cleaning Cleaning plugin

[mulliganplummer]

Reading 40 pages of posts will take a long time to read through. Quick answer, is it recommended to clean all the plugin Loots says to clean. I have gotten different answers.

 

Thanks

[smr1957]

LOOT is a sorting tool, not a diagnostic - and anything it says other than sorting, should be taken with a very large grain of salt - as often, it is totally wrong about issues that it reports. It is NOT to be trusted as to errors, missing patches, or having wrong versions - and especially not as regards cleaning, since it only indicates that the edits are "dirty" not whether they are needed or not. Indeed, over the years of helping in the Steam forums, even with those who are using autocleaning (which is reliable for all except the Master files, which it is now recommended should not be cleaned, nor should any Creation Club content), a frequent cause of issues that we see is due to people cleaning everything that LOOT recommends should be cleaned. Though mod authors have gotten better ay cleaning their files, and improvements to the Creation Kit has made certain kinds of errors that used to require cleaning less frequent, still, there are some mods that intentionally have Identical to master (ITMs) records in them and removing them will break the mod.  As such, the final word on whether a mod should be cleaned or not is the mod author's, and  lacking any statement otherwise, it is better to not clean  mods only on LOOT's say so.  Note that this is not a reference to the effectiveness or safety of using autoclean on mods, which is completely safe except as previously cited concerning the Masters and CC content, it is just a statement as to the reliability of using LOOT as anything other than a sorting tool.  And, it should be noted, with large builds, even what it says as to sorting, should be taken with a grain of salt, as well.

[Pseron Wyrd]

4 minutes ago, smr1957 said:

And, it should be noted, with large builds, even what it says as to sorting, should be taken with a grain of salt, as well.

I agree with this.  I always take LOOT's recommendations as the first step in arranging my load orders, not the final step.  

[Scythe Bearer]

Remember too, that Loot is only as good as the data input to it.  Mod authors can supply data to Loot on Prerequisite/corequisite mods, mods which must be loaded before their mod, and which mods are incompatible.  Mod authors can also supply the cleaning verification data which Xedit creates when a mod is cleaned.  But if authors do not supply this data to Loot, then Loot is basically guessing.  And given that quite a few mod authors do not clean their mods nor supply the data which Loot uses to order mods, Loot's load orders are a best guess. 

This does not mean that you shouldn't use Loot.  The majority of responsible Mod authors do clean their mods, and do feed the mod data to Loot, and the more authors which supply data to Loot, the better Loot's load order becomes.