Understanding Groups, or "Why am I getting Cyclic Sorting Errors?"

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Understanding Groups, or Why am I getting a Cyclic Sorting Error?

In the plugins tab of Vortex, is the manage groups is where you can assign plugins to specific groups.

However, there's a caveat to doing this if you just think that Groups are the same things as Categories like in NMM.

Groups in Vortex are a means to also sort your load order, by 'locking' same type esps, into certain areas of your load order.

Click on the Manage Groups button in the Menu on the Plugins Tab, and note how there's a hierarchy of the groups, with arrows flowing to and from each group to show you visually, how plugins assigned to each of those groups will be placed in your load order.

So far, people are mostly using groups, to instantly put an esp at the end of their load order, such as Scrap Everything.esp, by just assigning it to the "Dynamic Patches" group, because as you can see by the screenshot, it's pretty low in the hierarchy and will be put after EVERY Group, that comes before it in the chain.

So, for some people, (myself included) when they first start using Vortex, they may decide to order things nicely into the groups, believing that they are just there to organize their plugins into neat categories/groups/names like NMM does, which then accidentally becomes a complete mess once that person tries to make a rule to load an ESP in a lower group, to load BEFORE an esp that's assigned to a higher group, and et voila, your very first "Cyclic Error" Message!

The problem being this:

Group A, is higher up in the hierarchy than Group C, now you have a bunch of esps assigned to group A, and a bunch of others assigned to Group C, now, for some reason you decide that Mod_1.esp from Group C, should load BEFORE Mod_2.esp in Group A, well, this cannot happen, because Group C is LOWER in the hierarchy than Group A, so this will get you the inevitable "Cyclic Error" Message.

This is where the confusion starts, because there are two ways to sort your load order, by using groups, and by making individual rules for each esp, and people coming from NMM (myself included), believe that groups in Vortex are only a Naming/Organizing feature, which leads to the Cyclic Error problems and frustration.

Now, having said that, groups are also a GOOD thing, because they can be though of as "Containers", so you can assign a number of mods that all do the same thing, such as all of your landscape.esps, and assign them all to the Landscape Group, you can assign all your Flora.esps, to the Flora group.

Now, due to the hierarchy of Groups, ALL of your Landscape esps, will MOVE AS ONE UNIT, to load AFTER all of your Flora Esps.

Using groups essentially 'locks' your same type esps into that specific area of your load order.

On top of that, you can then sort WITHIN the group, your Flora plugins so they play nice with each other, by setting modA.esp to load BEFORE ModB.esp INSIDE the Flora Group. Just don't try to load MadA.esp in your Flora Group, to Load BEFORE any esp in any group that comes BEFORE the Flora group in the Group Hierarchy, or AFTER a group that comes later.

So, when you assign to groups, you guarantee your esps a certain spot in the load order, and you can sort them to your heart's content INSIDE the same group, but you cannot sort them with other mods OUTSIDE the Group, or assigned to a Different Group.

Hopefully this has cleared up a bit of confusion as to how stuff works in Vortex.

If I'm wrong in any of this, someone please come along and correct me.

*Your "Manage Groups" screen will look different than mine, I've taken a screenshot of it before and after installing 311 mods, and they both differ greatly.
This is just to show the Hierarchy of Groups, and What Groups Load BEFORE and Load AFTER each group.