LOOT is a plugin load order optimiser for TES IV: Oblivion, TES V: Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It is designed to assist mod users in avoiding detrimental conflicts, by automatically calculating a load order that satisfies all plugin dependencies and maximises each plugin's impact on the user's game.
LOOT also provides some load order error checking, including checks for requirements, incompatibilities and cyclic dependencies. In addition, it provides a large number of plugin-specific usage notes, bug warnings and Bash Tag suggestions for Wrye Bash.
While LOOT is able to calculate correct load order positions for the vast majority of plugins using only their content, it cannot do so for all plugins. As such, LOOT provides a mechanism for supplying additional plugin metadata so that it may sort them correctly.
LOOT is intended to make using mods easier, and mod users should still possess a working knowledge of mod load ordering. See Introduction To Load Orders for an overview.
LOOT does not support Windows XP or earlier.
LOOT can be installed either using its automated installer or manually. To install LOOT manually, extract the downloaded archive to a location of your choice.
If LOOT was installed using the installer, then use the uninstaller linked to in the Start Menu to uninstall LOOT. If LOOT was installed manually:
LOOTfolder in your local application data folder, which can be accessed by entering
%LOCALAPPDATA% into Windows' File Explorer.
When LOOT is run, it will attempt to detect which of the supported games are installed. If a default game has been set, LOOT will run for it, otherwise it will run for the same game as it last ran for. If the relevant game cannot be detected, if there is no record of the last game LOOT ran for, it will run for the first detected game.
LOOT can also be launched with the LOOT.exe [--game=<game folder name>] command line parameter to set the game to run for. If the supplied game folder name is valid, the default and last game values are ignored. The default folder names are Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout3 and FalloutNV.
Once a game has been set, the main window will be displayed.
Clicking the Edit Metadata
button will open LOOT's metadata editor, where you can make changes to the metadata LOOT uses to sort plugins, the messages that get displayed for plugins, and any Bash Tag suggestions LOOT makes.
Clicking the Sort Plugins
button will begin the plugin sorting process. This will sort your plugins, allow you to make any changes to the load order it produces, then display a report that details the results of LOOT's activity.
Clicking the View Last Report
button will display the report generated the last time LOOT sorted your plugins for the current game.
The File
menu provides menu items for sorting plugins, viewing the debug log and the last report LOOT generated, and quitting LOOT. The menu's Redate Plugins
option is provided so that Skyrim modders may set the load order for the Creation Kit. It is only enabled for Skyrim, and changes the timestamps of the plugins in its Data folder to match their current load order. A side effect of changing the timestamps is that any Steam Workshop mods installed will be re-downloaded.
The Edit
menu provides menu items for accessing LOOT's metadata editor and the settings window.
The Game
menu allows you to change which game LOOT is running for. Games that LOOT cannot find are greyed out, and the the one LOOT is running for is marked with a bullet point. To change the active game, simply select another game in the list.
The Help
menu provides a link to this readme and an about page that contains the version of LOOT being run, some legal information and a link to the project homepage.
Clicking the Sort Plugins
button in the main window will begin the sorting process.
First, LOOT downloads and applies any masterlist updates available, if the relevant setting is enabled. If the latest update cannot be parsed (eg. due to typos), then LOOT will roll back until it finds a version that works.
LOOT then sorts your plugins according to a combination of data from the plugins themselves, and any masterlist and userlist entries they may have. If a cyclic interaction is detected (eg. A depends on B depends on A), then sorting will fail.
If sorting is successful, the calculated load order is then displayed in the dialog shown above. In this window, you can view the load order calculated by LOOT, and make any edits to the metadata used that you feel are necessary. The window is a simplified version of the metadata editor window, in which all metadata that does not affect sorting is hidden. Please see the section below for more information on how to edit metadata using it.
If the Apply
button is clicked, LOOT does one of two things: if no edits were made, then it immediately applies the load order; but if edits were made, then it repeats the sorting process with the new edits applied. If the Cancel
button is clicked, then the load order and any edits made are discarded.
