SSE Missing Meshes and texture when meshes and Textures are in BSA

[Colemanallen1987]

So i am trying to update my mod, but i am having issues when testing on vanilla Skyrim, all my meshes are not showing up and textures are missing, I have a large amount of textures so split them in two, So its texture1 download, texture 2 download, then my One BSA and ESM with my meshes in a single download......what am i doing wrong, works perfect if i manually drop the mesh and texture folder to skyrim!!!!

[Pickysaurus]

Does the name of the BSA match the ESM exactly?
e.g.

MyModIsCool.esm
MyModIsCool.bsa

any variation will cause the game not to load it.

[Colemanallen1987]

Ok so how would i do that if i need to break up the meshes and textures do to size, would adding a number make it not work?

[JonathanOstrus]

Ok so how would i do that if i need to break up the meshes and textures do to size, would adding a number make it not work?

No it won't. Having them named anything other than "PluginName.bsa" will cause them not to be found. The exception is on Special Edition there's a second file "PluginName - Textures.bsa" (space before and after the hyphen). You can use a .ini edit to include them if you're doing it just for yourself. Either edit the Skyrim.ini or SkyrimCustom.ini Then in the Archive section where the bsa's are listed add yours. There is a line length limit of something like 300 characters (I don't remember the exact number) so be aware of that.

[Archive]
sResourceArchiveList=Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Meshes0.bsa, Skyrim - Meshes1.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa
sResourceArchiveList2=Skyrim - Voices_en0.bsa, Skyrim - Textures0.bsa, Skyrim - Textures1.bsa, Skyrim - Textures2.bsa, Skyrim - Textures3.bsa, Skyrim - Textures4.bsa, Skyrim - Textures5.bsa, Skyrim - Textures6.bsa, Skyrim - Textures7.bsa, Skyrim - Textures8.bsa, Skyrim - Patch.bsa

Since this sounds like a mod you're distributing, requiring ini edits is not a great option.

 

Another option is to use dummy plugins to load the extra archives. So you could just load up CK (no plugin file) and save a dummy file. Name it something like "PluginName1.esp". Then convert it to esl so it doesn't steal a full load order slot. Now just name one of the texture archives "PluginName1 - Textures.bsa". You could even have a second one named "PluginName1.bsa". Though that could get confusing having both and actually having textures inside them. I would probably opt for just having the "Textures" named one as my first example. Either one or both can exist and the game will load them provided the plugin with the matching name is flagged for loading.

 

Another trick if you don't want them to be actual .esl files is to save the .esp and use xEdit to set the ESL header flag. This will cause the .esp to be sortable within the esp space in case you need it to be in a particular order for override precedence. Note NMM as of 0.65.10.0 on GitHub still sorts .esp with the flag up into the "ESL" space after ESM flagged files. I've pushed a code fix for this but it hasn't been merged in. If you use the in game mod manager you can sort the ESL flagged .esps in the right spot. Other mod managers besides NMM may work as well.

Edited September 26, 2018 by BigAndFlabby