Merging NPC records with Mator Smash actually mostly works

[khumak]

I finally got around to trying Mator Smash and was pleasantly surprised at how well it combines conflicting NPC changes and actually gets it mostly right.  SSEEDIT's merged patch and Wrye Bash's bashed patch both get it horribly wrong.  Mator Smash correctly merges almost everything.  The only 2 things I've noticed that it sometimes merges incorrectly are facemorph and tint layers, but usually it even gets those right.  I'm using the following conflicting NPC mods below (in order) and have yet to run into anyone who's look did not match my load order while also retaining all of the benefits of the other mods that didn't conflict:

 

Opposite Gender Animations Fix
Immersive Armor
Immersive Weapons
Ethereal Elven Overhaul
Diversity
Hott Witches (oldrim)
Hott Vampires (oldrim)
The Ordinary Women
Bijin AIO
Valerica (Bijin)
Serana (Bijin)
AIO - YBMT

 

So for instance, without me fixing anything Brelas gets EEO's facemorph but Diversity's Apachii Hair while Irileth keeps Bijin's appearance and body armor but gets an immersive weapon, but no facemorph changes from EEO or Diversity.  There's a few instances I found so far where a USSEP change got reverted or a facemorph or tint layer was incorrectly merged but it's close enough that I can let Mator do almost everything and then just fix the few that it made a mistake on.  Prior to this I had to manually merge every single NPC in the game for this to work.

 

Mator also does a great job with water, lighting, and sound conflicts in worldspaces and cells while preserving any other edits made by your other mods.  No more hand tweaking everything to get my ELE/RWT/Sound mods to play nice...  When I filtered for conflict losers I had to fix a grand total of 1 cell record that Mator didn't carry the ELE change over to.

 

I did notice after some more play testing that while Mator gets a lot more things right than SSEEDIT's merged patch or Wrye Bash's bashed patch does, it does still get some types of records completely wrong so I had to go and delete those sections from my smash patch.  I haven't yet found a way to disable the parts I don't like before it builds the patch.  In my case I delete all of these fields and leave the rest:

 

dialogs, quests, perks, race, region, scene, form IDs, story manager branch node, story manager quest node, spell, package, weather

 

Dialogs and quests in particular are completely hosed by Smash in my case so until I did this, Amorous Adventures was broken.

[General Neondaze]

Did you use the auto setting to merge the mods?

[khumak]

I didn't merge any mods with it, I just created a "smash all" patch that merged the changes from the ESPs.  I still have all of the individual mods enabled.  I did merge a bunch of mods prior to that but I do that manually with SSEEDIT.

[Guest]

At some point, the language people use in the modding community is going to have to change. Gotta start getting people to say "resolved conflicts" rather than "merge" because people automatically think of .esps being merged when that's not what's happening. You can see that's where half the confusion comes from on the Mator Smash page, people thinking Mator Smash is a replacement for both Wrye Bash and Merge Plugins.

[Kristus Kringle]

Between Mator Smash and FallrimTools, my game is very stable again. I felt like Bash was causing me more problems than it was solving. I have a bad habit of trying new mods. 

[khumak]

I still use Wrye Bash in addition to Smash.  Wrye Bash seems to be better at merging leveled lists than Smash is so I do both and then filter for conflict losers to see if either of them merge lists that the other one missed.  I copy the changes I want from both of them into an override and then disable both of them.  Then when I add a new mod I run both of them again and just filter for conflict losers to see if I need to tweak my override.

 

I don't use the SSEEDIT's automated merge option anymore at all.  Mator seems to do everything that does, but better.  I still need SSEEDIT to manually tweak things that Mator and Bash miss or resolve incorrectly though.

 

I was particularly impressed with Mator Smash's handling of water, lighting, and sound conflicts for cells and worldspaces.  I have over 200 plugins active after merging dozens more including ELE (which has conflicts with practically everything) and only had to manually tweak 1 or 2 records that Mator missed a water or image space setting for.

 

Both Mator and Bash still miss a few leveled lists that I have to merge manually but between the two of them they catch most of them.

