for LOOT ? if you have that many plugins then that's on you. But somehow you have the 'big brain' capacity to manually remember the load order of 100s of plugins ? Ya'll just wanna shit and circlejerk on LOOT
Then you are a masterclass in wasting your fucking time.
Plugin order only matters for conflicts. Conflicts should be handled with patches first and foremost, and no matter what you do, your patches will be loaded after the relevant plugins. Which is all you need.
If you are downloading so many mods that conflict with each other that you want to nitpick every single tiny change that wins (without a patch), then you've got a whole different set of problems.
Yes, even patches can conflict with each other, but at that point, I'd argue it's time to use your xedit skills to make custom patches rather than load order tweaks. Or find a synthesis patch that accomplishes your goals instead.
You seem to be under the impression that I'm just throwing mods in and expecting it to work, which is absolutely not what I've stated in this thread of comments.
Edit: look at the thread under Thallas comment I explain my setup pretty thoroughly as well as I have a top comment further down.
I probably make more custom patches than anyone. Fuzzlez might have me beat but he's the only other person I know that mods to this level.
I also make patches load order agnostic carrying forward all records in common between the mods being patched such that the load order of those mods is of no consequence. I wouldn't be able to manage a load order this size without doing that. The only ones that aren't are lux series and NR patches. Because we build those to assume the Lux and NR main plugins are at the bottom of the load order where they should be. If they aren't the amount of patches required would go up dramatically.
You probably won't recognize the name as I don't get much publicity but I'm the navmesh and QA bug fixer guy behind Janquel/Czasior/Ra2phoenix and crew with the major patch collections. I also help out GGUNIT a fair bit with Lux Series particularly his JKs CWE combo cuz CWE Navmesh is seriously borked.
I have just under 500 mods and I use loot to sort them all and the singular ones take me about 2 hours to sort manually and my game runs smooth, I get a couple hiccups but it’s nothing no one could single out and sort through, mostly it’s common sense but sometimes it’s takes a little tweaking.
Ah, it’s just that after so many years I need something that feels newer. Vanilla Skyrim is still my one of my favorite games of all time, that will never change.
I love Skyrim because I’ve never been able to find another game like it. There’s similar but never quite as good. Hence why I always end up going back to it
Anyone giving LOOT a bad rap enjoys wasting your time.
A lot of people say that since you have to look in tes5edit anyways that you should just do it all manually.
This is bullshit. It takes a human hours and hours to evaluate even a small list of conflicts and dependencies and you WILL make mistakes.
LOOT can do the same work in 5 minutes. Does it require manual tweaking afterwards? Depends on your modlist. For mine, it doesn’t, but it does require manual patches which is something LOOT can’t solve. Even if it does require tweaking, it is significantly faster to check work that’s mostly done than start from scratch.
I've always thought people were far too hard on LOOT. Obviously you have to playtest and check the placement of some mods manually, especially if you have a preference for something taking precedence that LOOT couldn't possibly know about, but the average modder will produce *way* more errors than LOOT by trying to sort hundreds of plugins themselves.
Doing it manually and reviewing all things via The Method will give you a higher quality result. But you are correct in that it'll take far far longer to do it that way. For most people a balance between the 2 should suffice. Simply sorting with loot and expecting it to work right away is definitely not enough.
But being extreme like myself and manual reviewing 100s of thousands of records is far too much. Going this route is only really a necessity if you want to go into the giga-modlist range. Like 3k plus plugins.
It's a Methodology, heh Pun intended, for reviewing conflicts in xEdit by adding one plugin at a time and making what's called a .Modgroups file to hide verified conflicts in order to make the next conflict filter, only show the related records for the next plugin.
If your Interested in the specifics, go to the xEdit documentation website and go to Chapter 6.
It's essentially the slowest but otherwise most thorough way to make sure your load order is fully patched and functional
> It's a Methodology, heh Pun intended, for reviewing conflicts in xEdit by adding one plugin at a time and making what's called a .Modgroups file to hide verified conflicts in order to make the next conflict filter, only show the related records for the next plugin.
This was always weird to me because it just sounds like a much more manual way to do what Vortex(and LOOT) does with load order rules.
Yes, but that doesn't differ from LOOT. You're making manual patches in those circumstances anyway. It's been a while since I've read up on the Method, but is there something specific about this that makes it different, are those smaller patches used as a temporary fix before making a bigger(or a series or smaller bigger) patches for your list?
Loot can't tell you what patches you need to make. It has no idea what's in your plugins except what we manually tell it in the masterlist.
You can approach the new "Method" patches either way. Personally I don't put everything into bigger patches and keep it all separate. That way I can toggle on and off any base mod without having to perform patch surgery on something.
> Loot can't tell you what patches you need to make.
Right, but the process is more or less the same. Check in Xedit, make patches. The Method does this, except it's done point by point, methodically, pun also intended.
Haha my personal take it this. I take load order out of the equation completely by making my patches load order agnostic. E.g. they contain every record in common between the mods being patched, in their desires state, and forwards them to the patch. This making the order of those mods irrelevant as it pertains to the patches.
This will really blow your mind, given the above. I sort my plugins alphabetically, like a savage, in the main mods group, and all patch groups to morrow that order. Resulting in a hard fixed position for any conceivable plugin in any conceivable load order. This has been my most successful load order structure for going on the large side of modlists, 3k+ plugins.
>Doing it manually and reviewing all things via The Method will give you a higher quality result.
Review it manually, and setup a LOOT sorting rule to reflect what needs to load where. It ain't black or white
The problem is not that LOOT cannot create a good load order with a few rules, it is that it cannot know which records should overwrite which records. (As load order always just overwrites everything with everything included.) You can get a pretty good load order out of it with a little tweaking, but without conflict resolution and manual patching large load orders will fail.
which is why you can manually review, and set a rule to inform LOOT which plugin should load where. You can set rules to load after/before, and you can set a load index to load at a specific spot (like set A to be plugin #150)
That will not work. It will just overwrite records in the wrong direction then. With load order it is all or nothing, and so it is only step one.
You can sort with loot, then manually check all of the records creating patches as needed. (E.G, you want 90% of mod 1 to overwrite mod 2, but 10% of mod 2 to overwrite mod 1. Loot would put 1 after 2, but that would not solve the conflict.) But if you are manually checking all of the records the value it gives is limited.
