Masterlist Editing

The purpose of this page is to give a bit of information to help with editing a masterlist.

General Hints

• Look in the masterlists for examples, and see the Masterlist Syntax document for the details.
• If you're editing the masterlist in Notepad++, then you will probably find the contents of Masterlist Syntax Highlighting useful.
• Only make edits/additions you're confident about - otherwise create an issue in the masterlist repository's issue tracker, or discuss in the BethSoft forum thread.
• Make as many silent comments as you want within the masterlists - it doesn't hurt (within reason). However, make sure to put them above the line(s) that they refer to.
• Use blank lines to separate mods that are grouped together or where it helps readability.
• Test your changes before uploading them, to make sure you didn't make any syntax mistakes. You can do this by disabling masterlist updating in your BOSS install, then replacing the masterlist it has with the one you've edited, and running BOSS.

How Plugins Are Added

Most of the time you can get away with just reading the mod's description and putting it into the relevant group in the masterlist, if the description/readme is available online you won't even need to download it. This is mostly for mods that just add a new set of armor, or a new item somewhere.

Mods of a specific type (like companion mods) almost always go in one group, so they're similar.

For more complex mods though you'll need to download it and load up TES4Edit/FO3Edit/FNVEdit/TES5Edit, to see exactly what the mod changes and therefore what it would conflict with, and place it based on that.

Bash Tags

All Oblivion and Skyrim Bash Tags are fully documented in the Wrye Bash Advanced Readme. However, in the absence of thorough documentation for Wrye Flash, the following Tags are recognised by it for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas:

• Deflst: Mod over-rides FormID changes, works a little like the Delev tag. Required for mods that remove items from repair lists, amongst other things.
• Destructible: Mod modifies destructible statistics for objects (Import Destuctible)
• WeaponMods: (New Vegas only) mod changes modifications for weapons (such as scope, suppressor, ex-magazine, etc.) (Import Weapon Modifications).

Before adding a tag to a mod, it is recommended that you:

1. Check the mod in TES5Edit to see if it does actually require that tag.
2. Think about the nature of the mod, is it designed so that it is ok if things get overriden, or will it malfunction if that occurs?
3. Read the mod documentation and the mod description field in Wrye Bash to check whether the mod author has supplied any tags with it, or recommended any to be added.

Since Bash tags after the Bash Patch are ignored, any mods which may require them, but load after the Bashed Patch for the time being should have the tag suggestion commented out so as to not confuse users.