ESLify (ESL Guide to Tagging Your Plugins and Maintaining Plugin Limitations)

"Guidelines that mark small patches that have no business taking up precious plugin limits!"

[DISCLAIMER] I am not responsible for any damages you may incur as a result of your use of the MOD, your game, your will, or anything else you may gain access to below. That being said, it's not hard to do. I repeated the important bits a few times, drilling the information into my foil-lined pea brain. Now, go out and take ownership of your new amazing version of Skyrim SE and make it a fantastic world like Bethesda has never done before, filled with so many 8K mods that your GPU will be short of a VR* every time you load the game! Well, I mean, they really created a fantastic game. That's why we are here. But the good and creative people in this modding community only make it better.

If this guide is helpful to you, please don't forget to like it. And, if you want the best Skyrim SE experience, check out the Nordic Skyrim Guide for a comprehensive Skyrim SE modding guide!

There are some important issues to consider when using ESL-tagged files:

[1] You must have a copy of SSE 1.5.3 or newer to use ESL tag files.

[2] You must be using a copy of SSE CK 1.5.3 or higher (we will be using xEdit) to correctly identify these files for editing.

[3] The file cannot contain more than 2048 records, otherwise the form ID will overflow into another FE slot and destroy the save.

[4] The form ID needs to be compressed to make the file valid. CK has an option in the file menu called "Compact Active File Form IDs". xEdit also has this feature. Please heed the warnings when using any of these.

[5] You cannot compress IDs on a file that you want to continue using in an existing save, or you will corrupt it because the form IDs it contains are overwritten. Only do this for files that haven't been started for use yet, and only exist as public versions. Don't use the "Compact Form ID" feature on a mod you're already using in the game!!

[6] NMM does not work with files with an .esl extension or with the ESL flag. It is reported that if one of these is present in your Data folder, it is completely locked. Use a functional mod manager such as Wrye Bash to manage these types of mods.

[7] If through some weird twist of fate you end up with an ESL-tagged file that is also ESM-tagged, and someone for some reason uses a standard .esp file as the main file, that file will be forced to be loaded into the wrong part of your setup. Normally, standard .esp files are never loaded before any ESM tags, this is an exception now and it should be treated as a bug reported to the author of any mod.

The theoretical limit should now be 4096 ESL tag patterns. A single file marked ESL can theoretically hold up to 4096 form ID records. In reality, this actually ends up being the 2048 table ID record, as the engine retains everything from $0x0000 to $0x07FF. Therefore, all files using the ESL flag must contain an internal form ID between xx000800 and xx000FFF. Anything outside this range will have no effect and the game will crash or cause severe data corruption due to exceeding it.

You want to make sure you're not using Compact Form ID on a mod you're already using in the game. When you do this the ID will change and the save won't know what to do with it and will be corrupted. Read line [5] above ^

Also, the data looks quite old because when I use NMM I have .ESL. no problem. NMM didn't lock me in. They just didn't cooperate in terms of load order. They often want to jump to the top of the list.

To be clear, we're just changing the title flag. We will not change the .esp extension. Leave it as is. This will keep the .esp functionality well matched to your load order while also keeping it from counting against your plugin limit. If you've used the Nordic Skyrim guide, this should get you around 60-100 (more or less) patch type addons (and a few others) that can flag ESL, depending on the mods and patches you use.

In the Nordic Skyrim Guide you can also read thi …