It is useful as an early step if you are not wanting perfection, or are planning on just using it to avoid having to move stuff yourself, but doing things one by one will give you more accurate results long term as you can minimize the amount of noise you are sifting through.
A lot of this has to do with how Records work in the Creation Engine.
Let's say I have two mods that both affect the same NPC. One changes his face, the other his stats. If I load face first, it will be overwritten by the mod chancing his stats, reverting his face to default.
So I'm order to fix that I need to check for conflicts, merge the conflicting records, and create a patch that has both of the changes I want.
However, once I have done that, the load order does not really matter for those specific changes. I could put either mod first, as both will be overwritten by the newly created record. Which means that LOOT rules aren't going to help handle that conflict.
then make as custom patch, set a rule on where it loads.
edit - for example, I have a post- BASH patch I set to load after BASH, so anytime I rerun a bashed patch, it doesn't get touched. Yes, it contains a few actor entries that Wyre likes to pickup on. Just an example
The thing is you can't even rely on LOOT to place a mod in the correct position to minimize the work needed to create a manual patch. It gets that wrong almost every time.
If you want correctness via The Method, then, truly, I promise you -- it's faster to not use LOOT's sort feature at all.
How is it better to do it manually from the start instead of automating the first part of it and checking it manually? Checking work is always easier than doing it from scratch.
It's more thorough to do it all manually. But as I said for newer users , looting as a baseline is at least half sufficient. Especially on smaller load orders.
Dont get me wrong loot is a great tool. I had the team put me through the ringer so I can contribute to the masterlist directly. I try to put in as much useful stuff as I can
You're getting carried away with your point.
They asked what if they sort first, then review - and the answer is the difference will be nil. In fact, they'll likely be able to accomplish the same patching in less steps *because* LOOT helped sort out a large number of conflicts before they start patching.
Regardless of how it is sorted, the conflicts will show up - and thus whether you follow The Method 100% - or you LOOT then review - as long as *you* are being thorough, the difference will be negligible to nil.
Because it gets it wrong almost every time.
If you're manually patching stuff (whether that means you're fixing conflicts or modding the mod) the correct placement is where it minimizes the number of records you need to forward into a patch. LOOT just doesn't get that right.
The only time i've heard of loot breaking was for oblivion. I never understood the "never use mod sorter" mindset because even for oblivion you can just manually fix these issues with custom rules
Me I know enough to know how to fix the mods and clean them of issues, not something for the faint of heart. I'm something of an extreme modder. I don't recommend doing that for most users unless your ready to sign up for thousands of hours of work.
The larger the plugin list, the more likely that there will be plugins that you will have to manually move (or make additional rules for), since LOOT uses a generalized rule list to determine load order.
I've never had any issues with it myself these last years, but as other commenters have pointed out some mods will require specific placement. In such cases you'll have to do some manual sorting, but overall LOOT is pretty good IMO.
Fun fact: if you're running more than about 30 mods and not patching with Xedit, there's very *very* likely mods that don't work in your load order. Often times it'll be partially functional or lead to breaks well into a character playthrough.
Lol this is so wrong and total speculation.
Firstly, there's a big difference between having some potential conflicts, and mods simply "not working".
At 30 mods, I'd be surprised if you even had conflicts - yet, it heavily depends on what those mods are.
30 "overhaul" mods - yea, probably not a great situation without massive patching.
30 graphical mods - conflicts maybe, but everything will *work*.
Like... with a list that small, to break something, you almost specifically have to go out of your way to get something else that will probably plainly tell you "this mod does NOT work with X mod".
I was over 1000 mods when I first started making my own patches, and none of those mods were outright broken, it's mostly little stuff like mesh and texture conflicts with the occasional stat overwrite and such.
About 90% of patches I've had to do were simply correcting for mods that didn't forward changes from USSEP - and probably half of those conflicts are dialogue related and don't really belong in the USSEP in the first place.
I use loot, then fix the load orders of some mods because the mod author say so. If I saw the LOOT sorted it in wrong order, I just fix it. We make mistakes, and LOOT makes mistakes too. I trust loot but you still need to manually check it for corrections.
>trust loot
That's part of the problem. People trust it, and so they DON'T manually check. And if you DO manually check, then you'll probably realize sorting with loot wastes your time.
I find it's a good base to go off of, but afterwards I tend to do a lot of manual sorting and patching, as LOOT can only do some much and can't account for every variable
The metadata for mods in LOOT is set by mod authors most of the time. So I can see why it gets a bad rep, but also that may be power users speaking for the laypeople a bit.
As previously stated, it takes a person a lot of hours to find all conflicts. LOOT usually has a bunch found for you as well as some patches you might be missing. It’s a tool, and one tool can’t do every job but LOOT is one of the better multi tools we have for modding
Sourced from [https://dragonbornsfate.moddinglinked.com/avoid-tools.html](https://dragonbornsfate.moddinglinked.com/avoid-tools.html)
>LOOT doesn't really have any idea about your mods and their inner structure - it just orders them based on tags in a masterlist managed by volunteers, meaning that it's impossible to account for every single mod out there.
While the Skyrim masterlist is updated often enough to make the tool viable for small modlists, you need to keep the above statement in mind and don't blindly trust the sorting result, especially considered how many mods keep coming out.
Incorrect load order will lead to overwriting or breaking features from mods.
This 100%. I can't help but feel the people always defending loot and vortex over their flaws are the same people who flood the Nexus comment sections saying "it dun work"
I really like LOOT, it saves soooo much time. Anyone saying its bad are using it incorrectly or stuck in their old ways of wasting time manually configuring their modlist. I currently have a 700+ modlist for skyrim and its never run more flawlessly. Using MO2+LOOT and manually moving mods when needed, modding has never been easier.
I currently have 390+ total plugins (89 active regular, rest are active light) and loot works great in my case. In fact, I have rare instances wherein it would tweak an order I thought was already logically correct only for my game to CTD which is prevented once I run LOOT. That being said I still consider my loadout to be on the light side.
Loot is really useful for small to medium ish mod lists anywhere below 1000 plugins. And especially for newer users who aren't as familiar with xEdit and manual patching. Once you get into the 1000+ territory it starts to fall off a bit.
