TES5Edit VS zedit

See the The Case for Exclusively Supporting .esm Files in Starfield (midway on the page).

The Source Code Form is available at https://github.com/TES5Edit/TES5Edit

You can find it here, by the way. Just make sure to run it through MO2, otherwise it won't find your plugins.

I can see they use xEdit from NM (link) but they also mention only "-SSE" argument on cleaning. 4.0.4 NM version of xEdit also needs "-DontCache" argument, you can read issue 803, it was fixed in further experimental versions but not in the NM release. If anyone use 4.0.4 they absolutely need "-DontCache" to avoid missing parts of Soul Cairn and Apocrypha.

Github

xEdit is one of the main modding tools. It allows you to view and edit .ESP, .ESM, and .ESL files, view conflicts between these files, and a whole lot more (I'm really selling it short there). It's available here, with an installation tutorial here

Also I suggest updating your SSEEdit, it's up to 4.1.4 now https://github.com/TES5Edit/TES5Edit/releases

Download it from Github: https://github.com/TES5Edit/TES5Edit

First, "copy as overwrite into" in FO4Edit 4.0.3 gave me an "assertion failure in line 15543" and empty records, something like this https://github.com/TES5Edit/TES5Edit/issues/651 . Supposedly, it's fixed in TES5Edit 4.0.3h but I have no idea of how to build it from source and if it will work with FO4.

There aren't any other big problems with older versions of the game other than what wankingSkeever mentioned, and so long as you are diligent with what new mods you download and use you should be fine using v1.5.97. Hopefully there will be a script that is released in the future for SSEEdit or zEdit that renumbers all problematic forms for our version so this won't even be an issue.

Alright so, should be obvious but the very first thing to do is to read the description of every mod you want to download. After doing that, click on the Requirements drop-down and look at the mods there. Most of the time, the available patches will be listed under “Mods requiring this file”. There's a few people hosting patch hubs that make the process super easy (kryptopyr, Janquel, Czasior, etc). I make a merge for each patch hub (using zMerge), or for the specific mods being patched if there's no hub and the patches are scattered in different uploads. Once you get used to the process, it's not too painful to re-do when there's an update. I keep everything neat and ordered with MO2 separators, so that helps.

For more plugin spots, try to convert some to ESPFE using xEdit. Some people still need spots even after every available conversion has been done. If so, use ZMerge (a variant of ZEdit.) There are instructions titled, "ZMerge Setup" on Lexy's LotD Prerequisites page (about 3/4 towards the bottom of the page.)

Portable_x64.7z (HTTPDownloader+State|https://github.com/z-edit/zedit/releases/download/0.6.6.1/zEdit_v0.6.6.1

Might I introduce you to our lord and saviour, zMerge?

You can try ZMerge for simple mods it should be fine but for mods with scripts or mcm you have to look

In VR we need to do a lot of merging of esps to avoid the 255 esp limit. This has the unfortunate habit of breaking dlls and scripts since the original esp and formid can change. I've recently released MergeMapper to try to help with this problem if you use zmerge. It provides two capabilities:

I ran zEdit thru MO2. ---------- zMerge (built-in to zEdit) "is the recommended tool for merging for skyrim & skyrim se" https://github.com/z-edit/zedit/releases setup of zMerge (a good video on it in key parts though assets, BSAs and loose files, are now merged in with archives set to the default "extract"). Don't forget to set the load order from it's tab. I had to use the old merge method setting "cobble down" as the new "merge down" method setting failed final stage of cleaning the meged plugin when generating it. https://youtu.be/oQ1mdOGosdc If you need help with zMerge there is a Discord server for it: https://discord.gg/wK5rP5a5