I'm not saying the sky is falling. This is absolutely normal for a Bethesda DLC. However, I ran it through TES5Edit and it has 54 ITM records, and 8 deleted references. Please, if you can, run it through TES5Edit yourselves. It helps with mod stability.

If you don't run any mods, you're good to go.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw3g_N1jcZQ

I'm new to using it and afraid of potentially messing up.

You are saying that we can and should clean the Dragonborn esm with tes5edit?

Of course, every DLC is dirty. Still a good idea to remind people about cleaning

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fw3g_N1jcZQ is a great tutorial. Added to the OP.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. If you don't run mods then you have no reason to. This is only an issue with mods.

95% of my mods are re-textures. Is this really necessary?

Better safe than sorry. It literally takes 5 seconds. If 100% of your mods were retextures I'd say forget about it, but who knows with that 5%.

The only real issue here is those 8 deleted references. Basically, if a mod tries to call on those, your game crashes. What TES5Edit does is it undeletes them and just disables them so they're there if mods need them.

So, yes, you don't 100% have to do this, since your mods might not requires those references. But unless you know the inner workings of them, and everything they use, can't say for sure. I'm making this sound like it's a cure for cancer or something. It just helps prevent crashes is all. Crashes that may or may not be a threat with your mod loadout.

Thanks. I'm following all Gopher's videos and was thinking of looking up this one, just wanted to be sure it's not a bad idea for some reason.

And this is where the unofficial patches come into play...

The patches don't touch this. At least, I think they don't. Do they? I would assume not.

Not that many dirty edits or bad references, but cleaning is still necessary.

I excepted to have to use TES5Edit, and wait for the unoffical patch, it always turns out that way

I'm off to actually play the DLC. Have fun, guys.

Thank you very much for reminding!

I haven't used tes5edit before, but can it cause any issues on my current saves if I clean all the important files now?

Nope they dont, the Unofficial patches cant fix gamesas dirty edits, the only people who can are gamesas .. they never do, so its down to the individual to do their own. And use the Unofficial patches to put the bugfix fest icing on the cake.

That's kinda what I was thinking... but I do remember being told repeatedly in class throughout my program. To check your work for edits and fix as needed or make note so somewhere down the pipeline they're taken care of. I'll take a look at dragonborn later.. I don't have many mods.. I've had no time due to school. Soooo yea!

Is is safe to clean it before checking to see if the references are there on purpose; I know I know that that would give Beth too much credit but still....