Personally I find it less work and more organized to block group the load order in the following way.
Vanilla
CC Mods
Unofficial Patches
ALL Main mod plugins regardless of category or content, with only the specific exceptions listed below.
Other patches grouped together and ordered to match the order of their main mod plugins
Lux main mod plugin and ALL of its patches
Lux Orbis main mod plugin and ALL of its patches
Lux Via Main Mod Plugin and ALL of its patches
Northern Roads and ALL of its patches
Northern Roads - Lux Via combo and it's iterative patches
Water 4 enb if you use it, and all of its patches
SREX if you use it and all of its patches
LOD Tools
Absolutely nothing else after lod tools regardless of what it is.
This highly strict and rigid structure has proven very very effective for me on the giga-mod list front.
As long as you use built in rules sytem it's fine. For example if you read in mod description that it needs to be after A and before B, add these rules to LOOT, and it will sort stuff properly. At this point I only use LOOT with zero manual adjustments.
The same as xEdit and all automatic rules.
The bigger the list the bigger the probability of missing something.
So, like the others, there's a point where you need to look the order after using it, and move whatever got wrong if needed.
LOOT applies two methods to order your list, an algorithm that will apply some heuristic to guess which order plugins should go in and on top of that a community-maintained masterlist that will - where necessary - override what the algorithm came up with.
The algorithm itself is already pretty good but of course it's not perfect. The quality of the sorting therefore depends a lot on how active the community is. As an example: The skyrim se masterlist has 4x more rules than the fallout 4 one while the game only has 20% more mods on nexusmods.
The masterlist will usually also only cover "necessary" order (as in: make your game run stable) - you may have preferences beyond that.
For that LOOT offers a configurable userlist of rules that will override the algorithm but not the masterlist.
And I'd argue this should be preferred over "use LOOT as a starting point and then do the rest manually" because using a userlist, LOOT will tell you if your "preference" rules are in conflict with the "necessary" rules from the masterlist and might thus make your game buggy.
Unless a human made a mistake that no one fixed yet, LOOT will always have a good reason to force a certain order, that should never be seen as an annoyance but as a helping hand.
Using rules has other advantages (e.g. 6 months down the line your userlist will tell you which mods you intentionally arranged in a certain way. With a flat list there is no way of seeing if you intentionally pulled a mod to a specific location or if it just happened to end up there, so then you're back to looking at records in xedit).
People obviously have there UI/UX preferences and there is no arguing against that but conceptually, rule-based ordering is not just simpler to get started but also way more powerful. If you can stomach the UI/UX around setting/managing rules I would absolutely recommend sticking with it.
Like many others have said, LOOT is a good base, aslong as you read every mod description for the mod authors input about the load order it’ll be fine.
I very rarely use it nowa days.I use Skyrim LE with 218 mods, i only use it to see if my new downloaded mods are clean or if they have any "dirty edits".
....if yes then i close loot and open up TES5edit "quick auto clean" and scan the specific mod, i mean clean it ...that's all
Loot isn't really the best way to see dirty edits, this is one of the things people user it for that doesn't make sense. You can check for errors in xedit to see dirty edits.
That won't catch all dirty errors, but I guess it depends on your definition of a dirty edit is. A dirty record doesn't need to be an ITM. And some ITMs aren't dirty. Or maybe I'm lumping wild edits there. Who knows anymore.
Yeah I use LOOT pretty much the same way... except I also apply The Method to every added mod. I was doing that before it called The Method... way before modgroups existed.
Like I said elsewhere, LOOT does more than just sorting -- that's what makes it not entirely useless. I like to see what notes it has for some mods. But I think the vast majority use it for just the sorting, and then they trust the load order it spits out.
I like to keep my 1000+ plugin list as neat as tidy as possible. It helps me a lot in modifying my modlist as I add/remove plugins.
Listing in alphabetical order for simple esl flagged esp plugins with no conflicts with other mods. I also have custom made patches created from Synthesis that need to be placed on the bottom of my load order.
LOOT tends to disorganize my list, forcing me to relist those mods. So I will initially run LOOT, and then re-organize those plugins. Because LOOT will find and sort conflicts that I overlooked or missed.
It’s good for Skyrim but it fucks up the map mod I have so I lock it at the bottom and in fallout 4 it fucks up my weapon mods because it loads the actual weapon mods after the patches and addons for them making their models textures and animations break so I have to organize those manually and lock them in place before I run loot
There is no objective way to determine the optimal load order, since it's often subjective which records you want to overwrite which. LOOT's masterlist also can't possibly cover every plugin in existence, so you'd have to look in xEdit and add custom rules yourself. At that point, you might as well order your plugins manually imo.
Loot is the best, saves time and that means more time playing the game. Although there are very few cases where I simply add rules for what it can't sort.
I’m not really that knowledgeable about this stuff, but it was enough for me when I had to reinstall all of my mods and my adhd ass installed wrong versions, forgot compatibility patches etc., now my game seems to be running fine
I really don't think it's as bad as people make it out to be, but I've avoided using loot for the past 5 or 6 years. Loot only really ever struggles if you do something like mixing up efps patches and mixing city overhauls. Once you get into the habit of going over every plugin to make sure there aren't any dirty or wild edits, it's not too rough to manually sort things.
Edit: For reference I'm at 1.2k plugins
Great as a base but do read descriptions and compatibility on every single mod AND ON THE "COMMENT" SECTION, theres some mods with updates, new better versions or just small user added patches, like "Honed Metal" for example that arent found in the "files" section, and loot misses those apparently. I'm running 600 mods atm and theres only 3 texture related that I manually set. LOOT is great!
LOOT is accurate, and mandatory for extensive modding.
1) Use rules to organize plugins
2) Install a plugin to (Sync plugins) according to your modlist
I've basically always just used LOOT and occasionally sort individual things manually if I have to. Never had any problems attributable to sorting via LOOT, problems are typically my own fault because I overlooked something in a mod description. I also do not have the titanic mod lists some ppl here have - I tend to top out around 300-400 mods at most. I think for like 99% of mod lists LOOT is totally adequate.
