This is a basic guide to how to utilise the Equipment Slots (hereafter just called “Slots”) mod, which is an absolute fundamental for fashion and especially photography.
Slots has four major functions:
1. Swap any item from any slot to another (e.g. Gloves to Helmet), including slots that do not usually have visuals.
2. Show items in slots (e.g. “amulet”) that normally do not have visuals, increasing your total number of equippable items significantly.
3. Show and hide different pieces of garments (different “objects”).
4. Show and hide different parts of the body (vertex masking).
When you first open Slots, you are presented with two tabs. On the primary/default tab, there are two toggles and your currently equipped items are displayed. Below that are all of the wearables in your inventory.
The two toggles are recommended only to be used for virtual photography purposes rather than normal gameplay (though some people report success but use them at your own risk outside of photos).
The first toggle allows for weapon, wing, and horn slots to have visuals (you will still need to change the slot assignments of your items to them, of course, described below).
The second toggle allows for amulets, rings, and camp clothes to be displayed with visuals.
When you go to your inventory pane in Slots, hovering your cursor over an item will show its name and currently-assigned slot (the default if you’ve never used Slots before):
If you click the icon for the item, a tooltip will come up with a number of options.
To equip an item from your inventory, click and select “equip” or right-click it.
To change the slot of an item, you open the Visual or Nonvisual tabs to select a new slot. You can also enable visuals on some of the slots that are not wired to show visuals in vanilla, like amulets or weapon slots.
Remember that the appropriate toggle up above must be active for the not-usually-visible slots to show visuals (e.g. rings/amulets).
The item should now appear on your character. If it doesn’t, make sure that you are set to the correct clothes (aka camp or armour) and/or that it isn’t a headwear slot disabled. If you still don’t have visuals, triple check that the item you are trying to equip actually is available for your body type. Slots will/can “equip” items that normally would not be equippable for some BTs but still will (obviously) not have visuals.
You may also need to reset the dummy’s appearance by toggling one of these switches on the vanilla photo mode UI.
Remember, of course, to show weapons if you utilize a weapon slot.
Finally, Slots has two more utilities at the bottom of the default pane. You can create an item version of an item in your inventory to place in the world by hitting the “Visual Template” button. This will spawn in a loot mesh version of your item as though it were on a mannequin, and you can maneuver/move it like any other asset or prop. “Fix item for EasyDye” can be used on stubborn modded items that do not seem to display correctly in EasyDye.
Moving to the “Objects” tab, you will see that there are a number of labels shown here that correspond to your character, their hair, assorted (ahem) body parts, and equipped items.
When you open up one of these, you will see both “Vertex Masks” and “Objects.” “Vertex Masks” are the technical way of saying that an item hides a specific body part or object (e.g. underwear or thighs, etc.). Many items come with these Vertex Masks pre-specified so that, for instance, a bra does not clip through a shirt, or to hide clipping of body parts that are not seen in a garment so they do not have to be rendered (both preventing clipping and, ostensibly, enhancing performance)
For any number of reasons you might want to unhide or hide different body parts than a modder specified (it’s very easy for modders to forget to mask body parts or underwear, for instance). Here you can see that the dummy’s thighs are now hidden using vertex masking:
One of the most common uses is to use a “dummy body” in place of the actual BG3 body, which means that a body part will be hidden so that a built-in replacement (actually part of the garment’s visuals, not the character) can be used instead. In order to use a wearable (or part of a wearable) that has a dummy body that you do not want active, remember to both unmask the vertex-masked part AND deactivate the visual body component in the wearable.
To hide part of a visual, open its “Object” dropdown. You can then de-select a mesh to hide its appearance on the character. (If you try to deselect part of a mesh with physics and are wondering why nothing seems to happen, there is nothing extra to hide: clothing with physics have an always-hidden secondary mesh that lets the physics work on them, so it is unfortunately not a modular component).
You can have a TON of fun playing around with the different objects that make up wearables and finding different modular options from them.
Depending on the outfit and modder, you can have a ton of customisation options that can completely change the look of an item.
You can even repurpose parts for use on other mods with a little careful selection and editing. For virtual photography this is especially nice, where you can either do a bit of work in post-processing or pose carefully to hide clipping/oddness. Here, I took Sune’s embroidery and applied it to the Madman Esprit Top (literally at random because it happened to be in my inventory, and even so, it looks surprisingly nice):
You can especially have a lot of fun with items that have built-in VFX layers. Hide the objects that are actual wearables, and leave on the VFX.
You’d never know that she’s actually wearing Stellar Nocturne under all that Goth drama, but it’s there!
I hope this helps you guys make full use of Slotty Slots Equipment Slots! If I got any of the details wrong or you are still confused about something, please feel free to hit me up on the Discord.
I’m really happy to see how many of you are making use of the “slot edits” on the website, too, so if you have “Encyclopaedia-inspired” outfits I’d love to see them (feel free to tag me). Going through all the Object layers for the site is fun, but it can take a very long time, so it means a lot to know that people actually make use of them.