Mod Testing Set-up?

[DWooT]

For those of you creating your own mods or testing other peoples mods, how do you create a pristine testing environment?

 

Or in other words, how do I keep my personal game and all its mods separate from a baseline/vanilla game with only the mods I'm testing?

 

Or in other-other words, is there a way for me to have two copies of FO4 (both on one computer, not boot-leg, only purchase one copy of the game) and two copies of NMM so I can manage things completely separate?

[HomicidalGrouse]

I asked this same question a while back. You can basically take your main Fallout 4 directory and rename it to something else. Verify the game with Steam and it will redownload it. You could avoid the redownloading part by copying most of the files manually though.

 

Anywho, once you're done with that, all you need to do to switch back and forth between the two versions is rename the new version to something else (like Fallout 4 Clean), then rename your modded copy back to Fallout 4. Verify with Steam and it'll recognize everything and be good.

 

I believe you can also avoid the renaming step entirely by simply placing your clean FO4 directory on another drive or in another folder, and then creating desktop shortcuts to your Fallout4Launcher.exes on your desktop. IIRC, Steam doesn't actually need to verify the game each time you want to switch back and forth. The game will just make Steam recognize it when you launch it.

 

EDIT: A technically easier way would be to use ModOrganizer or even NMM's profiles feature. You could have a "vanilla" profile running no mods. ModOrganizer does it better than NMM, but it's also still really buggy for FO4.

Edited October 6, 2016 by HomicidalGrouse

[DWooT]

Thanks. I've been on NMM since the beginning (yeah, really long ago, about 1.5 months). I just tried tonight tinkering a little with the NMM profiles. Not sure if I like the constant "bouncing" back-and-forth of the data directory. I may give the more "complex-trick" approach a try.

[shavkacagarikia]

I would advise you to make a new save which you will use for testing your mod only.

[damanding]

The problem with the NMM profiles is that it wants to use the same mod list for all profiles because it stores mod files directly in the Data directory instead of virtually linking to it. Mod Organizer lets you keep the mod list and the save games associated with them separate. But MO is buggier and less user friendly. If you're not really familiar with modding it can be an annoyance at times. I haven't been able to get Loot to work with mine but it's not the end of the world because I know how to self-sort pretty well.

[DWooT]

Thanks for the info on NMM vs MO.

[HomicidalGrouse]

The problem with the NMM profiles is that it wants to use the same mod list for all profiles because it stores mod files directly in the Data directory instead of virtually linking to it. Mod Organizer lets you keep the mod list and the save games associated with them separate. But MO is buggier and less user friendly. If you're not really familiar with modding it can be an annoyance at times. I haven't been able to get Loot to work with mine but it's not the end of the world because I know how to self-sort pretty well.

 

I can't wait for MO for FO4 to be at least as stable and reliable as it is for Skyrim. I much prefer it, but when I tried to get it up and running a couple months ago the game was having issues with the mod list and I had a lot of crashes.

 

So here I sit with the two FO4 installations method while using NMM for my mod manager... lol

[damanding]

So far the only real issues I've had with MO2 is that I can't figure out how to get LOOT to work with it and more annoyingly whatever app I do run from it, CK, FO4Edit, and Fallout itself have a very high tendency to crash on exit or otherwise not shut down completely. I pretty much always run task manager and check to see if the process is still running to kill it (especially if MO is still showing up as locked). I was trying to update one of my mods, finally finished, saved and exited CK. It crashed and corrupted the esp to the point that the CK won't even recognize it and place it in the esp list for me to open again.

[AGreatWeight]

I'm a bit wary of using seperate profiles in NMM atm, so I just go with having FO4 and Steam installed on two seperate drives, one for playing (with mods) and the other (vanilla) for testing my mods. It does mean that I have to move the contents of 'vanilla' Steam (minus the Steamapps folder) into/out-of a backup folder every time I switch from one to the other, which is a bit cumbersome, but it's worked for the last several months.