How do I hunt down an offending mod?

[Narks]

Some mod is adding "sleep / shield / (something else, I forgot the name) controller" items to my NPC's. This would be fine, except I can see them. And pick them up. And they are worth 9 million gold. Eww.

Is there an easy way to figure out what item the mod belongs to?

[nottlong]

The 2 most common ways is to set everything back to vanilla oblivion and then add mods one at a time until you get the problem. Or going from what you are using now and deactivating mods one at until it gos away. There is no easy way. If it is something that just came up,say you added 2-3 mods at one time then remove those and see if that fixes it. If it does then you can add them back in one at a time until you find the one. But to start with I would use TES4Edit and see if any conflicts show up with it. Debubing can be a pain but is worth it in the long run.

[Khettienna]

FormID Finder and RefScope are two OBSE plugins made explicitly for your purpose.

If you don't have OBSE, you can use the Beta Comments system. Loot one of these items, drop it on the ground, and make a new Beta Comment with the item targeted in the console.

Or, if you have Wrye Bash, loot one of these items and drop in on the ground. In the console, target the item, and note the first two digits of the hexadecimal Reference ID at the top of the screen next to the item's name. Exit the game and launch Wrye Bash. The first two digits from the Reference ID will be the load order number of the plugin of origin. If the first two digits are FF, however, you'll need to use Refscope or FormID Finder, or manually disable your mods one by one to see which one contains these items.

It is a very common modding practice to use the "token" system. "Tokens" are inventory items created as an efficient way to start or direct scripts, usually; some are designed to be equipped on an NPC, but remain invisible. In that case, the items are marked in the Construction Set to be "unplayable", which means they will be invisible to the player. If you are using Wrye Bash's feature to make all items playable, or you are using some similar mod or utility to accomplish that task, you will continue to be plagued by the sight of these tokens. If this happens to be the case, you are best off addressing it from this direction so you don't have to cheat yourself of the hundreds of mods that use token systems.

Hope this helps!

[Narks]

Wrye Bash's feature to make all items playable

Whoops, I didn't expect that to happen when I ticked that. Thanks!