Does Skyrim have a hard mod limit?

[Balgin]

Hello everyone. I seem to have run into an interesting problem with Skyrim lately. Before continuing I need to stress that this isn't specific to any one mod but that it seems to be affecting all mods in general.

 

I appear to have reached a hard mod limit. A brick wall, if you will. At this point whenever I install a new mod there's a chance that it just breaks the game completely. Either saves won't load at all or they do but suddenly something is missing (the infamous Dawnguard incompatibility issue that many mods seem to be laden with). The save will load but all my equipment will be gone or character appearance is messed up etc. Essentially installing a new mod can seriously break the game.

 

To further confuse things this isn't related to having the new mod active in the load order. I can remove it from the load order and the game will continue to be broken. The only way to fix everything is to completely uninstall whatever new mod it is. Delete every single file. Then suddenly, every save loads perfectly normal again.

 

When this first occurred I obviously suspected there was something wrong with the mod in question. Now it's happening with almost any new mod I try out (although it usually only seems to happen if the mod in question will add new scripts to the scripts folder but it sometimes happens with non script mods too).

 

This has obviously got me considering clearing out old mods that I don't use very often any more (and that's probably not a bad idea). While I have a backup archive of most of the skyrim mods I've ever installed on a separate hard drive (for in case anything went wrong with any of them so I could essentially reset them back to their original form by reinstalling) I don't have everything backed up, especially some of the older ones. Sometimes I look at my load order and honestly wonder if anything I use still requires SPIKE.esm, for example (especially as Spike has been superseded by SKSE).

 

Anyway, I thought I'd ask if any of you have experienced this problem or have any idea what's going on. My gut tells me it might be something to do with the overall size of the Skyrim folder being bloated with mods or something similar but I'd be interested to know if anyone's got any suggestions or observations that might help me out here. Again I should stress that it doesn't seem to matter which new mod is being tried out but that rather it appears to be some sort of general issue.

[MadMansGun]

yes, 255 esp/esm files. ( -4 for DLC and update esm files)

[KoolHndLuke]

People get around the limit by merging plugins.

 

 

[Mister X]

Additional to say is, that only mods with plugins count to that limit. Simple replacements (mesh, texture, music, ...) without an esp/esm or SKSE plugins without esp/esm you can get as much as you want

[Grey Cloud]

7 hours ago, Balgin said:

Again I should stress that it doesn't seem to matter which new mod is being tried out but that rather it appears to be some sort of general issue.

Are you talking about mods or plug-ins? If the latter then your question has already been answered.

[Balgin]

8 hours ago, MadMansGun said:

yes, 255 esp/esm files. ( -4 for DLC and update esm files)

You're talking about active mods on the load order. I'm not. I'm talking about the total number of installed mods regardless of whether they're activated or not.

 

I have 504 mods installed. Installed.

 

I typically have 243-244 mods (excluding the 4 core files) active on the load order. I'm not over the active limit but there seems to be some kind of passive limit as well which is rather unexpected.

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Balgin said:

You're talking about active mods on the load order. I'm not. I'm talking about the total number of installed mods regardless of whether they're activated or not.

Mods that do not have a ESP/ESM plugin are either replacing vanilla assets/assets by mods you already have installed or are SKSE plugins or SKSE plugin files. SKSE plugins are only limited by std::vector::max_size and you are not going to reach that other than running out of 32-bits virtual address space to allocate new plugins.

Mod managers have very big limits too (32-bits or bigger) for mod entries.

 

Other than unsigned 8-bits integer - 1 (because 255 is a special reserved value) for ESP/ESM plugins, there is virtually no limit.

[brown66]

56 minutes ago, Balgin said:

You're talking about active mods on the load order. I'm not. I'm talking about the total number of installed mods regardless of whether they're activated or not.

 

I have 504 mods installed. Installed.

 

I typically have 243-244 mods (excluding the 4 core files) active on the load order. I'm not over the active limit but there seems to be some kind of passive limit as well which is rather unexpected.

 

Sorry my English, it's not my native language.

I suggest you try Save Game Script Cleaner (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/52363), but only after remove the mods that cause the problem and save the game again.

I also read somewhere that there is some kind of limit (I think it was some kind of sripts) for the save games and that this limit affect Skyrim SE and possibity Skyrim LE. If I remember correctly, my current save game has about 60Mb (my main character is at level 87 without cheats), so your save game should at least get over there.

And, I don't want to teach anybody, but make sure you don't have mod followers with incompatible bodies in your mods list.

