I've been trying to make a form to save credentials for external APIs. I limited the form to admin access and I'm trying to make it encode the values for user/pass when it saves but I cannot get the N/encode module to load in the clientscript I'm attaching to my form. Is there a better way of doing that?

Why are you trying to perform the encoding on the client side and not on the server side?

I'm not sure how. The behavior I was going for was to allow admins to set/update the credentials in a custom form but store the fields encoded and then decode them for the api calls. I thought the way to do that was with a clientscript attached to the form for my custom record using the pageinit and saverecord entry points.

You should do it on the server side. Capture the values on the "post" method on the server side, encode them and then save them.