How do i create a mod file?

[meikosakine47]

I recently retextured the hunting shotgun and would like to turn it into a mod file how can i do this?

[madmongo]

If you don't want to replace the existing shotgun, then you need to extract the shotgun mesh from the meshes bsa, which you can use with the bsa browser that comes with fomm. I don't know the actual file name, but for the sake of this conversation let's say it is shotgun.nif. For your own mods, it is best to create new folders in the meshes and textures directories, but if you really want to you can put your new shotgun in the existing weapon directories. Let's assume for this conversation that you'll make your own directories.

 

So you create the folders \data\textures\myshotgun and \data\meshes\myshotgun. Take the shotgun nif that you extracted, and put it in the \data\meshes\myshotgun folder, and put your new textures in the \data\textures\myshotgun folder. Now go into nifskope, open the shotgun nif, and change all of the texture paths to point to your new textures. Then save it to a new nif called myshotgun.nif (or whatever you want to name it).

 

Now go into the GECK. Some weapons have a 1st person model and some don't. Open up the shotgun weapon and take a look under the art section. If it has a separate 1st person model then you'll need to make that first. Find the existing 1st person model under statics, and edit that to point to your new nif, and make sure you save it with a different editor ID. Then, open up the shotgun weapon, change its editor ID to whatever new editor ID you want for your shotgun, and change the 1st person model to the static that you just made, and change the art to point to your nif.

 

If you want to change any of the stats, you can do that as well, but if it is just a retexture you can leave them as-is.

 

Now that you have your new weapon, you need to place it somewhere in the world so that your player character can get to it. You can give it to an NPC or you can stick it on the ground somewhere or you can shove it into a container, whatever you like. You can even get fancy and make it a quest reward or something like that.

 

Then save your mod and you're done.