LOOT is a plugin load order optimisation tool for TES IV: Oblivion, TES V: Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and Fallout 4. 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.

Although LOOT is able to calculate the correct load order positions for the vast majority of mods without any user input, some plugins are designed to load at certain positions in a load order, and LOOT may be unable to determine this from the plugins themselves. 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.

Downloads

Releases are hosted on GitHub, and snapshot builds are available on Bintray. The snapshot build archives are named like so:

loot_<last tag>-<revisions since tag>-g<short revision ID>_<branch>.7z

For example LOOT v0.7.0-alpha-2-10-gf6d7e80_dev.7z was built using the revision with shortened commit ID f6d7e80, which is 10 revisions after the revision tagged v0.7.0-alpha-2, and is on the dev branch.

Building LOOT

LOOT's build process uses CMake. Most of LOOT's C++ dependencies are managed by CMake, but the following must be obtained manually:

Boost v1.55+

Building LOOT's GUI also uses Node.js. With it installed, run npm install then node_modules/.bin/bower install from the repository root to install the additional tools and dependencies required.

The GUI's HTML file is automatically built when building the LOOT GUI binary, but it can also be built by running node scripts/vulcanize.js from the repository root.

Platform-specific instructions for building Windows binaries using Microsoft Visual Studio are given in docs/BUILD.MSVC.md, and instructions for building Linux binaries using GCC are given in docs/BUILD.LINUX.md.

CMake Variables

LOOT uses the following CMake variables to set build parameters:

Parameter	Values	Default	Description
`BUILD_SHARED_LIBS`	`ON`, `OFF`	`ON`	Whether or not to build a shared LOOT API binary.
`MSVC_STATIC_RUNTIME`	`ON`, `OFF`	`OFF`	Whether to link the C++ runtime statically or not when building with MSVC.

You may also need to set BOOST_ROOT if CMake cannot find Boost.

Building The API Documentation

The API documentation is built using Doxygen, Breathe and Sphinx. On Windows, install Doxygen and Python 2.7, add Doxygen's binary path, C:\Python27 and C:\Python27\Scripts (or wherever you installed Python to) to your %PATH%, then:

python -m pip install breathe sphinx
cd docs/api
doxygen
cd ../..
sphinx-build -b html docs/api build/documentation/sphinx

Packaging Releases

Packaging scripts are provided for creating an installer on Windows and compressed archives on Windows and Linux.

Run the scripts/installer.iss Inno Setup script to build an installer executable in the build folder. The script requires the Inno Download Plugin to be installed. If the unofficial Korean and Simplified Chinese Inno Setup translation files are installed alongside the official translation files, then the installer script will also offer those language options. If they are not found, the installer will be built without them.

The archive packaging script requires Git, and on Windows it also requires 7-Zip, while on Linux it requires tar and xz. It can be run using node scripts/archive.js, and creates archives for LOOT, its API and the metadata validator in the build folder. The archives are named as described in the Downloads section above.