1. Making Technical Improvements

I am not going to try to reinvent the wheel here. This is the definitive guide to making technical improvements for performance in your Skyrim game::

https://wiki.step-project.com/STEP:2.10.0

The Skyrim Total Enhancement Program (or STEP) guide is the product of a lot of dedicated work by a lot of people. All the recommendations listed have been tested extensively in game and can be thoroughly trusted. I admit that it looks very intimidating at first glance. However, the very fact that it is comprehensive and, dare I say, exhaustive is what makes it the definitive go-to guide. Do not expect to go through it in an hour. It will take time to read and understand but, if you are needing a technical fix for your Skyrim performance this is where you will find it.

1a. Ini files

One of the major reasons to go through the STEP wiki is to optimize your .ini files. These will have an impact on your performance as pointed out by Worik in the comments on this blog. While it is a good and useful thing to become familiar with the files, and while it is very important to try to optimize them for best performance, let me once again mention Bethini (found on Nexus, the link is in my first post on this blog). This is the method for getting the best results for your .ini files for those who just want to play Skyrim and don't want to become Skyrim nerds. I've chosen to place this here because Bethini is brought to you by the same good people who brought you the STEP program in the first place.

2. Skyrim Zen

I am placing this here because simply giving the STEP program reference seems like too little for a blog entry yet going into another major topic might short change one or the other. So, let me give you a way of looking at adding mods to Skyrim LE.

At first I though of modding as something like barnacles that have accreted onto the ship (the Skyrim engine). With this perspective each mod could then be considered as something that should be expected to slow (and eventually with enough barnacles stop) the movement of the ship. Because of size and location each barnacle might have greater or lesser impact on the ship's movement but all of them had some. While there is some truth in this I believe I have come to a better analogy.

The Skyrim engine is like a water pump. For this purpose it is a closed loop system requiring the water that is pumped to return to the pump eventually. This might be like the water in a fish pond where the pumping action aerates the water. When you add mods it is like adding filters or screens to the water flow. Some are very porous and make almost no difference to the flow. Others have major impacts and can even change where in the pipes that water flows. So, depending on the filters (mods) that are added you can decrease your performance and even crash your game with just a dozen or so mods (even with all the requirements - not talking missing masters here) or you can have hundreds of mods (not plug-ins but mods) and have a very stable and playable game. This change in analogy is important for a reason. Skyrim modding isn't about just avoiding "bad" mods. There are a few of these but not as many as you would think from the complaints that are out there. There is also the interaction of one mod with another. Back to the filter analogy. If one filter closes off the flow on the right side of the pipe and the following filter closes off the left side of the pipe you will have a problem. Similar things can, and do, happen with mods. There are plenty of mods that work just fine by themselves and with many other mods but are incompatible with a handful of other mods. Where possible, most mod authors note known incompatibilities on their modpage. However, they can only publish what they know and many of these incompatibilities are not made known to them.

Why is any of this philosophical bullshit of any importance to you? The mindset can keep you from falling into a trap. You have 150 mods loaded and start noticing a problem (slowing, stuttering CTD, etc.). You stumble across the fact that eliminating #100 in your load order fixes your problem and conclude that #100 is a "bad" mod. No, you have proven that #100 has been a significant part of your problem but there may be one or more other mods with which it is interacting that is causing the problem. It may be that if you had removed #78 first you would have fixed the problem equally well and thought that #78 was the problem. So, when you have a problem, and when you think that you have "fixed" a problem by removing a mod keep your mind open (especially if this was a mod you really wanted in the first place) that you may have found only part of "the problem." There may be, and often is, another solution that will allow you to keep your "problem" mod.