Tool Output Awareness

Overview

Several tools in a Skyrim build don't ship records a human authored — they generate them, and the user re-runs the tool, overwriting the output every time. Reqtificator, ParallaxGen, DynDOLOD, Synthesis, TexGen, xLODGen and NPC Plugin Chooser 2 are all in this class. Their plugins (and the meshes / textures they emit) are derived artifacts, not design intent.

This is an operational guardrail, not a procedure: it changes how you treat the load-order winner across every read, conflict pull, and patch you author. The failure it prevents is concrete and houseCARL hits it repeatedly — it reads the true load-order winner, sees a generated plugin sitting on top, and forwards that generated data into the patch it creates. The next time the user runs the tool, that frozen copy is either stale, a duplicate the tool fights, or — for path-bearing data like ParallaxGen's rewritten mesh and texture paths — simply wrong, because the generator assigns different paths on the next run.

The core rule