What's your experience with Nexus Mods Vortex and DFU?

[AuntiePixel]

Just wondering what your experiences have been with Vortex and DFU? I foolishly assumed I was just going to grab a couple mods. Now I have many and keeping them all updated manually is rather a fuss. My experiences with Nexus' mod management tools have been rather mixed in the past.

[Ralzar]

Never used any mod managers as I find handling it manually dead easy. Except for a couple of specific mods, most just require you to put one file in the mods folder and that’s it.

I’ve run into quite a few users that experienced weird behaviour using mod managers, which could easily be caused by how new versions of DFU should be installed in fresh folders. Which is not how a mod manager would expect it to be installed.

[TheLacus]

In my experience it does everything it claims and I never had an issue with it.

Mods must be archived with standard folder structure to allow automatic installation. It's possible that is the cause of issues found by others.

[King of Worms]

I had a report from a DREAM user where the mod did not work qhen downloaded thru Vortex. He had to delete the files, download manually, place in the same folder as they were and it worked.

I dont use Vortex for DFU.

But I used it for fallout 3, where the mods were a bit more complicated, with multiple plugins in each mod, which I wanted to turn on/off separately etc

[XJDHDR]

I love Vortex. In fact, I use it to install DFU itself because it's the only mod manager I've used that can install files in a game's root directory. I also use it for almost all the games I mod that it supports. The only exceptions are the later Bethesda Game Studios games (i.e. Morrowind onwards and their Fallout games) but only because Mod Organiser 2 does a better job for those particular games.

While manually managing mods is possible if you have a small number of files to manage, a manger becomes pretty much essential after installing a lot of mod files, especially if mods overwrite each other. I know that the author of the mod "Sneaking Detection Recalibrated" once mentioned that he learned this the hard way. That said, Ralzar is right that the preferred way of modding DFU means that there naturally isn't much management that needs to be done.

I haven't had any issues with DFU updates breaking Vortex either. I just delete the old files, extract the new files to the same place and re-deploy all my mods. It also makes it super easy to update mods. Some can even be updated from within Vortex itself. I personally think that most issues people have with Vortex are probably PEBKAC errors.

[King of Worms]

While on search what PEBKAC means (and I agree with you on this) Ive found another good one
IBM error ("idiot behind machine") - I did a lot of those, and I guess Im not alone...