What´s the kick with having more then 200 mods active?

[SirDuke]

Just asking?!?

 

You know, I accept that there are a lot of different mods for ANY kind of taste out there...

And I´ve modded my game just the way I like.

But I have only about 140 modifications running, with only 93 esm/esp.

 

And I swear, I don´t even use them all, some are just running in the background...

 

Now, every second time, someone is asking for help here, and posting his modlist...

...for me it´s like; "wooooohhhhh, 249 esps active and wondering why something might conflict???"

 

Do you REALLY use them all?

Or might it be just lazyness to sort some out?

Is it the maximum number you just want to reach?

 

And asking the professionals here;

Isn´t the game getting more and more unstable, with every more mod you install?

I mean;

Isn´t the 187th weapon crate, added to riverwood, some day killing the cell buffer?

 

I´m just curious...

[LesboIsBesto]

I have 205 active now & I use everything when I can, script based mods & amor/weapon ones alike. Most of these kinda happen on their own like SexLab mods & others I have to actively seek em out to play with them but either way, I still play with em all whenever possible. 

 

As for stability, my game takes a couple startups to work sometimes now rip, but I dont give af anyways long as I can still play in the end. Plus I save often so even if I crash, it usually doesnt screw with my game

[worik]

it's in fact about 300+ ... Thanks to the nine, they gave us mod merging and now I am down to 130+ esp/esm.

And yes I need them all. Truth to be told, I could do with some more

[MrEsturk]

I had to learn the hard way, turning more than a few savecodes I put a great deal of time into into potatoes due to the mod bloat making them unplayable over time. At this point I'm down to about 84 esm/esp. Granted my game is bloated to the hilt with loose file replacements, but I get use out of all that as it part of the complete cosmetic overhaul I imposed on my game.

 

I guess most people simply don't make the connection that all those dormant mods they still have active pack on the bloat to their game. Even less probably know about Skyrim's 4 gig ram hardcap, thus not understanding their 32 gig DDR4 ram cards + 800$ graphics card does little help keep Skyrim running smooth and stable.

 

Even trimmed down I still get a fair number of "Out of Memory" CTDs, though only in a few problem spots of the game. I swear Dawnstar must have a memory leak or something similar. I can prance around bloated Whiterun triggering script heavy events with reckless glee no problem. Yet Dawnstar (and to a lesser extent Solitude/Winterhold/Windhelm) will OoM over a scripted sneeze.

[shadow866]

Well..You could have like 50 esp and have a really unstable game. It all depends what kind of mods you install. So its not really about how many esp's you got.

Im at the ESP cap and also got like 100-150 esp's that have been merged into 2 or 3 esp's. Tho most are followers and weapon/armor packs thats have been merged.

Vanilla skyrim has far to few npc's. It doesnt really feel alive. So i got loads of those installed as well.

My load order is huge due to all the combat overhaul mods and landscape/city mods and survival mods and so on for immersive.

And yes, my game is very stable. It took alot of effort to make it stable.

Vanilla skyrim is very boring so i pretty much overhauled everything.

Even tho skyrim is from 2011 it still can look like a next generation game with the right mods.

There are loads of mods out there so its very easy to hit the esp cap. You gotta know skyrim limits before you throw every random mod in there. Luckily there are plenty of guides and ironic....even more mods that make your skyrim stable.

[Darkpig]

I really should reduce my load (Not that one ?). I mostly keep mods to tweak my game. Some I keep to stabilize my game, some I keep to reduce or add content to my game that I think should or should not be there, and some are silly things like armor mods. Somethings gotta give.

 

To be honest there is quite a lot I would change about skyrim if I could.

[Nazzzgul666]

Well, in general: yes, i use all my mods installed and no, it's not unstable. Like mentioned by others, the pure mod/esp count doesn't really matter at all. Even very script heavy games like my current one isn't necessarily unstable - it's slow, partly because i don't have a power rig but a potato, and sometimes it needs up to 10 seconds until a dialogue opens. But CTDs, freezes, broken saves or anything else game breaking...? Maybe one CTD in 20-30 RL hours playing and no other problems, i call that quite stable.

Not perfect, but i dismissed the idea of a perfectly stable game when i started modding, especially if i try a combination of new WIP mods that i never tried before, and possible nobody ever did in exactly this combination. Which is quite likely with something like 200+ mods.

