How do I go about merging one mod with another? Can I use TesVSnip to copy and paste from one to the other? Are there any problems to be aware off?

TesVsnip is broken and will break your mod (on mobile so i dont have a link to the theead about it) you will have to do it manually or wait for tesvgeko

Really? That's a shame. I was prepared to do it manually, as it would be a learning excerise, just annoying as my machine would not be able to cope with two CKs open at once

Open the CK, set active an esp and click on the other plugin. You'll save on the active one all the things you have duplicated from the plugin. Hope it helps: i use this metod to copy in an esp all i need.

wrye bash

Which isn't at all what the OP is looking for.

All the methods I know of have pretty much been covered already. Though, I could easily be not thinking of some at the moment...

http://www.creationkit.com/Version_control.

Only some people claim that. TesVsnip works fine for me, hasn't broken a thing yet.

But yeah, Version Control is the proper way.

You've been lucky then. TESVSnip doesn't recompress records. It decompresses them just fine, but doesn't compress them again on saving. If you don't flip the compression flag then the game will still expect those records to be compressed.

The more serious issue is that Snip doesn't handle the second layer of compressed records - at all. There is another flag that indicates if there is a compressed sub-record and Snip isn't recognizing that flag right now. I'll have to get this documented and posted up. We are processing the extra compression in Gecko. Not all records have compressed sub-records, so it's possible your mod doesn't have any and that's why you're not seeing a problem.

Oh, and Gecko will offer mod merging as one of the features once we're done.

You can turn on compression in TESVsnip by manually editing TESVSnip.exe.config and changing the following:

	  		False	  

To:

	  		True	  

The bloody button in TESVSnip to turn it on simply doesn't work, hence you need to do this manually. After that you can check which records need to be compressed in TESVSnip under 'Options' -> 'Compression Settings...' and then the settings will stick.

Not saying that this solves all issues, but I do regularly edit our stripped down Skyrim.esm (removed all worldspaces and cells) and I have compression for every form type turned on. Works fine. And they actually do get compressed this way, since the file size gets like 4 times smaller than with compression turned off. I wouldn't know about this second layer of compression you are talking about, I'm not an expert.

Good to know. I'll pass that along. Thanks for the info.

Does this method allow me to take things that dont belong in an esm (such as Vanilla records that I've edited), and keep them in an esp, and only put new records in the ESM?

Like for example if I edit a Vanilla Weapon Leveled List in my esp, but I also add new weapon records to my esp, will Version control only put the "new weapons" in the esm, and keep the Vanilla edits in the esp?

That's ideally what I would like to do. So that I can separate the new content (there's a lot) from the Vanilla edited content.

I'm not sure if there's a batch option for that but you could do it manually.

You get a list of every record your ESP affects, and you can order them on originating plugin. So yes, that's pretty easy to do.