None of the efforts I made the last time I modded Morrowind to guide myself upon my inevitable attempt to return to the same game/install months later helped me at all. It is a complete disarray, the game won't launch in any modded profile, and none of my fixes work. Deep sigh.
The name of my boulder is 'Modding', and the mountain up which I roll it, 'Morrowind'.
The only saving grace is that I still have all the mod files, so with a bit of digging (thank fuck for the Everything search program), I'll be able to skip a lot of downloading, which is a lot of extra steps, and will even be able to skip some of the file processing. Morrowind mods don't all update super frequently - sometimes it worked fifteen years ago, and it still works now, even on OpenMW. (More likely that it worked in 2021 in OpenMW, and still works now).
deeeeeeep sigh.
I truly don't know how to better leave indicators of my work and progress. In well over half the cases of a 500+ mod list, hand-crafted changes need to be made to mods to get them to work correctly (everything from the smallest patch or file choice or folder structure, to full-scale rebuilds/cleans/bugfixes), and it's hard to fully and truly indicate the work done.
I have like 10 folders of Graphic Herbalism in different states of completion. One clearly says COMPLETE, but it has the oldest Date Modified, and the guide has absolutely been updated since then, but the naming conventions are otherwise the same for the updated guide, so I have absolutely no idea what's real and what's not here.
Not to mention all the little tricks and workarounds that are needed to get ModOrganizer2 to play well with OpenMW with mods (which has now changed in the latest version of OpenMW, too!). Having to manage MO2's virtual file system (which almost always necessitates running things from within its VFS to recognize them), but remembering OpenMW doesn't need to do that, and is instead managed another way.
This is supposed to be a modular and reversible process, but, fuck me, it takes so much extra work on my part to have the final result be modular like it's supposed to be. Mod lists are built in such awfully interdependent ways that it's almost incompatible with the idea of modularity.
Deeply frustrating, when it genuinely takes even a single minute to get through a single item on the list (and that's moving pretty fast in a lot of cases), and there are ~550-ish mods worth checking out (maybe 50-100 crucial ones, but they need blending and updates to fit in nicely, and then you want to round out the blending and updates otherwise original textures stick out like sore thumbs, and then you end up ~300 mods deep and might as well go whole hog...). It's still a couple hours, minimum, of intense focus, which I can only hope for in the middle of a medication uptick.
Guh.
It's too many added steps to put a txt into each archive detailing what, if anything, I've done, when it was DL'd, etc, and I hate making changes in MO2 b/c they're not reflected in the archive (for better or worse), meaning if I lose comprehension of the mod list (which I have), I lose a LOT of work hidden in the VFS. All that remains is extremely verbose naming of each archive with truncated changelogs and dates, so I know that a mod has been tweaked to necessary specs, and when (in a date that Windows can't fuck up.)
Which is still so much extra work. Blegh.
Fucking slow-ass process.
Tempted to just rip a copy of my partner's setup and try to start from there, since it's much easier to update a working copy (as the list I use provides a good changelog so I can just follow it into current version), but that's not accounting for all the OpenMW tricks and updates and shit... Egh.
It's a lot. But I fuckin' love this game. So much.