I've never seen an urge to merge mods, i'm not really into followers at all so if i decide to install custom ones i add 1-3, not 30. I've found a couple of outfits i really like and while i'd appretiate some more variations of those i couldn't find them, so... 5 armor mods is what i have to go. I don't use much texture replacers either, most are for NPCs. Honestly i've just never had the patience to scroll through all the stuff avaivable, it's not that much important to me.

All in all i'm usually around 200, not necessarily above that number. But i know i could easily go beyond without losing much stability, maybe i'd need a better graphic card when using many graphic enhancements.

 

My personal opinion when it comes to stability is: cloak spells are an abolishment from hell and should be avoided as far as possible, especially when mods add them on several NPCS at once. But that's really just my experience, it's not like i made a study about it.

[Ernest Lemmingway]

I just surpassed 215 mods, 154 files, all active and being used, all stable. Not perfect, which is impossible even without mods, but it's not crashing every 15 minutes. Mostly because I finally got ENB to work three months ago. Now if I just got Bash to work it might be even more stable...or at least figured out how to get Windows Manager to stop trying to control my frame rate since I quit using the Speed Hack in ENB because it disabled graphics modification. I really, really hate Win 10.

[The First Lady of Hats]

  I tend to keep two load orders in Mod org. One fer actual gameplay, tends to have the really big hungry things active like LOTD, INEED and various other script heavy mods. One fer screenshotting various shennanigans wi' wierd stuff like jaxon positioner, tilty camera fings, extra lights or pose mods enabled. Since imma in the process of rebuilding a load order they're both pretty much carbon copies of each other right now, both sat at 240 esp's wi' no problems past or present tense.

 

'pparently the "Official" limit is 255 esps, I've noticed oddities start if'n I go to 250 so I try keep 245 as me maximum. Wyre bash seems to complain I have more than 300 mods installed, dunno where the hell it actually pulls this number from (unless it's counting texture replacers and whutnot too.) but I've managed to tell it to shut the hell up and saftely ignore it without consequence so far. I realize that eventually something will prolly break (There's always that ONE more mod you want to add and push your luck with) but so far, hundreds upon hundreds o' hours of play and all seems rosy.

 

14 hours ago, Ernest Lemmingway said:

Now if I just got Bash to work it might be even more stable...

What weirdness is yer Bash up to?

[Ernest Lemmingway]

1 hour ago, The First Lady of Hats said:

What weirdness is yer Bash up to?

It makes my game unstable and causes a CTD after a few minutes. Honestly I don't have it installed at the moment and I'm fairly sure it's because I merged leveled lists when we're not supposed to when I did last use it. Eh, the game is pretty stable as is; it's Win 10's Window Manager trying to manage my frame rate and causing choppy play that really irks me right now. I just need to fiddle with some settings in MO, I think.

[Mexicola88]

Active Mods 274 Active Plugins 175 my game is still very stable. A few years ago i had like 400 Active Mods and 255 Active Plugins but it wasn't very stable because i didn't have SKSE Plugin Preloader in combination with Crash Fixes installed. But now my current modded game is rockstable. It only crashes every 6-8 hours or so.

 

Always depends what kind of mods.

[Distortedrealms]

Funny thing, I did a copy of my most stable profile in MO, and wanted to see if I I could trim a few mods from the 400+ mods I use, and honestly I kept almost every one because I used all of them haha. If you have a stable game, and a rig to back it up, sky is the limit with mods. 

[redeyesandlonghair]

I have 327 mods installed and I actively use all of them in some way each time I play Skyrim.  I used to have mods that didn't see much use, but I got rid of those.  I put in the work to make the game be stable so that I could use all the mods I want to use - and yeah, it was a lot of work.

[Grey Cloud]

I'm with the OP on this one. Currently 182 plug-ins and 212 mods which is slightly higher than usual with the mod number. The only time I ramp up the numbers is after a hardware upgrade just to see what the new confibulation can handle. Once I've got my head around this I drop back and keep a good amount of redundancy in reserve.

 

I use SCO Summer Edition (by ACEEQ) plus a grass mod and they take care of my environmental prerequisites. No snow or storms mods need apply. I use JK's Skyrim Lite for the man-made environment.

I have the usual suspects: USLEEP, SMIM, UIExtensions, SkyUI, etc.

I very rarely use quest mods and if I do they are uninstalled at the end of that game.

