Help with Overlapping mods

[SofOuerradi]

Hello, I am new to modding and I have a question that's been bugging me; if I install a few texture mods e.g floral, water, night sky and a full game texture mod (the full game texture mod has textures for all the other texture mods I want) will the full texture mod dominate over the others? what will happen? Edited January 22, 2012 by SofOuerradi

[ClayboTGW]

Say mod 1 replaces Floral meshes and textures and mod 2 replaces a few things including the floral it will simply overwrite those floral files,,,now esp based mods that have scripts and animations and such can conflict and cause crashes and bugs this is where load orders become important.

[becauseIhadto]

Hello, I am new to modding and I have a question that's been bugging me; if I install a few texture mods e.g floral, water, night sky and a full game texture mod (the full game texture mod has textures for all the other texture mods I want) will the full texture mod dominate over the others? what will happen?

 

Mods generally come in three flavours:

 

-Textures

-Meshes

-.esp or .esm files (working code that changes the behaviour of the game)

 

Textures and Meshes are files that can be overwritten. For example, I use Skyrim HD 2K's texture pack, but I've overwritten the flora textures from Skyrim HD 2K and the vanilla meshes (since Skyrim HD is just textures, and thus did not overwrite any vanilla meshes) with Vurt's Overhaul. If you delete a texture or mesh, do not get scared -- this is actually how these mods are uninstalled. The vanilla texture will restore itself automatically from the appropriate .bsa file, no fuss, no muss. This also means: don't touch the .bsa files.

 

.esp and .esm files, on the other hand, are subject to a specific load order: if you want a mod's function to over-write a conflicting function in another mod, put it later in the load order. For instance, I have several crafting mods, and one of them is JewelCraft -- one of the things this does is rename Corundum to Copper (the mod leaves corundum ingots' function the same, however charcoal is now used to smelt iron ore into steel). This conflicts with one of my other crafting mods -- hell, probably all of them -- so I put JewelCraft as the last crafting mod in the load order, and it works just fine.

 

As far as installation and general mod management, I only use Nexus Mod Manager to handle the load order for esp/esm files, otherwise I do my installations manually -- sometimes people will include files in the rar download that aren't listed in the description, especially in large texture packs, so it's a good idea to give a quick look through the folders in the rar before you unpack the thing to make sure you're not accidentally overwriting any textures or meshes you wanted to keep.

 

Always keep the original rar file you downloaded. Chances are you'll mess up at least once or twice, and you'll just create unnecessary work for yourself if you delete the rar files once you're "done" with them. I even keep the ones I've uninstalled so I know which ones to avoid while browsing the Nexus.

Edited January 23, 2012 by becauseIhadto

[Leeira]

I want to use the official HD package as the new base and overwrite it with the Skyrim HD 2K's texture pack (not everything will be overwriten so Skyrim should look nicer than with only vanilla+2K pack).

But if I just install the 2K package and load the official texture pack's esp/bsa, the 2K pack will be overwriten as far as I know. How can I unpack the official bsa and use it as a normal texture mod like 2K's?

I use many texture mods, so packing the 2K pack into a esp would not solve the problem and would be a pain in the *** because of the updates of the modder's texture packs.