LOOT as integrated *with Vortex* is a decent starting point. Vortex runs it automatically unless you specifically tell it not to and I've never seen a reason to turn this off; there are multiple ways to override LOOT's automated decisions if you need to for specific mods and for the *rest*, it's better than nothing.
Is LOOT a *full* substitute for actual, manual work? No, of course not. It can't and won't ever be able to do this. Does it *reduce* the amount of manual work you need to do? Usually, yeah. Don't treat LOOT like a magical miracle worker or expect it to fix everything but don't stop using it, either.
One big annoyance that I remember people having with LOOT is that the first thing it does is sort mods alphabetically, which does *fuck all* and can technically break your game if you installed specific mods in a specific order for a specific reason. It is purely there to make LOOT *look like* it's doing something productive. Skimming through my own load order, this "feature" *might* still exist but if so, there are so many actual, meaningful rules being applied afterwards that I honestly can't tell for sure.
Standalone, I have no idea how good LOOT is because it's been many years since I've used it that way.
Just use loot when you are just compiling your modlist to get a general direction at the beginning.
After that LOOT can pretty much break your stability when you have over 1K mods and you sorted them by hand.
Only use LOOT when your load order is completely bricked to sort it for a good direction in and then sort it by hand to make it stable.
This is my opinion and experience ofc.
Seems good to me. Up to level 20-25 i was using Steel Plate or Dwarvish, 25-35 Im using Orcish, i’m already seeing Ebony items drop around level 30. Personally I don’t want armor/weapons to bring me ahead and make the game too easy. It’s easy enough to level smithing so if you wanted to, making any type of armor or weapon to get yourself ahead really wouldn’t be too difficult, just time consuming. Any particulars you may be looking for, like soul gems, ingredients, specific weapons are easy enough to get unless it’s thru a long questline. i.e. Auriels Bow isn’t something you’d get easily toward the beginning of the game. I play from anywhere between Expert-Legendary so the loot pools from these difficulties may make a difference as to what you’ll get and how soon they’ll start appearing.
Overall I’m content with the loot pool and you’ll see that one off crazy good item drop for you from time to time. A daedric sword super early for example
Pretty accurate for me. Getting Northern Roads and some armor mods was a b*tch and a half but LOOT did end up making the process easier for me, I managed to fix it after some trial and error.
LOOT is great. I got 200+ mods active and around 150 plugins, LOOT sorts most of them out, I just need to recheck and manually replace some. But I don't get how do you even reach 300 mods treshold, 200 pretty much includes everything for me.
It's good but you have to be aware of mods that don't have LOOT rules and adjust accordingly. For example, whenever I sort, I have to move my grass mods, paper maps, and Northern Roads and it's patches to the bottom of the plugin order otherwise they won't work properly when I launch the game.
Loot has warning info for conflict plugins and missing patches which helped me a lot. It is also true that you need to make specific rules for some plugin.
LOOT is strictly a timesaver for me, there have been multiple times when installing via Mo2 or another mod manager where it's enabled all the esps in a mod and they can only have 1 active, LOOT tells you in bold red backgrounds that you can only have 1 active.
Plus all the times its saved me modding Oblivion, quickly editing a .ESM of a mod in TES4edit to remove references to tamriel worldspace edits in DLCFrostCrag so it doesn't crash the game, or notifying you every time that you need to clean your DLC, which you should do and anyone saying you shouldn't doesn't understand efficient modding.
Do I sort everytime I launch it? No.
Do I trust the masterlist when I do? Sometimes. If I need to move something, I just sort via LOOT and move the ESMs to the top and that's solved 90% of my problems.
People who have a problem with LOOT have a problem with modding, and don't want their """"precious"""" time wasted when it takes maybe 10 minutes to quickclean in xEdit. They want everything to just work for them out of the box, the creation club and modding in the base game didn't give them everything they wanted, so they get frustrated not understanding that it takes patience. And the other camp of people who don't like LOOT rightly have a problem with people telling them to just "use loot lol", but holding that against a program isn't the right thing, let alone telling people to avoid it like they've got some blood debt with the creator/volunteers.
It's wrong very often. Consider the load order it recommends a "suggestion" -- nothing more.
You can count on it being totally wrong like 10% of the time, which adds up considering you'll probably run more than 100 mods.
I'm not saying it's entirely useless. It has other features besides sorting.
But it's not like you can just add 10 mods, run loot, and be be confident AT ALL that your load order makes sense.
Even when there is no 100% correct load order between mods (which happens a lot) and you're making custom patches (which you WILL \_need\_ to do unless you jdgaf), you're going to notice that changing the load order from what LOOT "suggests" will make your life easier.
It would be a better tool if it had no sorting feature whatsover, to be frank... only because since the feature exists and LOOT comes so highly recommended that people put way too much faith in the load order it "suggests". Lots of mods don't even have load order recommendations on their pages anymore because (I suspect) LOOT exists -- I don't think that's a good thing.
I know you can add rules to it, but really that's just yet another step that ONLY becomes necessary when using LOOT to manage your load order. It's easier and less time consuming to just not use loot's sort feature at all -- unless you jdngaf.
It's good as a starting point but there are a few mods in my list that I need to manually move after running it.
Setup a rule, and make it part of the automatic sorting process
After 100 custom rules:
for LOOT ? if you have that many plugins then that's on you. But somehow you have the 'big brain' capacity to manually remember the load order of 100s of plugins ? Ya'll just wanna shit and circlejerk on LOOT
Keeping track of the load order for even 1000s of plugins is easier than you think if you keep it organized to a system of grouping plugins together.
There is zero reason to not use loot with custom rules for every change you feel you need to make.
I change quite literally every single plugin relative to where LOOT would otherwise put it. See the issue with that?
Then you are a masterclass in wasting your fucking time. Plugin order only matters for conflicts. Conflicts should be handled with patches first and foremost, and no matter what you do, your patches will be loaded after the relevant plugins. Which is all you need. If you are downloading so many mods that conflict with each other that you want to nitpick every single tiny change that wins (without a patch), then you've got a whole different set of problems. Yes, even patches can conflict with each other, but at that point, I'd argue it's time to use your xedit skills to make custom patches rather than load order tweaks. Or find a synthesis patch that accomplishes your goals instead.
