Most of us modders never left, really only Wolf and Stori3D Past left as a result of ME's abandonment. You already have permission from Wolf, though Stori3D is much harder to reach. Wolf's mods in general are already updated, and those that aren't mostly can't be.

There's quite a few active modders still - Equinox, Peaceman/Sir_Moodz, Xaerthus, Wilfrith, Shad, and myself, off the top of my head.

Thanks for responding!

I knew some of you were involved as the CE team, I am glad to hear about the rest. I was really hoping that Stori3D and Kobe (sorry, I don't know how to put the two dots above the "o" ) would come back and update their work, or at least give permission to do so.

I'm not a coder or I would just take it upon myself to patch up what I want. That being said, I am slowly building up a working Load Order that is currently over 200 mods. At one point I had it up to 414 mods, but muffed something up and couldn't figure out what I did, so I'm trying again. This time I'm being a little more meticulous and patient with myself.

It would be helpful if I knew how the game "builds", ie, what is the first thing it loads? The map? Then what? I'm referring to things like physics, models, scripts, etc... If you've ever modded anything by Bethesda, you understand that the game is looking for specific categories of mods to be loaded in a specific order. Am I making sense?

Right now, I'm building the LO strictly off of prerequisites, ie., a skybox mod, followed by the Moon mod, then Equinox Core, then Additional Item Tags, etc. Basically if it doesn't have a prereq, it goes up top. Then mods that build off of those. Then compatches, etc. I'm probably way off base, but that's what happens when an old guy with no programming skills sets out to tackle a project like this.

Most mods should be compatible with each other - load order should only matter when mods overwrite each other or use each others' scripts. Usually if that's the case the mod will have them as dependencies, which are automatically loaded - you don't have to subscribe to or add dependencies to your world, Equinox Core for example will automatically load if any mod using it is present.

To be honest there's not much hope for reviving old mods - most of us will only spend time on something we're interested in doing and is worthwhile, and most of the time reviving old mods isn't really a priority.

One thing to note is that there's different types of modders - I guess you could call them scripters and modellers. We really only have two scripters (not counting Gwin, one of the community devs that doesn't do modding), Equinox and Peaceman. The rest of us are more skilled in Blender and simply adding blocks to the game, which involves creating models and definitions to turn them into blocks. We all have fairly limited modding time and most is put into our own projects.

Hmm. It must be because I'm trying to run a truly huge Load Order that I'm running into more problems. It has definitely been my experience of late that "hand building" the LO has worked where just adding all the mods without ordering them first has not. And I'm still curious as to how the game loads itself in, there has to be an order to it.

Please understand I mean no disrespect, I know that you know way more about this stuff than I do but I have one of those minds that when I start to obsess about something, I wanna understand it as best I can. I guess it just makes more sense to me that if the first thing the game is trying to load in is, say, the skybox... then any skybox mod I wanna use should be first in the LO, not like 42nd or something where the game has to try and go backwards and load something in that should have already been there.

Or maybe it genuinely doesn't matter? Idk... and that's what's bugging me, I actually don't know and the lack of knowledge is making me crazy.

As far as reviving old mods, the problem lies with the fact that some of those mods added some greatly needed content to the game! The Plants (single player) mod (not Re:Plant) is one of them, and the PlantstoSeeds mod requires Plants (single player). The PlantstoSeeds mod says it's .8 ready but when you try to run a game with it in, it loads in the Plants mod (not .8 ready) and the game crashes. So therefore neither mod can be used and that bums me out. I figured it was worth a shot trying to get modders to update their mods, but I completely understand about not wanting to go back and redo something you already did for the benefit of only the handful of people still playing this game. Especially if you don't know if the next update is going to break it again.

All I wan't is Skyrim with the ability to build like ME:CE! Is that too much to ask??!

Stop looking at me like that, I'm NOT crazy, just ambitious.

On a side note: the game Crusader Kings 3 has some really amazing character models and a way to custom design your character... is there a way to port that kind of thing over to ME? Also, if I build something in ME, is there a way to export that model over to a game like Foundation? I know I'm putting my ignorance on display for everyone out there to see, but I never said I was smart... just handsome.

Thanks for your time, Johnbeere.

As far as I know load order is irrelevant unless mods specifically interact with each other. Dependencies like Equinox Core need to come before the mod that uses it, however, mods with dependencies set up don't need them added to your world - if you don't add them, the game will automatically load them correctly.

When loading, the first thing the game does is simply integrate the mod files with the game files, and then starts loading the game from there. Because of that it really doesn't matter what position a skybox mod is in - no matter where in the load order, it will load at the same time as any other mod. Really I don't know what the game loads first specifically - I don't think anyone does since it doesn't come into play.

As well ME really doesn't mind a huge mod list, as long as the mods themselves all work and dependencies are above the dependent mods. ME's unique in that regard, as mods aren't added on top of game content, but integrated into it. Mods are essentially made in the exact same way the game was.

I checked out the Plants2Seeds mod - looks like it only adds features missing from Kobi's plants mod, it doesn't do anything to vanilla plants so it wouldn't do anything even if it didn't load Kobi's plants mod.

Anything to do with characters is very difficult. Player models have been added before, but customizing them beyond coloring them (can be done in the wardrobe with the vanilla player model) is too difficult. We'll be lucky to just get more character models, as it's the sort of thing that's much more effort than it's worth.

And no, there's no way of exporting ME creations as models. I imagine it's not impossible for that to be added, but again far more effort than it's really worth.

I must be in a parallel universe or something.

In between my last comment and this one, I tried adding two mods (Deco Pack and Deco Pack 2+) on top of what I know is a working LO. Two mods that both say they are .8 ready. The game crashed when I tried using either one.

This is why I can't just dump all the mods I want in and try to run it. There is simply no way to tell what interacts with what. At least by adding one at a time I can figure out what works and what doesn't (relative to the mods in my list, I realize a mod may work just fine on its own).

Thank you for explaining how ME works with mods, it really is very different from other games in that regard. And thank you for soundly crushing my dreams for customizable characters and exportable constructions.

I figured PlantstoSeeds didn't do anything without Plants, but with it saying it (PlantstoSeeds) was .8 ready I was hoping it would load Plants and then modify it in such a way as to work in .8. Obviously I was wrong.

Oh well. I will patiently keep building this LO one mod at a time and learn to be happy with what I have. Who am I kidding, I'm never satisfied.