Merge mods OR convert to ESLs OR what?

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

Good evening everybody!

 

I have recently hit the "plugin limit" of Fallout 4.

So I wanted to free up some space.

I use lots of weapon mods (most require AWKCR), so my first thought was "I will just merge them all together (including their AWKCR patches)".

So I started merging mods together, never more then a hand ful at once.

I thought that if I only merge a few mods at once, it will be easier to test and to fix if there are problems.

 

That went well for some time ....

I got all of the "not - AWKCR - dependent" weapon mods merged together and working fine.

 

But most of the mods that require AWKCR don't really like beeing merged ...

They work fine when I load them together in the game.

But whenever I try to merge them, some of the weapons don't show up in the game (yes, I checked that I loaded all the meshes / textures / ... )

I also tried to create a "merged Patch" using FO4Edit. That didn't help either.

 

So the question now is: What should I do with them?

 

• Should I try and merge them "by hand" using FO4Edit?
• Should I try to convert every of those mods to a ESL file? [That brings up the question: How many ESLs can you load? You can only have 254 or 255 ESP/ESMs, but what is the limit for ESLs?]
• Should I just "delete" all of the AWKCR stuff out of the weapon mods, then merge them and after the merging, add the AWKCR stuff (keywords, ... ) in by hand?
• Is there anything else I could try?

How do other people deal with the ancient problem of "too many mods"?

 

Sorry if this has been answered before, but I am just confused, frustrated and don't know what to do.

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

UPDATE:

 

I am currently trying the "screw AWKCR, merge all the mods without it" - method and so far I have only got 2 minor errors ....

All of the AWKCR patches are ESL file ...

Hmmmm ...

Could it be that the "merge plugins" software has a problem with working with ESLs? Because that would explain a lot!

[chobibogamer]

What errors are you getting? It's been a year since I last used the tool so I don't know if the updates on the plugin format is going to be a problem for merge plugins, sorry.

[YouDoNotKnowMyName]

When I was trying to merge mods with AWKCR patches (ESL) I was getting errors like "FormID record type QUST expected KYWD" (or some stuff like that ... I can't remember exactly and I don't want to retry this again, because I got it working the way I described above).

Some weapon meshes would just not show up in the game (all the meshes / textures / materials / scripts / ... were loaded )

Things like that.

 

I guess it was because some weapon mods have a "quest" that handles the leveld list stuff.

But I went into FO4Edit and edited / deleted some of that stuff because I didn't want some weapons to appear on NPCs in the game ...

Maybe that is the reason why it got screwed up? Because I messed with it. No, that would just be impossible ... :laugh:

 

But I got it working now!

 

I just said "screw AWKCR" and merged all of the weapon mods without AWKCR patches. Yes, that makes the crafting of those weapons a bit weird, but I don't care.

If that really annoys me I can always add the proper keywords myself ... (create a AWKCR patch for the whole merged esp).

 

What I learnt from this is that there is never a easy "one click - solution [it just works]" and in the end, the process of try-fail-learn is always much more rewarding and satisfying.

[chobibogamer]

Maybe that was a problem from the original mod? Have you tried checking for errors before merging? Sometimes there are mods with mismatching records.

 

Anyways, as long as its already working, no need to touch I guess :) setting up mods take a lot of time and sometimes I just want to play hehe :)