How does TS4 decide mod conflicts?

[travelmedic]

I'm much more likely to be playing an Elder Scrolls or Fallout (or Starfield) game, and am pretty well versed on settling mod conflicts and making patches for those types of games.

 

However, once in a while I play The Sims 4 for something different.  Over the years my Mods folder has grown ridiculously large, and I'm now using Sims Tray Importer to help clean it up.

 

Finding and eliminating duplicate files is easy.

 

Looking at the conflicts section though, I have many.  For example, I've ended up with about 10 different butt sliders (hosukai, cmar, etc.).  It's not just butt sliders, but other mods too.  Can they all be used simultaneously, or will one win and override all others?  How does the game decide which?

 

I'm probably going to just pick one winner from each of these conflicts and delete the others and hope for the best.  Most of them seem to be CAS related, from some of the pre-made Sims you can download here or elsewhere.  Hopefully that won't make everyone suddenly look freakish when the sliders they were made with go missing.

[Crashdown117]

As far as I know and have observed over the years, conflicts are handled a bit differently for different kinds of mods and custom content.

 

The basic, straightforward case is the one that is also intentionally used sometimes (not sure how translations for mods do it these days, but they used to be an example for this) and will probably seem familiar to you from modding Bethesda games. As the game reads the mod files (IIRC, in alphabetical order on Mac and in inverse order on Windows), it will add anything in there to the game, using its respective ID and overriding any IDs that already exist. This works for e.g. tunings (i.e. buffs, object effects etc.), CAS items and Build mode stuff.

 

Sliders, like rigs, skin stuff and default replacements, are a different thing from my experience. For example, DR conflicts will usually have the game revert to its own, built-in default, and skin conflicts will pretty much always look terrible in-game. For sliders, I'm not sure how things are handled exactly, but I'd expect to see either odd behvior or nothing happening at all. Personally, I'd definitely advise against having two sliders that override the same vanilla CAS slider, or at least thoroughly testing how things behave with both of them in place.

 

Finally, for the sake of completeness, conflicts between script mods will simply break stuff. It will not necessarily render your entire game unplayable, but the conflicting mods won't work properly (which is kinda obvious, I know).

[Scorpio]

I've had problems when using the same type of sliders from 2+ different authors at the same time.

They were facial sliders for nose, mouth, and eyes.

Many custom sims downloads include cc sliders and since the filenames are sometimes different it's easy to get dupes of the same type.

Also watch out for 'defaults' in the skins and eyes categories as you don't want multiple defaults of anything.

 

Skin Overlays and non-defaults you can have many as long as they're not dupes.

Edited April 6, 2024 by Scorpio