Is Bashed patch still a thing?

[HunterGuy2]

It's been a super long time since I've looked at any bethesda games... but I remember it used to be almost guaranteed that something would break if you didn't create a bashed patch with Wrye Bash. Is that still a thing in Skyrim SE? I noticed that it's not mentioned anywhere in the beginner's guide.

[Seijin8]

1 hour ago, HunterGuy2 said:

It's been a super long time since I've looked at any bethesda games... but I remember it used to be almost guaranteed that something would break if you didn't create a bashed patch with Wrye Bash. Is that still a thing in Skyrim SE? I noticed that it's not mentioned anywhere in the beginner's guide.

Yes and no.  It is still there and basically functional, but things like Mator Smash have largely superseded it.

[HunterGuy2]

Ah. I didn't see any reference to Mator Smash in the beginner guide either. Is that functionality built into Vortex these days or something?

[Seijin8]

4 minutes ago, HunterGuy2 said:

Ah. I didn't see any reference to Mator Smash in the beginner guide either. Is that functionality built into Vortex these days or something?

I don't use Vortex, but based on what I've heard, I sincerely doubt it has any such ability.

 

Mator does exactly what Bashed Patch does, except it handles conflicts in a large number of record types, far past what Bashed Patches can do.

[phillout]

Just stay with the Bash, Smash tends to break a lot of things, like quests, dialogs, whatnot. It simply merges everything by default - I mean all the records. Perks, magical effects, ingredients, you name it. Thus breaking many things, like Amorous Adventures, CACO + Ordinator combo, etc. You can good results with it, if you fiddle with your load order for a day or two, looking at the results it produces in xEdit and tweaking Smash settings. But is it really worth it?

 

Just use Bash. It's safe and does exactly what it's supposed to do.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, phillout said:

Just stay with the Bash, Smash tends to break a lot of things, like quests, dialogs, whatnot. It simply merges everything by default - I mean all the records. Perks, magical effects, ingredients, you name it. Thus breaking many things, like Amorous Adventures, CACO + Ordinator combo, etc. You can good results with it, if you fiddle with your load order for a day or two, looking at the results it produces in xEdit and tweaking Smash settings. But is it really worth it?

 

Just use Bash. It's safe and does exactly what it's supposed to do.

Are you sure that's the right way to put it? I mean, things can also break if too little is merged. A conflict is a conflict, after all. It sounds more like one might breaks things from doing too little, and the other might break things from doing too much. And of course, not doing either breaks even more. I don't really see any "safe" option here, other than manually resolving conflicts in xedit, and since nobody's perfect, that's not safe either.

 

Correct me if i'm wrong.

[phillout]

7 minutes ago, lynak said:

Are you sure that's the right way to put it? I mean, things can also break if too little is merged. A conflict is a conflict, after all. It sounds more like one might breaks things from doing too little, and the other might break things from doing too much. And of course, not doing either breaks even more. I don't really see any "safe" option here, other than manually resolving conflicts in xedit, and since nobody's perfect, that's not safe either.

 

Correct me if i'm wrong.

 

Yes, if you have conflicting mods - you need compatibility patches resolving those conflicts, those hand-made patches you find everywhere. They are out there for a reason.

 

Trusting an automated tool to make a huge "compatibility patch" for your whole load order is a recipe for disaster. Even TES5Merged patch is safer than what Smash produces. Smash may be a good tool to help a mod author to make a compatibility patch, i.e. you load 2 esps and Smash them, and then look at the result. But for God's sake, don't blindly run it on the whole load order because you've heard it's awesome and all cool kids use Smash, crap like that.

 

Even worse, the algorithm Smash uses to decide what edits should be forwarded to the patch is totally dumb, and tends to forward all "unique" edits, even those erroneous wild edits broken mods introduce. If there is an error in some mod, you can be sure it will end up in the patch because, FFS, it's "unique edit".

 

So just don't use it.

[blau3r]

Just gonna hijack this thread real quick and ask a related question. Should I still create a SSE Merged patch - remove leveled entries and extra masters - before wryebashing? Or has that changed since I last modded

[Kristus Kringle]

Bash and Mator caused more problems than they solved so I quit both but maybe I wasn't using them right.

[Guest]

4 hours ago, phillout said:

 

Yes, if you have conflicting mods - you need compatibility patches resolving those conflicts, those hand-made patches you find everywhere. They are out there for a reason.

