TUTORIAL - Compatibility Patch (Patreon)

How to make two mods work together.

I posted about this some time ago and promised a tutorial. Now I'm sure the system works so I'm ready to teach you how to patch two mods to work together when possible.

Let's recap what a CONFLICT really is: nothing more than two mods overriding the same resource. 

Here I have a conflict between a Bug Fix mod and a New Features mod overriding the same Buff:

Only one of these two modifications to this buff will make it into the game, and it may seem not a big deal but it actually means that LMS Sam mod will not work correctly at all if the bug fix modifications will take precedence over her mod. The "eat human food" power will not work, and the problem is the conflict, so she will not be aware of it if you go to her and tell her that her mod is not working for you.

Sims 4 doesn't have a proper way to define a specific load order for mods, and I'm not sure how well the conflict detector tool works, because I just open up mods to see if they may or may not conflict with something else. 

The closest thing we have to tell the game that we want a set of specific mods to override everything in every case, no matter what, because we know we want those mods to always work as they should, is Coolspear's Overrides Folder

It's a modified version of the resource file you have in your mods folders that tells the game that the folder named OVERRIDES must take priority over everything else, so it doesn't matter how many conflicts you have in your game, a mod placed in there will always be the one whose modifications will get applied. 

This, by the way, work for CC too:

Like right now, I have in the overrides folder the whole CC dump Praline made recently, because I merge CC and when she made the dump, I was to lazy to unmerge and delete the old files. In this folder, the new ones will be the only ones loaded by the game anyway, so I can take it easy and procrastinate on putting some order as long as I like. 

This is useful not only to choose what we want the game to surely load, but also to find out if you have a conflict. Drop a mod in there, if it works like it should then... congratulations, you have a conflict.

And it's useful also to solve conflicts by creating a new conflict... a new files that includes the modifications made by all the mods that override a same resource, and will assure that all the modifications will be loaded by the game. 

So let's see how we patch two mods to work together, by creating a new mod we will place in the overrides folder, so we don't have to touch the original mods in case of updates.

So I'm going to work with KS - Better High School mod and mine Teens Jump To University:

No my mod is a joke compared to KS one, her mod make a lot of modifications while mine only adds a chance card to the grade school A level. Point is, if you put them both together, then either my mod will not work at all, or her mod will not work correctly. And none of them has any problem at all... the only problem is that they both override the career_HighSchool_LevelA XML to add different things.

This is what KS added:

This is what I added:

Collapsed because it doesn't fit the screen, but if you're not sure of what's changes from the default Maxis, then open the original Maxis XML and compare:

What I'm going to do now, is take the High School A XML from KS Mod and export it:

I'll then make a new empty package, and import it into it:

so I have now a new package with KS modifications and only the offending XML in conflict with my mod, what i can do now is take my modifications to the same file, and paste them into the one I exported from KS mod:

So I now have the conflicting XML with both my stuff and KS stuff... I don't need to touch her mod or my mod in any way. 

I can save this package as KS-Zero_CompatibilityPatch and put it in the overrides folder. My mod and KS mod will keep being in the Mods folder.

What happens next? This XML will be the 3th and only one the game will consider and will make sure that both the resources from my mod and from KS mod will be loaded by the game. And you'll need to update this ONLY if when an update for one of the two mods comes out, this specific XML will be the one interested. 

Now, since people have been having problems downloading Coolspear's overrides folder from the Asylum, I'm including it AND the screen of the original post in this tutorial. But I'll remove it if asked.