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Recently I got back into modding and realized I needed to do some back tracking to remove effects not in use. However its proven to be a very long task becuase I cant tell which effects are in use or which ones are just taking up space and not in use. I was wondering if there was an easier way to remove not-in use assets faster or if there was a current tool I could use that could just tell me whats in use and what isnt in my mod folder. I highly doubt there is, but I thought I would ask anyways.

Someone with programming knowledge should write a program easily. The program has to look for non-commented-out mentions of the fx files in the odf files, then delete the ones which are not mentioned anywhere. Even if you read some documentation you could do it in an easy language e.g. VisualBasic.

To clarify, you want to know which effects are loaded into memory but never actually seen during gameplay? AFAIK there aren't any with the stock assets. Given that this game is on both PC and consoles they would have optimized all builds to use the least amount of memory possible. Disabling things like unused effects, models, animations, etc, would be chief among optimizations. Obviously that doesn't apply to mods, so if you're talking about non-stock stuff that's a different story.

Just curious, why do you want to do that?

Oh you see im revisiting my empire rising mod. I found an older build on a hard drive I had and im simply trying to get back on the train. So right now im pain-stakingly removing things that arn't in use like random fx files i didnt remove during the builds save. In general im just trying to make my file smaller.

Well I can save you some time. If you don't reference an FX inside and ODF file it won't get put into the final munge. It will get converted to the right format to go into the .lvl file, but REQ files are created by the munge and if that effect isn't referenced anywhere it won't get dumped into the .lvl file at the end.

What Teancum said. If you want to delete them anyway, use Notepad++ to search through all of your files at once. It's also a very helpful program in general.