[General Neondaze]

I used the wrong language in my post (#2).

 

I use Wrye to bash patch, allowing me to deactivate a number of esp'. I also use Mator merge plugins.

 

I have shied aware from smash. If I use Smash rather than Wrye will I be able to deactivate some esp' as with Wrye?

[Guest]

8 hours ago, General Neondaze said:

I used the wrong language in my post (#2).

 

I use Wrye to bash patch, allowing me to deactivate a number of esp'. I also use Mator merge plugins.

 

I have shied aware from smash. If I use Smash rather than Wrye will I be able to deactivate some esp' as with Wrye?

No, Mator Smash does NOT merge plugins. Its is conflict resolution only. If you want to reduce your plugin count, use Merge Plugins (by the same author).

[General Neondaze]

1 hour ago, fringecosmos said:

No, Mator Smash does NOT merge plugins. Its is conflict resolution only. If you want to reduce your plugin count, use Merge Plugins (by the same author).

OK, that's clear.

 

When I use the merge plugins tool, should I exclude the resultant esp from Smash?

[Guest]

1 hour ago, General Neondaze said:

OK, that's clear.

 

When I use the merge plugins tool, should I exclude the resultant esp from Smash?

No, you can include the merged esp in your Smash. As suggested on the Mator Smash page and comments, you can Smash a group of plugins to resolve those conflicts and then merge those using Merge Plugins. Then after that, Smash your whole load order.

 

Currently, Matortheeternal has a post saying just that on the first comments page: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/90987?tab=posts

[General Neondaze]

21 hours ago, fringecosmos said:

No, you can include the merged esp in your Smash. As suggested on the Mator Smash page and comments, you can Smash a group of plugins to resolve those conflicts and then merge those using Merge Plugins. Then after that, Smash your whole load order.

 

Currently, Matortheeternal has a post saying just that on the first comments page: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/90987?tab=posts

Thank you.

 

I didn't know that the two mods were only on the Skyrim site.

[Guest]

3 hours ago, General Neondaze said:

Thank you.

 

I didn't know that the two mods were only on the Skyrim site.

It's also available on Matortheeternal's Github: https://github.com/matortheeternal

As far as being only on the Skyrim side of the Nexus and not on SSE's side, Matortheeternal said that it will be moved over once the launch of the software stabilizes. 

[znaroks]

So as someone not familiar with mator smash, it does the same thing as wrye but better? I just use wrye for the bashed patch, thats it

 

[khumak]

50 minutes ago, znaroks said:

So as someone not familiar with mator smash, it does the same thing as wrye but better? I just use wrye for the bashed patch, thats it

 

 

Mator Smash is better at certain types of records in my experience (like NPC records), it also merges records that Wrye Bash completely ignores.

 

So far Wrye Bash is better with leveled lists at least for my mod list.  Mator does sometimes catch things that Wrye Bash misses with leveled lists as well though.  I do both and then just copy the parts I want into an override.  Mator seems less reliant on bash tags as well so if you have mods that don't have the right bash tags that Wrye Bash is looking for, Mator will do a better job.  As an example, Immersive Jewelry's Nexus page lists some bash tags that the mod should have when making a bashed patch but it doesn't actually have any of those tags unless you manually edit the meta data for it.

[Kristus Kringle]

I don't know it well enough to explain it properly but I believe Mator and Wrye have similar goals but approach them differently. He answered a lot of questions on a recent reddit post. 

[JohnSmith54]

Maybe will be usefull for others who Google this topic.

You can merge mods with zMerge (zEdit) - it works absolutely reliable, never had any issue. For example I merged all Flower Gilrs mods into one big mod, it works fine. 

[TopDogCat]

10 hours ago, JohnSmith54 said:

 

You can merge mods with zMerge (zEdit) - it works absolutely reliable, never had any issue.

Well I wouldn't say without issue.  It depends on what you merging.  I merge it with a batch patch that I edit, and it works for the most part, but it can get messy.  I plan to smash it all together when done, but there is a reason you find mod list  Bashed and Smashed.

I'd do my FG, but I have some SL dependencies and it could get ugly for me.