A Beginner's Guide to Making Your Own Compatibility Patches

[jharise]

There are probably other guides out there that cover this same thing, but I decided to put together a simple guide to making compatibility patches, so here it is. It's a guide for beginners by a beginner at modding.

 

Jharise’s Basic Guide to DIY Skyrim Compatibility Patches (It’s easier than you think!)

 

Ever picked up a mod that looked really neat only to find out that it’s got some major incompatibilities with your other mods? Are you struggling with invisible armor on your custom race? Well, despair no more! By following this simple and concise guide, you can kiss those compatibility issues goodbye forever without having to beg for patches, because you’ll be able to make your own.

 

What this guide covers:

*Making a basic compatibility patch between mods

*Making a basic mod-added equipment compatibility patch for custom races

 

What this guide does not cover:

*Scripting. If your mods involve scripting that is race-dependent, then I can’t help you. That’s not what this tutorial’s for. This guide is only for basic conflict resolution.

*BodySlide for races with custom body types. The custom races section of this guide is only for equipment that does not require additional fitting for nonstandard body shapes (helmets, tails, accessories, etc). If your custom race uses the standard male/female body as the rest of the races in the game, then this guide will work for body armor as well. If not, expect some weirdness.

*The Creation Kit. The Creation kit has its place, but I don’t recommend using it for basic patching for a number of reasons.

1; You can’t set .esp files as masters, which you’ll be needing to do for pretty much every patch you make.

2;  the UI is pretty intimidating for people new to modding, which I assume anyone who needs this guide probably is.

3; Put simply, it’s unnecessary for basic patching. The only thing I would recommend using the Creation Kit for when it comes to basic patches is removing superfluous masters if they were added by accident and fixing the dark face bug (which I will also not be covering here).

 

That said, let’s get on with it!

 

 

1.      1. WHAT YOU’LL NEED

TESEdit/SSEEdit

 

TESEdit/SSEEdit is a powerful tool that lets you see exactly where your mod conflicts lie. You can download this program for free on the Nexus, and it’s where you’ll be doing most of your patching work. Definitely pick this up. I’ll be using screenshots from SSEEdit since it’s the one I have, but the two should be functionally identical.

 

2.       2. LOADING THE CONFLICTING MODS

When you open up TESEdit/SSEEdit, you’ll be greeted with a list of all of your currently-enabled mods.

 

 

To make a simple compatibility patch, you’ll want to right-click and choose “Select None” to uncheck everything. Then use the Filter field at the top to choose only the mods you’re wanting to work with during this session. Usually, this is just the two mods you want to make a patch for, so for this guide, I’m going to use the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch (USSEP) and RaceCompatibility.

After selecting the mods you want to work with and clicking “Okay”, this is what you should see:

 

 

Click the plus arrow next to the mod name to get a categorized list of all the objects that mod affects.

 

 

What we’re interested in right now is the “Armor Addon” category, so we’ll expand that now.

 

 

Armor Addons are the visual part of any piece of equipment. These are what actually applies the 3D mesh to the item when it’s worn, and any item can have any number of addons associated with it, allowing for different meshes to display depending on race or sex. For example, circlets look different on Khajiit and Argonians than they do on humanoid races. This is because the circlet has different armor addons for each. This also means that custom races will, by default, have all of their equipment invisible because the system can’t find a valid armor addon for that race, as the basic addons won’t have them in their list of allowed races.

In the image above, the items marked in red indicate there is a conflict present. In the case of the RingGoldAA (the AA indicates this is an Armor Addon), the original game didn’t have Khajiit Vampires included in their valid races, probably due to oversight. USSEP adds them to the list, but RaceCompatibility, being based on the vanilla game, overrides USSEP and removes them again. So, what we’ll want to do here is make a COMPATIBILITY PATCH.

 

3.       3. ACTUALLY MAKING THE PATCH

Let’s go ahead and right-click on the RingGoldAA object in the left panel. Near the bottom of the context menu you’ll see the “Copy as override into…” option. Click this.

 

 

You’ll get this warning. Don’t worry about it and just click “Yes, I’m absolutely sure”. We won’t actually be changing any existing mods, so there’s no need to worry about messing anything up here.