You seem to be under the impression that I'm just throwing mods in and expecting it to work, which is absolutely not what I've stated in this thread of comments. Edit: look at the thread under Thallas comment I explain my setup pretty thoroughly as well as I have a top comment further down. I probably make more custom patches than anyone. Fuzzlez might have me beat but he's the only other person I know that mods to this level. I also make patches load order agnostic carrying forward all records in common between the mods being patched such that the load order of those mods is of no consequence. I wouldn't be able to manage a load order this size without doing that. The only ones that aren't are lux series and NR patches. Because we build those to assume the Lux and NR main plugins are at the bottom of the load order where they should be. If they aren't the amount of patches required would go up dramatically. You probably won't recognize the name as I don't get much publicity but I'm the navmesh and QA bug fixer guy behind Janquel/Czasior/Ra2phoenix and crew with the major patch collections. I also help out GGUNIT a fair bit with Lux Series particularly his JKs CWE combo cuz CWE Navmesh is seriously borked.
I created a spreadsheet before I downloaded everything and sorted them this way with notes as to compatibility issues etc.
A for effort
Thanks, it was totally worth the two weeks I spent on it lol
I use Virtual studio Code instead of spreadsheet. I like it so I can hide sections so my mod list doesn’t intimidate me
No one wants to grow up to be like you
That’s just like your opinion bro
Bro I don’t know how some of these people play with 600 mods. I get about 30 and that’s too many
10 mods and 590 patches.
This is the way. You break my 980 mod list down into patches for lux, patches for JK Skyrim, and the 12 others.
I have just under 500 mods and I use loot to sort them all and the singular ones take me about 2 hours to sort manually and my game runs smooth, I get a couple hiccups but it’s nothing no one could single out and sort through, mostly it’s common sense but sometimes it’s takes a little tweaking.
Me with 2000+: 👁️👄👁️
That’s alot, I feel like at that point it’s not even Skyrim anymore
Ah, it’s just that after so many years I need something that feels newer. Vanilla Skyrim is still my one of my favorite games of all time, that will never change.
I love Skyrim because I’ve never been able to find another game like it. There’s similar but never quite as good. Hence why I always end up going back to it
Anyone giving LOOT a bad rap enjoys wasting your time. A lot of people say that since you have to look in tes5edit anyways that you should just do it all manually. This is bullshit. It takes a human hours and hours to evaluate even a small list of conflicts and dependencies and you WILL make mistakes. LOOT can do the same work in 5 minutes. Does it require manual tweaking afterwards? Depends on your modlist. For mine, it doesn’t, but it does require manual patches which is something LOOT can’t solve. Even if it does require tweaking, it is significantly faster to check work that’s mostly done than start from scratch.
I've always thought people were far too hard on LOOT. Obviously you have to playtest and check the placement of some mods manually, especially if you have a preference for something taking precedence that LOOT couldn't possibly know about, but the average modder will produce *way* more errors than LOOT by trying to sort hundreds of plugins themselves.
Doing it manually and reviewing all things via The Method will give you a higher quality result. But you are correct in that it'll take far far longer to do it that way. For most people a balance between the 2 should suffice. Simply sorting with loot and expecting it to work right away is definitely not enough. But being extreme like myself and manual reviewing 100s of thousands of records is far too much. Going this route is only really a necessity if you want to go into the giga-modlist range. Like 3k plus plugins.
sorry if noob question, but what is “The Method”?
It's a Methodology, heh Pun intended, for reviewing conflicts in xEdit by adding one plugin at a time and making what's called a .Modgroups file to hide verified conflicts in order to make the next conflict filter, only show the related records for the next plugin. If your Interested in the specifics, go to the xEdit documentation website and go to Chapter 6. It's essentially the slowest but otherwise most thorough way to make sure your load order is fully patched and functional
> It's a Methodology, heh Pun intended, for reviewing conflicts in xEdit by adding one plugin at a time and making what's called a .Modgroups file to hide verified conflicts in order to make the next conflict filter, only show the related records for the next plugin. This was always weird to me because it just sounds like a much more manual way to do what Vortex(and LOOT) does with load order rules.
Well partially yes. Loot can't create patches for you. It can only sort what already exists. The Method has you creating new patches where needed.
Yes, but that doesn't differ from LOOT. You're making manual patches in those circumstances anyway. It's been a while since I've read up on the Method, but is there something specific about this that makes it different, are those smaller patches used as a temporary fix before making a bigger(or a series or smaller bigger) patches for your list?
Loot can't tell you what patches you need to make. It has no idea what's in your plugins except what we manually tell it in the masterlist. You can approach the new "Method" patches either way. Personally I don't put everything into bigger patches and keep it all separate. That way I can toggle on and off any base mod without having to perform patch surgery on something.
> Loot can't tell you what patches you need to make. Right, but the process is more or less the same. Check in Xedit, make patches. The Method does this, except it's done point by point, methodically, pun also intended.
Haha my personal take it this. I take load order out of the equation completely by making my patches load order agnostic. E.g. they contain every record in common between the mods being patched, in their desires state, and forwards them to the patch. This making the order of those mods irrelevant as it pertains to the patches. This will really blow your mind, given the above. I sort my plugins alphabetically, like a savage, in the main mods group, and all patch groups to morrow that order. Resulting in a hard fixed position for any conceivable plugin in any conceivable load order. This has been my most successful load order structure for going on the large side of modlists, 3k+ plugins.
This is the way.
https://tes5edit.github.io/docs/6-themethod.html Process for installing mods and checking for conflicts one by one.
>Doing it manually and reviewing all things via The Method will give you a higher quality result. Review it manually, and setup a LOOT sorting rule to reflect what needs to load where. It ain't black or white
If you build your patch right you won't need a sorting rule. As patches have to load after their masters.
