Managing Mods
Once you have installed one or more mods, you will be able to manage them in the main BCML window.
Viewing Mod Info
If you select a mod, the "Mod Info" panel will show its name, a brief description, its load priority, the path where it is installed, the kinds of recognized changes it makes to the game, and optionally a link to its homepage and a preview image.
From the mod info screen, there are a few useful buttons. You can enable, disable, update, or uninstall the selected mod. You can also click "Explore" to view the mod's files in your default file manager.
Managing Load Order
When conflicts between mods cannot be fully resolved, one of them must take priority over the other. By default, BCML gives each new mod installed priority over the previous mods. You can, however, customize this load order.
By default, mods are sorted from highest to lowest priority. This means mods on the top of the list will override conflicting changes made by mods beneath them. However, since some people prefer the reverse convention (used, for example, by Nexus Mod Manager), you can toggle the mod display order in BCML by clicking the sort toggle.
To change your load order, click the "Show sort handles" icon. This will enable drag-and-drop on your mod list to chage the order. Once you have finished sorting, you will need to click "Apply Pending Changes" for BCML to process and merge the new load order.
Load Order Tips
- In general, complex mods should take priority over simple ones. For example, as I am writing this, Crafting Project and Relics of the Past are probably the most complex mods in common use. They should therefore take very high priority.
- In general, if one mod changes the appearance of an actor and the other changes its behavior or other parameters, the skin should take priority. (Example: The Linkle mod should be given higher priority than mods that edit armor stats.)
- Any time a mod doesn't appear to work, try changing its place in your load order to fix it.
Other Functions
If you make any manual changes to your installed mods, or if you run into other issues and need to clean up, click "Remerge," and BCML will process all of your mods from scratch. Always try this before anything else, and especially before reporting bugs. Most crashes and bugs that appear immediately after installing big mods or several mods can be solved by remerging.
BCML also provides a backup and restore feature for your mod configuration. When you make a backup, every mod you have and the exact state of their merge will be compressed and saved. They can easily be restored at any time, and as long as you are on the same version of BCML, the restored setup is guaranteed to be identical to the original. Backups are stored as 7z archives in your BCML user data.