The Ultimate Guide to Morrowind Load Order Sorter: Tips, Tricks and Best Practices

Setting the right load order for your TES III: Morrowind, TES IV: Oblivion, Nehrim: At Fate's Edge, TES V: Skyrim, TES V: Skyrim Special Edition, TES V: Skyrim VR, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout 4 and Fallout 4 VR mods is a crucial step to enjoying a stable modded game. The Load Order Optimisation Tool (LOOT) can help with that, by providing automated load order sorting that's simple to use and fully customisable.

Morrowind Load Order Sorter

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While sorting, LOOT checks for load order errors (such as incompatibilities and missing requirements) and notifies you of any issues that it detects. It also provides thousands of plugin-specific messages, such as usage notes and bug warnings, to help keep your game healthy.

The order in which your mods load can be critical to them working properly and adjusting the load order can resolve many problems. Morrowind executes Master files (.esm's) and plugins (.esp's) in sequence, known as the "load order", and it is the last changes to a particular item or NPC or script that take effect. If a number of mods make changes to an object (includes NPCs and creatures) and we do nothing, only the changes made by the last mod are implemented and the others ignored. This is fundamental to an understanding of how mods operate and are managed.

Changing the load order and using the Merge Objects function provided by TESTool allows us to determine which mod's changes will have primacy, to maximize or at least optimize the different changes implemented and to reduce conflicts. By altering load order we determine which mod's changes will have primacy. By using the Merge Objects function available in TESTool we amalgamate the changes made to the same object by a number of mods.

The following covers in great detail the answer to one of the most frequently asked questions regarding Vortex: why we chose to forsake the established plugin drag and drop approach in favour of what we are convinced to be a more hassle-free solution to load order management.

Dragging and dropping plugins freely is one way of achieving a stable load order and likely the main way many veteran modders of Bethesda Games (The Elder Scrolls and Fallout series) will have employed in the past. The downside of this approach, however, is that it requires knowledge of mods, plugins, the way they interact, and ultimately: the mod content itself.

Further, mod authors will often be overly cautious in their recommendations regarding where their plugin needs to go in the load order and simply opt to tell users that it needs to load last. However, there is generally no need for a plugin to load dead last in the load order. All that matters is that it loads before/after other plugins that conflict, or otherwise interact with it - which to determine requires knowledge about both plugins in question.

Lastly, it is also possible that information provided by a mod author or someone compiling a working load order at one point is simply outdated and no longer accounts for the most recent versions of plugins by the time you read about it.

With Vortex, on the other hand, you are delegating load order management to a powerful tool: LOOT - the Load Order Optimisation Tool - designed to automatically sort your plugins in a sensible way. Not only that, but LOOT will also alert you to issues in your load order such as missing patches (patch plugins) that you need in order to make two or more mods compatible with each other.

Without LOOT, you are relying on your own knowledge of mods and plugins in order to determine, which mods need patches in order to be made compatible, which mods need to load before one other, but after yet another mod etc.

In essence, LOOT is a curated masterlist that is constantly being updated by mod authors and knowledgeable users alike. You can think of it as a load order management tool powered by the combined load order related knowledge of thousands of users.

Manually tinkering with your load order should be the absolute exception, not the rule. It also makes it a lot harder for people to help you troubleshoot any potential issues you might experience, as a load order that has been manually created via drag and drop is more prone to errors.

To sum it up, given our years of first-hand experience with not only modding various games, but with actual development of mod managers and mod management tools, we have arrived at the conclusion that the best way to reliably create a stable load order is a combination of automation and the rare, exceptional custom rule, rather than the previously established drag and drop system as a base for load order management.

Ultimately, we want to move towards a future where load order optimisation is entirely automated and constantly enhanced/maintained by our community of millions of modders, rather than taking a step back to the previously established drag and drop system. If you are in doubt, please consider giving the automatic load order sorting Vortex provides a shot and you might discover that it takes a huge load of work off your shoulders.

If you do encounter an actual technical issue with the automatic load order sorting, please, consider contributing to LOOT directly and do not hesitate to inform us providing concrete examples of plugins that are being sorted in the wrong order via our Vortex support forums.

The hard part about maintaining the Oblivion masterlist would be making all of BOSS's implicit load order rules explicit (e.g. does B load after A in the BOSS masterlist because it needs to, or just because that's where it was put?). Though now that LOOT has groups, I suppose you could try bunging everything in a load of groups to match the BOSS masterlist and go from there. That's a very heavy-handed approach though.

You know, I don't think there will be a "what tool is better than the other" confusion, because most people are using LOOT these days and those people doesn't want be *forced* to use another tool just to sort a loadorder in Morrowind.

I installed Oblivion and 7 DLC, not Mehrunes Razor and Vile Lair, then I sorted the loadorder in LOOT. The result I got was that there were two DLC with the same timestamp then I sorted the loadorder in BOSS without having two DLC with the same timestamp.

You can add any of mlox's rules to mlox_user.txt, but for people that want to customize their load order, the [Order] rule is probably all that is needed. Here is a simple example:Let's say you want to make sure that mlox always puts plugin "Foo.esp" before "Bar.esp". Just create a simple text file called "mlox_user.txt" in your mlox directory (using Notepad or whatever) containing the following:[Order]Foo.espBar.espFrom now on, when you press the mlox update button, mlox will make sure that this is the order for those two plugins. Note that the [Order] rules in mlox_user.txt (your personal rules) take precedence over the rules in mlox_base.txt.

When you say "messes up load order" I'm assuming you mean on the left-hand side yes and not the plugin list right? Good to know, because I was going to be doing that. As far as doing the whole switching back and forth, I wouldn't want to do that on my SSD, but I suppose I could copy and past it on to my Data drive and then move it back when I want to try something else yes?

I also don't see any benefit in "backing up" load order ... isn't that info tied to and saved in the profile?? If not, isn't it simple to run LOOT each time profiles or plugin list changes? Am I missing something fundamental, or are we just dealing with personal preferences here?

Hello, Im currently running MSGO and Morrowind Rebirth (both most current versions) along with pursuit enhanced, and I had noticed that the two mods better clothes and better armor seem to just simply stop loading, giving the NPC's the vanilla segmented appearance. I was troubleshooting and I discovered that this stopped when I disabled Morrowind Rebirth 3.1.esp only. This file is the very last one in my load order. I want to use these two (MSGO & MwRebirth) together and this is the only thing preventing that (it does not impare the game in any way and it does not cause any error messages). Do you know why its doing this, and how I can fix it?

So much like a user previously described as I down loaded version 3.3 from the nexus and installed then checked the master and plugin files for 3.3 my morrowind failed to launch any new or old game. So I go back to my start up menu to remove the master and plugin files but it crashes immediately when I press on the data files option on the start menu. Not sure what's going on here because I've used previous versions before with no problem. I found it odd that there were 2 master and 2 plugin files for 3.3 but for master me plugin there was 1 for each that had no description for it or any information. Could those empty files be the problem? 2ff7e9595c