JK's Individual Mods (from LE) and Merging into a JK's Skyrim esp

[Skinjack]

Over the past few months I have slowly converted (as I got to them) a number of JK's LE mods, mostly the big cities. I'm pretty sure they are working correctly, so this is just a hypothetical because I am trying to clean up my mod list. Amongst other reasons.

 

If I take those mods I have converted can I merge them into a single plugin and name it with the same esp JK's Skyrim uses? I know you could do it with the LE version so I'm assuming you can. I'm just not sure about the naming of the esp. Plus I've gotten tired of all the other mods out there making a patch for JK's Skyrim and not the individual mods from LE since most of them are not in SE. Some people have been pretty good about doing patches for Whiterun, but I have a few of the other cities out there I could stand to pay the same attention to. Besides, this will save me space in the long run and make it easier in the future.

 

If I name it with the same name as the esp I am assuming I can then use all the various patches for Skyrim rather than hoping someone releases a version I want for the individual cities.

 

I use a great number of soldierofwar's Great City/Town Series and a few others like Ozymanius's Ivarstead, so I don't want to use the full JK's Skyrim. The video on JK's Skyrim for removing cities from the esp and patches seems extremely tedious at best, so I was hoping this might work as an acceptable alternative to getting rid of so many cities and fixing so many patches. The task seems daunting at best.

 

Anyone know if this would work?

[thumbincubation]

Take this with a grain of salt, because I'm still pretty weak on patching and merging, but I think if you merge say 3 cities into one mod and name it the same as JK's Skyrim, you still couldn't use the JKs Skyrim patches, because they would be attempting to change things in mods you haven't merged into yours. I suspect it would require whole new patches made, just for it and whatever you need it to play nicely with.

[Skinjack]

I'm not an expert on those things either, that is why I posed the question. I know other people have mentioned changing the esp name for JK's mods in other threads, I'm just not sure how it would cascade downhill. In theory, it should work. In practice... who knows? I can live with the way I have things set up, I'm just trying to make things easier for future mods on this new PC. I guess when you are setting up a play-thru you can take a few liberties when you intend to start a new game once everything is in place.

I'll wait on someone with more experience with mod merging and patching to put in his or her two cents on this subject before I make the decision to go that route. I appreciate your answer though. It has led me down a new train of thought I hadn't really considered. I'm pretty sure I've seen author responses saying an individual mod would still get the changes from something like JK's AIO, I just never considered if it would effect cities where I didn't use it.

[Algabar]

It's exactly like thumbincubation said. You can't use patches for the "all in one" JK's Syrim. It is a different file than the merge you want to do. In fact, you could run into severe issues including CTDs, e.g. if the patches are looking for assets that simply don't exist in your merge (or have a different ID). If you run a "custom" setup, you have to do the patching yourself.

 

OFC you CAN merge the JK's plugins you use into one esp. TBH though, I'm always hesitant on things like that. If you need to free up plugin slots, there are other and IMHO better ways: "Eslify" your smaller plugins by simply adding the "ESL" flag to the file header in SSEEdit. This way you can "save" plugin slots without downsides or risks.

[Skinjack]

Thank you for the reply. Guess I remembered wrong or misunderstood what I read. No big deal, really. I was just looking at mods I could adjust for a cleaner install and these were on the list. I guess if I ever get desperate for slots in my load order I'll look at this again. But I'm being rather picky at the moment with what I install, so I still have plenty of slots left.