. Properly optimizing your mods NavMeshes and checking your mod for Deleted Vanilla NavMeshes ( which can also be caused by a CK wild edit even if you did not do it yourself ) is important. Mods altering the same cell and the same NavMeshes when your mod is not optimized will cause Skyrim to Crash. Poorly optimized NavMeshes with errors reported by the CK will make Skyrim unstable. Instabilities like fast travelling to a location and Skyrim crashes. Note the ones found to be deleted in the games masters, cannot be undeleted. To fix deleted Navmeshes in your mods, Arthmoor has provided a walkthrough in Skyrim - Fixing Navmesh Deletion in TES5Edit

Manually cleaning your mods is also important to remove wild edits. This is mostly down to the experience of Mod Authors to solve such problems, but there are a few noted later in this guide which are in the DLCs which everyone can easily Manually clean. Some mods can have accidental Wild Edits in them caused by the author looking at how Bethesda did something they wish their mod to do as well. These Wild Edits often prevent Skyrim from doing things like advancing quests, spawning NPCs, assigning dialogue to NPCs, preventing NPCs from patrol areas they are assigned to. They can also alter Vanilla Lighting and Triggers that the author wished to use. All of these things affect any plugin with conflicting records loaded before a mod with Wild Edits.

Mod authors - Learn to use xEdit, and ensure the only records in your mod plugins are what you would expect to be in there, its the most important tool the community can make use of when used properly.

Mod Users - Follow this guide...

Before moving on to the Manual cleaning, something everyone should do prior to Manual Cleaning :


Automatic cleaning of Bethesda's ESMs with xEdit

With the games Original esm's installed ( You can use Steam to Verify Integrity of Game Cache of Skyrims files to ensure you have good error free copies of the original master files ), and in accordance with the following wiki article http://www.creationkit.com/index.php?title=Skyrim_Dirty_Plugins_List :



Load up xEdit.

1. Right click the plugin selection screen and select "none"





2. Tick the relevant esm to edit, and click okay ( If you have not cleaned any of your Master files yet, the first one to tick will be Skyrims "Update.esm" ), then click Okay





After each of the following actions, wait for a message in the message window that the previous operation has finished / Done :

3. Right click the plugin after you get the "Background Loader : Finished" message,and choose "Apply Filter for Cleaning"





Wait until Filtering is finished then ..

4. Right click the plugin and choose Remove Identical to Master Records





Wait until it finishes then ..

5. Right click the plugin and choose Undelete and Disable references





Wait until it finishes then ..

6. Close xEdit, and it should check with you that you wish to save the plugin ( this only happens if you have made any changes to the plugin to save, if it just closes .. Then you have not cleaned anything )



Rinse and repeat the Automatic cleaning ( steps 1 - 6 above ) for each of the master files.

Working from first to load, to last, not including Skyrim.esm or any unofficial patches
( No point doing Skyrim.esm, and the unofficial patches are already done and should not be cleaned )

So clean in this order

Update.esm

Dawnguard.esm

Dawnguard.esm ( Yes it needs to be done twice )

Hearthfire.esm

Dragonborn.esm


Dawnguard.esm needs to be cleaned twice ( as of xEdit 3.1 onwards - After doing the automatic cleaning routine once on Dawnguard.esm, and saving it, load it up again in xEdit and you will be able to clean a further 6 ITMs )

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Dawnguard.esm needs manual cleaning aswell as automatic cleaning


After the automated cleaning is done, you can also now manually clean a few more Wild edits xEdit will not have touched ...

Recently Arthmoor has brought to the attention of the community additional information regarding manual cleaning of Dawnguard.esm, which everyone needs to do for their own setup same as automatic cleaning ( because nobody can legally upload official master files anywhere, everyone needs to do their own )



First load up xEdit

When the plugin selection comes up, right click and select None
Then put a tick in the box just for Dawnguard.esm, click Okay
After its finished loading, right click Dawnguard.esm and choose "Filter for Cleaning"


1. For "CELL 00016BCF: Remove XEZN subrecord referring to RiftenRatwayZone [ECZN:0009FBB9]. Otherwise it blocks the official fix in Update.esm." .... Expand the records as in the following screenshot, and right click the indicated sub-record, and choose Remove





2. For "CELL 0001FA4C: Wild edit. Remove this record. It's a testing cell." .... Expand the records as in the following screenshot, and right click the indicated record, and choose Remove





3. For "CELL 0006C3B6: Wild edit. Remove this record. It's a testing cell." .... Expand the records as in the following screenshot, and right click the indicated record, and choose Remove





NOTE : This guide used to include cleaning instructions for "CELL 00039F67: Wild edit. Remove this record. It's a testing cell" ( The WICourier edit ) - But since the new version of TES5Edit 3.1+ now cleans that as part of the automated cleaning ( which you should have done prior to manual cleaning ), you no longer need to clean it manually afterwards.


