Hi, guys! Many different mod authors are creating add-ons for VotW, and most of them follow Razorwire’s basic tutorial (which is currently outdated—I’ll make my own tutorial for those of you interested in creating new add-ons in the future). The problem is that the tutorial doesn’t cover tips on how to properly pack the mod for others to use. The main file is an ESP, which takes up mod slots (the max is 255 ESPs, by the way), and the rest of the files are left loose, which not only takes up drive space but also slows down game loading and can potentially decrease performance.
I tried reaching out to the mod authors of the add-ons that Hunt for Holotapes supports, but some of them declined to repack their mods or give me permission to do it. So, you guys are mostly left to do it on your own. That’s why I decided to share two tutorials with you—one on how to make VotW add-on ESPs flagged as ESL and another on how to pack loose files into BA2.

A) How do you know if a mod has loose files?
If you go to the mod’s Nexus page, then go to Files and click Preview file content, you’ll notice that there are no BA2 files (or right-click it in your Mod Manager and select Open in Explorer).
BA2-packed mods usually consist of one .esp file and two BA2 files—one named Textures and the other Main. Instead, if you see a list of various files with .DDS, .xwm, .nif and similar extensions, that means the mod has loose files (or you see different folders if you look through Mod Manager).

B) How do you know if a mod has ESP not flagged as ESL?
Check Plugins (on the right side, with bunch of .esp, .esl etc files) in your Mod Manager (I use only MO2 so not sure how about Vortex). If the plugin from the mod has a yellow dot next to it, it means that its ESL flagged and is ok (if you also see yellow chest, it means it has BA2 files). If not, you have to flag it as ESL yourself (or at least try, not all ESPs allow flagging as ESL).

1) How to flag ESP as ESL
I recommend using this tutorial (ignore that its for Skyrim, it works the same way for Fallout 4): Go Beyond Skyrim's Mod Limit - Converting ESPs to ESLs


2) How to pack files into BA2 archives
a) Install Creation Kit (CK includes Archive2): Download Fallout 4 Creation Kit from Steam
     a.a) Find Archive2.exe (for me its in SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\Fallout 4\Tools\Archive2)
b) Pack the files: Packing mods into BA2 with Archive2

After you packed the files into BA2 archives you can delete the loose files.



Done!