Hi guys, this is my first real post here, and I'm wondering if I could get some advice.

We all know the amount of fantastic texture packs and overhauls that have helped polish this rather dusty old game, to the point its almost overwhelming. Out of the 100 or so mods I've installed, probably half of them are texture packs and that has really stretched the height of my mod list. I'm wondering if it's possible to merge some of these packs together into a single mod. Would it be as simple as just merging it all together, or would it be more complicated than that? To be clear, this is just for personal  use. I just want to simplify my load order and remove any conflicts.

I'd love any advice on this, there is surprising little info on the subject.

Simple texture 'packs' don't usually have an .esp although some of the really large texture overhauls may. I'd have to look over my mod list a little to tell you which ones I use. The point being, if they are just re-textures (no esp) they don't count against your active plugin count. Merge Plugins can help you merge mutiple .esp's into a single merge.

You can merge texture packs manually by selectively picking the textures and corresponding meshes and rolling them into your own 'special' pack. It can be very tedious and Mod Organizer has an advantage (IMO) when doing this, because it easily shows you what texture or mesh is overriding another one. I may be able to direct you to some tutorial's if I knew more about your preference for mod Manager's and whether you're talking about mods with .esp's or just texture mods. If you're using the new Vortex, I know nothing.

Ah ok, thanks for your response. I should have been more specific. Yeah, a couple of mine do have esp's like book of water and NPC overhauls, but I was talking about simple texture re placers. I just want to de-clutter the mod list, and increase stability by removing a bunch of conflicts even though they aren't game breaking.

Outside NMC's and OJO Bueno (which has the one Nuka Cola esp), most of the ones I use are mods that re texture specific things, like Neat Clutter, or dust storms, ghouls, Super Mutants, storm drains etc. If I want to merge a texture into another mod that does have an esp, would that create issues?

I do use Mod Organizer, its the best one imo. How would you go about this with MO? My plan was to go into file explorer, create a new folder for all the textures, use NMC texture as a base, and merge from there. I can give you a list of all the textures I want to merge if that helps.

So with MO I put the big texture pack lower in the list. Double click the mod to bring up the tabbed window and see what textures/meshes it overwrites, make a list and then open up those mods one at a time and in their file tree disable the overwritten pieces/files. I do this first and then go in game to check before I do anything dumb. I do not delete the overwritten files, because I always want to be able to reactivate it without the hassle of re-downloading it.

You might find that there are some textures in NMC that you might like to overwrite with a particular texture from another mod which again is a good reason not to delete the individual files. Like I said, tedious, but eventually you will end up with a very specific, personal choice of various textures and meshes that you will copy into a new folder.

Name that folder whatever you like, archive it into .rar or .zip and install like you would any other mod but lower in the list. Then you can deactivate all the other texture packs (or even delete, but I don't) that are now redundant. I currently have 425 mods installed, many of which are textures and 239 active plugins.

Someone here may have a simpler/quicker way to do this, but this is my way. Lots of coffee and breaks are required!

Dang, that's some mod surgery right there! Do you think there is a difference between your way and just making the folder and overwriting each file with the one I want to replace it with? Say, for example, I wanted to use OJO's over NMC's, instead of individually disabling the conflicted files I just merge it over the top of NMC's. I know there will probably be some NMC textures I prefer and your way is better for that, but overall, it won't break anything willl it? I'm happy to lose a couple of preferred textures here and there if it saves me time. I keep back ups of all my textures anyway, if I want the original back.

Thanks for the help. And holy hell, that is a lot of mods. I thought my 113 was getting bloated. The amount of editing needed to make that load order work would be enough to write a book. You must definitely know your stuff to not get a crash every 5 minutes. I'm very impressed.

Your way would work of course, but it sounded like you were looking for a way to eliminate some mods in the list. I've found in my own modding that I'm a glutton for the "next great texture" until the bloat is something awful, so I followed some others advice to learn how to pare it down to just the textures I want instead of a stack of textures/meshes doing the same thing. When you get into the ridiculous 400-600 or more mods it becomes easier to crash the game....and I have many times. It's part of the learning curve for me. I'm not sure I know what the easy path is!

Ok yeah, that makes sense. Thanks for your advice, it's all been real helpful.