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Desperate For Stable Play and Sexlab Fun


CarmelPop12

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Didn't go through the whole thread, so if this general advice (which I've learned the hard way) has been said already, I apologize.

 

MO is an absolutely fantastic tool that enables you to play Skyrim while modding Skyrim: pure gold.  Gone are the days of completely screwing up your game and having no idea how to get it working again, and consequently not being able to play, for days or weeks, the game you've been enthralled by, while you figure out what the hell went wrong.

 

But there are two major pitfalls in the learning curve of MO that can get you back stuck in modding hell if you're not careful:-

 

1) Overwrite must always be clear, in every profile.  That means, soon as something pops up in Overwrite in a profile, make a mod out of it specific to that profile and relevant to whatever spat it out (e.g. FNIS, Bodyslide, etc.)

 

2) You often need to make several copies of a given mod for the left pane, named appropriately per Profile.  For example, weather mods, lighting mods and body mods are usually quite choosy wrt what other mods they play with.  That means, if you have only one copy of the mod, the way it's set up in the Profile you first set it up in it might work in that Profile, with the other mods that Profile has, but not in another.  So the idea, when this happens, is to be aware of how mods play with each other, and to reinstall and rename COPIES of the more complex mods that have different setup requirements depending on what other mods they're interacting with.

 

Once you get these two basic rules down pat, the power of MO is yours - you can have umpteen Profiles with umpteen completely different setups, some with a broken Skyrim, and instantly you can go back to the Profile you're playing your main ongoing game that you love, with full confidence that it'll fire up properly and the Profile will be exactly the same as the last time you played it, no matter what else you've been doing in other Profiles.  And that means you can test setups in other Profiles, and gradually add the good stuff to your ongoing game, enriching it as you go.

 

^^^This^^^. As to a stable playthrough, as most have said, you need to be picky, especially with heavy scripts. I play on an Acer Aspire laptop, 8gigs of memory, an Nvidia 940m 2gig gpu, and a 2.5 ghz i5. Not a gaming rig at all. I run 4k Fair Skin Texture on all the females in my game, my PC and followers all wear 4K armors and any male followers are 2k and the restare 1k male texture. I have SFO and a few other landscape overhauls. I can play with Sexlab 1.62 no problem, Devious Devices, and Defeat, Beeing Female, and lots of other scripted mods. BUT, and this is a big but, I have to be very choosy about what i play and how many of these mods I play with in one go. That's the beauty of MO. Look at the screen shots I posted. I have over a thousand mods!!! It's crazy, I know, I have a problem....But I also have about a dozen profiles. One is for the kinky DD stuff, another for general badassery, ext. ext. But I can say that I run Sexlab in all of them, lots of overhauls, and lots of scripts. It's just finding what sit well together, and not messing with things mid game. Make Batch Patches. Make Merged patches. These will help immensely. Check the mod pages and read EVERYTHING. Watch for what assets are being changed. If the mod has an MCM config, lower the cell scans some if allowed. Disable them when not in use if allowed. The new version of Sexlab Aroused has an option for that. If you do the Creature Framework, dont' have it connected to Aroused. If there's something that runs checks or papyrus scans but you can limit who or what they do so on, do that. I've been a long time at this, as many have and we have all been through what you are going through.

 

One thing I will also recomend is to make a profile in MO that has your can't do without mods all set up. SKSE, SkyUI, Racemenu, Sexlab, XPMSE, Bodyslide, SLAL, SOS, ext. but nothing that you don't absolutly need. I mean nothing at all extra beyond the very base of what you want. Get that set up and stable. Once you have that foundation established then go ahead and add the rest of the fancy stuff you may want. But don't add it to that profile. Never touch that profile, ever. Make a copy of it using the MO built in feature, and add the new stuff to these copies. This way if something gets way out of hand, you have your foundation still sitting they ready to be built upon once again. Don't get discouraged. It is possible. But don't get greedy. No, do get greedy. Download a thousands mods. But make a dozen profiles using that stable foundation to run only a handful at a time.

 

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One thing I will also recomend is to make a profile in MO that has your can't do without mods all set up. SKSE, SkyUI, Racemenu, Sexlab, XPMSE, Bodyslide, SLAL, SOS, ext. but nothing that you don't absolutly need. I mean nothing at all extra beyond the very base of what you want. Get that set up and stable. Once you have that foundation established then go ahead and add the rest of the fancy stuff you may want. But don't add it to that profile. Never touch that profile, ever. Make a copy of it using the MO built in feature, and add the new stuff to these copies. This way if something gets way out of hand, you have your foundation still sitting they ready to be built upon once again. Don't get discouraged. It is possible. But don't get greedy. No, do get greedy. Download a thousands mods. But make a dozen profiles using that stable foundation to run only a handful at a time.

