Do I need to clean 41 dirty AE CC mods?

[Gh0sTG0]

Hi. Just installed AE update with all that CC content. New clean install for checking, etc.

Starting LOOT I see, that not only 4 DLC's are dirty, but 41 more mods esm/esl's are dirty too =(.

Do I need to clean them all manually? Or there's some way to automate it? I tried searching but find nothing about that =(.

[DocClox]

Honestly, probably not. As long as you load them all ahead of other mods, anyway. They presumably work with other CC mods. Because they're curated mini-dlc and have been subjected to Bethesda's usual rigorous quality control and all that ?

 

Anyway, ITM records shouldn't break other CC mods, and so long as they don't load after other mods, they can't really cause problems there, either.

 

There is a potential issue with deleted records, but I'd be tempted to leave them as they are unless and until it turns out that one or more of them is causing problems.

[nilead]

Dont. For mods - definetly dont, mod authors are normally really carefull about what goes in, and even if not so - i wouldnt trust LOOT algorithm over their call what goes into mod. LOOT is very far from infailable, and warnings to explicitly not clean mods arent comepletely uncommon.

 As for masters - used to do it with masters, after a while stopped bothering. If it makes a difference - i havent noticed it. Then again, no harm in it as well, as far as i can tell. And it was recommended be some fairly well written guides by people who know more than i do.

 So, for core .esm's - yeah, probably. Might be entirely skippable. For mods - absolutely no, unless you're qualified to judge an edit as unnececery by yourself.

[DocClox]

6 minutes ago, nilead said:

Dont. For mods - definetly dont, mod authors are normally really carefull about what goes in, and even if not so - i wouldnt trust LOOT algorithm over their call what goes into mod.

 

I'm not sure I can agree there. I mean, I have yet to see a convincing case made for why a deletion is necessary, and each deleted record (as opposed to moved or disabled) has the potential to crash the game, if referenced by an otherwise working mod further down the load order.

 

I'm prepared to be convinced that the occasional ITM may be needed for the correct working of a mod, but lacking specific examples of why it's a good thing, the practice just seems like mod authors deliberately breaking other mods so that theirs keep working. It still seems like bad practice.

Edited December 20, 2021 by DocClox

[Gh0sTG0]

Ok. So cleaning only ESM's looks good. TY @DocClox @nilead

[nilead]

2 minutes ago, DocClox said:

I'm prepared to be convinced that the occasional ITM may be needed for the correct working of a mod, but lacking specific examples of why it's a good thing, the practice just seems like mod authors deliberately breaking other mods so that theirs keep working. It still seems like bad practice.

Never said its a good thing. But potetntial damage of cleaning is massive compared to leaving dirt in. And lacking the experitiese to judge case-by-case myself, i go by the fact that modders do occasionally put warning against cleaning and personal experience. Im in fact convinced that some, if not most of those, are at best unneccecery and best case is selective cleaning.. But unless one has the skills and time to judge every case himself, blanked cleaning is way, way more problematic than leaving things as is.

[DocClox]

1 hour ago, nilead said:

Never said its a good thing.

 

Fair enough, you never said that.

 

1 hour ago, nilead said:

But potetntial damage of cleaning is massive compared to leaving dirt in.

 

Let's get this in proportion for a moment. The potential damage is that the cleaned mod stops working. The potential damage of not cleaning is that half a dozen apparently unrelated mods stop working, or crash the game in the case of UDRs, for no immediately apparent reason.

 

1 hour ago, nilead said:

And lacking the experitiese to judge case-by-case myself, i go by the fact that modders do occasionally put warning against cleaning and personal experience.

 

OK. Two sorts of dirty edits , generally speaking.  UDRs and ITMs.

 

UDRs are where a modder deletes something from the base game. Say, to take a very simple example, that I make a mod that has a reference to a tree in a script or condition. Then you come along and make a new bandit camp, and that tree is growing out of the middle of a tent - so you delete it.  Now, any time both our mods are loaded, the game crashes when my mod tries to reference that tree because it doesn't exist in the game any more.

 

We call 'em UDRs because the cleaning process Un-deletes and Disables the Record. That means that even if my mod doesn't work, at least it doesn't crash the game because of your bad modding practice. "So don't depend on trees", you're probably thinking, and you're right. But what if it's something more subtle. What if it's a navmesh record? What if the deleting modder didn't realise he'd deleted a record? It can be horribly easy to do, and we all have bad days.

 

The other dirty edit is the ITM. That's a record Identical To the Master file. So for an example: you edit a mod and, in the process of rotating the cell view, you click on a rock for a moment too long and the CK interprets this as a change. None of the rocks values have altered, but the record gets inserted, unaltered into your mod.

 

Then I add a dungeon door in that location, and move that rock a couple of feet to the left so it doesn't hide my dungeon door. You mod loads after mine, and it moves the rock back. Now I get a thousand posts about how the dungeon door isn't there.

 

Cleaning fixes all these problems., and while I'm willing to believe there may be cases where an ITM is needed to undo a mistake that can't be fixed by other means, it still seems like arrogant and lazy design for the most part. Anyone with specific counter examples, please feel free to explain the problem to me and I'll cease to post such things.

 

1 hour ago, nilead said:

Im in fact convinced that some, if not most of those, are at best unneccecery and best case is selective cleaning.. But unless one has the skills and time to judge every case himself, blanked cleaning is way, way more problematic than leaving things as is.

 

I recently had an interesting chat on Reddit with a chap who seemed to have mod cleaning conflated in his head with the anti-vaxxer movement, and took it very personally that I suggested that mod cleaning might be a good thing, and told me it was always my responsibility to anticipate every bonehead dirty edit that could possibly break my mods, and to fix it in my mod rather than expect people to take the simple precaution of cleaning a mod.

 

And granted, if a reputable modder says "please don't clean this one ITM in my mod or things will break", I'll tend to respect that, even if I question the design that led to that necessity. On the other hand., I think this growing meme that "all mod cleaning is always bad and dangerous and unnecessary" is deeply counter-productive. (Not that you're going that far yourself, of course, but I have met those who will unironically take that position).

 

Edited December 20, 2021 by DocClox

[nilead]

17 minutes ago, DocClox said:

OK. Two sorts of dirty edits , generally speaking.  UDRs and ITMs.

 That was unironically helpfull. Thanks for sharing the info.

[DocClox]

11 minutes ago, nilead said:

 That was unironically helpfull. Thanks for sharing the info.

 

My pleasure. :)

[donttouchmethere]

53 minutes ago, DocClox said:

OK. Two sorts of dirty edits , generally speaking.  UDRs and ITMs.

Thanks for the explanation!

Now I know why this stone blocks my front door. ??