Can't get Mator Smash to handle one particular use case

[Piranhaha]

Hi all,

 

I'm tinkering around with how to use Mator Smash and it's working amazingly well for the most part, but there's one particular scenario where I can't get it to behave correctly. The record in question is Ulfric's head texture. In my load order, it's handled as follows:

 

Skyrim.esm (not smashed): default

Unofficial Patch (smashed rules #1): same as master

Original Opening Scene Extended (not smashed): same as master

WICO (smashed rules #2): record is deleted

WICO Original Opening Scene patch (not smashed): record is deleted

MorrowLoot Ultimate (smashed rules #1): record is resurrected, same as Skyrim.esm

MorrowLoot Patches Merged (smashed rules #1): record is deleted as in WICO

Small NPC Appearance Mods Merged (smashed rules #2): record is resurrected, same as Skyrim.esm

 

Here's a screenshot of the scenario in SSEEdit, highlighting the problem: https://imgur.com/HJDHN0h

 

Here's a screenshot of the NPC record settings in Mator Smash which I'm using for mods that are not supposed to edit NPC appearance: https://imgur.com/RHjLuj4 (smashed rules #1)

 

Here's a screenshot of the NPC record settings in Mator Smash which I'm using for mods that are only supposed to edit NPC appearance: https://imgur.com/zalsAgM (smashed rules #2)

 

As you can see, the record gets passed around a lot. The conflict-winning mod (before the smashed patch) is my merged appearance mods esp, which contains Males Of Skyrim, which contains a record for Ulfric that seems to depend on having the default head texture. 

 

The problem I'm running into is that in this special case, WICO and the Appearance Merge Patch are both mods that edit NPC appearance so I want to use the same smash settings with them. The merge patch contains records for a small number of NPCs that I want to use in preference to WICO's settings. Because WICO removes the head texture (different from master) while the merge patch's record restores the same record as master, Mator Smash decides to bring that change from WICO into the smashed patch. But I need the appearance mods to completely overwrite one another; otherwise I'll get a blend of appearances. I thought I'd be able to do this by chaining all appearance attributes together (as in my screenshot for smashed rules #2) but it doesn't seem to be working as you can see in my SSEEdit results. Everything else is working great; I'm getting skills, inventory, AIdata, etc being forwarded from other mods and mixed into my NPC appearance mod. It seems to be just this one thing that's not getting handled correctly.

 

I could easily fix it in SSEEdit but I'd rather learn how to Smash correctly so that if I see something similar pop up when I'm re-checking the records I can deal with it in an automated way.

 

Thanks for any help!

Edited January 13, 2018 by Piranhaha

[Mator]

Sorry I haven't responded yet, this is a complex use case and I've been working on a lot of other things.

 

I think chaining may be broken, and fixing it may resolve the problem for you.  That said, you should make sure the elements you're chaining are all treat as single entity in addition to being chained.

[Piranhaha]

Hey Mator, thanks for your response. I had tried control-clicking all of the chained elements and toggling "Treat as single entity", and only records with sub-records (e.g. NAMA, NAM9, etc) end up with that flag toggled; FTST doesn't get toggled. I just tried again and got the same behavior. I then toggled "Treat as single entity" on the entire NPC_ record and was rewarded with the blue circled (1) next to it, but when I rebuild the smashed patch the FTST record still wasn't preserved. It's not a huge deal and it looks fine in-game so I'll just roll with it for now. I do have another issue which I'll post in the main Mator Smash thread (sorry, overlooked it when posting this one).

 

Thanks again.