Merging mods in Wrye Bash

[merryMalfunctioning]

How do you know if mods can be merged into a bashed patch in Wrye Bash? With Oblivion, mods would be marked "mergeable", and then Wrye Bash would go ahead and merge them. But that doesn't happen with Skyrim.

 

So how do you know whether to use "Mark Mergeable" on a mod?

[Guest]

 

 

Automatic Merging by the Skyrim Executable Wrye Bash

Wrye Bash can create a bashed patch containing resolutions for some of the conflicts between plugins. Key capabilities of the bashed patch are:

• some plugins can fully merged into the bashed patch, and these plugins can then be disabled,
• some tweaks can be added to the bashed patch, avoiding the need for a plugin to set these (e.g., crime radius and maximum number of companions in Skyrim), and
• a few data record types, such as leveled lists, can be merged automatically in the bashed patch avoiding the need to manually create a compatibility patch for these.

Documentation on creating a bashed patch with Wrye Bash is available in the Bashed Patch section of the General Readme for Wrye Bash (use the "?" icon on the bottom of Wrye Bash to display this file) and in the Wrye Bash Pictorial Guide. There is also a

on this and additional discussion on Wrye Bash in the STEP Wrye Bash guide. The bashed patch can automatically resolve and merge several types of conflicts between mods.

The data record merging used in the bashed patch handles several types of conflicts. Like the TES5Edit Merge Patch discussed below, for records that are part of "leveled lists" it can properly handle situations when one mod changes a subrecord and another mod changes a different subrecord and also when when two or mods change the same subrecord. In addition to resolving conflicts in leveled lists, Wrye Bash can also automatically resolve some non-leveled list record types when two mods change the same subrecord. For example, if one mod changes an NPC skill level to 50 and another mod changes the same skill to 60, the bashed patch will choose one of these changes or use a compromise value based on both (e.g., 55). In performing this task it uses Bash tags (for more details on the tags see here) to help determine which mod's records should have precedence when there is a conflict. These tags are automatically assigned to a mod when LOOT is used, or they can be assigned manually in Wrye Bash.

The Skyrim version of Wrye Bash does not merge nearly as many record types as the versions for TES4 (Oblivion) or Fallout (Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas). Wrye Bash for Skyrim handles record types for leveled items, leveled NPC, Names, Item Stats for armor and weapons, and a very small set of game settings (GMST). The only game settings it handles are ones explicitly included in the bashed patch menu; it does not include any GMST records from mods. It remains, however, the best way to merge leveled lists and leveled NPCs, but with the WB limitations in Skyrim other utilities are often needed to supplement its capabilities. An experimental version of Wrye Bash for Skyrim is available that handles a much larger set of hash tag types; once this has been tested Wrye Bash will be able to handle some of the merging that is especially tedious to do manually.