Q:  What is "QUASIPC"?

A:  A large patch compendium, currently 85 patches between various popular mod combinations, all of which are now (as of v1.9.0) ESPFE "magic featherweight" plugins.

Q:  What's an ESPFE plugin?  And why do you call them "magic featherweight"? 

A:  I'll answer the second question first.  ESPFE plugins do not use up a slot in your 255-plugin limit load order!!  Yes, really!  There are almost no restrictions left on them now except that they do not work well with Nexus Mod Manager, which is no longer supported and you should really stop using for a dozen other reasons as well.  They also work fine alongside Creation Club content.

Q:  Do I really have to read the wall of text below?

A:  If you wish to start using ESPFEs, you really should.  Besides, a lot of the discussion below actually has nothing directly to do with ESPFEs, it's also an in-depth discussion of the proper placement of patches in your load order, which applies even if you download nothing from this mod, and which contradicts what seems to be the conventional wisdom of the matter.  With examples.

Q:  Ok, so what exactly *are* ESPFE plugins?

A:  They are an ESP-ESL hybrid... meaning, they have an ESP extension, but they have the "ESL" flag checked in the File Header.

Q:  ESLs?  I heard those are bad, especially for patches!  What gives?

A:  When true ESLs (by which I mean a plugin with an actual .ESL extension, as opposed to just the ESL flag checked in the File Header) were introduced for the Creation Club, they were tested and found that they do not obey normal plugin order rules.  A true ESL will be forced to load immediately after the ESM's.  This is fatal for patches as it almost always makes them impossible to place after the mods that they are attempting to patch.  You also can't make an ESP a master to an ESL, which again is fatal for patches.

Q:  So why don't these patches have that problem?

A:  Because they are still ESPs.  They just have the "ESL" flag checked in the header record.  The result of this is that they obey normal plugin order rules, and other ESP's can be added to them as masters, BUT, they are loaded in ESL FE space, meaning they don't take up a slot in the 255 ESP plugin limit.

Q:  Has this method been tested?

A:  Extensively.  For about 9 months by Fallout 4 modders, and then by virtually the entire community for SSE ever since I first posted these patches.  Highly endorsed by ElminsterAU (author of xEdit).  Most modding tools have been redesigned to work with them by now  (NMM and Mator Smash are two notable exceptions).   An example of their previous use in FO4 prior to is this mod, "Visual Reload Compatibility Patches"  by Zeridian, who I am very grateful to as he made me aware of this functionality.

Q:  Are there ANY known bugs associated with using ESPFEs?

A:  Only one known bug at this time, but it's pretty rare-case.  IF an ESL or ESPFE adds brand new CELL records (which is pretty unusual for a mod to do), and that mod is not the very first mod to be loaded into FE space (meaning any FE slot greater than FE000), AND that new CELL record is overwritten by another plugin, then temporary references in that CELL will not appear in game.   That's it.  None of the patches in QUASIPC are affected by this bug.  If you're converting your own mods to ESPFEs, though, it's a good idea to keep an eye out for brand new CELL records and simply don't convert any plugins that have them.

Q:  How did you test that these obey the proper load order?

A:  Mostly by testing the blackface bug.  As anyone who has used multiple NPC replacers affecting the same NPCs knows, if they are not ordered in a very precise manner, with a synchronized install order AND plugin order, you'll get blackface.  I set up my replacer mods in such a way that if my patches for a couple of them weren't loading exactly where I placed them in my load order, blackface was inevitable.  And guess what?  No blackface.  These patches are definitively, positively, absolutatively loading exactly where they are placed in the plugin order.

Q:  Wait - I checked out that Fallout 4 mod and in his sticky post where he talks about this, he says "The downside is just keeping track of them, because mod managers aren't updated to detect this workaround yet."  Is that still a problem?

A:  For a while there only Mod Organizer 2 supported them, but they are now also supported by Vortex and the development version of Wrye Bash.  In MO2 (the mod manager I recommend most highly), you even get a little helpful yellow dot next to each ESPFE patch in your plugin order that, when hovered over, says:  "This ESP is flagged as an ESL.  It will adhere to the ESP load order but it will be loaded in ESL space."  And the name of the plugin itself changes to being in italics so it's VERY easy to tell which are normal plugins and which are ESPFEs whenever you look at your plugin list.  Which is awesome.

Q:  Who came up with the name "ESPFE"?

A:  I did.  Zeridian called them ESP LITE, and some other modders still do, but that seems bulky to me.  I prefer "ESPFE", because they are otherwise normal ESP's that just load into the FE space where ESLs are loaded.

Q:  Do they work alongside Creation Club mods, or other true ESLs?
 
A:  Yes. 

Q:  What about NMM?

A:  Attempts were apparently made by the author maintaining the Github-developed version to get them working, but last I heard it still wasn't working right.  I recommend just moving on from NMM.  Seriously.  Never met anyone who made the switch to MO2 who wasn't enormously happier in the end.

Q:  What about SSEEdit?