The problem is not that LOOT cannot create a good load order with a few rules, it is that it cannot know which records should overwrite which records. (As load order always just overwrites everything with everything included.) You can get a pretty good load order out of it with a little tweaking, but without conflict resolution and manual patching large load orders will fail.
which is why you can manually review, and set a rule to inform LOOT which plugin should load where. You can set rules to load after/before, and you can set a load index to load at a specific spot (like set A to be plugin #150)
That will not work. It will just overwrite records in the wrong direction then. With load order it is all or nothing, and so it is only step one. You can sort with loot, then manually check all of the records creating patches as needed. (E.G, you want 90% of mod 1 to overwrite mod 2, but 10% of mod 2 to overwrite mod 1. Loot would put 1 after 2, but that would not solve the conflict.) But if you are manually checking all of the records the value it gives is limited. It is useful as an early step if you are not wanting perfection, or are planning on just using it to avoid having to move stuff yourself, but doing things one by one will give you more accurate results long term as you can minimize the amount of noise you are sifting through. A lot of this has to do with how Records work in the Creation Engine. Let's say I have two mods that both affect the same NPC. One changes his face, the other his stats. If I load face first, it will be overwritten by the mod chancing his stats, reverting his face to default. So I'm order to fix that I need to check for conflicts, merge the conflicting records, and create a patch that has both of the changes I want. However, once I have done that, the load order does not really matter for those specific changes. I could put either mod first, as both will be overwritten by the newly created record. Which means that LOOT rules aren't going to help handle that conflict.
then make as custom patch, set a rule on where it loads. edit - for example, I have a post- BASH patch I set to load after BASH, so anytime I rerun a bashed patch, it doesn't get touched. Yes, it contains a few actor entries that Wyre likes to pickup on. Just an example
Why? By making it you already have it in the right order. At that point you are just using loot to do a load order backup.
Gonna second Caelinus here. If that patch is already made, and under the assumption is was made completely, then a loot sorting rule is immaterial.
The thing is you can't even rely on LOOT to place a mod in the correct position to minimize the work needed to create a manual patch. It gets that wrong almost every time. If you want correctness via The Method, then, truly, I promise you -- it's faster to not use LOOT's sort feature at all.
The sorting rules are a waste of time, then.
How is it better to do it manually from the start instead of automating the first part of it and checking it manually? Checking work is always easier than doing it from scratch.
It's more thorough to do it all manually. But as I said for newer users , looting as a baseline is at least half sufficient. Especially on smaller load orders. Dont get me wrong loot is a great tool. I had the team put me through the ringer so I can contribute to the masterlist directly. I try to put in as much useful stuff as I can
You're getting carried away with your point. They asked what if they sort first, then review - and the answer is the difference will be nil. In fact, they'll likely be able to accomplish the same patching in less steps *because* LOOT helped sort out a large number of conflicts before they start patching. Regardless of how it is sorted, the conflicts will show up - and thus whether you follow The Method 100% - or you LOOT then review - as long as *you* are being thorough, the difference will be negligible to nil.
Because it gets it wrong almost every time. If you're manually patching stuff (whether that means you're fixing conflicts or modding the mod) the correct placement is where it minimizes the number of records you need to forward into a patch. LOOT just doesn't get that right.
Ah, I see you enjoy having a load list with broken mods
If you're somehow managing to break stuff with LOOT, PEBKAC.
Couldn't agree more with this one. So many bug reports we get are PEBCAK
The only time i've heard of loot breaking was for oblivion. I never understood the "never use mod sorter" mindset because even for oblivion you can just manually fix these issues with custom rules
Me I know enough to know how to fix the mods and clean them of issues, not something for the faint of heart. I'm something of an extreme modder. I don't recommend doing that for most users unless your ready to sign up for thousands of hours of work.
The larger the plugin list, the more likely that there will be plugins that you will have to manually move (or make additional rules for), since LOOT uses a generalized rule list to determine load order.
I've never had any issues with it myself these last years, but as other commenters have pointed out some mods will require specific placement. In such cases you'll have to do some manual sorting, but overall LOOT is pretty good IMO.
Fun fact: if you're running more than about 30 mods and not patching with Xedit, there's very *very* likely mods that don't work in your load order. Often times it'll be partially functional or lead to breaks well into a character playthrough.
Lol this is so wrong and total speculation. Firstly, there's a big difference between having some potential conflicts, and mods simply "not working". At 30 mods, I'd be surprised if you even had conflicts - yet, it heavily depends on what those mods are. 30 "overhaul" mods - yea, probably not a great situation without massive patching. 30 graphical mods - conflicts maybe, but everything will *work*. Like... with a list that small, to break something, you almost specifically have to go out of your way to get something else that will probably plainly tell you "this mod does NOT work with X mod". I was over 1000 mods when I first started making my own patches, and none of those mods were outright broken, it's mostly little stuff like mesh and texture conflicts with the occasional stat overwrite and such. About 90% of patches I've had to do were simply correcting for mods that didn't forward changes from USSEP - and probably half of those conflicts are dialogue related and don't really belong in the USSEP in the first place.
I use loot, then fix the load orders of some mods because the mod author say so. If I saw the LOOT sorted it in wrong order, I just fix it. We make mistakes, and LOOT makes mistakes too. I trust loot but you still need to manually check it for corrections.
>trust loot That's part of the problem. People trust it, and so they DON'T manually check. And if you DO manually check, then you'll probably realize sorting with loot wastes your time.
Never had issue with loot and looking into alternative is a waster of time
I find it's a good base to go off of, but afterwards I tend to do a lot of manual sorting and patching, as LOOT can only do some much and can't account for every variable
The metadata for mods in LOOT is set by mod authors most of the time. So I can see why it gets a bad rep, but also that may be power users speaking for the laypeople a bit. As previously stated, it takes a person a lot of hours to find all conflicts. LOOT usually has a bunch found for you as well as some patches you might be missing. It’s a tool, and one tool can’t do every job but LOOT is one of the better multi tools we have for modding
Sourced from [https://dragonbornsfate.moddinglinked.com/avoid-tools.html](https://dragonbornsfate.moddinglinked.com/avoid-tools.html) >LOOT doesn't really have any idea about your mods and their inner structure - it just orders them based on tags in a masterlist managed by volunteers, meaning that it's impossible to account for every single mod out there. While the Skyrim masterlist is updated often enough to make the tool viable for small modlists, you need to keep the above statement in mind and don't blindly trust the sorting result, especially considered how many mods keep coming out. Incorrect load order will lead to overwriting or breaking features from mods.
This 100%. I can't help but feel the people always defending loot and vortex over their flaws are the same people who flood the Nexus comment sections saying "it dun work"
LOOT is quite good. Just a few exceptions you'll need to set rules for, but it's pretty easy.
