Priority & Conflicts

Ship · everyone. Two packs, one sprite — who wins? This is the rule, how to control it, and how to read the conflict report the Pack Manager already shows you.

You'll be able to: predict which pack wins a clash, change that outcome by reordering, read the conflicts foldout, and recognise the one deliberate exception to the rule.

The rule, in one line

When two enabled packs target the same asset, the higher-priority pack wins. Everything else on this page is a corollary of that.

Priority is the list order

In the Pack Manager, packs are listed in priority order, top = highest. The pack nearer the top wins any asset both of them touch. To change who wins, change the order — drag a pack up or down (or use its up/down arrows), then Apply. Nothing settles until Apply; reordering without it changes the picture, not the game.

A useful mental model: a clash isn't pack-vs-pack wholesale, it's per asset. Pack X can win the cloak while Pack Y wins the music, if that's how their files fall. Priority only decides the assets they both claim.

Reading the conflicts foldout

The Pack Manager doesn't hide collisions — it reports them. Each conflict line shows the asset key and winner › loser, so you can see exactly what's being overridden and by whom. Expand the Conflicts foldout to read them; the header itself tracks the count (muted "none" → highlighted "N").

The Status Overlay at the bottom of the screen shows the total conflict count too — a quick "how tangled is my current setup" gauge without opening anything.

The one exception: editor text wins

Every asset type follows "packs beat the root workspace" — except text. For text, the root workspace beats every pack.

It's deliberate. The Dev Hub's Dialogue Editor saves to the root Text/, and root-wins guarantees an edit you just made in the editor is never silently shadowed by an installed pack. So: sprites, T2D, audio, video → packs over root; text → root over packs. (More in Text & Dialogue.)

"My pack worked until I added another"

Almost always: the new pack overrides the same asset. Open the conflicts foldout — it names the exact keys that collide and who's now winning.

• If the new pack should win there, reorder so yours sits higher, then Apply.
• If the new pack shouldn't be touching your asset at all, that's a bug in that pack — its files are mis-named or its scope is broader than intended. Report it to its author, not as a Stitchwork issue.

Layering on purpose

Conflicts aren't only accidents — you can stack packs deliberately:

• Base + accent. Put a full skin low and a small "just the cloak" pack high; the accent wins its few assets, the base wins the rest.
• Addon packs. A pack can gate itself on another being enabled (a PackActive condition), so it only applies on top of its parent — see Conditional Activation.

Used this way, priority is a layering tool, and the conflict count is just the seam where your layers meet.

You can now predict and control which pack wins, read the conflict report, and remember the text exception. Related: Pack Manager for the controls, How Stitchwork Works for why load-time replacement makes this clean.