Cleaning Master files. Good idea or not?

[Havoc1337]

So in Skyrim when I started to pile up a massive amount of mods I had to do some juggling to keep the game stable enough to play. That included creating merged patches for all the mods and most importantly cleaning bethesda Master files (.esm)

 

Does anyone know if that's still a good practice in FO4?

DLCRobot.esm seems to be full of dirty edits and records that can be undeleted but I have no idea if some new system is in place that makes that process unnecessary or maybe even contraindicative.

I'm at a bit over 100 active mods right now and start getting semi-random CTD and other annoying stuff like getting stuck in Power Armor to name a few.

[reconphil]

According to Gopher, cleaning the master files is necessary if you mod your game, otherwise there shouldn't be a problem. His video covers Skyrim. I followed the same procedure for Fallout 4 and it seemed Okay but I started to experience random CTDs. I am restoring my game and DLC and will wait until wiser heads give some advise.

[stihspid]

Um, Never clean the official DLC .esm Just too messy, but it works. Also any other .esm, or .esp would be flagged in LOOT if it was a bad idea to clean. Other than that, and I don't even use LOOT, I'd have to have a very specific problem to even check to see if I could clean something. I start with Sort Masters, and that's basically the only thing I do. Because I know those are going to be wrong, because I'm using a different load order than the author. So that would be the first thing, as a global mass change.

 

Then play the game, test it. Most of the cleaning was done when I read the description for the mods as I was downloading it. It will say if it conflicts an causes issues, heck just avoiding anything all that complex can do that. Though this build isn't based on anything but good build practices & experience doing so. Typically I edit it however I like, but most of that is merging effects into single override forms an such, or editing, it's rare that anything actually gets fixed. Sort masters & a good load order does that.

 

It's an Override build. The mods override the mods that load before them. So as long as that part is right, most of the testing or looking for a stable game is already done. LOOT basically generically builds a Override build which is just avoiding all the information used by the human brain to remember oh, this goes after this, this is what I need to make a somewhat organized old school override build in a component & foundation way. It's just groups of stuff, but in a order that works.

 

BAK build, is just getting backup copy of anything before you change. Such as seen here, I wanted to try cleaning the mods or masters to resolve this particular issue so I started by making a copy of all the .esp & .esm that I stashed away, then I tried cleaning it, and it didn't do a dang thing, because the problem came from me indiscriminately downloading & installing mods into a great big epic of epicness mess. xEdit will do that already, it's just more easy to copy the BAK directly, cause you can drag an drop it back in, BAK savegames, BAK load orders, BAK mod installs, ect. NMM does some of this too.

 

You shouldn't have to clean anything besides "Sort Masters" But don't forget it's an override/merge build, there should be tons of mods that need to be merged into one mod, which all started with them being in groups of similar content basically, adjusted to merge specific rules/guidelines. Now, as a last ditch effort, I'll remove ITM on mod authored .esm & .esp but test it duplicating the issue I was trying to resolve & I would back it all up beforehand. Then if I ever ran into a crash upon load (such as the one caused when a mod deletes something then another mod changes it later) I'll set deleted to disabled & sometimes I'll do that when I "Sort Masters" After that though there is still Navmesh crash to desktop, so it's important to differentiate between a build problem, inherent problem, and something that cleaning could even fix.

[brothalynshhung]

^ that was very informative >.< thanks, kudos.