Does anyone know what this means?

[Crimson]

So I get this warning when I click on plugins --> unofficial skyrim patches on the Nexus Mod Manager; WARNING: This plugin file extension .esp. but its file marks it as an esm!

[Ilja]

USKP acts as a master for several other mods. It has ben "ESMfied".
- ESP = Elder Scroll Plugin file
- ESM = Elder Scroll Master file

That is nothing to worry about.

[Crimson]

Originally posted by Ilja:

USKP acts as a master for several other mods. It has ben "ESMfied".
- ESP = Elder Scroll Plugin file
- ESM = Elder Scroll Master file

That is nothing to worry about.

Thank you.

[gnewna]

It also allows the Unofficial Patches to take their correct place in the load order (directly after the Update.esm and respective DLC files - it goes official file, unofficial patch, official file, unofficial patch...) to work properly, particularly important if you have other mods which have .esm files as all .esm (and ESMified .esp) files will come at the very top of the load order, before other .esp files. (I can't remember why the USKPs are .esp files, though, but anyway, as Ilja says, it's normal.)

[Crimson]

Originally posted by gnewna:

It also allows the Unofficial Patches to take their correct place in the load order (directly after the Update.esm and respective DLC files - it goes official file, unofficial patch, official file, unofficial patch...) to work properly, particularly important if you have other mods which have .esm files as all .esm (and ESMified .esp) files will come at the very top of the load order, before other .esp files. (I can't remember why the USKPs are .esp files, though, but anyway, as Ilja says, it's normal.)

Thanks.

[Belanos]

If the message really bothers you, just change the esp to esm yourself and make it official. They should work just fine after that. I'm not really sure why they named them as them esp files frankly.

[Ilja]

Originally posted by Belanos:

If the message really bothers you, just change the esp to esm yourself and make it official. They should work just fine after that. I'm not really sure why they named them as them esp files frankly.

Not recommended, because several applications and XML-lists especially look for Unofficial Skyrim Patch.esp file and not ESM-file.

[★Kelvy★]

Because Beth will not allow the modders access to their main files in making the patches - ESMs, thats why they are 'Unofficial' and modified the esp extentions to work the way they do.
This my understanding of this subject.

[gnewna]

It's perfectly possible to create mods that have the .esm extension, though (for example: Apachii SkyHair, EFF's core module, Climates of Tamriel's main part...) Far as I can tell, the patches were originally .esp files but eventually they changed to an esm-ified .esp for various reasons mentioned above. They kept the .esp extension partly to limit issues for people updating their patch at that point, and partly I imagine for the reason Ilja mentions in his latest comment.

[Belanos]

Originally posted by Kelvy:

Because Beth will not allow the modders access to their main files in making the patches - ESMs, thats why they are 'Unofficial' and modified the esp extentions to work the way they do.
This my understanding of this subject.

It's really not difficult to turn an esp file into an esm. You can do it using TES5Edit. The drawback is that once it's an esm, it can't be directly edited by the CK. I suspect that they originally turned it into an esm, but simply renamed the extension to esp so that it could be loaded up and edited. The CK doesn't care about the internal data, all it looks for is the esp extension in order to determine whether to make it available for editing or not. At least that's how it worked with all the other Bethesda games. I'm still kind of new at the Skyrim CK.

[★Kelvy★]

Never to old to learn new info, but for some reason I read in the past that they couldn't access Beth, to have them included into main game files, alas esps/come esm-ified.