A:  In the current new full release on Nexus (4.0.0), ESPFEs are fully supported with tons of new features to make identifying which ESPs are safe to convert to ESPFE easy.  NOT ONLY can SSEEdit now load more than 255 plugins (if those above 255 are ESL's or ESPFE's only, of course), AND recognize ESPFE's and list them as loading into FE space while still sorting like ESP's, it will ALSO throw warnings during the background loader process if it finds an ESPFE that needs to have its formid's compacted in the CK, and *will not let you save* an ESP that you've set the ESL flag on if uncompacted formids would cause a problem.  That is *awesome*.  And then there's the "-PseudoESL" parameter that will load every ESP that can be an ESPFE *as* an ESPFE, to make it easy to identify and flag them all in one pass. 

Q:  Wrye Bash? 

A:  The development version of Wrye Bash can handle these.  You can get it from the Wrye Bash Discord channel.

Q:  Mator Smash?

A:  This tool will not work with more than 255 plugins loaded, whether ESPFE or not, so you'd have to deactivate any overage to get MS to start.   I personally would always recommend to get familiar with SSEEdit and patch your mods by hand instead anyway.  See below for my dissertation on why merging mods in general is a bad idea.

Q:  Vortex?

A:  All reports are that ESPFE's work great with Vortex now.

Q:  Who do we have to thank for being able to use this?

A:  Fallout 4 fans appear to have discovered this and asked the MO2 team for support, and they got it.  Much gratitude to the FO4 fans AND the MO2 development team (particularly Silarn) for making them work with MO2 which got this whole ball rolling.  Thanks to Zeridian for making me aware.   HUGE thanks to ElminsterAU for going far far beyond the call of duty to make SSEEdit work perfectly with ESPFE's.  If there's any modder I'm aware of (besides me, of course!) who has earned and deserves all the donations and Patreon support in the world, it would be him.  His work makes every other modder's work possible.

Q:  Can these ESPFE patches be merged with Merge Plugins?

A:  Yes.  But why would you normally need to?  The point is that this frees you up to place the patches exactly where you want them without impacting your total plugin limit, and the place I always recommend is immediately after the second mod that you are patching in your plugin order.  That's the only place that the typical patch can be guaranteed to work as intended.  The short explanation is:  If Mod A needs to come before Mod B in your load order, then all patches involving Mod A in any way have to come before Mod B as well.  So unless you're pretty skillful and going over everything in SSEEdit yourself to make sure ALL conflicts are accounted for, doing a Merge Plugins that moves all your patch records to the very bottom of your load order can have unpredictable results.  With these ESPFE patches, placing all patches at the bottom is no longer optimal.

Q:  Why is it not optimal to put patches at the bottom of the load order?  They *have* to go at the bottom if I'm merging them.  And I've always been told that patches should go at the bottom of the load order anyway.

A:  I'll explain why it's almost always a bad idea to put any patch any lower in the plugin order than absolutely required in a moment.  Those who advised this were probably primarily motivated to evade the 255 plugin limit and that it was worth the potential instability price (if they were aware of this issue at all, and it often was worth it, until now). As for Merge Plugins, it's an excellent tool for circumventing the 255 plugin limit IF you know what you're doing and are deeply aware of every conflict in your load order and can compensate, but if it's NOT needed (and with these patches, the limit becomes much less of a problem), or you're NOT willing to really analyze your load order completely, then it is simply bad practice to use it *because* it requires moving patches lower in the load order than they need to be.  

Here's a simple example. Say you're using CRF, The Ordinary Women, and Bijin.  You set up your load order properly like this:

Cutting Room Floor.esp
TheOrdinaryWomen.esp
Bijin AIO.esp

Because your install order of these mods is the same (though that's not relevant right now), everything works fine.  Bijin overrides for the NPCs that Bijin changes, and TOW works on whoever's left over.  Then you add my TOW-CRF patch to the mix where I advise to put it.

Cutting Room Floor.esp
TheOrdinaryWomen.esp
Qw_TheOrdinaryWomen_CRF.esp
Bijin AIO.esp

Everything still works fine.  The patch gets to patch records that Bijin doesn't overwrite, and the ones that Bijin does overwrite, the patch is overwritten as well.

But now someone tells you to merge your patches!  So you do.  And that merged patch of course goes at the bottom.

Cutting Room Floor.esp
TheOrdinaryWomen.esp
Bijin AIO.esp
MergedPatch.esp (containing Qw_TheOrdinaryWomen_CRF.esp)

Now characters that Bijin overwrites have Bijin's meshes and textures, but TOW's ESP for the patched records.

Blackface.

To the response "Well, just don't merge NPC replacer patches", the principle holds for almost any mod combination that requires a specific load order to function, it's just most obvious with replacer mods.  If any Mod A *has* to come before Mod B for them to work correctly, any patches involving mod A (in any way!) *must also* come before Mod B.  I can illustrate a similar situation with Relighting Skyrim and ELE.  RS has to come before ELE for them to be compatible.  If you load RS after ELE, ELE will be almost completely wiped out.  If you load RS and then ELE, but add a patch for RS and some third mod and load it after ELE, you are wiping out ELE's changes to whatever interior cell records are in that RS patch.