I have a slew of mods which remove or otherwise nullify as much of the vanilla game as possible (The Choice Is Yours, Timing Is Everything, etc), so no dragons or vampires etc. As I've said elsewhere, I am convinced that this alone contributes to stablity.

I have umpteen SL/LL mods which are ever-presents. They are mods which contribute to me being able to play the game I want. What I didn't do was trawl through the the mods here on LL and install every mod with 'sex' in the title or a pair of tits on the description page. (If I was 40 years younger? Hmmn, ? . . .)

A lot of my mods are what I call 'fire and forget' mods - Unread Books Glow, Better Carry Weight, etc.

What I consider my 'big' mods are things like 3DNPC, War Zones, OBIS, etc. Mods which add a lot of content. I keep these to a minimum and tweak the MCMs to reduce the impact wherever possible.

I currently have about 6 or so NPC overhauls on the go (pure coincidence that they are all female NPCs). Nice variety which gives different shapes and sizes for the all the wimmins.

 

Net result is a stable game which allows me to play free-style and change my style mid-game should I so require. I stroll around the province doing pretty much what I like, when I like. Well, at least until the next gang of OBIS bandits turn up.  The bastards.

 

It seems to me that a lot of people who, say, install a trillion armour mods tend to forget or not realise that a lot of that content wont make it into the game. e.g. all else being equal, only one mod can provide the leather armour. All the other iterations of it from the other mods wil be overwritten.

 

Another example would be follower mods. You see lots of mod lists with the 3 Bijin mods and a trillion follower mods. I may be wrong here but it seems to me that they want pretty women everywhere who they can use as followers but they don't know it can be done with an overhaul and a follower mod. They aslo end up with umpteen hair mods, brow mods, eye mods, etc because they are required by the various follower mods. (And they wonder why Race Menu is always bombing out).

[FauxFurry]

It takes a lot of mods to get things anywhere close to my exacting specifications. Even then, I only tend to run around 118 plug-ins or so. I tend to add more only to try out new mods or to try to convert others...to my detriment since it is what breaks a perfectly stable set-up more often than not. Just having the things installed at all renders everything unstable enough to have to purge everything related to Skyrim from every part of my PC just to be sure what is causing crashes when nothing in the Data files could be doing it.

[Raider1]

I don't see it as a kick, You add as many mods as interest you and make the game closer to the style you like.   Normally I really don't pay that much attention to the number of mods I have installed.  I've played with as few as five and currently, after checking, 181 for Skyrim.   Thanks to a mod I am playing a wizard and enjoying  being a mage for the first time.   

 

I have two mods for FO3, 80 for FNV, and 98 for FO4.  

 

[Ernest Lemmingway]

On 7/24/2018 at 12:58 AM, FauxFurry said:

It takes a lot of mods to get things anywhere close to my exacting specifications. Even then, I only tend to run around 118 plug-ins or so. I tend to add more only to try out new mods or to try to convert others...to my detriment since it is what breaks a perfectly stable set-up more often than not. Just having the things installed at all renders everything unstable enough to have to purge everything related to Skyrim from every part of my PC just to be sure what is causing crashes when nothing in the Data files could be doing it.

Been there. Modded Skyrim is a lot like Jenga: one wrong move and the entire thing collapses.

[wokking56]

I was running 249 for a while but was having some issues, so I trimmed it down. Losing things I didn't really use or need now I'm at 199 and relatively stable.

 

Yes I use them all; sexlab and various extras, some weapons and armors, a couple of housing mods, extra NPCs (Immersive Wenches & Inconsequential NPCs), several followers, beautification mods (both NPCs and environmental), some gameplay enhancements, a couple for stability and a handful of patches. It adds up real quickly.

[Jinxxed0]

I have 867 mods installed, merged down to 162 esps

 

I would say 70% of the mods i have are clothing and armor for mix matching outfits for my characters and the many followers and NPCs in my game that I decide i want to live in one of my player homes. maybe 10% of the mods are waifu followers. 5% weapons. Then i have spell mods and gameplay mods as well. I of course have texture and town overhauls and stuff as well to make my game look great.

 

i have all these mods installed because i have nearly 3,000 hours in Skyrima nd I like changing things up. i keep the mods installed because I like having options for dressing up my favorite NPCs. My characters also tend to wear different stuff through out a play through and not just one thing. I dont think i've ever touched vanilla armor and clothes sense 2012 honestly.