 

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Also when you see a shiny new mod you want to try in one of your current profiles. Copy the profile to a new profile (create copies of any "Overflow" output mods named to the new profile) and test it there first long enough to decide whether it belongs in your play or not before you hook it into a play through that it might end up spoiling.

 

Another point is when installing a mod is to add the version number of the mod to it's name and to always install new versions of mods under new names (not necessary with clothing mods but for mods with scripting this can be a real life saver). That means you can keep running profiles that are started or dependent on those older versions. You will have to manually switch each profile to the new mod if you want it in that run but you'll have the old version for a fall-back if the new one is not ready for play yet. Too many authors remove all older versions as soon as the latest one is released so a common refrain is people asking for a copy of the older mod because they removed it.

 

There are also some mods like the delightful "Get Stripped! Again!" mod that you may want to play with using one of your characters but wouldn't want or need the mod for a whole play through. As quick copy of the profile with that mod added/enabled will allow you to divert into the play that mod provides without making it a permanent part of the play through. Slaverun Reloaded is another mod that falls into that category, you can add it to an existing play through via copy of a profile and run through the whole mod and then discard it and return to your original play through without having messed it up.

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I didn't read all 12 pages, but i think i still can give some advice.

1. One important thing about using Loot: It isn't recommended to change load order during a gameplay. I often did it myself without problems, but if you have any problems... that might be the point. So, install the mods you want, run Loot, (test if they work nice together, change mods, run Loot, repeat), then start playing with a new game.

 

2. If you re-install your game often... a switch to MO might be worth it. There are a lot of things to learn if you switch, and some stuff is more complicated than with NMM, but for me the main reason to switch was that i was tired of re-installing. With MO you just don't need to.

 

3. Test if stuff works with a new game, always. It's much more often your save that is somehow broken, not the entire game. A big help here is "Alternative starts" which let you start without doing all the annoying "get out of Helgen" stuff. And if you're tired of make the settings for sexlab etc every time again, make the minimum profile mentioned above, only the mods you definitly want, make the settings in the cell where you start, save and copy that save to any other profile you want to use/test/whatever. That saves some time too. :)

 

*edit: and because my all time favourite Getting Stripped! was already mentioned... it has one part in Whiterun with 4 different endings and a second part in Riften with 7 or 8 different endings... the difference is not always that big, but playing it a second or third time is something i definitly recommend. :)

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*edit: and because my all time favourite Getting Stripped! was already mentioned... it has one part in Whiterun with 4 different endings and a second part in Riften with 7 or 8 different endings... the difference is not always that big, but playing it a second or third time is something i definitly recommend. :)

But for that you only need a save to work with, not a whole new profile.

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Didn't go through the whole thread, so if this general advice (which I've learned the hard way) has been said already, I apologize.

 

MO is an absolutely fantastic tool that enables you to play Skyrim while modding Skyrim: pure gold.  Gone are the days of completely screwing up your game and having no idea how to get it working again, and consequently not being able to play, for days or weeks, the game you've been enthralled by, while you figure out what the hell went wrong.

 

But there are two major pitfalls in the learning curve of MO that can get you back stuck in modding hell if you're not careful:-

 

1) Overwrite must always be clear, in every profile.  That means, soon as something pops up in Overwrite in a profile, make a mod out of it specific to that profile and relevant to whatever spat it out (e.g. FNIS, Bodyslide, etc.)

 

2) You often need to make several copies of a given mod for the left pane, named appropriately per Profile.  For example, weather mods, lighting mods and body mods are usually quite choosy wrt what other mods they play with.  That means, if you have only one copy of the mod, the way it's set up in the Profile you first set it up in it might work in that Profile, with the other mods that Profile has, but not in another.  So the idea, when this happens, is to be aware of how mods play with each other, and to reinstall and rename COPIES of the more complex mods that have different setup requirements depending on what other mods they're interacting with.

 

Once you get these two basic rules down pat, the power of MO is yours - you can have umpteen Profiles with umpteen completely different setups, some with a broken Skyrim, and instantly you can go back to the Profile you're playing your main ongoing game that you love, with full confidence that it'll fire up properly and the Profile will be exactly the same as the last time you played it, no matter what else you've been doing in other Profiles.  And that means you can test setups in other Profiles, and gradually add the good stuff to your ongoing game, enriching it as you go.