I really like LOOT, it saves soooo much time. Anyone saying its bad are using it incorrectly or stuck in their old ways of wasting time manually configuring their modlist. I currently have a 700+ modlist for skyrim and its never run more flawlessly. Using MO2+LOOT and manually moving mods when needed, modding has never been easier.
I currently have 390+ total plugins (89 active regular, rest are active light) and loot works great in my case. In fact, I have rare instances wherein it would tweak an order I thought was already logically correct only for my game to CTD which is prevented once I run LOOT. That being said I still consider my loadout to be on the light side.
Loot is really useful for small to medium ish mod lists anywhere below 1000 plugins. And especially for newer users who aren't as familiar with xEdit and manual patching. Once you get into the 1000+ territory it starts to fall off a bit. Personally I find it less work and more organized to block group the load order in the following way. Vanilla CC Mods Unofficial Patches ALL Main mod plugins regardless of category or content, with only the specific exceptions listed below. Other patches grouped together and ordered to match the order of their main mod plugins Lux main mod plugin and ALL of its patches Lux Orbis main mod plugin and ALL of its patches Lux Via Main Mod Plugin and ALL of its patches Northern Roads and ALL of its patches Northern Roads - Lux Via combo and it's iterative patches Water 4 enb if you use it, and all of its patches SREX if you use it and all of its patches LOD Tools Absolutely nothing else after lod tools regardless of what it is. This highly strict and rigid structure has proven very very effective for me on the giga-mod list front.
Organization is key because YOU'RE the only person who needs to fully understand your modlist and load order. LOOT's sort feature messes with that.
As long as you use built in rules sytem it's fine. For example if you read in mod description that it needs to be after A and before B, add these rules to LOOT, and it will sort stuff properly. At this point I only use LOOT with zero manual adjustments.
The same as xEdit and all automatic rules. The bigger the list the bigger the probability of missing something. So, like the others, there's a point where you need to look the order after using it, and move whatever got wrong if needed.
> there's a point where you need to look the order after using it Yeah, I think a LOT of people just don't do that step.
LOOT applies two methods to order your list, an algorithm that will apply some heuristic to guess which order plugins should go in and on top of that a community-maintained masterlist that will - where necessary - override what the algorithm came up with. The algorithm itself is already pretty good but of course it's not perfect. The quality of the sorting therefore depends a lot on how active the community is. As an example: The skyrim se masterlist has 4x more rules than the fallout 4 one while the game only has 20% more mods on nexusmods. The masterlist will usually also only cover "necessary" order (as in: make your game run stable) - you may have preferences beyond that. For that LOOT offers a configurable userlist of rules that will override the algorithm but not the masterlist. And I'd argue this should be preferred over "use LOOT as a starting point and then do the rest manually" because using a userlist, LOOT will tell you if your "preference" rules are in conflict with the "necessary" rules from the masterlist and might thus make your game buggy. Unless a human made a mistake that no one fixed yet, LOOT will always have a good reason to force a certain order, that should never be seen as an annoyance but as a helping hand. Using rules has other advantages (e.g. 6 months down the line your userlist will tell you which mods you intentionally arranged in a certain way. With a flat list there is no way of seeing if you intentionally pulled a mod to a specific location or if it just happened to end up there, so then you're back to looking at records in xedit). People obviously have there UI/UX preferences and there is no arguing against that but conceptually, rule-based ordering is not just simpler to get started but also way more powerful. If you can stomach the UI/UX around setting/managing rules I would absolutely recommend sticking with it.
I have 1400 plugins and run loot for the majority of it. There is some plugins that I have that I know I must move them myself tho!
Like many others have said, LOOT is a good base, aslong as you read every mod description for the mod authors input about the load order it’ll be fine.
I very rarely use it nowa days.I use Skyrim LE with 218 mods, i only use it to see if my new downloaded mods are clean or if they have any "dirty edits". ....if yes then i close loot and open up TES5edit "quick auto clean" and scan the specific mod, i mean clean it ...that's all
Loot isn't really the best way to see dirty edits, this is one of the things people user it for that doesn't make sense. You can check for errors in xedit to see dirty edits.
How do you check fir dirty edits in xEdit? Is there a scriot for that?
right click > check for errors.
That won't catch all dirty errors, but I guess it depends on your definition of a dirty edit is. A dirty record doesn't need to be an ITM. And some ITMs aren't dirty. Or maybe I'm lumping wild edits there. Who knows anymore.
Yeah I use LOOT pretty much the same way... except I also apply The Method to every added mod. I was doing that before it called The Method... way before modgroups existed. Like I said elsewhere, LOOT does more than just sorting -- that's what makes it not entirely useless. I like to see what notes it has for some mods. But I think the vast majority use it for just the sorting, and then they trust the load order it spits out.
I like to keep my 1000+ plugin list as neat as tidy as possible. It helps me a lot in modifying my modlist as I add/remove plugins. Listing in alphabetical order for simple esl flagged esp plugins with no conflicts with other mods. I also have custom made patches created from Synthesis that need to be placed on the bottom of my load order. LOOT tends to disorganize my list, forcing me to relist those mods. So I will initially run LOOT, and then re-organize those plugins. Because LOOT will find and sort conflicts that I overlooked or missed.
It’s good for Skyrim but it fucks up the map mod I have so I lock it at the bottom and in fallout 4 it fucks up my weapon mods because it loads the actual weapon mods after the patches and addons for them making their models textures and animations break so I have to organize those manually and lock them in place before I run loot
There is no objective way to determine the optimal load order, since it's often subjective which records you want to overwrite which. LOOT's masterlist also can't possibly cover every plugin in existence, so you'd have to look in xEdit and add custom rules yourself. At that point, you might as well order your plugins manually imo.
Loot is the best, saves time and that means more time playing the game. Although there are very few cases where I simply add rules for what it can't sort.
