
This provides a common store for the total load order in lieu of the plugin timestamps used by the other games. Modding utilities would then perform their changes on "loadorder.txt", updating "plugins.txt" to reflect any changes to active plugin load order as required. "plugins.txt" would be kept in synchronisation with "loadorder.txt" so that the order of plugins that the game loaded was the same for both files, but the latter would allow the load ordering of inactive plugins. The solution agreed on by Lojack (Wrye Bash), Kaburke (Nexus Mod Manager), WrinklyNinja ( BOSS) and Dark0ne (owner of the Nexus sites) was that total load order would be stored in a "loadorder.txt" file, itself stored in the same location as "plugins.txt". This has the result that inactive plugins do not have any load order. This brought with it a fundamental change, in that load order is no longer an intrinsic property of a plugin. In Skyrim v1.4.26, a new textfile-based load order system was introduced, in which load order is decide by the order in which plugins are listed in "plugins.txt".

An installed plugin's load order is therefore an intrinsic property of that plugin.

In Oblivion, Nehrim, Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas and early versions (pre-1.4.26) of Skyrim, load order is decided by the relative timestamps of plugins in the game's Data directory. When any such methods are being used, the load order of inactive plugins decides which plugins override others, similar to as if they were active. This is both because it is easier to display a single list of plugins than a list and an unordered set, and because modders have engineered methods that allow the changes made by inactive plugins to be loaded by another plugin (eg. Nevertheless, it is useful when working with load orders to consider the load order of all plugins, even if only some of them will actually be loaded. Active plugins are listed in the game's "plugins.txt" file, which is stored in the user's local application data folder.

This list is the load order of the plugins.Ī game will only load the plugins that are active. This "rule of one" results in a list of plugins, with those earlier in the list having any conflicting changes overriden by those later in the list. If two plugins alter the same game data, then the changes made by the plugin loading later will override those made by the plugin loading earlier. Load ordering is the method used to determine how conflicts between mod plugins (.esp.
