Wrye Bashed Patches and Merged Plugins: Getting Around The 255 .esp Limit

[cowgirl1776]

Hello everyone, I have reached the 255 plugin limit and I am a bit unsure about how to continue past this point. I hear a lot of talk about Wrye bashed patches and merged patches function; one solves incompatibility and the other just merges plugins. It seemed simple enough, but I also encountered all sorts of warnings from tutorials about using them and it unnerved me a bit. I am not finished modifying SSE, but since encountering the 255 mod limit I cannot test my game to ensure stability and any unforeseen issues when traveling to impacted areas with all of the plugins. Of course, this is quite new to me and I apologize if I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose and capabilities of Wrye Bash and merged plugins.

 

 

- Can I create multiple merged plugins and then create a batched patch out of them to address incompatibility?

• This partially ties into the following question. I am looking for two things: solving incompatibilities and reducing the number of plugins to, or below, 255.

 

 

- Can I rebuild existing batched patches with additional mods?

• When I load Wrye Bash I am told that mods have been deactivated due to exceeding the 255 plugin limit. Can I go through the process with these plugins and then turn around and add the rest to a rebuilt patch by repeating the process?

 

 

- Will merged/batched patches be recognized by dependent plugins, or do I need to merge the dependent plugins with it?

• Say for instance, I merge plugin A into a larger group of plugins. However, plugin B is left out of that patch. Plugin B requires plugin A to be activated, but plugin A is deactivated due to it being merged into another plugin.

[IsharaMeradin]

 

Hello everyone, I have reached the 255 plugin limit and I am a bit unsure about how to continue past this point. I hear a lot of talk about Wrye bashed patches and merged patches function; one solves incompatibility and the other just merges plugins. It seemed simple enough, but I also encountered all sorts of warnings from tutorials about using them and it unnerved me a bit. I am not finished modifying SSE, but since encountering the 255 mod limit I cannot test my game to ensure stability and any unforeseen issues when traveling to impacted areas with all of the plugins. Of course, this is quite new to me and I apologize if I'm fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose and capabilities of Wrye Bash and merged plugins.

 

 

- Can I create multiple merged plugins and then create a batched patch out of them to address incompatibility?

• This partially ties into the following question. I am looking for two things: solving incompatibilities and reducing the number of plugins to, or below, 255.

Yes, you can.

 

- Can I rebuild existing batched patches with additional mods?

• When I load Wrye Bash I am told that mods have been deactivated due to exceeding the 255 plugin limit. Can I go through the process with these plugins and then turn around and add the rest to a rebuilt patch by repeating the process?

You can always rebuild a bashed patch but your plugin count must always have a slot open for the bashed patch itself. **

 

- Will merged/batched patches be recognized by dependent plugins, or do I need to merge the dependent plugins with it?

• Say for instance, I merge plugin A into a larger group of plugins. However, plugin B is left out of that patch. Plugin B requires plugin A to be activated, but plugin A is deactivated due to it being merged into another plugin.

 

Don't do this. Plugin B would fail to work properly as its required parent is missing, may even cause the game to crash. Also, merging plugins will break any scripted dependency that uses GetFormFromFile and similar variants to retrieve records from other mods without making explicit dependencies. In otherwords, know your mods well before trying to merge them.

 

 

 

 

** One possible trick to help reduce the load order, the bashed patch will sometimes completely merge an entire plugin into the bashed patch and disable the original plugin. You could with care, run the bashed patch and have those plugins merged within, rename the bashed patch plugin, add in a few more mods up to the limit again and build a new bashed patch. This should, in theory, merge the old bashed patch into the new one thus allowing you to have a few more plugins than normally allowed.

At the same time, many of the plugins that would get merged into the bashed patch could probably be safely converted into ESL files. But don't convert between ESP and ESL or vice versa mid-game as that is asking for trouble. Only attempt such conversions before starting a new game.

 

On that note, seriously think about your load order. Do you really need that many mods? Are you actually going to utilize every single one of them? If using MO2, switch to a separate profile and test out individual mods in-game. Decide if you really want those or not.