LOOT then generates a report and displays it either in a new window or in your default browser, according to the value of the relevant setting. Any errors encountered during the sorting process will be displayed in this report. See the next section for more information on the report.
LOOT is able to sort plugins ghosted by Wrye Bash, and can extract Bash Tags and version numbers from plugin descriptions. Provided that they have the Filter Bash Tag present in their description, LOOT can recognise filter patches and so avoid displaying unnecessary error messages for any of their masters that may be missing.
While reading very large plugins, such as the game's main master file, LOOT may appear to stop responding: this is not an issue. The time it takes for LOOT to sort your load order depends primarily on the size of the masterlist being used, the total size of the files in your load order, and the number of plugins in your load order. The first run is likely to be longer than subsequent runs as LOOT needs to download the full masterlist, rather than just the changes made by updates. In testing, it was found that sorting ~90 plugins with a total size of ~350 MB and a 5 MB masterlist takes around 15 seconds, though performance will vary with computer hardware.
LOOT's results report is comprised of two sections:
Summarytab gives information on the versions of LOOT and the masterlist used, whether masterlist updating is enabled, and breaks down some message and plugin numbers. It also notifies you if there have been no changes in the
Detailstab since you last ran LOOT for the same game. Finally, the
Summarytab is also where any global messages supplied in the masterlist and any errors encountered during sorting are displayed.
Detailstab lists the plugins LOOT sorted in their new load order, along with any messages LOOT has provided for them. LOOT will also display the plugin's CRC value and extract its version if found in the plugin's description field. If LOOT suggests any Bash Tags to be added, they will be displayed in green text, while any Bash Tags to be removed will be displayed in red text.
In addition, there are a few filters that can be used to selectively hide items in the Details
tab. These filters are:
Do not clean..
LOOT will display the version numbers of any plugins that provide them in their description fields. If a plugin supplies no version number, it cannot be displayed. The version numbers may not reflect the actual version of the mod installed - this could either be due to the mod author forgetting to update the description, or due to a mistake in LOOT's detection. As version numbers are supplied by mod authors in a wide range of formats and LOOT has to detect as many as possible, it occasionally identifies parts of some descriptions as version numbers incorrectly. When in doubt, check the version number given in a mod's readme.
LOOT's plugin messages are a valuable resource, acting as a means of providing users with information that they might otherwise not obtain. It is important for a stable, healthy game that you act on any messages that require action.
If you think a message suggests an unnecessary action, report it to an official LOOT thread. If you encounter a message that is non-conditional, ie. it suggests an action but is still displayed on subsequent runs of LOOT after the action has been carried out, also report it to an official LOOT thread, so that it can be made conditional.
LOOT's sorting algorithm uses the contents of plugins to work out where they should load relative to one another. However, this is sometimes not enough for it to produce a correct load order. In such cases, additional metadata can be supplied so that the plugins get sorted correctly. This metadata is supplied to LOOT by two sources: one is the masterlist, which is maintained by the LOOT team, and the other is the userlist, which you can edit as you desire.
The metadata editor allows you to manage the metadata stored in your userlist. It is a more fully-featured version of the dialog displayed during sorting. When opened, it lists all the plugins you have installed, and any that are missing but have existing user-added metadata, in alphabetical order. Plugins that load BSAs are displayed in blue text, and plugins with user-added metadata are displayed with a tick in the first column of the list. Selecting a plugin then opens its metadata for editing, and displays any existing metadata in the fields to the right of the plugin list. Right-clicking a plugin displays a context menu containing a few commands. The editor fields and context menu commands are explained in the tables below.
The Add …
, Edit …
and Remove …
buttons are used to edit the contents of the list currently visible. The Edit …
and Remove …
buttons are greyed out if no row is selected or if the selected row is not user-added metadata, but comes from the masterlist or the plugin itself. Metadata that comes from the masterlist or the plugin itself cannot be edited or removed, only added to. This is to prevent users from accidentally overriding important metadata.
