How and when to do a clean save?

[Pkatt]

I have a question-  I see a lot of time a modder will update his/her mod, and say you need to do a clean save.

 

I know the concept is to take out mods, and save your game, and then reload mods, I "think".  But I'm not sure of doing it right.

 

Could someone verity the correct way to do this?   And if there is a thread somewhere, I apologize for not finding it, simply point me to it.

 

Things specifically that confuse me-

 

-If a modder says you need to do a clean save, does that mean that you take out ALL your mods and save, then reactivate them?  Or do you just take out the one that you are updating, and do that?    What if the one you need to take out is a master of something else, do you take them out too?

 

-If you suddenly decide you have the order of your mods wrong, and need to reorder something, I have heard that is a bad thing.   Is it?  Will a clean save, without the mods you want to reorder, be ok, or do you just start a new game in that situation?

 

 

thanks for any input.

[KainsChylde]

You are correct, a clean save is removing the mod, loading the game and creating a save without it, and reinstalling the mod. If other mods are dependent on the mod being removed they need to be removed as well or your game won't load. And I don't know who told you that rearranging your load order is bad, that's wrong. Moving around your load order is often the only way to get some mods to work together.

[Pkatt]

Thank you for the reply!

 

I dunno, I had read somewhere, that if you were pretty far into a game, and suddenly rearranged the load order, that it would throw things off, because the saves were expecting the mods in the other order.     I can understand if you rearranged in such a way where something that was dependent on something else was now above it, but I thought as long as you didn't do that you should be fine.

 

I guess I'm just gunshy.  way back, I was playing an Oblvion game, was quite a ways into it, and I remember I upgraded Better Cities, and then ran BOSS.  It rearranged everything.  I thought, hmm, must a better order.  But then it started CTDing all the time, to the point of being unplayable.  I downgraded Better Cities back to what I had, and put my load order back, but it still crashed all the time after that.

 

 

[jbravo]

What you probably read were people having issues with the Mod Configuration Menu (MCM) mod.  Some people (including myself) have reported that the menus of certain mods that use MCM malfunctioned after having changed the load order of the relevant mod.  This isn't a universal complaint, so you probably shouldn't worry about it unless it happens to you.

[Pkatt]

Ah yes, now that you mention that, I think I do remember reading that in relation to MCM!

 

Sometimes all this info just gets jumbled up inside my head and I can't remember what I read related to what.

 

Thank you both for replying and clarifying that for me!