Vortex: Load before vs load after

[jkk3zt4jhhfuit5]

Forget it - found it: Plugins section (under Mods) has a Load Order column.

Edited February 20, 2020 by jkk3zt4jhhfuit5

[Zanderat]

Yes, the plugins tab.

[HadToRegister]

Forget it - found it: Plugins section (under Mods) has a Load Order column.

 

 

Just remember the the Plugins Tab shows the load order of the ESPs, the MODS tab is where you determine which Meshes and Textures LOAD BEFORE or LOAD AFTER other Meshes/Textures

[Ragnarklok]

Don't know if this is a dead thread or not, but what I'm confused on is the difference between "requires" and "load after". Obviously if I mark a plugin "load after", it will load it after whatever I told it too load after.

BUT

If I mark something "requires" will it also do the same?

Like, if mod A "requires" mod B, will it automatically load A after B?

Do I need to make 2 rules, requires AND load after? Or can I save time and not mark anything requires, and just mark everything load after? Lol

[HadToRegister]

Don't know if this is a dead thread or not, but what I'm confused on is the difference between "requires" and "load after". Obviously if I mark a plugin "load after", it will load it after whatever I told it too load after.

BUT

If I mark something "requires" will it also do the same?

Like, if mod A "requires" mod B, will it automatically load A after B?

Do I need to make 2 rules, requires AND load after? Or can I save time and not mark anything requires, and just mark everything load after? Lol

 

 

I don't think ANYBODY has used "Requires" yet.

 

Just use Load Before and Load After, but only use it when Vortex tells you there's a conflict, it's not usually necessary 95% of the time to create rules

[Guest deleted34304850]

i've used "requires" in testing, but honestly, it made s#*!-all difference.

 

for example I decided that any simsettlements mods would - logically - require simsettlements, so i made "required" rules. then when i removed simsettlements, all the mods that require it flagged up showing that they were missing something.

 

With load before/load after - you'd load a patch for a specific mod AFTER the mod - and that's the best use case for that rule.

 

However, i made my rules for testing, as HTR has said - you really don't need to go off and make a rule for everything as Vortex will do it for you. Unless, that is, you're one of those maniacs who thinks that their "hand crafted" rules that they spend significantly more time futzing with than playing the game is the way to go.

Vortex interfaces with LOOT and takes pretty much all the pain away from having to craft rules for literally every single mod. There are always exceptions and outliers, I currently have about 200 mods in my latest game and about 4 of them have load after rules. That's it.

 

If you are one of those hand crafted load order maniacs, of which there are many, then you're going to have a hell of a time with Vortex doing all that work for you.

[Rattledagger]

Don't know if this is a dead thread or not, but what I'm confused on is the difference between "requires" and "load after". Obviously if I mark a plugin "load after", it will load it after whatever I told it too load after.

BUT

If I mark something "requires" will it also do the same?

Like, if mod A "requires" mod B, will it automatically load A after B?

Do I need to make 2 rules, requires AND load after? Or can I save time and not mark anything requires, and just mark everything load after? Lol

 

With plugins it's simple, since while Vortex does have something called "Requires" and "Is Incompatible With", this has at least in my experience never worked.

 

Then it comes to mods on the other hand, you do have the two conflict-resolution rules you can create, "Load mod A before mod B" and "Load mod A after mod B", and you use one of these to tell which order two mods should come in.

 

In addition for mods you can create a "Requires"-rule or a "Conflicts with..."-rule. You don't need to use either rule, but the meaning of the "Requires"-rule is to indicate, mostly to yourself, that if you example have mod A and mod B active, you must also remember to enable the compatibility-patch between mod A and B, let's say this is called patchAB. To remember 6+ months from now, you can create a rule that says "Mod A requires mod patchAB". If you now, or 6+ months from now, enables mod A but forget to enable patchAB, you'll get a warning telling you which mod you've forgotten to enable.

 

As for "Conflicts with...", this can example be you've got two mods C and D that both makes major changes to the perk-trees in Skyrim and this means C and D is mutually incompatible with each others. As a reminder these two mods can never be used together, you can create a "Mod C conflicts with mod D" and now, or 6+ months from now, if you accidentally enables both C and D, you'll get a warning you should not use both mods.

 

So, both "Requires" and "Conflicts with..." is completely optional to use and they can be helpful for you to remember 6+ months from now that you've either forgotten to enable a required mod, or you've accidentally enabled two mods that will never work together. Neither rule has anything to do with conflict-resolution, meaning you must still create "Load before..." or "Load after..." rules for all mod conflicts.

[Tannin42]

The requires/incompatible fields for plugins are a LOOT feature. I expected the LOOT dll to report any problems with them together with all the other messages it generates and tbh I never really looked into it because no one ever seemed to care, but apparently these are checked only in the UI which would mean it's actually Vortex's job to verify them. Crap :(

 

In regards to mods: As Rattledagger said, these don't influence load order, they are just something that gets validated and reported as an error if there is an unfulfilled "requires" rule or two mods are enabled where one is marked as conflicting with the other.

Technically Vortex is also designed to be able to get these rules from a server (that's the primary purpose of the meta servers field in Settings) and it was considered to make it so "requires" rules received from the server could be automatically downloaded and installed, so for example if you download a race menu plugin and race menu isn't installed, Vortex could go and fetch it automatically (even fetch the appropriate version if details about compatible versions are provided).

 

But that would require a database with dependencies to be maintained and no one has the time to do that...

[Rattledagger]

 

But that would require a database with dependencies to be maintained and no one has the time to do that...

If you example tries to download "Cutting Room Floor" for SSE you'll get a pop-up telling you the mod requires "Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch", so wouldn't this dependency-information that must already exist somewhere at Nexus also be usable for Vortex?

[Tannin42]

Unfortunately - as far as I've been told that's just a text field, the author could put anything in not just mods that actually exist on nexus - at the same time it doesn't store things like ids or version of the thing it depends on so that info isn't really useful for our purpose. We wouldn't be able to verify in Vortex that the dependency is actually installed nor would we be able to find a download just based on that.