The Show only conflicting plugins
checkbox filters the plugin list so that only plugins which either contain conflicting records or (if the selected plugin loads a BSA) load BSAs that may contain conflicting resources are displayed. While the filter is active, it is also possible to add plugins to the Requirements
, Incompatibilities
and Load After
lists by drag 'n' dropping them from the plugin list. The filter must be deactivated to select another plugin for editing.
The Save Changes
button will save any user-added metadata to your userlist, including any changes made, then exit the metadata editor. The Cancel
button will exit the editor without saving any changes.
| Field | Description |
|---|---|
| Enable User Changes | If this is checked, LOOT will use the metadata you supplied when sorting the current plugin. Otherwise, your metadata will be ignored. |
| Priority | Modifies plugin position relative to others that change one or more of the same records, but which are otherwise unrelated (ie. neither plugin lists the other as a master, requirement, or in its "load after" list). Plugins that don't change any of the same records are not compared, unless:
A plugin with a higher priority value will load after a plugin with a lower priority value. Plugins have a default priority of 0. |
| Requirements | This is a list of files that are required by the current plugin for it to function correctly. LOOT will display an error message if any of the listed files are missing.
Any file, not just plugins, can be listed here, and each file has three sub-fields:
Note that listing a plugin's masters as requirements is pointless, as LOOT already checks them. |
| Incompatibilities | This is a list of files that are incompatible with the plugin. LOOT will display an error message if any of the listed files are found.
Any file, not just plugins, can be listed here, and each file has the same three sub-fields as for the requirements field. |
| Load After | This is a list of plugins which, if present, the current plugin must load after, but which are not required. This field can be used for resolving specific compatibility issues. |
| Messages | A list of messages that are to be displayed for the plugin in LOOT's report. These have no bearing on a plugin's position in the load order.
Each message has four sub-fields:
If a message's condition determines that it should not be displayed, then it will not be displayed, no matter the language. However, if a message's condition determines that it should be displayed, but the language is specified and doesn't match the language LOOT is running in, the message will not be displayed. |
| Bash Tags | A list of Bash Tags. These are used by Wrye Bash when generating a Bashed Patch. LOOT's metadata includes Bash Tag addition and removal suggestions, and any Bash Tags that came with the plugin are also displayed.
As LOOT can suggest Bash Tags be added or removed, it is possible for the same Tag to appear twice, being suggested for addition and removal. In such cases, removal overrides addition. Each Bash Tag has three sub-fields:
If a plugin's masters are missing, an error message will be displayed for it. Filter patches are special mods designed for use with a Bashed Patch that do not require all their masters to be present, and so any plugin with the |
| Context Menu Command | Description |
|---|---|
| Copy Name | Copies the selected plugin's filename to the clipboard. |
| Copy Metadata As Text | Copies the selected plugin's current metadata, as it appears in the userlist, to the clipboard. This makes it easier to share your metadata changes with the LOOT team, as they can then paste this text directly into the masterlist, and also avoids any typos being introduced. If posting the text in an online forum that supports BBCode (as most forums do), be sure to wrap it in [code] tags, eg. [code]copied text[/code], so that the spaces are not removed by the forum software.
|
| Remove Plugin User-Added Metadata | This removes all saved user-added metadata from the selected plugin, and any unsaved data added to the plugin since the Metadata Editor window was opened. |
| Remove All User-Added Metadata | This removes all user-added metadata from all plugins. |
LOOT's settings window may be accessed by clicking Edit→Settings
in the main window's menu bar. LOOT's settings are detailed in the table below.
| Setting | Description |
|---|---|
| Default Game | If set to something other than Autodetect, this overrides game autodetection. If the game specified is not detected, LOOT falls back to autodetection. |
| Language | Controls the language LOOT uses in its interfaces. Debug messages are always displayed in English, and any plugin messages that do not have translations in the selected language will be displayed in English instead. |
| Debug Verbosity | Controls the verbosity of the debug output, which is written to %LOCALAPPDATA%\LOOT\LOOTDebugLog.txt.