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Now that the Master files are cleaned, you could put them in a zip, and get your mod manager to install them - Maybe at a future date you want to do a refresh of steam cache and it redownloads the masters which are not the same as the originals anymore (because you cleaned them), so then you would need to reclean them again. But beware, Bethesda have started redoing some masters due to Creation Club mods compatability, so make sure any redownloaded masters are not newer than your previously cleaned ones, because in that case you will need to reclean and rezip them again anyway.

You can go through the rest of your Load Order using Automatic cleaning of ITMs and UDRs on all your mods plugins. The sequence of cleaning mods plugins should be after you have your Load Order correct, masters are cleaned, then clean them with the last to load being the last to clean. Mod authors should have done them already, so most will probably not need cleaning. Also look out for any mod specific cleaning instructions in the mods description.

Prime example = The Unofficial Patches will not need any cleaning, they are already done, and any remaining ITMs in those plugins should be left alone because they do have a purpose .. ( its a very rare occasion when this is true ).

The xEdit Work In Progress Development topic is at the following link https://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?/topic/3750-wipz-tes5edit/

Development project is at GitHub https://github.com/TES5Edit/TES5Edit

And newer versions of xEdit (3.2.7 +) have a link to Discord top right of xEdit window.

Edited April 2, 2019 by Guest

[Deleted133263User]

Sticky topic requested - Along with amending the title typo

[Deleted133263User]

Edited the OP for a bit more clarification, and now that TES5Edit 3.1 has been released ( which does one of the manual cleaning stages during automatic cleaning ) .. Amended the manual cleaning section to remove the WI Courier edit no longer needed.

[Deleted133263User]

A bit more editing of the wording for clarification.

[Shurah]

What's the interest to do a tutorial to remove testing cells? Some of these cells are used by quests to remove NPCs from the world, so in the best case these edits will be useless.

[Deleted133263User]

Arthmoor made the entries on the Creation Kit wiki :

http://www.creationkit.com/Skyrim_Dirty_Plugins_List#Mods_Needing_Manual_Cleaning


and answered a similar question in the AFK Mods topic :

http://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?/topic/4110-manual-cleaning-skyrim-master-files/&do=findComment&comment=153868

Curious question, because I've never read this before so obviously have never done it. Are the "Testing Cells" doing any harm if they aren't cleaned out?

No, they do no harm, but with the new Bash tag detection script they can cause a mod to get tag recommendations that don't fit.

As far as I know there have been no reports of any negative impact in removing them

http://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?/topic/4110-manual-cleaning-skyrim-master-files/

http://www.theassimilationlab.com/forums/topic/14507-guide-manual-cleaning-skyrim-master-files/

http://tesalliance.org/forums/index.php?/topic/7533-guide-cleaning-skyrim-master-files/

 

And since version 3.1 of TES5Edit, one of those Wild Edit Testing cells is being automatically cleaned without any manual cleaning ( CELL 00039F67: Wild edit. Remove this record. It's a testing cell ) - As noted in the OP. I dont think Zilav has had to change anything in TES5Edit with regard to that so far ( the latest W.I.P of TES5Edit still automatically cleans it, which has been updated quite a lot since 3.1 hit the streets ).

 

 

If you do not wish to do the manual cleaning Dawnguard part of the guide .. That is entirely up to you.

I would at least recommend the first one though :

CELL 00016BCF: Remove XEZN subrecord referring to RiftenRatwayZone [ECZN:0009FBB9]. Otherwise it blocks the official fix in Update.esm

( Dawnguard.esm load order loads later than Update.esm )

Edited May 10, 2015 by Guest

[Shurah]

Thank you to have taken the time to do a detailed reply.

[Deleted133263User]

Amended the OP - As noted by Elgar if using the latest W.I.P of TES5Edit, it will clean 68 ITMs from Dragonborn.esm ( previous versions cleaned 64 )

[Deleted133263User]

Updated the OP - To reflect Release of TES5Edit 3.1.2 on Nexus

Also there was a discrepancy of how many records were processed after the last edit noting 68 ITMs instead of 64 on Dragonborn.esm, the processed records of UDRs now reads 214318 processed records instead of 214322 ( minus the 4 additional records removed prior to doing UDRs )

[Deleted133263User]

Uploaded new image for CRC checks at the end of the guide