Vortex and Sseedit

[leifyjai]

Just a heads up - it looks like when I run Sseedit and make a change to a .esp file, Sseedit puts the old .esp file into its Sseedit backup folder in Data\, then saves the new, modified .esp file in the Data\ folder, *replacing* the Vortex deployed file link to the actual .esp file residing in the AppData\Roaming\...\mods directory tree.

 

I found this out after using Sseedit to do some cleaning and Oldrim water fix script work (getting rid of water seams). After I was done, I used the "Purge Mods" button on the top of the Mods page of Vortex, and expected to find a clean Skyrim Special Edition folder. But instead, there were copies of each of the .esp files I had modified and saved with Sseedit.

 

I haven't tried "Deploy Mods" yet, but I think first I am going to just move the modified .esp files over into the AppData\Roaming\Vortex\SkryimSE\mods folders overtop of the old .esps.

 

I did compare file sizes, and the files in Skyrim Special Edition\Data were definitely the new files, they were a bit smaller than the files left in the Vortex mod folder in AppData\Roaming.

 

So it looks like this is a problem that could be just waiting to bite the unwary, because it sure looks like if you go to the trouble of using Sseedit to modify an esp file, the next time Vortex re-deploys, it will overwrite the new, "cleaned" (or whatever) version of your esp file with the original version stored in Vortex's mod directory tree structure.

 

Just FYI

 

-leifyjai

[HadToRegister]

This also happens when using NMM
SSEEdit writes the esp file to the actual data folder, and if you "reinstall" or whatever, NMM will choke at first, but it will eventually overwrite the esp with the unedited one so you're back to square one.

What I had to do when using SSEEdit and changing anything in an esp was I had to extract the original mod into its own folder, copy and overwrite the old esp with the new esp, the &z up the folder with the Same name as the mod, but with MY name in front of it so I knew I edited it, such as naming "LootFinder.7z" to "HadToRegister - LootFinder.7z", then import the edited mod into NMM and install it guaranteeing the edited esp gets installed whenever I install/uninstall the mod.

I'm telling you this, because I imagine the workaround will be exactly the same for Vortex.

[Rattledagger]

At least in my experience if any of the files in data-directory is changed, next time you hit "Deploy" you're asked if you want to make the changes permanent or if you'll revert to using the original file(s) instead. The default is to permanently do the changes and this seems to copy the new files to your /mods/-folder for so re-establishing the hardlink.

 

While I've not tested with xEdit, I did try with Requiems java-patcher generating a new esp and it seemed to work as it should.

[leifyjai]

Thanks for the replies. I actually did copy the new esp files back into the .7z mod archives, which still reside in NMM/SkyrimSE/mods cuz I just did the migration recently.

 

I guess I should have gone ahead and re-deployed to see if Vortex offers to update its mod folder files with the modified versions remaining in the ../Data folder. I will do a test run of that, by introducing some minor change, then restoring it, to an esp file and see what I get.

 

One thing that made me nervous about trying the re-deploy over the modified esp files is that Sseedit did not seem to update the modified time stamp, so the only way I could tell the difference between the cleaned version and the original (besides the file location) was the slightly smaller file size for the cleaned esp files remaining in the ../Data folder.