Load up your mods
If you already have a mod in the works then load this up along with the mod you wish to take the items from, be sure to make yours the active mod, otherwise load the resource but do not make it active. That way when you save you do not affect the resource mod only your own.
Find the items
For this example we will choose clothing as it is more involved than the other things.
Step 1: First go to the clothing tab and find the item you wish to copy, double click it to bring up the items window and then change the ID, i usually just prefix mine with Cali.
Make a note of the body parts it uses as you will need to do those next.
Hit save and when prompted say yes to create a new item.
Step 2: Next go to the body tab and find the relevant body parts and change the ID like you did in step 1.
Step 3: Now return to the clothing tab and reassign the body parts to your newly created clones.
That’s it you now have a new piece of clothing the same as the original 🙂
The same method applies to armour but for other objects you just need to do step 1.
But what about scripted items?
As some things may have scripts attached you will need to make a copy of the script.
Step 1: Hit the pencil button to bring up the script window, find the script you wish to copy and then highlight the text and hit ctrl-c.
Step 2: Next open a new script and hit ctrl-v to paste your copy, change the ID of the new script and save.
Never just change the id of the original as it will not create a copy it will just alter that script.
Step 3: Assign your new script to the object.
Do’s and Don’ts
Do make sure you change ID’s when using things from other mods to help prevent conflicts, you may not use both mods together but somebody might.
Don’t Look at any of the items in the render window before you clone them as they will get tagged and end up in your mod, if this does happen it’s not a disaster as you can clean them out afterwards with a mod cleaning utility 😉
If you have used a unique prefix cleaning your mod should be easy as anything that shouldn’t be there should be more obvious.
That’s it, simple 😀