It's not a bug, it's a feature
Those are the words that were uttered by some genius, some time, probably. And it's also the source of the A2 Always Long Hair mod.
I was working on an A2 outfit mod when I was inspired by the fact that A2 has the option to switch between two different hairstyles using her wig item. I thought this could be a great opportunity to experiment with custom hairstyles in the wig slot while keeping the standard hairstyle in the default slot. This turned out to be harder than expected though, for two reasons.
First off, the hair meshes aren't saved in separate files like I was expecting, and it took me a while to find the correct models because of that. A2's full-body model has long hair (selected by the wig), while the default short hairstyle is saved as a separate hair mesh model.
Once I figured out how and where the hair meshes were stored, I came across another issue. As soon as I exported the player model using the Blender2NieR tools, the wig item stopped working. The default hairstyle would become whatever was active on the player model, which is by default the long hairstyle, and the short hairstyle would be completely dismissed. Sounds familiar? Yup, that's exactly what the Always Long Hair mod does!
While I was complaining to my fellow modders about my toggle-able hairstyles not working, it was brought to my attention that this could actually be seen as a pretty nice feature. Cosmetic "hat" items like Adam's glasses and the lunar tear are meant to replace the longer hairstyle, but this no longer happens with the exported models, so you can now combine cosmetics with the long hairstyle to make different A2 looks. As suggested by DevolasRevenge, I decided to release it as a mod because it gives the player new options to explore in terms of looks.
I'll still be chugging along with the other outfit mod I'm working on, but I probably won't be able to introduce multiple hair styling options with it unless I take a deep dive into the code and figure out what's causing the wig not to work once the file has changed. But that, ladies and gentlemen, is a journey for another day. For now, enjoy the A2 Always Long Hair mod!
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