|
| Update masterlist before sorting | If checked, LOOT will update its masterlist, should an update be available, before sorting plugins. |
The games list allows the customisation of which games LOOT offers support for, trivialising support for multiple copies of a game and Total Conversions. The games listed here will be displayed in the main window's Game
menu when LOOT is next run. The Add Game
, Edit Game
and Remove Game
buttons are used to edit the list. Each game has several columns, which are explained below.
| Column | Description |
|---|---|
| Name | The name of the game, or another identifying string, that is displayed in menus and the main window's title bar. |
| Base Game Type | Every game LOOT runs for must use the plugin file format and load order system of one of the following games:
|
| LOOT Folder Name | The sub-folder which LOOT uses to store the game's files in. Each game must be given a unique sub-folder. |
| Master File | The game's main master file. This is specified as it must load before all other plugins. Note that Skyrim-based games will always load Skyrim.esm first, so this column must always be set to Skyrim.esmfor such games. |
| Masterlist Repository URL | The URL of the repository that LOOT uses to update its local copy of the masterlist. If set to an empty string, masterlist updating will be skipped.
Masterlist repositories are Git repositories that are configured to allow unauthenticated read access and contain a masterlist file named masterlist.yaml in their root directory. The LOOT team maintains a set of official repositories for the games that LOOT supports by default.
|
| Masterlist Repository Branch | The branch of the masterlist repository that LOOT should get masterlist updates from. |
| Install Path | The path to the game's folder, in which the Data folder lies. Either this or a registry key must be supplied. |
| Install Path Registry Key | The registry key, in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE, that contains the install path of the game. This is used to obtain the install path if LOOT has no previous record of the game's install path, or LOOT's stored install path is invalid. Either this or an install path must be supplied.
|
Note that for Skyrim, multiple copies or Total Conversions will all edit the same plugins.txt file, and so they lack the level of independence that is achievable for other games.
If LOOT encounters a problem at any point, it should provide an error message, either in a dialog (as is generally the case) or in its report (as for errors encountered during the sorting process). If LOOT unexpectedly crashes, or you experience a problem for which no error message is given, please report the crash or problem to an official LOOT thread (see Contributing To LOOT), so that it can be fixed.
If the information below does not help you to solve any problems you are experiencing, please seek further support in one of the official LOOT threads.
There are a few general reasons why LOOT may fail to function correctly. Check if any of the symptoms listed below fit your issue.
lockyour load order.
TESV.exe, as this interferes with LOOT's ability to decide how to set the load order.
plugins.txt or loadorder.txt when they are opened in Notepad.
LOOT is very much a community project, and contributions from its users are vital to its upkeep. The best way to contribute is to make changes yourself at GitHub! It's the fastest way to get changes you want applied, and you'll get your name automatically immortalised in our credits.
Otherwise, general discussion takes place in LOOT's official forum threads. These are linked to at the bottom of LOOT's homepage.
If you want to submit metadata, the easiest way to do so is to add the metadata to your own LOOT install (either during sorting or in the Metadata Editor), and use the Copy Metadata As Text feature to easily get it in a form that you can then edit into a masterlist on GitHub or post in the official forum threads.
Information on dirty plugins is very welcome, but for such information to be useful we require at least the filename and the CRC of the dirty plugin. The CRC may be calculated using Wrye Bash or 7-zip, with other sources being unverified as correct. In the case of 7-zip, the CRC checksum for data
is the one required. In addition to the CRC, the number of records removed (the ITM count) and/or undeleted (the UDR count) are also welcome.
LOOT supports translation into other languages, with the following limitations:
Translations are best submitted through GitHub's forking system. You will need to fork the LOOT source code repository. All file paths given below are relative to the base folder of that repository.
To translate LOOT's installer:
src/installer.nsi in a text editor of your choice.
English Strings. Copy and paste this section into a new text file, and translate the quoted strings, replacing the English text. For the lines beginning
VIAddVersionKey, only translate the second quoted string.
