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Which Mod Manager Do You Use?


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I use MO1 for 32bit games and MO2 for 64bit games.  I have used pretty all the Mod Managers, but I like MO the best.  I like to tinker and MO is easy to enable/disable mods especially when the game is not running correctly.  You can also see if multiple mods are writing to the same files by looking at the left pane.  Easy to move a mod you don't want overwritten down in load structure.  The team that came together to get MO2 working correctly has my thanks. I have no complaints with MO2 now.  Loot, bodyslide and FNIS all work and open/close correctly.  Over the past year it was a little frustrating.  I did go back briefly to NMM during the time MO2 was being worked on, but it took so long to install Mods as compared to MO, which is usually less than a minute even for big mods.  

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9 hours ago, joemonco said:

Why not just spend the $100 for a windows license and use the time you save to do something useful?

 
Perhaps you should ask yourself why this person prefers to act in this way: to have the desire to improve oneself, to express oneself in a field that is just as enriching but different from your preferences, such as working with a system based on a Linux distro, for example ...
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I think people will tend toward three groups: those who have lighter load orders, those with heavy load orders, and mod creators.

 

The first group will likely have learned through manual installs and can keep track of what mod does what in their head. They'll use NMM because it's clear to them how one mod affects another.

The second group will have a mess of conflicts and issues they need a scalpel to navigate, and MO will help them do just that. While MO is the equivalent of breaking an egg with a sledgehammer, it's also unmatched in its ability to allow the user to fine-tune his or her mods. Not only can you readily see conflicts, you can resolve them with minimal effort or just uninstall an offending mod with a click. It's exceedingly useful to a user with hundreds of mods.

The third group requires a stable editing environment, and NMM will provide that. If you're using the CK to build something, it requires significantly less effort if your base game has all the content required and doesn't need you to engage it through a third party program, which contributes to instability.

 

Which mod manager is right for the player? The one which provides the greatest functionality for the required purpose. If you have hundreds of mods, learn MO. If you have dozens of mods, use NMM. If you want to make mods, use NMM.

 

That said, if you're new to modding Beth games, use no manager at all. It's far better to learn how mods work and then to progress further with a management tool than to try to mod the hell out of your game from the beginning. That way you know what the various files do and what is likely to conflict with any given new thing. This allows you to spot problems before they become problems and fix them. Often, you can simply download the mod, open the archive, and look at the files to see where you might have a potential problem.

 

Real world example: I recently bought FO4 because there was major discount and there are plenty of mods for it here, and the first thing I did was load it up on 200 or so mods (about 140 of them having actual plugins) because "I know what I'm doing because I did this with Skyrim." It should surprise no one that this didn't work, and I've spent the last month or so paring down the list and figuring out which conflicts were important and which were benign, all the while working through the entire desired list of toys. I tried NMM at first, but very quickly abandoned it because the mod list was far too large for NMM to handle and do what I needed. With MO, I'm about 3/4ths of the way through it, validating them one at a time.

 

Use the appropriate tool for the job at hand, and no tool is objectively better than the others.

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Wrye Bash, i stilll find it the best. Alas it has not reached the level of Oblivion version in the newer games. Still handy, though.

I have tried MO, but i don't like the virtualization. I want to be able to modify stuff in the game's folder.

NMM is like Windows: easy to use for common folk, but too limited for those who know what they're doing :tongue:

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5 minutes ago, ToJKa said:

Wrye Bash, i stilll find it the best. Alas it has not reached the level of Oblivion version in the newer games. Still handy, though.

I have tried MO, but i don't like the virtualization. I want to be able to modify stuff in the game's folder.

NMM is like Windows: easy to use for common folk, but too limited for those who know what they're doing :tongue:

 

That's a good point. For Skyrim at least, WB is still a staple for checking masters and building bashed patches. While I still find MO better for the heavy load order, WB is an essential tool I refuse to do without.

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1 hour ago, ToJKa said:

Wrye Bash, i stilll find it the best. Alas it has not reached the level of Oblivion version in the newer games. Still handy, though.

I have tried MO, but i don't like the virtualization. I want to be able to modify stuff in the game's folder.

NMM is like Windows: easy to use for common folk, but too limited for those who know what they're doing :tongue:

If that's the only reason you don't use MO... you know that you can modify stuff with MO in the according mod folder?  It may need a second look which mod is actually controlling the things you want to change, but i prefer to know which mod has control anyways. ;)

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On 30.1.2018 at 8:22 PM, v48342 said:

I am using none because they do not run in linux. I am using git instead, as a general purpose version control system tool it does the job pretty well and offers things that those probably do not. For the few mods that are not simple copy and paste, I parse the fomod config files by hand, it may be tedious sometimes but it is not hard at all.

It never came to my mind, it would run there.

But anyway, using something like git as a mod manager ... cool idea

8D 

 

 

 

 

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On 2/4/2018 at 10:19 PM, SleepyJim said:

Not sure if anyone's seen this yet, but an alpha version Vortex has been released to a few people for testing. Here's a first impressions video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p0e8q22WsTg

Been reading some of the stuff on the nexus page about it, forced install into program files only, sys links, bleh, I have had multiple times where windows update themselves have killed all my syslinks, which is why I refuse to use them at all now.

 

True some of the install stuff may change but syslinks are a hell no for me, ever.

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On 2/6/2018 at 1:08 AM, Shizune said:

If you're playing Oldrim and using anything besides Mod Organizer v1.3.11 you should rethink your life choices.

Haha. All ripping aside, I think SkyAddiction really hit the nail on the head in their earlier post.

On 2/3/2018 at 4:43 AM, SkyAddiction said:

I think people will tend toward three groups: those who have lighter load orders, those with heavy load orders, and mod creators.

Ie, NMM/MO/NMM, for light (and static) loads, serious loads (and changes), and mod authors who want to avoid virtualization due to the modding process. However, I would say that MO is a superior tool (for mod users, not modders), while sometimes using an inferior tool can be the better choice.

On 2/3/2018 at 4:43 AM, SkyAddiction said:

That said, if you're new to modding Beth games, use no manager at all.

Personally, I wish I had learned how to use MO from day 1. I wasted so much time trying to fix things with a brick when I could have used a nailgun.

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