LOOT

Introduction

LOOT is a plugin load order optimiser for:

• Starfield
• The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition (and Anniversary Edition)
• The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR
• Fallout 3
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Fallout 4
• Fallout 4 VR
• Nehrim: At Fate's Edge
• Enderal: Forgotten Stories
• Enderal: Forgotten Stories (Special Edition)

LOOT can automatically calculate a load order that satisfies all plugin dependencies and maximises each plugin's impact on your game. It can also detect many issues, and provides a large number of plugin-specific usage notes, warnings and Bash Tag suggestions for Wrye Bash.

While LOOT can correctly handle the vast majority of plugins without help, some plugins need additional metadata to be sorted correctly. LOOT has a masterlist of metadata for each supported game, and you can add more to customise LOOT's behaviour.

LOOT helps make using mods easier, and you should still possess a working knowledge of mod load ordering. See Introduction To Load Orders for an overview.

Downloads

Releases are hosted on GitHub. Linux users should install LOOT from Flathub.

Snapshot builds are available as artifacts from GitHub Actions runs, though they are only kept for 90 days and can only be downloaded when logged into a GitHub account. To mitigate these restrictions, snapshot build artifacts include a GPG signature that can be verified using the public key hosted here, which means it's possible to re-upload the artifacts elsewhere and still prove their authenticity.

The snapshot build artifacts are named like so:

loot_<last tag>-<revisions since tag>-g<short revision ID>_<branch>-<platform>.<file extension>

The Linux archives use a standard directory layout (e.g. bin/, lib/, share/). The ICU, Intel TBB, Qt and system library dependencies are not included.

Snapshot builds are also provided as single-file Flatpak bundles, which can be installed like so:

flatpak --user install ~/Downloads/loot.flatpak

You may also want to install the Adwaita theme:

flatpak install flathub org.kde.KStyle.Adwaita//6.5

Building LOOT

Refer to .github/workflows/release.yml for the build process.

Windows

The GitHub Actions workflow assumes that CMake, curl, gettext, Git, Inno Setup 6, Python, Visual Studio 2019 and 7-zip are already installed.

Linux

The GitHub Actions workflow assumes that you have already cloned the LOOT repository, that the current working directory is its root, and that the following applications are already installed:

• cmake v3.6+
• curl
• git
• python and pip
• wget

(The list above may be incomplete.)

Not all LOOT's features have been implemented for Linux builds. Issues labelled linux on LOOT's issue tracker cover such missing features where they can be implemented.

CMake Variables

LOOT uses the following CMake variables to set build parameters:

You may also need to set BOOST_ROOT if CMake cannot find Boost, and Qt6_ROOT (e.g. to C:/Qt/6.5.3/msvc2019_64) if CMake cannot find Qt.

Building The Documentation

The documentation is built using Sphinx. Install Python and make sure it's accessible from your PATH, then run:

pip install -r docs/requirements.txt
sphinx-build -b html docs build/docs/html

Alternatively, you can use Docker to avoid changing your development environment, by running docker run -it --rm -v ${PWD}/docs:/docs/docs -v ${PWD}/build:/docs/build sphinxdoc/sphinx:7.1.2 bash to obtain a shell that you can use to run the two commands above.

Packaging Releases

Packaging scripts are provided for creating an installer on Windows and compressed archives on Windows and Linux.

Run the scripts/installer.iss Inno Setup script to build an installer executable in the build folder. If the unofficial Korean, Swedish and Simplified Chinese Inno Setup translation files are installed alongside the official translation files, then the installer script will also offer those language options. If they are not found, the installer will be built without them.

The archive packaging script requires Git, and on Windows it also requires 7-Zip, while on Linux it requires tar and xz. It can be run using python scripts/archive.py, and creates an archive for LOOT in the build folder. The archives are named as described in the Downloads section above.

The archive packaging script calls windeployqt.exe when run on Windows: it must be accessible from your PATH.