File->New catalogue from POT file...and choose the template file at
resources/l10n/template.pot. In the Catalog propertiesdialog, just click
OKwithout changing anything.
loot.po translation file in the relevant subdirectory of resources/l10n, then select Catalogue->Update from POT file...and choose the template file you downloaded. Click
OKin the
Update summarydialog.
Some languages may use different words or phrases for different contexts where only one word or phrase may be used for all contexts in English. While no contextual information is supplied to translators by default, it can be added on request. To request the addition of contextual information to a text string, contact WrinklyNinja, quoting the structure that contains the string for which you are requesting contextual information.
Some strings to be translated may contain special characters. Different types of special character that may be encountered are:
\. Backslashes must be escaped using another backslash, so if you wanted to display a single backslash \, you would put \\ in your translated string.
". Double-quotation marks must be preceded by a backslash, ie. \", or LOOT will crash when it tries to display the string.
\n. Do not change the position of these characters relative to the surrounding text, they are responsible for creating new lines.
&. If a string contains a word that begins with or includes an ampersand, the string is for a menu item and the ampersand is a symbol placed before a specific letter and used to show which keyboard key can be used to select that menu item. The ampersand can be moved to be placed before a more appropriate letter in the translated text.
%1%. If formatting placeholders are used in the untranslated string, they must all be present in the translated string, or LOOT will crash when it tries to display the translated string. Placeholders can be moved around so that the sentence makes grammatical sense in the target language.
loot.po in a location of your choosing.
LOOT is developed by a team on GitHub, with contributions from users. A full list of GitHub contributors may be found here. An up-to-date list of team members may be viewed on the project wiki. Unless otherwise noted, team members can be contacted on the Bethesda Softworks Forums or on The Nexus Forums via the private messaging system.
LOOT's masterlists were largely converted from BOSS's masterlists, and so credit is due to the very large number of sources and people who have contributed to them.
In addition, the following are credited with application-related support:
LOOT is written in C++ and makes use of the Alphanum, Boost, libespm, libgit2, libloadorder, wxWidgets and yaml-cpp libraries. LOOT's reports are written in HTML5/CSS3/Javascript and make use of Polyfill.js and RequireJS. Copyright license information for all these may be found here.
LOOT is distributed under the GNU General Public License v3.0, aside from the documentation, which is distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License v1.3. The full texts of the licenses are included with LOOT in the accompanying GNU GPL v3.txt and GNU FDL v1.3.txt files.
While the GPL license allows anyone to make derivative works of LOOT, the LOOT Team encourages those thinking of doing so to first discuss their reasoning for such an endeavour with the Team. It may be that what the derivative work would do differently is already planned for a future version of LOOT or would be happily integrated into LOOT, thus avoiding any extra effort by others.
LOOT has been specifically designed to prevent it being locked into the LOOT Team's official masterlist repositories. Nevertheless, the LOOT Team appeals to the community to avoid the distribution of unofficial masterlists, as this would only hamper the effort to create one set of stores for load order information. Any issues with a masterlist are best brought to the attention of the LOOT Team so that they may be remedied.
GNU Free Documentation License Version 1.3 Notice:
Copyright (C) 2012—2014 WrinklyNinja
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts.
A copy of the license is included in the file named "GNU FDL v1.3.txt".
This appendix provides a general overview of load ordering in the games LOOT supports for those who are unfamiliar with the concept. For simplicity, the game
will be used when the text refers to any of the games that LOOT supports.
Mod plugins for the game are files that end in .esp or .esm. These files are created by the game's official editing tools, or by third-party modders' tools. They contain various data records, which cover almost all aspects of what is in the game – NPCs, items, races, interiors, worlds, quests, etc. – and can either be new or changes to the records added by another plugin.
When the game is run, it loads each installed plugin one by one in a certain load order. The load order is important for two reasons:
There are a few hardcoded rules related to load order:
.esm stands for Elder Scrolls Master).
Skyrim.esm always loads before all other plugins.
Update.esm is present, it is always loaded. It loads after all other master plugins, unless it has another position explicitly set.
