Since I recently found out how to delete a .2da row with Kotor Tool, I'm very curious to know which .2das it's safe to remove a row that is not the last row?
Mainly I'm looking to find out about the most commonly modded .2das. I know stoffe said that apperance.2da, spells.2da, and feats.2da are not safe.
Is it safe to remove rows from portraits.2da, globalcat.2da, upcrystals.2da, or heads.2da? I mean, if I have multiple instances in of the same portrait in portraits.2da, is it safe to remove all but one?
I know it doesn't bother the game to have multiple instances in portraits.2da, so it shouldn't bother it to remove those multiple instances, but I want to be on the safe side.
Since I recently found out how to delete a .2da row with Kotor Tool, I'm very curious to know which .2das it's safe to remove a row that is not the last row?
Mainly I'm looking to find out about the most commonly modded .2das. I know stoffe said that apperance.2da, spells.2da, and feats.2da are not safe.
For all 2da files referred to by line number the ordering of the lines is very important. If you delete a line, insert lines anywhere else but at the end or sort the content of the file you will most likely break it, since the indexes will change, resulting in odd behavior or even crashes in-game.
A few such line number indexed files I can think of from the top of my head are appearance.2da, spells.2da, feat.2da, effecticon.2da, placeables.2da, heads.2da, portraits.2da, classes.2da, skills.2da. Basically any file that is referred to from other game data (2DAs, GFF files, scripts etc) with the line number.
Some other 2da files are referred to by the row label or one of the column values instead. Examples of such files are visualeffects.2da, globalcat.2da, plot.2da. The ordering of rows is not important in those files and they can be sorted and have lines deleted and inserted without breaking anything in the game, AFAIK.
To add to what stoffe said, some .2da files even refer to rows in other .2da files, one example that I'm familiar with is ammunitiontypes.2da and baseitems.2da. The baseitems.2da file has columns that will defer to row numbers in ammunitiontypes.2da, for example the baseitems.2da row "Blaster Rifle" has a column that refers to the row "Blaster fire" in ammunitiontypes.2da by row number. Also most .ut? files refer to row numbers of various .2das, even some scripts refer to .2da row numbers. In general .2da files are the most annoying files to keep track of.
To answer your question the simple way Princess Artemis. In theory all 2da files can have rows deleted and added with little to no problem it is the columns that are usually locked in. Now just because Rows are okay to delete doesn't mean that you should for the reasons Stoffe and Mav listed above because different 2da files will reference different rows in other 2da files.
All right, thanks all. This is a tremendous help, as some people have asked me how to completely remove a mod from a game, and I didn't want to tell them to try deleting .2da rows if the backups I make sure my mods make happen to corrupt or they've installed several mods since then. It will also help me not blow up my entire Override again by jumping the gun because I wanted to delete nine instances of the same portrait in portraits.2da ::smacks forehead::
I'll just tell them to either grab the back ups or leave the .2das alone (except in case of wishing to remove a new PC appearance, then they can edit the row so forPC=0).