Loading BA2's into a merged file?

[acemanaustin00]

I recently combined a few weapon and armor mods together in order to cut down on clutter in the load order, and I have put combined the associated meshes and textures into the respective ba2's with Archive 2 (example: FAMAS - Meshes/textures.ba2 into the merged file of Gun - meshes/textures.ba2), but the mesh never seems to load in to the game properly. Any suggestions or fixes would be appreciated, because I really want to keep my load order down

[bbiller]

The main thing with the combined patches, aside from cutting down the esp and esm files count, is that the combined patch will refer directly to the original ba2 and any loose files the mods need to use.

 

So example, patch 1 has an esp and a ba2 file, patch 2 has an esm file and a batch of loose files. In the case of combining those, the resulting patch probably would end up as an esm, but would still refer to the original loose files and the ba2 file with what would be in those.

 

Granted I would suggest checking what is inside the archives for your mods and just combine those that are independant/stand alone that only have the one or other of the file types with ba2 files that contain the rest of what the mod needs. Once you have the combined patch, you will want that listed in place of the original patches, but the ba2 files will need to be in the data directory through your mod manager. You may be able to put all the pieces in a new custom archive and that would save some issues, but you'd need to duplicate the internal structure for the archive. There should be an archive utility that will fit the need (suggest 7zip or IzArch, both are free, Google will help you find them).