List of mods that you should not extract their BSA

[nilok]

Has anyone seen a list like this?

 

 

[NexusComa]

Pretty sure you will never have any trouble unpacking .bsa files ...

Now the order you over-wright other files would come int play.

It would have to follow your load order.

[Novem99]

Why on earth do you think that some .bsa archives should not be extracted???

[cdcooley]

If you mean extracting the BSA from the downloaded file so you can install it. Do that for every mod. If you mean extracting the individual files packed into the BSA into your game's Data folder then why would you want to do that?

 

BSAs exist to make accessing the resources faster and more efficient. They also ensure that resources get loaded in the correct order in 99.999% of the cases for Skyrim (although in earlier games there were problems with resource ordering). The only reason for extracting resources from a BSA would be to resolve some specific mod conflict and even then you would be extracting specific resources not everything.

[nilok]

Why on earth do you think that some .bsa archives should not be extracted???

 

Because I have seen a few mods mention to never do so. While I was starting out trying to do STEP, I had serious questions about even the optimized textures, because in some places people said extract other places they said don't. SRLE_Extended_Legacy_of_The_Dragonborn even has a few like the Arthmoor villages, so I figure there has to be more.

[lofgren]

Most likely just modders trying to avoid being held responsible when you screw up your own game, like how every single modder says to load their mod last and never merge it even when there is no reason for it to load last and no reason it couldn't be merged. They just don't want users coming to their comments section to whine about how the mod broke their game after the user borked the installation.

[cdcooley]

The advice to unpack files from BSAs is a bad habit left over from previous games. In previous games people ran into problems of conflicting resources (textures, meshes, etc.) from different mods getting loaded in seemingly random orders when they were packed into BSAs. The BSA loading logic was unstable and the only way to ensure the correct resource would be used was to unpack all of the BSAs. The order in which they were unpacked would then determine which one was used.

 

But Skyrim fixed the BSA problem by forcing the resources loaded from BSAs to match the load order of the corresponding ESP files. So now the only reason to unpack a resource from a BSA is to force some particular file from a mod early in your load order to override the ones that come after it. That's almost never what you want, but when it does happen it's OK to unpack those specific resources. But files packed in BSAs are more efficient for the game to load (and that's more true for Skyrim Special Edition where textures get their own BSAs with unique optimizations) so it's better to have things in BSAs whenever possible.

[twiztedmongoloid]

Why on earth do you think that some .bsa archives should not be extracted???

 

There are two for sure that i know the authors both say to keep packed in BSA.

 

Immersive college of winterhold. (gives error if you extract)

 

INIGO (author himself advises to leaved packed)

 

I personally always extract BSA's except those i mentioned in order to manually delete certain files as done and advised in the STEP guides in my sig.

[twiztedmongoloid]

If you mean extracting the BSA from the downloaded file so you can install it. Do that for every mod. If you mean extracting the individual files packed into the BSA into your game's Data folder then why would you want to do that?

 

BSAs exist to make accessing the resources faster and more efficient. They also ensure that resources get loaded in the correct order in 99.999% of the cases for Skyrim (although in earlier games there were problems with resource ordering). The only reason for extracting resources from a BSA would be to resolve some specific mod conflict and even then you would be extracting specific resources not everything.

 

Extracting is done in SRLE and extended in order to remove certain conflicting files. I extract majority of BSA's with MO and have never had an issue.

[cdcooley]

 

If you mean extracting the BSA from the downloaded file so you can install it. Do that for every mod. If you mean extracting the individual files packed into the BSA into your game's Data folder then why would you want to do that?

 

BSAs exist to make accessing the resources faster and more efficient. They also ensure that resources get loaded in the correct order in 99.999% of the cases for Skyrim (although in earlier games there were problems with resource ordering). The only reason for extracting resources from a BSA would be to resolve some specific mod conflict and even then you would be extracting specific resources not everything.

 

Extracting is done in SRLE and extended in order to remove certain conflicting files. I extract majority of BSA's with MO and have never had an issue.

 

As I said, the one remaining reason to extract files is to resolve conflicts. The optimal solution would be to only extract the conflicting file from the earlier BSA so that it can override the later ones as a loose file. If you have a sufficiently powerful machine you probably won't notice, but extracting a majority of your BSAs does take more disk reads, processing power, and even memory to access all those loose files than it would if they were in BSAs.