 

 

To make our patch, we’ll want to check “new file” .esp and click OK.

 

 

Name it whatever you like, but I recommend using something easily distinguishable. I’m going to call this one “USSEP_RaceCompatibilityPatch”. Click OK to create it.

 

 

This will add our new patch to the mod list. Right now it only has the one Armor Addon we copied over, but you can do this with as many records as you like by highlighting more than one (hold CTRL while clicking nonadjacent records to select multiple objects) before choosing “copy as override”. You can also add additional items by doing the same thing as above and selecting your new patch instead of “new file”. I’ll do this now.

 

 

Copying the records into a patch won’t fix the conflicts by itself (as indicated by the red highlight still on the items). What you’ll need to do now is edit your patch’s version of the record.

 

 

In the right panel, the lines in red indicate our conflicts. For our patch, we’ll want to select which parts we want to use. You can do this easily by clicking and dragging the desired option over to the far right.

 

 

Now just do this with the rest of the red lines, selecting which parts you want to keep from each.

 

 

Once you eliminate all of the conflicts, the record on the left will turn yellow and the text green, indicating that while the record has been altered (yellow), there are no remaining conflicts (green text). This is what you want. This gold ring Armor Addon is now fully compatible with both of the selected mods. The same method can be used to resolve most mod conflicts, not just with Armor Addons. Save your changes and you’re good to go!

You can also right-click on something to remove it if you need to.

And there’s your basic compatibility patch done. But I know what you’re saying—what about custom races?

Custom races will (usually) come with all of the vanilla assets already assigned, so this is mostly so you can make your other mod-added equipment compatible with these custom races. This is also very simple.

 

4.       4. CUSTOM RACE COMPATIBILITY

 

 

For this example, I made an example throwaway race I can use, but the steps will be the same no matter which custom race you use. Select the custom race mod and the other mod you want compatibility for when you load up TESEdit/SSEEdit and do the above steps to copy the item you want compatibility for into a new .esp. I’m using Farm01Hat01AA for this demonstration, but you’ll presumably want to use whatever mod-added equipment you’re wanting compatibility for.

What you’ll want to do next is copy anything from your custom race mod (it doesn’t matter what it is) into your patch in order to set it as a master. Once the master is set, you can remove this copied item from your patch as it's no longer needed.

 

 

Click Yes, then continue to the next step.

 

 

Scroll down to the “Additional Races” section of the item you want compatibility for and right-click in the empty field I have highlighted here and select “Add”. It should create a new slot that says “Null Reference.” Double-click or right-click/Edit this to access the drop-down menu listing all of the available races (including the custom race ONLY IF it’s set as a master for your patch, which is why we did the above step).

 

 

 

After the custom race is added to the list of available races, save your changes and quit.

Congratulations! You’ve just made a custom race equipment compatibility patch! 

TIP: If you're converting multiple items, you can also highlight several references and drag the additional races to each one to make things much faster.

 

 

And the best part is that most of the time, the file sizes for these will be so low that you can mark them as Lite so they don’t take up .esp slots. To do this, simply click on File Header in your custom patch and change the Record Flag to ESL.

 

 

 

 

And there you go. Your patch won’t take up any .esp slots.

If TESEdit/SSEEdit gives you an error when you attempt to save after changing this flag, it probably means that the file size is too large and it doesn’t qualify as Lite, in which case uncheck the ESL flag you just added and deal with it taking up a .esp slot.

[chillmaxed]

I'm so glad I found this. Thank you, Jharise. You beautiful beautiful person.

[Jade514]

hey mate i was wondering if you could make a guide on how i would go about converting armor mods for the femboy race since i am at a lose.

[Claudiaalv]

On 6/6/2020 at 4:11, johnathon648 said:

Hola amigo, me preguntaba si podrías hacer una guía sobre cómo haría para convertir los mods de armadura para la raza femboy ya que estoy perdido.

Hi, how about you use the femboy mod from Bc4life, by the way it is an excellent mod, follow the guide that gives it, I followed it to the letter and I have had good results and I have made several compatible armor for the mod    

[Hatred666]

Followed the instructions to the letter but the custom race refuses to show up on the dropdown menu. It worked yesterday but today it just didn't lmao