I'm basically trying to combine many mods into my KOTOR games, similar to what was done with the Holowan Plugin. Mostly lightsabers. Does the upcrystals.2da file's line #'s have to match anything besides the filenames (scripts, etc...)? I'm seeing the K1template/K2template tag files, and I'm unsure of what those are for. I suppose I'm wondering the same about the baseitems.2da and appearance.2da files, too. I'm not interested in creating an installer or anything (I'm not a modder myself), I just want to play the games with as much of this great new content as I can. I've used TSL Patcher, KMM, etc., but I'm more interested in doing it by hand so I know that everything will be working properly without conflict. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Be prepared to do a lot of .utc/uti editing, as well as merging your .2da files.

The very quick explanation -
1. Merge applicable .2da files, noting the new row locations of anything you merge in.
2. Edit the corresponding .ut* to reference the new row in that 2da.
3. Test!

This could take a very long time, and fortunately TSLPatcher works quite well. It is not perfect though, and if you take the time to painstakingly merge things yourself, it may work out better than the alternative.

What I find difficult in this venture is that some mods alter the same scripts. This is far more difficult to manage, although not impossible. You can edit scripts to work together in some cases, but not all. In some cases it is possible to rename a conflicting script, but that will necessitate editing .dlg's and possibly/probably more.

Thank you! I haven't been editing the .ut* references, which is what I think has been messing me up.

Glad to help! I saw your post in the BoS thread, so I assume you are trying to make BoS and Yavin 4 play nicely. If you accomplish that feat, you will want to remember how you did it - it would be of great benefit to many if you would share it!