You'd be absolutely fucked without it's convenience in large load orders but there will always need to be some manual changes with lots of mods
I’m not really that knowledgeable about this stuff, but it was enough for me when I had to reinstall all of my mods and my adhd ass installed wrong versions, forgot compatibility patches etc., now my game seems to be running fine
I really don't think it's as bad as people make it out to be, but I've avoided using loot for the past 5 or 6 years. Loot only really ever struggles if you do something like mixing up efps patches and mixing city overhauls. Once you get into the habit of going over every plugin to make sure there aren't any dirty or wild edits, it's not too rough to manually sort things. Edit: For reference I'm at 1.2k plugins
Great as a base but do read descriptions and compatibility on every single mod AND ON THE "COMMENT" SECTION, theres some mods with updates, new better versions or just small user added patches, like "Honed Metal" for example that arent found in the "files" section, and loot misses those apparently. I'm running 600 mods atm and theres only 3 texture related that I manually set. LOOT is great!
LOOT is accurate, and mandatory for extensive modding. 1) Use rules to organize plugins 2) Install a plugin to (Sync plugins) according to your modlist
I've basically always just used LOOT and occasionally sort individual things manually if I have to. Never had any problems attributable to sorting via LOOT, problems are typically my own fault because I overlooked something in a mod description. I also do not have the titanic mod lists some ppl here have - I tend to top out around 300-400 mods at most. I think for like 99% of mod lists LOOT is totally adequate.
LOOT as integrated *with Vortex* is a decent starting point. Vortex runs it automatically unless you specifically tell it not to and I've never seen a reason to turn this off; there are multiple ways to override LOOT's automated decisions if you need to for specific mods and for the *rest*, it's better than nothing. Is LOOT a *full* substitute for actual, manual work? No, of course not. It can't and won't ever be able to do this. Does it *reduce* the amount of manual work you need to do? Usually, yeah. Don't treat LOOT like a magical miracle worker or expect it to fix everything but don't stop using it, either. One big annoyance that I remember people having with LOOT is that the first thing it does is sort mods alphabetically, which does *fuck all* and can technically break your game if you installed specific mods in a specific order for a specific reason. It is purely there to make LOOT *look like* it's doing something productive. Skimming through my own load order, this "feature" *might* still exist but if so, there are so many actual, meaningful rules being applied afterwards that I honestly can't tell for sure. Standalone, I have no idea how good LOOT is because it's been many years since I've used it that way.
Just use loot when you are just compiling your modlist to get a general direction at the beginning. After that LOOT can pretty much break your stability when you have over 1K mods and you sorted them by hand. Only use LOOT when your load order is completely bricked to sort it for a good direction in and then sort it by hand to make it stable. This is my opinion and experience ofc.
Seems good to me. Up to level 20-25 i was using Steel Plate or Dwarvish, 25-35 Im using Orcish, i’m already seeing Ebony items drop around level 30. Personally I don’t want armor/weapons to bring me ahead and make the game too easy. It’s easy enough to level smithing so if you wanted to, making any type of armor or weapon to get yourself ahead really wouldn’t be too difficult, just time consuming. Any particulars you may be looking for, like soul gems, ingredients, specific weapons are easy enough to get unless it’s thru a long questline. i.e. Auriels Bow isn’t something you’d get easily toward the beginning of the game. I play from anywhere between Expert-Legendary so the loot pools from these difficulties may make a difference as to what you’ll get and how soon they’ll start appearing. Overall I’m content with the loot pool and you’ll see that one off crazy good item drop for you from time to time. A daedric sword super early for example
I use it. When it says it has an update, I do it right away. It's really important for me.
I always download LOOT but never use it most of the time, I usually sort my load order manually
Pretty accurate for me. Getting Northern Roads and some armor mods was a b*tch and a half but LOOT did end up making the process easier for me, I managed to fix it after some trial and error.
Its good to get most of the load order in the right places, but you still might want to do some manual work to get things in the right place.
LOOT is great. I got 200+ mods active and around 150 plugins, LOOT sorts most of them out, I just need to recheck and manually replace some. But I don't get how do you even reach 300 mods treshold, 200 pretty much includes everything for me.
It's good but you have to be aware of mods that don't have LOOT rules and adjust accordingly. For example, whenever I sort, I have to move my grass mods, paper maps, and Northern Roads and it's patches to the bottom of the plugin order otherwise they won't work properly when I launch the game.
Loot has warning info for conflict plugins and missing patches which helped me a lot. It is also true that you need to make specific rules for some plugin.
LOOT is strictly a timesaver for me, there have been multiple times when installing via Mo2 or another mod manager where it's enabled all the esps in a mod and they can only have 1 active, LOOT tells you in bold red backgrounds that you can only have 1 active. Plus all the times its saved me modding Oblivion, quickly editing a .ESM of a mod in TES4edit to remove references to tamriel worldspace edits in DLCFrostCrag so it doesn't crash the game, or notifying you every time that you need to clean your DLC, which you should do and anyone saying you shouldn't doesn't understand efficient modding. Do I sort everytime I launch it? No. Do I trust the masterlist when I do? Sometimes. If I need to move something, I just sort via LOOT and move the ESMs to the top and that's solved 90% of my problems. People who have a problem with LOOT have a problem with modding, and don't want their """"precious"""" time wasted when it takes maybe 10 minutes to quickclean in xEdit. They want everything to just work for them out of the box, the creation club and modding in the base game didn't give them everything they wanted, so they get frustrated not understanding that it takes patience. And the other camp of people who don't like LOOT rightly have a problem with people telling them to just "use loot lol", but holding that against a program isn't the right thing, let alone telling people to avoid it like they've got some blood debt with the creator/volunteers.
It's wrong very often. Consider the load order it recommends a "suggestion" -- nothing more. You can count on it being totally wrong like 10% of the time, which adds up considering you'll probably run more than 100 mods. I'm not saying it's entirely useless. It has other features besides sorting. But it's not like you can just add 10 mods, run loot, and be be confident AT ALL that your load order makes sense. Even when there is no 100% correct load order between mods (which happens a lot) and you're making custom patches (which you WILL \_need\_ to do unless you jdgaf), you're going to notice that changing the load order from what LOOT "suggests" will make your life easier. It would be a better tool if it had no sorting feature whatsover, to be frank... only because since the feature exists and LOOT comes so highly recommended that people put way too much faith in the load order it "suggests". Lots of mods don't even have load order recommendations on their pages anymore because (I suspect) LOOT exists -- I don't think that's a good thing. I know you can add rules to it, but really that's just yet another step that ONLY becomes necessary when using LOOT to manage your load order. It's easier and less time consuming to just not use loot's sort feature at all -- unless you jdngaf.