Hi, this topic is quite old, almost annoying. I have a more specific question about this but all I see online are things I already know, or does not answer my question. What I want to know is how the game deal with conflicts.

Prelude:
I am an advanced Skyrim modder (Not mod creator). For those of you who modded or still mod the game, you must be familiar with a tool call TES5Edit. This incredible tool has, along with countless other features, the potential to create what we call a TES5 Merged Patch. It does the following: It let you merge records and/or edited values from different conflicting mods and apply them to the patch that you are about to create based on your mod list and load order. Therefore winning the conflict but in the meantime bringing the desired values to game.

Now, I know TS4 does not work exactly like this. As a matter of fact, TS4 merging would be way more similar to how Witcher 3 merges are made; using a DiffTool to automatically/manually merging pieces of script/XML together so the resulting merged file are a sum of both values (Some exception may apply, like editing the same exact thing but if you kept on reading, you know what I mean)

Enough of examples and stories. The real question is: How does TS4 handle a conflict. Let's say two mods conflict because they edit different aspect of a same "XML" (Not sure of the terminology).
- Will it try to automatically merge them upon load?
- If not, conflict winners are winning because of what?
- How does the load order work? Alphabetically? If so, does the directory structure matter?

My goal here: Some mods are conflicting, but really, they don't. What I mean by that is, they do not alter the same thing. I want to address that. I want to have control over who win in case of a real conflict. I want to merge edits that can definitely work alongside each other.

Do you guys know stuff about all this? I would very much like to be enlightened on this matter.
Thank you very much!

1) No it won't. TS4 won't merge anything.
2) Conflicts are resolved by whichever was loaded last is what will get loaded. So if you have 2 different hair styles or whatever with the same XML, whichever was loaded last will be the one you see in game.
3) AFAIK, it is alphabetically. The same way you see it in your directory is how it gets loaded to my knowledge.

And that's the extent of my knowledge unfortunately. If you want something to take control name it 'ZZZZZZZZZZZZ[item name]' and that will for sure override the other things. I might also be a complete idiot and it's whatever's loaded first wins but I'm 80% sure it's whatever's loaded last.

In my testing (at least for XML mods in Windows OS, this may not hold true for CC or Macs) the XML resource loaded first is the one that is used. Any subfolders are loaded in order as well, so if you have a subfolder named "C" then anything in that subfolder will be loaded before a mod named "D".

As a Skyrim player myself, I can tell you Sims has never had a tool like TES5Edit. There's nothing even close to what it does.

Thank you guys.

I'm still very confused as to why some mods that are literally made to work together, by the same author, overwrites each other but still work in the end? How so?

First example that come to mind here is the Emotional Inertia mod by roBurky conflicting with its own mod Variable Emotional Traits

Here:

It's rather simple: Emotional Inertia contains 300 resources, Variabel Emotional traits 151 resources. 35 of those resources are common to both mods, and those 35 make the same changes to the game files. So even if the two mods "conflict" in the eyes of the Mod Conflict Detector, due to the resources they have in common, it doesn't make any difference in this case, since the same changes will be imposed on the game regardless of which version of the resource trumps the other.