Trying to learn how to strip mods of unnecessary stuff

[Random987654]

Hey, hey,  

I'm trying to optimize my Skyrim setup for performance. Specifically I'd like to remove parts of mods that I don't need to save system resources. Here is an example of a follower mod:

 

I want to get rid of

1. all body textures (but not head, face, hair)
2. all custom items brought in by the mod (armor, weapons etc.)
3. if possible also quests

 

Can I just delete those chapters,

• Armor Addon, Armor, Outfit, Quest, Weapon as whole
• Texture Set: delete Body+Hand, keep Head

to get rid of these or is this more complicated?

 

Thank you all!

 

 

[Grey Cloud]

Softly, softly catchy monkey.

 

1. Make sure you have a backup of anything you are going to edit.

2. Don't go into the esp hacking and slashing. Make a single change (or change a single aspect) and see what happens.

3. (Using your Anya esp) Rather than delete Outfit, Quest, Texture Set etc just delete the entries under them - 2E..... 01_AnyaArmors etc.

 

Start by tinkering with something relatively uncomplicated such as a weapon. IIRC a weapon is a single entry and does not affect any other entry. If you delete the entry for "Anya's mega sword of death" and then right-click in the box you should get a drop down with all the vanilla weapons to choose from. (You may have noticed in my screenshot in the other thread that all my gels are carrying steel greatswords)

 

Sometimes when you make a change to a single entry it messes with other entries. If you right-click on Anya.Follower.esp you should see the option to check the esp for errors.

 

Another way to to figure out what you do and don't need is to compare the esp of a follower which uses your default body etc (only uses Facegen files) with a follower esp like Anya's. (You can have more than one instance of XEdit open at the same time so you can do a side by side comparison).

 

I've mentioned right-clicking a couple of times - XEdit has lots of options available in context menus via right-clicking. You can also copy/paste and drag n drop.

[travelmedic]

If you start messing with textures in xEdit, you might also need to update filepaths for the meshes in nifskope.  

[RohZima]

Man that's a whole level of OCD I never thought could exist...

 

The answer depends on the actual bit of data you remove. But those are just meta-data, the amount of resources you save will be meaningless. If you were franticly sweating over kilobytes then you should go around in game and get rid of lose items like cups and arrows in the game since that will store in your save as meta-data. Just using optimized textures would save dramatically more resources.

 

How many plugins are you going to do this for? My advice is to abandon this folly.

 

For your specific question, however, removing those entries will just remove that particular thing from the game - so the game will either revert to a default or nothing.

[Random987654]

Hey guys, quickly wanted to check-in here, last weeks have been busy, I don't really have the time to play or mod, so I need to pause this. When I got some free time again, I'll check what you suggested, Grey. Also I didn't understand everythind that RohZima's post, gotta come back to this, once I got more time for this.

 

Still wanted to say thank you for helping!