I would like some info on safely modding.

[Ru5tyShackleford]

Specifically, how bad are "dirty" mods, and is it bad to remove them and do their bad affects permanently affect the saves after it? In skyrim, weren't the dangerous mods the ones that leave scripts behind, and most others were mostly alright to move/remove? How badly can current mods affect my save now and in the future? Also, I understand that it's good practice to keep a backup in case you don't like a mod, or it has issues, however later on I may decide I no longer care about the mod, the support dies for it, or Istart running out of .esp space . Can dirty mods really break a game where they have been removed? I would really like to know these things because my main character is still going since launch, and want to keep it alive to the end of the dlc support for FO4.

 

Anyway, thank you for any responses, and please let me know if I need to re-write or clarify anything. I am typing this pretty late, and I may have rambled a bit.

Edited March 18, 2016 by RustyShackleford69

[PoliteRaider]

Unfortunately there's no completely accurate answer to most of these questions other than "it varies".

 

For example, how dangerous are dirty mods? Well... it's worth pointing out that the three most well known dirty mods for Skyrim are called Hearthfire, Dawnguard and Dragonborn.

 

There's a tendency of the community to attempt to judge mods by these highly specific technical details that the end user doesn't understand. Some descriptor becomes the buzzword that must be avoided or embraced. This isn't a useful way of approaching it though. Unless you understand the context behind it one piece of technical information doesn't tell you the whole story.

 

You might think it's safe to remove a simple mod that adds a fancy new desk because it doesn't use scripts but what you don't know is that some other mod you're using (or the vanilla game) has stored a reference to that desk in its array so that it can display some visual effect on items you've already searched or something like that. You delete the desk mod and suddenly that script on some completely separate mod gets an error it wasn't written to handle and causes problems with your game.

 

You pretty much have to either follow very basic, careful and broad rules and guidelines for mod safety (like never remove mods mid-game) or understand the technical details of how mods works completely. There's no one word shortcut that provides the benefits of the latter with only the time investment of the former.

 

You've mentioned that you want to keep your present savegame all the way through the active period of FO4 (in other words years). This requires the utmost caution and even then it's possible for a glitch in the vanilla game to somehow corrupt your save. Most of these "dangers" of mods are fairly small, even on the riskiest mods but they add up. Actually to be more accurate they multiply. Since every individual combination of mods has their own risks, adding one mod to twenty mods doesn't add one more risk factor, it adds twenty. These are all small, but eventually you might run into trouble and it might be from an unexpected source.

 

All you can do is try to take sensible precautions. See how mods have worked for other people, read the description, check the bug report pages, don't install any mod when it's first released but wait a little while for it to have a bit of history you can look at and try to keep the number of mods as low as possible while still meeting your needs. As you go along try learning a bit about how mods work and then you'll understand why a particular one might be dangerous. But modding is inherently risky and you might need to accept that keeping your savegame intact for years could be an unrealistic failure standard when it comes to modding an active game that is still being patched and having DLCs released.

 

Hope that helps, sorry I can't really be more specific there.

 

Edit: Oh sorry, I also wanted to include this link but forgot until after I posted. The creation kit wiki's cleaning guide is probably a good place to start for understanding dirty edits.

Edited March 18, 2016 by PoliteRaider

[Ru5tyShackleford]

Thank you, this is exactly what I wanted to see. I understand that keeping my save safe for the entire FO4 dlc active period is difficult thing, which I can live with. I will likely make a new main at some point anyway. Thank you for the link I will look over it and try to pick something up. Thanks again!

 

Also, any idea how clean new texture mods are? As in like new standalone power armor paint jobs?

Edited March 19, 2016 by RustyShackleford69

[PoliteRaider]

Thank you, this is exactly what I wanted to see. I understand that keeping my save safe for the entire FO4 dlc active period is difficult thing, which I can live with. I will likely make a new main at some point anyway. Thank you for the link I will look over it and try to pick something up. Thanks again!

 

Also, any idea how clean new texture mods are? As in like new standalone power armor paint jobs?

 

Textures aren't stored in saves so they're (baring the most catastrophic of unimaginable circumstances) not going to cause any long-term problems in and of themselves. A straight up texture replacer that sits in Fallout4/data/textures/ with just a filename ending in .dds that's pretty close to impossible to cause any problem whatsoever.

 

Creating a stand alone texture however requires creating new information in FO4Edit and possibly some day the construction kit, you're telling the game "Hey, I'm putting in a new set of power-armors please use these textures for it". Depending on how much is changed to achieve that is how much the texture replacement is going to have any risk. It's important to understand though that this isn't the same thing as the file being "dirty". Right now, any standalone texture can only be made in FO4edit, and because of the way this program works it can only create a dirty edit if the user makes a serious mistake (or for certain complex reasons that I'm not really qualified to explain, chooses deliberately to use a dirty edit for a very advanced function). The various xEdit programs like FO4Edit are what's used to clean the dirty files that the construction kit sometimes makes.

 

So, let's look at a suit of stand-alone power armor. Now, because I don't want to talk about anyone else's mod I'll talk about mine. This isn't to promote it or anything, but just so I can go behind the scenes a bit. I've got a suit of power armor I've made with the US Marine Corps colours on it which is a standalone texture. It doesn't replace anything in the game, it's brand new.

 

In order to do this it doesn't just install the textures, it has a new .esp which you have to load as a plugin, otherwise the armor just won't be in the game since it doesn't know that it should be. I didn't create this .esp myself and it wasn't made in FO4Edit because I used a special program that makes power armor paintjobs automatically. However there's no difference between the .esp created by this program and one made in FO4Edit, this way was just faster. I've loaded up my mod in FO4Edit and I can see that the .esp contains 3 new things.

 

A constructible object record, which tells the game "this can be built by the player and here's what you need to do it".

An Object Modification record, which tells the game "Here's what adding this to a set of power armor does".

And a Material Swap record, which tells the game "here's where you'll find the new textures to use for it".

 

All 3 of these are brand new records though, they're not changing or editing anything in the original game, they're just adding some new things into it. As such it's impossible for this file to be "dirty", that doesn't mean it's risk free. If you make that suit of power armor and then uninstall the mod, suddenly the game has this suit of power armor in it that it doesn't know how to use. Alternatively you might install another mod that changes some basic aspect of the vanilla game that my mod relies upon. For example my mod is to the X-01 power armor, if you installed a mod that replaced the vanilla power armors completely with new custom variations, the game might potentially no longer understand how to implement my mod since there's no longer be an X-01 suit of armor.

 

That said, these are extremely unlikely occurrences, you would pretty much have to go out of your way and deliberately cause a problem in order for my mod to break your game because it has such a small impact.

 

If my mod started doing other things though like adding in new effects that other power armors couldn't do, changing how the basic game worked, turned you invulnerable, etc, these would suddenly be more risky. Still not a lot but more than just a standalone texture mod.

 

So textures are almost completely safe, but a texture might contain more than just the texture itself.