My experience and advice regarding 1.5 patch and mods.

[OriginalBadPaladin]

Hi guys,

 

Over the last few days, both here and at Bethesda's forums, I've been reading a lot of posts from people regarding the problems they have been having getting their mods to work with the latest patch. There have been a number of solutions put forward, and I think they are all correct in their own way. But, people are encountering a wide spectrum of problems, some have it worse trouble than others, and some lucky people don't seem to be having any trouble at all.

 

It's all a bit complicated. So I thought I would try to simplify things by sharing what I know.

 

So, when it comes to enabling your mods, what I do know is this:

 

You don't need the latest version of NMM, you can do it manually.

 

Having said that, why wouldn't you use NMM?

 

You can enable mods in 2 ways, manually and within game.

 

You need to check your plugins.txt file. Usual location is something like:

C:\Users\buttmuncher\AppData\Local\Fallout4

This is hidden by default so you need to disable hidden files if you haven't already.

 

It contains a list of all of your active plugins including the main Fallout4.esm file.

 

Fallout 4 now requires an asterisk (*) before each plugin name in order to recognize it.

 

If you load Fallout and go to the mods screen, you will not see your previously installed mods displayed. This is because F4 only displays mods that you have downloaded from within Bethesda.net. Why? I dunno.

 

If you press T to see the load order, you will see your mods, but they won't be selected unless you put the asterisk before their name in plugins.txt.

 

Alternatively, you can of course activate them from here, and the game will modify plugins.txt by adding an asterisk accordingly.

 

So far, so simple, but...

 

For some reason, and I don 't know why or exactly when, F4 has a tendency to sneakily modify plugins.txt and delete all the asterisks!

For example, today I came to play the game and discovered that even though I had modified the file yesterday, all the mods were deactivated again. Why? I dunno. But I'm gonna find out, damn it.

 

Putting in all the asterisks again is a bit of a pain in the ass, so I keep a backup copy of plugins.txt complete with asterisks, so I can just copy and paste it back if the game decides to pull that again.

 

Or you could just activate them again from within F4, whatever is easiest.

 

I have faith that someone will figure out a solution to all of this rampant deactivating soon.

 

On the subject of Save Games.

 

F4 now creates a new directory for your character with [Modded] after it. All new saves of modded games will now be saved here. This means any mod that adds an .esp file to the Data folder and which you then activate. It does not seem to include mods that change Meshes and Textures for example.

 

All of these save files now have an [M] in front of them.

 

This change is not just cosmetic; it introduces a major change that is going to be a big problem for us modders. As it says when you login to Bethesda.net, all Steam achievements and trophies are now disabled!

 

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am not happy about this. I know why they've done it, but the fact is, Bethesda; I don't use mods to cheat, I use them to enhance the game. Why should we be forced to choose between playing a modded game and being able to get achievements? Can you imagine having to disable all your mods and play vanilla just for that? What a joke!

 

Now, I'm not saying I care about Steam achievements that much. I can live without them, but still, why do they give with one hand and take away with the other? Anyway, I'm not too worried, because I'm sure some modder will find a way to fix that, but it is a worrying portent.

 

Wrapping up.

 

There are probably things that I forgot to mention, and all of this knowledge has already been posted elsewhere, but I hope this summary helps anyone still struggling with the changes wrought by the latest patch.

[CalibanX]

I can't be bothered to mess around with the vanishing asterisks. I've just resolved to not play with mods that require plug-ins till all this get's fixed in a more comprehensive way. So, while I had to forgo my beloved UI mods, all of my texture & sound mods work fine and that's good enough for me for now.

[VIitS]

My experience is that the 0.61.18 version of NMM works infinitely better than the 0.61.20 version. I was using .18 for several days after the 1.5 (official) release, didn't have a single problem. I ended up closing NMM and opened it back up, then let it update because I haven't had any issues with NMM updates before. It didn't take me long to realize the newest version disables all your plugins if you manually change your load order in NMM, and it often refuses to actually acknowledge the change in your plugins.txt and loadorder.txt files.

 

Spent a bit of time tracking down the download link for the 0.61.18 version, uninstalled NMM and reinstalled the old version, and it works great again. I just tell it no when it asks to update.

[TheOriginalEvilD]

Just a guess, but with the asterisks thing, what if you went back and set the file as read only after adding the asterisks?

[BlackRoseOfThorns]

Just a guess, but with the asterisks thing, what if you went back and set the file as read only after adding the asterisks?

 

Selecting Read-only will prevent plugins.txt from resetting. It will be a hinderance only if you decide to download mods from bethesda.net.

 

 

On the subject of Save Games.

 

F4 now creates a new directory for your character with [Modded] after it. All new saves of modded games will now be saved here. This means any mod that adds an .esp file to the Data folder and which you then activate. It does not seem to include mods that change Meshes and Textures for example.

 

All of these save files now have an [M] in front of them.

 

This change is not just cosmetic; it introduces a major change that is going to be a big problem for us modders. As it says when you login to Bethesda.net, all Steam achievements and trophies are now disabled!

 

I don't know about the rest of you, but I am not happy about this. I know why they've done it, but the fact is, Bethesda; I don't use mods to cheat, I use them to enhance the game. Why should we be forced to choose between playing a modded game and being able to get achievements? Can you imagine having to disable all your mods and play vanilla just for that? What a joke!

 

Now, I'm not saying I care about Steam achievements that much. I can live without them, but still, why do they give with one hand and take away with the other? Anyway, I'm not too worried, because I'm sure some modder will find a way to fix that, but it is a worrying portent.

 

Achievements by Expired6978

http://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/12465/?

[tartarsauce2]

I keep a file I call "pluginsbackup.txt"
as opposed to plugins.txt or whatever, basically just adding "backup" to the plugin name
it has the files "as is" so that if I ever have the vanishing asterix issue for any reason, I just go and save it over the plugin file
I make sure to keep it updated, the vanishing plugins thing occurs a lot to me when changing mod load orders, removing plugins, etc suddenly, didn't used to before 1.5
so that's my workaround, hope it helps, it's as easy as opening the backup and saving over the thing

changing the main file to read only works wonder

[eboomer]

For those not too familiar with such things, you can copy-paste the contents of your plugins.txt file into Excel (or other spreadsheet software), and use a cell formula to add the asterisk (like ="*" & A1 in Excel, assuming you paste into cell A1), and then copy-paste the cells that now show the asterisk back into your plugins.txt file. It's still annoying, but should take less than a minute, and doesn't take longer the more mods you add.

[Fatalmasterpiece]

Just use the latest version of NMM and don't touch Bethesda's mod menu... it's really as simple as that.

[gamefever]

Fatalmasterpiece, on 07 May 2016 - 10:39 PM, said:

Just use the latest version of NMM and don't touch Bethesda's mod menu... it's really as simple as that.

 

Word!

[laowai68]

Just use the latest version of NMM and don't touch Bethesda's mod menu... it's really as simple as that.

 

 

I have updated to the latest NMM and I still need to activate each and every mod using the in-game interface. I'm sure I'm doing it wrong, but it still saddens me that that, in a effort on consoleify this game, Beth completely unsolved a solved problem for PC players. Worse, it was a problem that was solved not by their developers, but rather by the efforts of their enthusiastic community no less.

Edited May 8, 2016 by laowai68