Should you clean your esm files (fallout4.esm files and such)?

[Akulakha]

So I'm having a bit of a dilemma. I just finished my mod load order of 246 plugins and I'm pretty much satisfied with what I have. I even have gone through xedit and fixed a large number of conflicts and used loot to get my mod list in order. However during my play through, every time I enter the Corvega Assembly plant for some reason I experience massive fps drop in certain parts of it, particularly where there's bright light. I disabled enhanced light and fx to see if that did the trick and it still crashed. Then after being in the plant for around 10 minutes or so my game crashes. I checked my xedit and I see no conflicts whatsoever with the plant so I'm at a loss as to what to do. I have done some research and I was thinking about trying to clean all of my fallout 4 esm files but there seems to be a lot of mixed opinions on this topic. So I'm hoping to appeal to the nexus community to help me out before I begin cleaning them. Is it a good idea to clean my fallout esm files or no?

[Deleted3082751User]

yes on a heavily modded game. no if the game is vanilla.

 

this was very much mandatory for a heavily modded skyrim game, i would imagine the same to be true for fallout 4 (after all, both games pratically share the exact same engine).

 

however cleaning them probably wont increase performance, unless it is a conflict that is causing the performance drops.

 

but as per bethesda, all of fallout 4 master files are very dirty, as such i have cleaned them all multiple times, and have had no issues from that. but my game has always been heavily modded, 255 active esp files, 500+ active mods.

 

so i was more inclined to clean them, as to prevent potentional issues with plethora of mods i use, especially since fallout 4 master files do have many deleted references, which can and will most likely cause issues with any mod that attempts to place something where the deleted references are.

 

not too mention how incredibly buggy fallout 4 can be, even in its vanilla state i have seen many issues, most of which still are their to this very day, such as texture corruption, mipmap bugs, etc etc.

 

case in point, i have personally never had any issue resulting from cleaning the fallout 4 master files, in the entire 1k hours i have in the game.(which is 3 years experience)

 

some people will say do not clean them, as them dirty edits are required for the game to function, others might say you should clean them, as a cleaned product should theoretically run much better.

 

but in the end of the day it is your choice to make. (just copy the master files to a different location, so that if the cleaned files create more problems then it solves, you can always restore them, without having to re-download them again, altogether their not even that big anyway.)

Edited August 2, 2018 by Guest

[redravens13]

When I start having issues in the game, I will revalidate my core game files.  I will then run the plugins threw "loot".  If my master files are in need of cleaning after revalidating, I will clean them including all mod files.  It almost always clears up my issues.  And it does not harm the base game and most mods run well.  I will say, that after the Next-Gen Update, Cleaning the files helps but not as much as before.  The update really messed a lot of things up.  I hear a 3ed update is to be released and if that is so I foresee a lot of things will be messed up again.  For now, the game is getting better as Modders are correcting what Bethesda did.  So for now, I would still sat it is worth cleaning up all files Loot flags.  But after the 3ed update, who knows?

Edited October 19 by redravens13

[fraquar]

TBH, that might have been a thing 15 years ago - but I wouldn't bother anymore.

99.99% of mods will never touch the parts of the original .ESM's that required cleaning in the first place.

 

 

[exlandia]

Cleaning the Nuka World DLC made my game crash trying to go into the market and where the Pack headquarters is.  If I didn't clean the DLC I had no problems...