 

Absolutely.  Something that really can't be stressed enough about MO is how massive an advantage that virtual data directory is over any mod manager that doesn't use one.  When I used NMM I was frequently testing out new mods, installing, uninstalling varius mods, reinstalling mods to upgrade or change options, etc.  This all involved overwriting the files of any other mods I had that conflicted and there were usually a lot of them.  Inevitably my data directory would get so screwed up that the only way to recover was to just delete Skyrim completely and do a clean install and then have to reinstall every mod I had from scratch.  You NEVER have to do that in MO.

 

I don't touch my main profile when I'm testing out new mods, I make a new one.  If they don't work or I don't like them I just delete the profile and use my original one.  Zero chance of screwing up my existing stable game because I never changed it.

 

I do think some people rely too much on Loot though.  Loot does a great job of making sure that mods that are listed as required masters are loaded before the mods that require them.  It doesn't do such a good job at identifying mods that really need to be at the top or bottom of your load order for functional reasons.  For example Loot never puts my texture replacers anywhere near the bottom so they don't do anything unless I fix it manually.  So if you run Loot you probably won't CTD due to a master list conflict but that doesn't mean things will actually work the way they should without tweaking the things Loot gets wrong.

 

95% of the time if I try a mod and it flat out doesn't work it's because I got the load order wrong, with or without Loot.  The other 5% of the time there's a conflict that requires a patch or something.

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I do think some people rely too much on Loot though.  Loot does a great job of making sure that mods that are listed as required masters are loaded before the mods that require them.  It doesn't do such a good job at identifying mods that really need to be at the top or bottom of your load order for functional reasons.  For example Loot never puts my texture replacers anywhere near the bottom so they don't do anything unless I fix it manually.  So if you run Loot you probably won't CTD due to a master list conflict but that doesn't mean things will actually work the way they should without tweaking the things Loot gets wrong.

 

95% of the time if I try a mod and it flat out doesn't work it's because I got the load order wrong, with or without Loot.  The other 5% of the time there's a conflict that requires a patch or something.

You bring up another thing that Mod Organizer brings to the table. The ability to see down to the file level which files are conflicting and then it provides the tools to allow you to ensure a whole mod wins the file level battle or even to select individual files as the winners (by "hiding" the files that would otherwise win).

 

The only thing it doesn't let you do is take care of the Record level conflicts in mods, but you can run TES5EDIT to find and fix those.

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*snip*

MO is an absolutely fantastic tool that enables you to play Skyrim while modding Skyrim: pure gold.  Gone are the days of completely screwing up your game and having no idea how to get it working again, and consequently not being able to play, for days or weeks, the game you've been enthralled by, while you figure out what the hell went wrong.

 

 

 

I do think some people rely too much on Loot though.  Loot does a great job of making sure that mods that are listed as required masters are loaded before the mods that require them.  It doesn't do such a good job at identifying mods that really need to be at the top or bottom of your load order for functional reasons.  For example Loot never puts my texture replacers anywhere near the bottom so they don't do anything unless I fix it manually.  So if you run Loot you probably won't CTD due to a master list conflict but that doesn't mean things will actually work the way they should without tweaking the things Loot gets wrong.

 

95% of the time if I try a mod and it flat out doesn't work it's because I got the load order wrong, with or without Loot.  The other 5% of the time there's a conflict that requires a patch or something.

 

I might be wrong here, afaik Loot cares only about the script stuff which is much more difficult to find a proper order, so imho Loot can't be honored enough. ;)

And while Waxenfigure is right that MO shows you any conflicts and makes it easy to put the obvious things in a proper order, i do NOT recommend to use the sort function from MO, that just fucked things up for me more often than it solved anything. When MO complains about the order i usually change stuff manually or ignore it.

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I might be wrong here, afaik Loot cares only about the script stuff which is much more difficult to find a proper order, so imho Loot can't be honored enough. ;)

And while Waxenfigure is right that MO shows you any conflicts and makes it easy to put the obvious things in a proper order, i do NOT recommend to use the sort function from MO, that just fucked things up for me more often than it solved anything. When MO complains about the order i usually change stuff manually or ignore it.

 

 

Oh I agree, don't use the auto fix thing in MO.  That does crazy things to the order of your assets.  But I do pay attention to what it flags as a potential load order issue and fix it myself manually.  Just don't click the autofix thing or you'll end up with wierd things like vanilla DLC content half way down your load order and whatnot :)

 

I actually do something similar with Loot.  If I run it to see where loot would put some new mod I'm testing, I don't save the changes, I will manually place the new mod in an appropriate place based on what I saw from Loot.  That way Loot doesn't mess up the rest of my mods that are already working fine.  I wish Loot had an option to tell it hey, I have this new mod, find the best spot for it in my current load order without changing the positioning of any of my other mods.

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