Adventures with ESL

[lethielnyrond]

So here's a story.

 

I was scrolling through the recent mods, as you do, and I came across a mod I have missed very much, Go To Bed. I was right on my 255-esp limit, so I was about to pass on regretfully when I saw that it was available as an ESL, a light master. I've never had one of those, I thought, and I was very excited to find that as an ESL it wouldn't count toward my 255-esp limit. So I downloaded and installed it through NMM.

 

First check. It is not true that ESLs don't count towards your 255-esp limit. It is true that they don't count towards your new 254-esp limit. As things were, my new mod was bunking on the sofa in my merged patch's slot, and generally cluttering up the place. LOOT doesn't approve of subletting, and NMM sniffily informed me that I had 256 esps and SSE wouldn't start. (It did. Everything worked fine.) But I got tired of the nagging, and worried that something dire might be happening behind the scenes, so I decided that the best way was to try and convert a couple of my current mods to ESL and thus reduce my esp list to something more manageable.

 

I found instructions here: https://www.reddit.com/r/FalloutMods/comments/74e892/fo4_psa_tutorial_for_converting_small_mods_to_the/

 

I heeded the dire warnings, and soon located two really tiny, esp-only mods that didn't affect levelled lists and only depended on the base game and Update.esm: Unrelenting Force 1.0 and Earring of Godly Unburden. (What? Look, when I'm buying building materials for Skyfall Estate or Blackthorn, or even a Hearthfire house, it's just nice to be able to make it in one trip.) I checked that neither of them had huge numbers of FormIDs, and went through the conversion process in CK. It was easy as pie. I did try carrying on with my current playthrough (having first removed the esps, started the game, done a clean save without them, and then installed the esls, which I thought was clever of me) but I found there were problems--I still had the Unburden effect, but not the actual earring, which meant something was wrong--so I bowed to the inevitable and started a new game (uhhh-gain) and so far all is well.

 

So, success. ESLs work. If I can do it, anyone can.

 

What would be really nice, of course, is if there were some way to tell from the Nexus mod list which mods are actually available as ESLs. But I'm sure that will come.

 

Just wanted to share a happy story for once.

 

Lethiel

[kthompsen]

I've converted quite a few myself. Only would warn against converting external/building/landscape type mods for now... at least if you plan on generating LODs. ESLs don't seem to play well with LODGen/DynDOLOD.

[lethielnyrond]

I would only ever try it with esp-only mods.

 

I started a new playthrough recently, and was startled to see some buildings floating in the air just west of Whiterun. It was only when I got nearer and they vanished, along with a chunk of the adjoining landscape, that I realised that I'd done everything to clear up after deleting a certain mod...except regenerate my LODs. I have now done this. :rolleyes: :)

[lethielnyrond]

Sadly, it looks as though Unrelenting Force 1.0 is not working as an ESL.

 

Oh well. We learn by doing.

 

Lethiel

[fftfan]

Sadly, it looks as though Unrelenting Force 1.0 is not working as an ESL.

Interesting, it's like on Fallout 4. Certain mods generally won't work as an ESL. I've found these to usually not work when just manually converted to ESL using the option in the CK: New Settlement locations, Sim Settlements addons(A few author have gotten their own Sim Settlement addons working as ESL like IDEK's Logistics Station, I'm not sure how though), anything script heavy or anything just very complex in general usually seems like it won't work after conversion. I would guess that scripts may need to be done differently to work through an ESL, maybe certain functions they use can't access stuff from records if in they're in the ESL's <FE000000> index? For instance, custom settlements never actually registered after being converted to ESL. My guess is some kind of error happens, causing it to not run. But it must only be some number of functions, not all of them as some simple scripts can sometimes end up working. Bethesda might have made separate variants of functions for Creation Club, & perhaps for those these separate functions must be used over the previous or else it returns an error.

 

I find this stuff interesting as I'd like to be able to narrow it down to some conditionals to determine if a mod can or cannot be made an ESL, aside from the 4096 record limit. I'm working on some Fallout 4 mod stuff right now as I'd like to fix up & update some of my stuff but will probably get into Skyrim right afterwards. I'm getting by okay with only 160 total plugins but I strongly suspect I'll end up having far more for SSE.