LOOT is a plugin load order optimisation tool for TES IV: Oblivion, TES V: Skyrim, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It is designed to assist mod users in avoiding detrimental conflicts, by automatically calculating a load order that satisfies all plugin dependencies and maximises each plugin's impact on the user's game.

LOOT also provides some load order error checking, including checks for requirements, incompatibilities and cyclic dependencies. In addition, it provides a large number of plugin-specific usage notes, bug warnings and Bash Tag suggestions.

Although LOOT is able to calculate the correct load order positions for the vast majority of mods without any user input, some plugins are designed to load at certain positions in a load order, and LOOT may be unable to determine this from the plugins themselves. As such, LOOT provides a mechanism for supplying additional plugin metadata so that it may sort them correctly.

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

LOOT uses the following tools as part of its build process:

• CMake: To generate build files
• Bower: To manage the HTML UI dependencies
• Vulcanize: To build the HTML UI

To install Bower and Vulcanize, first install Node.js, then run npm install -g bower [email protected] from the command line.

LOOT requires the following C/C++ libraries (version numbers used in latest development revision given):

• Boost v1.59.0
• Chromium Embedded Framework branch 2454: Required to build the GUI, but not the API or tests.
• Google Test v1.7: Required to build the tests, but not the API or the GUI.
• Libespm
• Libgit2 v0.23.3
• Libloadorder
• Pseudosem: v1.0.1
• yaml-cpp: Use the patched-for-loot branch.

In addition, LOOT's UI relies on the web libraries below, which can be fetched by running bower install from the repository root.

• Polymer
• Jed
• Jed Gettext Parser
• Marked

Instructions for building Windows binaries using Microsoft Visual Studio are given in docs/BUILD.MSVC.md, and instructions for building Linux binaries using GCC are given in docs/BUILD.LINUX.md.

The HTML UI is automatically built when building the LOOT executable, but it can also be built by running node scripts/vulcanize.js from the repository root.

LOOT uses the following CMake variables to set build parameters:

The default paths given in the table above are relative to LOOT's CMakeLists.txt.

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

Run the scripts/installer.iss Inno Setup script to build an installer executable in the build folder. If the unofficial Korean 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 for Windows and 7-Zip to be installed. It also requires the fs-extra Node.js module, which can be installed using npm install fs-extra. The script can be run using node scripts/archive.js, and will create .7z archives for LOOT and its API in the build folder. The archives will be given filenames using the output of git describe --tags --long.

Snapshot build archives are made available on Dropbox fairly regularly. If you can't or don't want to build LOOT yourself, but still want to test a more recent build than the latest release or pre-release, you can check to see if there is such a build available.

The archives are named in the following manner:

LOOT <last tag>-<revisions since tag>-g<short revision ID>.7z

For example LOOT v0.7.0-alpha-2-10-gf6d7e80.7z was built using the revision with shortened commit ID f6d7e80, which is 10 revisions after the revision tagged v0.7.0-alpha-2.