Sorry, i should've been more precise: By "conflict" i don't mean two mods changing the exact same values, but the same "compound" - such as with levelled lists. In other words: Not actually conflicting data, but just limitations of beth's stoopid engine. The way i understood it, bash can do this for some "compound-records", but smash can do it for more? And yes, i completely agree an automated tool cannot resolve real conflicts - i'm just looking for one that takes all the bullshit out of beth's data-structures, and merges what can be safely merged.

[phillout]

1 hour ago, lynak said:

Sorry, i should've been more precise: By "conflict" i don't mean two mods changing the exact same values, but the same "compound" - such as with levelled lists. In other words: Not actually conflicting data, but just limitations of beth's stoopid engine. The way i understood it, bash can do this for some "compound-records", but smash can do it for more? And yes, i completely agree an automated tool cannot resolve real conflicts - i'm just looking for one that takes all the bullshit out of beth's data-structures, and merges what can be safely merged.

 

Bash handles leveled lists and containers just fine, provided the esp has appropriate bash tags. Most mods changing those records do have the tags. if some of them don't - you can always add tags yourself, but that's actually rare and isn't that much work to do. This is exactly why people run Bash - to merge LVL and CONT records. And yes, this is safe - unlike merging all records, like factions, that end up in soldiers and inhabitants of Dragonsreach attacking you on sight because you killed a deer (true story from someone who used Smash in the past).

[phillout]

4 hours ago, blau3r said:

Just gonna hijack this thread real quick and ask a related question. Should I still create a SSE Merged patch - remove leveled entries and extra masters - before wryebashing? Or has that changed since I last modded

You don't need it if you have a proper set of compatibility patches for all mods you have installed - and this is what I would recommend instead, like installing QUASIPC. Or other specialized compatibility patches, specific to mods you have in your LO.

[blau3r]

I generally make sure to get all the compatibility patches. Is there any risk of a "safety" merged patch fucking things up?

[HunterGuy2]

Thanks for the info everyone  Based on these responses + my own reading, what I'm hearing is that:

a) Mator is hit-or-miss

b) Bash is ok if you know what you're doing, but due to bad asset tagging in skyrim, does not "just work" like it did in Oblivion

c) Bashing used to be a way to make an all-in-one compatibility patch.. but now that it's less reliable, individual custom compatibility patches are the safest way to go

[fringecosmos]

Mator Smash is not an automated tool. It's first step is automated, yes. After that, you need to manually do things with it like setting up manual rules after observing it's results in xEdit. Using it properly will eliminate the need for a lot of patches (though not all). If you are using it properly, it should rarely, if ever, break things. If all it was ever intended for was an automated process, then loading up Mator Smash would just present you with a giant SMASH button and absolutely nothing else. It has other features, but if you aren't willing to use them, then don't expect good results from the program.

[Grummkol]

I use the latest version of BASH from the discord fine.  It doesn't merge plugins anymore, (not necessary with ESL's) and now supports the full range of bash tags (it used to be only delev,relev names and invent in SSE).  It also works fine with load order of over 255 which maator smash can't, so if you wanted to build a smash patch you would have to selectively disable plugins (and do this every time you rebuilt it).

Last I heard maator was working on zSmash which would support over a 255 load order, but I think he's focused on zedit at the moment.

 

[Guest]

2 hours ago, Grummkol said:

I use the latest version of BASH from the discord fine.  It doesn't merge plugins anymore, (not necessary with ESL's) and now supports the full range of bash tags (it used to be only delev,relev names and invent in SSE).  It also works fine with load order of over 255 which maator smash can't, so if you wanted to build a smash patch you would have to selectively disable plugins (and do this every time you rebuilt it).

Last I heard maator was working on zSmash which would support over a 255 load order, but I think he's focused on zedit at the moment.

 

It's 4 times slower though, or has that been fixed? Wrye beta taking forever was the main reason i switched back to the old version.

[Wolfstorm321]

Yes, it is. I use the 307 version.

[Grummkol]

17 hours ago, lynak said:

It's 4 times slower though, or has that been fixed? Wrye beta taking forever was the main reason i switched back to the old version.

Yes it's slower.  Part of the stuff that was changed to support load orders > 254.  I'd say it takes about 5 minutes to generate a bashed patch for me, thats with  247 ESP/ESM's and 198 ESL/'s in the load order.