How do you Bash-Delev mods? Is it needed?

[weltall]

Not counting the official DLC and their unofficial patches, which I am guessing they do not need to be bashed, although I could be wrong, there are a handful of other mods that BOSS says that they need it. Up to not I have not really bothered with that ever, but I just installed "Immersive Weapons" and I read that if I do not bash-delev it, the weapons from it will not be appearing in random chests. What exactly do I need to do? Also other mods apart from IA that BOSS says that they need Bashing are: More Craftables, Immersive Armors and Deadly Dragons.

 

Three extra questions for whoever knows the answers for em:

 

- SPIKE.esm has been "added" by many mods, and I usually overwrote it, with "Immersive Weapons" being the last. What exactly it does and will that make other mods not work? Mostly I am worried for the "Guard Dialogue Overhaul".

 

- BOSS reports that Climates of Tamriel and Cloaks of Skyrim need to be cleaned with TES5Edit. Is it needed?

 

- Why Wrye Bash was renamed to Wrye Smash? No fun =p

 

P.S. I have Dawnguard, Heathfire and Dragonborn dlc, and I use NMM to install mods.

Edited March 3, 2013 by weltall

[AlduinWorldEater]

I'm starting to wonder about that SPIKE.esm as well. And BOSS reports that Dawnguard and Hearthfire need to be cleaned too...any thoughts from anyone?

[ravenmast0r]

e/: About the main issue here:

All you really need to do is have the bashed patch at the bottom of your load order. Rebuild it whenever you change something in your load order. (right click on it -> rebuild patch)

Bash uses the tags (relev, delev) when it merges the leveled lists.

 

SPIKE.esm contains keywords for Guard Dialogue Overhaul to work with custom armor and weapon mods, such as Immersive Armors.

 

On cleaning: Do not clean official DLCs.

Reason 1:

The purpose of cleaning is to prevent mods near the bottom of your load order to unintentionally overwrite changes from other mods further up the load order.

Since official DLCs are loaded at the very top, there is no need to clean ITM records.

UDRs are another story, since mods that do not require the DLC in question may reference something that has been deleted in the DLC. This may or may not cause instabilities. I suggest you clean the UDRs only if you are using a lot of old mods and have problems with CTDs.

 

Reason 2:

TES5Edit can not actually detect changes in scripts and script properties bound to items. Hearthfire, for example, adds quite a lot of properties for children to interact with markers, etc. Since TES5Edit can not (yet) detect those changes, it will delete these references. Again, this does not affect UDR (to my knowledge).

Edited March 3, 2013 by ravenmast0r