Modding-OpenMW.com

Load Order

To ensure you have the right load order for your game, please visit the CFG Generator page. There you can select the mods you want to use and get the right data and plugin load orders for them.

The details

With OpenMW, load order refers to two things:

  1. The order of plugins (.esp, .omwaddon files, etc.)
  2. The order of data files (you are using separate data paths... right?!)

Tools exist for solving the first issue with vanilla. While tools such as Mlox produces results that can be converted to an OpenMW-readable format, they do not even consider OpenMW-native plugins (.omwaddon files) and in my tests produced incorrect results with an OpenMW loaddout.

The second issue does not exist for vanilla Morrowind since it doesn't even have that capability. But with OpenMW it is possible to produce undesired results with a "bad" data file load order.

How I produce my load order

The load order that's presented by the CFG Generator is produced through several steps:

  1. Setup a vanilla Morrowind install.
  2. Install Mlox from the git repo (I'm using the commit: 13b077407928cd42be6f21277b400ba2a8499683).
  3. Install Danae's rules list from the git repo, put it into the root of the Mlox install.
  4. I copy these rules (two .txt files from the repo) into my $HOME/.local/share/mlox directory so they are used when I run Mlox. Note that this location will be different for Windows users.
  5. Load up all non-omwaddon pluigins into a vanilla ini file. I wrote a small python script to do this for me, please find that on Sourcehut with some rough usage instructions.
  6. Scan this file with Mlox.
  7. Apply the adjustments made by Mlox, with some exceptions.
    • In some cases (that need to be documented), I found that Mlox recommended a load order that broke some mods.
    • Further, Mlox is totally unaware of native OpenMW plugins and can't factor those in.
  8. Translate the Mlox-edited vanilla ini file into the openmw.cfg format (someday I'll talk about this process in the tips section.)
  9. Manually insert the various native OpenMW plugins
    • This is a process of trial and error, but for the most part these plugins (at least, the ones recommended by this site) fit into the load order fairly logically.
    • Several quick playthroughs were done to ensure things were as they should be. Lots of flying around, teleporting, and doing things via the console for expedience.
  10. When all was found to be working, I settled on the load order as is currently found on the generator.