So the point is, if you don't have to use Merge Plugins or other patch bashers to stay within your 255 limit, and that's what ESPFE's are all about making possible, then don't.  Always put your patches immediately after the second mod being patched.  Always.  In that spot, a patch can never hurt you unless it's bugged.  Anywhere else you place a patch for Mod A and some unrelated mod C, you take a chance of moving a small piece of that mod A after some other mod B, when the load order of Mod A THEN Mod B is critical for them to function together properly.  And in some cases, moving only a small piece of mod A after B can be worse than moving all of mod A after B.  (Note - there are a few VERY limited situations where it can make sense and be advantageous to move a patch elsewhere, but it's so rare that the general rule is always wiser to follow unless you know *exactly* why you're breaking it.)

And that's why evading the 255 limit as this patching method does, without having to merge and move patches far lower than both their base mods, is a fundamental game changer.

Q:  Should I use ESPFE's for anything other than a compatibility patch?

A:  Sometimes.  They work great for compatibility patches because they usually only contain overrides of records that were added by a previously loaded plugin, and any plugin that only contains such overrides can be easily converted to ESPFE.  As for *new* records in a plugin, they can also be converted if the FormID is less than xx000FFF.  Larger than that, and the formids would need to be compacted in the CK.  Note that doing such compacting would make that mod break if used in an ongoing game.   SSEEdit versions 4.0+ can automatically detect which plugins can be converted by starting it with the -PseudoESL parameter.  Start it with that, then go through your list and add the ESL flag to the file headers of each one that loaded in FE space (it'll be easy to tell which ones loaded into FE space, trust me.)  I believe you will find that a sufficient percentage are convertible that you simply won't hit the 255 plugin limit as long as you convert all you can to ESPFE, and thus won't need to actually ever convert formids.  If you really hit the limit of 255 non-ESPFE plugins after having converted all the plugins to ESPFE that you can, I'd say that's a sign that you've gotten way overly ambitious in your modding.  Dial it back some.  Getting THAT many mods all working together flawlessly is nearly impossible even for the pros.

Q:  Are there any restrictions on how many of these ESPFEs you can use?

A:  SSE can theoretically handle up to 4096 mods in FE space (be they ESL or ESPFE), but there's also a restriction on how many total FormIDs they collectively add.  A single ESL/ESPFE can only add 2048 FormIDs, and if every single ESL/ESPFE you use adds a maximum 2048 FormID's, this brings the total number of mods you can load in FE space down to 300.  Which is still a hell of a lot, and the vast majority of mods in ESL space aren't going to add that many FormIDs.  The biggest patch on this page modifies less than 80 FormID's, and not a single one of them *adds* a new FormID, so I think the term "featherweight" is appropriate.  Let me reiterate that *modified* records do not count against any of these limits - only new records in your ESPFE plugin count, and patches rarely need to have any new records.

Q:  Are you SURE I shouldn't merge some patches still?  Like, what if Immersive Citizens is near the end of my load order, and I have five of your ESPFE patches that need to come right after it.  Wouldn't that save me 4 of these FE slots?

A:  The saving is *seriously* trivial.  Let's do the math.  We know that  the maximum number of FormID's is roughly 300 x 2048 = 614,400.  Divide that by the maximum number of FE slots (4096), and you can have an average of 150 formids per patch and still get use of the full 4096 slots.  The biggest patch in this compendium so far has about 80 formids.  Several have 3 or less.  I'm figuring it's going to be at LEAST a week before some crazed modder manages to increase their total plugin count from 255 to 4,351 (and the last 4096 being compatibility patches for the first 255).  Maybe even two weeks!  Let's worry about it then.  In the meantime, you couldn't run out of FE slots if you tried, unless you completely ignore me and start making your huge new content mods into ESPFE's, in which case you deserve your tears and it's all on you.  Oh, and if you do merge those Immersive Citizens patches, and then one of them gets updated, you gotta redo the whole merge process involving other patches that don't really need updating, increasing chances of human error, etc. etc., instead of just reinstalling QUASIPC, click and done.  Just.  Not.  Worth.  It.

Q:  I have an ESP in my load order that is empty, just there to load a BSA.  Can I make that an ESPFE?

A:  This works fine, and those are indeed a great candidate for being made ESPFE's.  Just open up that empty ESP in SSEEdit, click on its File Header, right click on Record Flags, and check "ESL".

Q:  If something goes wrong, can I blame you?

A:  Well, either you're the only person it's gone wrong for, or out of all the many thousands of folks who have been using these for the last several months that also had a problem, not one of them has bothered to report it.  How about instead you be the first one to report an issue without getting all bent out of shape and blame-y about it, and maybe we can figure out what exactly the problem is together, and see if there's some heretofore unknown limitation that I will certainly do my best to make sure everyone knows about.  I think that's a good plan.