Mod cleaning advice, please help.

[Murielkai]

Hey, its been a while and I am reinstalling Morrowind on the new PC. I need some advice on cleaning mods.

 

I have tried to use several mod cleaners that I have found on various sites that are supposed to clean the "72 evil dirty GMST's" but none of them seem to work. When I clean them then open the mod up with Enchanted Editor the dirty GMST's are still there.

 

Enchanted Editor will remove ALL of the GMST's but sometimes some changes are intentional and I need to keep them. I can use Enchanted Editor to go through and manually select each of the 72 dirty GMST's but... that takes a long time (that is what I did during my last install earlier this year).

 

TES3cmd's "tes3cmd clean <soandso.esp>" command doesn't seem to work either.

 

So my question(s) are:

 

1) Are the 72 dirty GMST's all I need to worry about? What about dirty dialogue edits?

 

2) What mod cleaner is really the best for cleaning?

 

3) Do you clean the official DLC (Tibunal and Bloodmoon)?

 

Any insight into this would be greatly appreciated, thank you.

[hollaajith]

Well, I think TES3cmd is the best. How exactly did you use it? I create .bat file like

tes3cmd clean --overwrite --hide-backups "Telvanni Teleporter.esp" > clean.txt

and it has worked every time. Make sure tes3cmd is placed in 'Data Files' folder.

 

1) GMSTs is one of the few few way a mod can get dirty. It is only restricted to mods which does NOT depend on Tribunal.esm AND Bloodmoon.esm. The CS adds the extra GMSTs if you don't have them loaded. So, if you have the mod only depend on Morrowind.esm, then the mod will have the 'Evil GMSTs' every time you save in CS.

As for dialogue, TESTool has diaogue ceaning option but it is known to cause more problems than it solves. Its best to do it manually. When you add new dialogue line, lines above and below to gets marked changed. When that happens, just add **DELETE** to the start of those lines and then you can easily identify those in 'Details' (File>Data Files>Details). You ca delete those from there by hitting 'delete' and saving the mod.

Then there are dirty edits which happens when you open an object and hit 'save' without changing anything. Happens most often when you modify reference data in the Render Window. You DO NOT hit save when you open an object from the Render Window. Both TESTool and tes3cmd work well to clean these.

 

2) I always prefer tes3cmd, but you can try TESTool.

 

3) Oh yes. I think all the official mods are dirty. They were released at a time when people and may be even the devs were ignorant about the 'dirty' problem with the CS. Get these which are the cleaned and bug fixed version.

 

PS : You can use

tes3cmd clean --overwrite --hide-backups *.esp > clean.txt

to clean all mods at once. Advantage with tes3cmd over TESTool is that tes3cmd also cleans cell's ambient and light settings. If the mod has any cell edits, then CS adds AMBI and WHGT every time you save. Those edits conflict with Lighting mods which intentionally modify those settings, like Lights 300 or True lightness and darkness mods. Edited January 6, 2016 by hollaajith

[Murielkai]

Hmm, I just spent about 3 hours cleaning my list of esp's with Enchanted Editor and TESPCD. Have you every heard of TESPCD? I was following this guide here: https://moddinginmorrowind.wordpress.com/2012/07/23/modding-tutorials-cleaning-mods/

 

I have and use TES3cmd also for making a multipatch. I heard TEStool has issues so I stayed away from it. Do you think Enchanted Editor (for GMST's) and TESPCD for dirty references and dialogue references is the same as what TES3cmd does?

 

My main concern is deleting references that should not be deleted, how common are mods with "necessary" dirty edits?

 

Also, just to note, I am using MGSO 3.0. Should I still use the Official mods you linked above or are they included in MGSO? I wasn't even aware those Official plugins existed to be honest, when I asked about cleaning the Official content I was talking about Tribunal and Bloodmoon, do we clean those also or leave them alone?

 

Thanks for your advice btw, I haven't modded Morrowind as much as Oblivion and Skyrim so I like to hear from veterans.

Edited January 6, 2016 by Murielkai

[hollaajith]

I mainly use TESPCD to know of the conflicts but not cleaning.

 

TESTool has issues with dialogue cleaning and with creating merged lists when the modlist is large. So, checking 'restricted dialogue cleaning' and using abot's MMOG for merged objects should be sufficient.

 

Tribunal and Bloodmoon are expansions. They don't need cleaning anyway. I suggest you update your mlox standalone version that comes with MGSO. mlox lists known issues which may include if the mod is require cleaning or not.

 

so I like to hear from veterans.

I don't think you get to meet many morrowind veterans here. They are mostly at the official forums though.

Edited January 6, 2016 by hollaajith

[Murielkai]

Right now I am just using TES3cmd by right clicking the Data Files folder and opening a command prompt to make the "tes3cmd multipatch".

 

Is "abots MMOG" better than a standard TES3cmd multipatch?

 

Whenever I use TES3cmd to clean a mod the dirty edits still show up in TESPCD and the GMST's still show up in Enchanted Editor. Why is that?

Edited January 6, 2016 by Murielkai

[hollaajith]

multipatch does not create merged objects. So you can't compare. Check the online doc for tes3cmd, I can't link since I'm posting from mobile.

 

As for cleaned mods having GMSTs, tes3cmd might have added clean suffix.