I’ve seen a lot of people having trouble installing mods manually lately, especially people who don’t own flat Fallout 4 for reference. The information people post is usually very partial. I pieced together what I could, and everything seems to be working alright. Please let me know if I’ve missed anything!
- Merge Plugins Standalone (or just Merge Plugins), is a tool for combining mods from Bethesda games which have.ESP/.ESM files. It uses the xEdit codebase as an API, and can be used with Skyrim, Oblivion, Fallout New Vegas, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4.
- I would recommend that you merge only pure record files, by copying records (in correct and non-conflicting order) to a new ESP file in xEdit. Fiddling with BSA2 files and leveled lists in that process can get messy and prone to issues.
- Fallout 4 is a post-apocalyptic role-playing game developed by Bethesda Game Studios and published by Bethesda Softworks.It is the fifth major installment in the Fallout series (eighth overall) and was released on Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One on November 10th, 2015, except in Japan, where it was released on December 17, 2015, due to the need to censor some footage.
- Fallout 4 needs the best possible conditions to perform. If you already have a fast and stable system, just skip to number 2. Cleaning/optimizing Windows is of course a huge subject, so I will not go into details, but rather give suggestions about what to look out for.
- The first step for modding any Bethesda game is Archive Invalidation. To implement this here, edit this file:
Fallout 4 Modding Tutorials: Merging small mods and tweaks Essentially you create a new plugin into which you copy all records from any plugins you want to combine. Then you can safely load only your combined plugin without any of the originals, since it includes everything, not just the overrides for conflicting records.
Documents/My Games/Fallout4Vr/Fallout4VrCustom.ini
I think this file is created after running the game once, but if it doesn’t exist you can just create it. Add the following:
[Archive]
sResourceDataDirsFinal=
bInvalidateOlderFiles=1
Note: I’ve seen some posts instructing people to list your modded directories for the DataDirs value, but according to flat Fallout 4’s Archive Invalidation page, doing so is unnecessary and can drastically increase loading times.
- Drop your mod files into the following folder:
Steam/steamapps/common/Fallout 4 VR/Data/
This should be any files included with the mods, such as .esp, .esm, .ba2, or directories.
- Edit the following file:
%localappdata%/Fallout4VR/Plugins.txt
ASROCK 1333-D667 AUDIO DRIVER DOWNLOAD. which is the same as the following absolute path:
C:/Users/YOUR_USERNAME/AppData/Local/Fallout4VR/Plugins.txt
This is where a lot of people are having problems. This file doesn’t exist by default but it’s just a text file and you can create it manually.
Add the full filenames of any .esp or .esm files (including the file extension) you put in the Data/ folder in the previous step. This makes Fallout aware of those files.
- Still in the plugins.txt file, put an asterisk (*) at the beginning of each filename you want to be active. This tells Fallout to load these files in-game.
And you’re done! Pretty sure that’s all the steps. It’s been working for me so far but I’ve only installed a handful of mods.
For reference, my plugins.txt looks like this:
Fallout 4 Merge Esp
*Insignificant Object Remover.esp
*Remove Overweight Cant Run Message.esp
*Vivid Fallout – All in One – Best Choice.esp
Fallout 4 Merge Esp Free
And a bonus: If you want to tweak different settings, rather than crawling .ini files and guessing at variables I highly recommend /u/bilago‘s configuration tool, which lists all the values used in the engine and edits them for you, as well as including dedicated menus for some of the more important tweaks.