help Activation order in New Game

[furel]

Hello, I have a bunch of mods, they seems to work fine, well, almost, there are things that I have to configure. But I wonder if when I press New Game is better activating some kinds of mods first (like Sexlab, SLIF, SL Arousal, etc), then activating a second group of mods, and so on.

Or just activating all at once shouldn't have any problem. I tried to find some info but I can't find this question in particular.

I'm not asking for the load order, but any advice is appreciated.

[traison]

I always start with SexLab. While I've never tried any other order, it only makes sense that the mod that is required by others be up and running first, no?

[travelmedic]

Better to have a test game and activate a few mods at a time.  That makes it much easier to find the source of any problems that may come up, instead of activating a lot of mods at once and then trying to narrow it down.

 

Once everything is added and tested, then you can start your new game for real.

[traison]

3 minutes ago, travelmedic said:

Better to have a test game and activate a few mods at a time.  That makes it much easier to find the source of any problems that may come up, instead of activating a lot of mods at once and then trying to narrow it down.

 

Once everything is added and tested, then you can start your new game for real.

 

Sounds like you read this more like what the order of installing mods should be mid-playthrough? I read it as activating mods (the ones that have the option) through the MCM. Wonder which one the OP meant? ?

[Varithina]

4 hours ago, travelmedic said:

Better to have a test game and activate a few mods at a time.  That makes it much easier to find the source of any problems that may come up, instead of activating a lot of mods at once and then trying to narrow it down.

 

Once everything is added and tested, then you can start your new game for real.

I am the other way around, I have every mod active and ready to go, but there again I never use start a new game, I have a couple of unmodded base game save files (all dlc are installed but no mods at all), one of which is just before the exit of the helgan escape tunnel, I just load that up, wait for a couple of minutes till all the pop ups stop arriving, then save and re-load to finish every thing off, then when all the new messages have done, open up console and go into racemenu and start working on that character, when done in racemenu, then do another manual save, then start working my way down the various mods in mcm.

[belegost]

I start in LAL cell, then open up MCM and go from top to bottom A-Z. I usually leave activating SexLab for second to last, because after that I do SLAL animations and that takes a while because I have a lot of them and am picky, and its the most boring part ofthe whole thing. The whole process takes about 40 minutes, 25 if I'm really rushing and leaving everything on default. Then I talk to Mara. Never had any issues related to mod activating order. It lead me to conclusion that it doesn't really matter.

Edited January 30, 2023 by belegost

[shrtjsrtj]

Do you mean activate as in activate them in the mod manager?

 

I always start a new game with all the mods I want to use activated in Vortex because changes to load order can be really bad, and Vortex likes to move things around. If you have a lot of mods and are worried about them all loading correctly you can open the console to take some load off and install Papyrus NG which speeds thing up tremendously. There are other techniques people use to get everything loaded when using a lot of mods but I haven't needed them and can't say whether they work or not.

 

Or did you mean activate via MCM, and what order to activate them in?

 

I usually try to do the mods that are dependents for other mods first, so for example Sexlab then Arousal. But it sounds like order doesn't really matter as belegost and I'm sure plenty of other people just do them alphabetically.

[furel]

I always start in the LAL cell, add new mods, save and try a start, if works, load from the cell and add more.

The thing I'm most worried about is, if I add new mods that pushes other mods further down, this can break the game? 

Changing the name of the character can break something in the mods?

If I just disable the mods in the in the right panel on MO2 (the .esm, .esp and .esl) and have go activa them in order, can cause shenanigans because of the scripts of some mod?

[Just Don't]

I have never done that. It's the exact type of practice that would make using some patchers or mods relying on said patchers very problematic, it could also mean altering your LO in the right way to produce that CTD with the sos dll.

 

1 hour ago, furel said:

Changing the name of the character can break something in the mods?

It shouldn't, unless a mod is very weirdly made to check for your character name after you first wrote it down.

 

1 hour ago, furel said:

If I just disable the mods in the in the right panel on MO2 (the .esm, .esp and .esl) and have go activa them in order, can cause shenanigans because of the scripts of some mod?

Disabling the plugins (what you do in MO2 right pane) is disabling the mod. Maybe parts of the assets will load if they're used by other mods or are a simple replacer using the vanilla filepaths. But any other functionality for that mod will break and yes you'll have orphaned scripts and you'll get the "this save relies in missing content" type of message if you do it and try to load an existing save. I don't know why someone would need to do that other than to remove the mod (and for that you should check if there's a recommended uninstall procedure, then run resaver).