Merging Mods

[Rennn]

Sorry if this is a resoundingly stupid question.

 

I've heard people talk about somehow merging mods. If it's possible, this could really help me. I'm working on two large mods, but they need to be done separately because I don't want to force users into downloading both if they only want one.

 

I was hoping to work on both mods separately, and release them separately. However, I want to use both at the same time, and they would conflict as they edit some of the same areas. I'd get trees sticking through floors and things like that. If I merged the mods, if that's even possible, would I then be able to have both mods in a single esp, so I could edit them to not conflict?

[David Brasher]

There is currently no TES4Gecko for Skyrim. So there is no utility to auto-merge mods.

 

TESVSnip can slowly manually merge mods, but there is some sort of serious problem with the Skyrim 1.6 update where many mods that were built with TESVSnip no longer work. So unless you know a great deal about this subject, it would be very dangerous to go this route.

 

Lots of merging can be done in the CK, but it is slow work.

 

The easiest option might be for you to use Wrye Bash to espify and esmify at the proper times and the CK to build a mastered conflict resolution patch. This patch mod would load after the other two mods and would use one or both of them as a master(s) depending on how severe the conflicts were. In a few cases, the patch would not even need any masters if it only has to edit vanilla content, but load order is still essential. The patch has to come after the mods it edits.

 

If trees sticking through floors is your only real problem, why don't you just go for 100% compatibility and load the two mods up at the same time and move the offending objects? You could possibly do this in a way that gamers who were only using one of the two mods would not notice that anything looked funny. You could do it with one mod active and the other not, and then reverse which mod is active and not. (If necessary.)

 

So what you want to do is absolutely possible, and there are several viable approaches you could take.