A plugin's position in the load order is often displayed by mod managers as a hexadecimal number, from 00 to FE (0 to 255 in decimal). The plugin with position 00 loads first, and the plugin with position FE is loaded last. Hexadecimal numbers are used to display the load order positions of plugins because these numbers form the first two digits of the code that the game uses to reference the records that the plugin adds, so knowing the numbers allows modders and mod users to determine from which plugin a record is from.
In Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas, load order is determined by plugin timestamps, and the plugins you have accessed are listed in %LOCALAPPDATA%\<game>\plugins.txt. As such, it's best to use a mod manager to create a backup of your load order. In Skyrim, the load order of active plugins is stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\<game>\plugins.txt, and modding utilities generally use %LOCALAPPDATA%\<game>\loadorder.txt to store the load order of all plugins. This makes backing up your load order as easy as making copies of those two files.
Dirty edits are often a side-effect of mod creation, and are often due to bugs in the utilities Bethesda has provided to create mods, rather than bad practice by mod authors. Dirty edits can cause a wide range of issues, including incorrect game settings, missing content, broken quests and crashing to desktop. The more dirty edits there are in a mod, and the more mods with dirty edits you use, the more likely you are to experience issues.
Thankfully there is a way to remove dirty edits from mods relatively easily, a process known as mod cleaning, using TES4Edit, FO3Edit, FNVEdit or TES5Edit (for Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Skyrim respectively). Detailed instructions and information on mod cleaning are available for Oblivion and Skyrim, with the process being largely the same for the others.
The problem of dirty edits is largely a problem of ignorance on the part of mod authors and users alike of the problems dirty mods can cause. As such, there are community efforts to raise awareness of dirty edits and cleaning. LOOT plays a key role in these efforts, as it holds the complete list of all known dirty mods (as does BOSS), and it uses this information to provide notification messages to users for any dirty mods they have installed.
LOOT identifies and describes unclean plugins using four key pieces of information. They are:
In addition to the above, there is another type of dirty edit known as a wild edit. These are any edit that is unrelated to the purpose of the mod, and so provide unnecessary opportunity for conflicts with other mods that do need to change the same thing. It can be difficult to tell if an edit is a wild edit, and so they cannot be automatically cleaned. LOOT can still notify users of wild edits and link to information on fixing them if the CRCs of plugins with wild edits are reported, along with details on what needs cleaning.
LOOT and the modding communities rely on user contribution of this information to progress. For information on how to contribute, see Contributing To LOOT. If you find that a mod contains dirty edits, you should also report this to the mod's author so that they can fix it.
Note: TES4Edit et al. will include a variety of junk records in the ITM count for a plugin, such as new empty cells that are automatically generated and are almost impossible to remove. These junk records are non-harmful, and LOOT may inform users when a mod contains these and no true ITMs to avoid confusion.
If you are running Windows Vista or a later version of Windows, LOOT (and other modding programs) may be prevented from working correctly by the UAC security feature. There are four common workarounds to this problem:
Program Files(or
Program Files (x86)if on 64-bit Windows). UAC prevents unauthorised edits to these folders, so by installing the game outside of them, you remove it from UAC's reach, allowing you to use mods more easily.
Full Controlpermissions over your game install folder. This will allow you to make any edits you desire while keeping UAC active and on guard for any edits made by programs you do not run, and also means that you do not need to reinstall your game to a new location.
Run as administrator.
For those that wish to take the third option and give themselves Full Control
permissions, here is a guide:
Properties.
Properties, select the
Securitytab, and click the
Edit...button. A UAC prompt may appear, simply allow yourself to continue.
Group or user namesbox, select the
Usersoption.
Full Controlin the
Allowcolumn. Press OK to exit. If a UAC prompt appears, allow the change.
Propertieswindow, select OK to exit. You should now have Full Control permissions over your chosen folder.
Only program history is recorded here. The masterlists are updated far too frequently for their changes to be concisely recorded here, but a full history of changes to them may be viewed by browsing the GitHub repositories.
.git folders preventing repository deletion.
Ctrl-F keyboard shortcut.