 

[Balgin]

9 minutes ago, Hawk9969 said:

Other than unsigned 8-bits integer - 1 (because 255 is a special reserved value) for ESP/ESM plugins, there is virtually no limit.

Thankyou. That's what I wanted to confirm. I appear to have run in to some other issue then. Once again I know all about the 255 mod limit on the load order. I'm not talking about the load order but the total number of installed mods (whether they're currently in use or not). This doesn't seem to have anything to do with mods without an esm/esp. I simply seem to have reached a point where attempting to install a new mod will break things (even if I'm not actually using it).

[Just Don't]

If I remember right there is also a ~580 esm/esp cap which takes into account any plugin/master within the Data folder (so it even counts disabled esp/esm files). You might want to check that if you have several mods,have done merges or disabled the esp but left them in there. Taking these esp/esm outside of Data should be enough to fix the issue if you indeed have near 580 esp/esm in total.

[Balgin]

39 minutes ago, dontknowdontcaredontask said:

If I remember right there is also a ~580 esm/esp cap which takes into account any plugin/master within the Data folder (so it even counts disabled esp/esm files). You might want to check that if you have several mods,have done merges or disabled the esp but left them in there. Taking these esp/esm outside of Data should be enough to fix the issue if you indeed have near 580 esp/esm in total.

Thankyou. As I previously mentioned there are 508 esm/esp's in the data folder and those include Skyrim.esm, Update.esm, Dawnguard.esm, Hearthfires.esm & Dragonborn.esm so I'm not ignoring and excluding those in the 508 total. Perhaps it's 508 instead of 580? If so then my situation would make a lot of sense.

 

Quote

I also read somewhere that there is some kind of limit (I think it was some kind of sripts) for the save games and that this limit affect Skyrim SE and possibity Skyrim LE. If I remember correctly, my current save game has about 60Mb (my main character is at level 87 without cheats), so your save game should at least get over there.

Brown66. Thanks. I've checked and there are no saves larger than about 15-16Mb in size.

[Balgin]

I ran a little experiment earlier. I completely removed an old mod that I do not use any more. That's the esp and all it's associated files from the correct folders and subfolders. Then I installed a previous game breaking "problem mod" and everything ran just fine.

 

Either 508 mods is the limit for the data folder or  there's some esp's and esm's lurking in subfolders somewhere that I need to go tidy up.

[Guest]

Why do you even have more disabled plugins than enabled ones in the first place? Even if we are talking a mod manager's profiles, you shouldn't have that many disabled plugins because you wouldn't have these mods enabled within a certain profile to expose those disabled plugins to begin with.

Hell, you can even hide them with MO if you just want the assets from a mod and not their plugin.

[Just Don't]

21 minutes ago, Balgin said:

Either 508 mods is the limit for the data folder or  there's some esp's and esm's lurking in subfolders somewhere that I need to go tidy up.

Checked the post I first saw and the sources linked in there and yeah, the limit seems to be 508. And only esp/esm directly in the Data folder count, anywhere else doesn't matter. You should never need +500 plugins in Data, never. So you can either move the unused ones outside of Data or put them in a subfolder and things should work fine (or at least work).

 

 

 

[Balgin]

12 minutes ago, Hawk9969 said:

Hell, you can even hide them with MO if you just want the assets from a mod and not their plugin.

MO seems to bypass SKSE and runs at a considerably slower framerate than simply using the SKSE launcher. I recently discovered a mod which might fix that but haven't experimented with it yet. It's called something like launch skse from anything (I'm paraphrasing because I haven't looked at it since yesterday).

[Guest]

4 minutes ago, Balgin said:

MO seems to bypass SKSE and runs at a considerably slower framerate than simply using the SKSE launcher. I recently discovered a mod which might fix that but haven't experimented with it yet. It's called something like launch skse from anything (I'm paraphrasing because I haven't looked at it since yesterday).

What? MO just launches the program and then hooks the system's I/O access/write functions within the program so they resolve their filesystem path to MO's virtual filesystem path.

What the hell are you even talking about anyway? I was asking why you've that many disabled plugins to begin with, it has nothing to do with MO or SKSE.

 

I do wonder however how you came to believe that "MO bypasses SKSE" when it would be pretty obvious that this isn't true when 90% of your mods fail to work due to the lack of SKSE.

[Grey Cloud]

2 hours ago, Balgin said:

I completely removed an old mod that I do not use any more. That's the esp and all it's associated files from the correct folders and subfolders.

Are you saying you did this manually?