Too many script intensive mods?

[JayTongue]

Hi guys, I've been looking into mods that I want to install but I keep hearing how it's bad to install too many script intensive mods. I am being extremely cautious about the mods I am downloading, and have been running BOSS after every mod installation.
 

Real Clouds, Wet and Cold, Footprints, Dragon Combat Overhaul, Guard Dialogue Overhaul, Better Vampires, Immersive Patrols, Lanterns of Skyrim, Convenient Horses, Dragon Soul Relinquishment, and Even Better Quest Objectives are some of the mods I want to get but unsure if having all of these would be bad for my system. Here are my specs and modlist if anything:

 

• OS: Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit SP1

• CPU: AMD FX-8350 4GHz 8-Core Processor

• RAM: 8.00 GB DDR3

• Motherboard: Gigabyte AMD 990FXA

• Graphics: GTX 660 Ti 2GB

 

Skyrim.esm
Update.esm
Dawnguard.esm
ApachiiHair.esm
AzarHair.esm
HighResTexturePack01.esp
HighResTexturePack02.esp
HighResTexturePack03.esp
Unofficial Skyrim Patch.esp
Unofficial Dawnguard Patch.esp
Unofficial High Res Patch.esp
Better Dynamic Snow.esp
StaticMeshImprovementMod.esp
StaticMeshImprovementMod-FurnitureChestSnowFix.esp
BorderSense.esp
RaceMenu.esp
RaceMenuPlugin.esp
RaceMenuOverlays.esp
towConversation.esp
SkyUI.esp
iHUD.esp
Remodeled Armor - Vanilla Replacer.esp
Remodeled Armor - Vanilla Replacer - Dawnguard.esp
Remodeled Armor - Underwear.esp
Lock Overhaul.esp
Babette.esp
LiFEv1.1.esp
OrcFemaleWalk.esp
FNISspells.esp
NoSneakAttackSound.esp
dD-No Spinning Death Animation.esp
Brows.esp
LovelyHairstylesLITE.esp
TheEyesOfBeauty.esp
Feminine Females.esp
Feminine Females Dawnguard.esp
dD - Realistic Ragdoll Force - Reduced.esp
ethereal_elven_overhaul.esp
SGHairPackAllinOne.esp

 

 

Mods that I have reconsidered because I am worried, and/or have heard bad things about them: Enhanced Blood Textures, Player Headtracking, skyBirds, SkyRe, Burn Freeze Shock Effects and several others. On a bit of a sidenote I have installed SMIM, and Skyrim HD - 2K, and I am planning on installing some other graphic mods so that means less assets/resources to work with. Now I wanna find out some things:

 

• Would it be worth it to download BOSS Userlist Manager - BUM?
• Can I install all of those mods I listed at the beginning of the topic post, are there any alternatives, if any, that I could look into?
• Is it okay to be this worried and cautious about installing mods
• Have you guys had any experiences with the mods I mentioned in this topic post that I am looking to install?

[Acoustyk]

For all that I know, all the script work is done by the CPU and yours surely can handle it. But Skyrim is fairly bad at multithreading so it may not use your CPU at its full potential.

Knowing that most of these mods can be uninstalled without leaving scripts in saves using MCM, I'd suggest you to try and see if it's hurting your perfs.

[JayTongue]

Well I have been extremely nervous for some reason about all of this, I don't wanna mess up like I did before where I got CTD constantly but I've learned a lot since then. I'm still wondering about those other things I mentioned in the post and still hoping to get some more answers as well as more opinions hopefully

[Uno]

Weat & cold is great mod, but I don't recommend it no matter what cpu you have...too messy (random crashes, freezes, savegame problems on load). On the other hand Isoku updated his mod improving the script loads and all...dunno.

[psammeticus]

I have almost the exact same rig. The userlist manager has become pretty handy to override BOSS's ordering when it ends up conflicting and for assigning load order for the mods that the BOSS team hasn't sorted yet. I don't need to use it very often, but it might be worth getting in any event.

 

I would say that it's perfectly reasonable to fret about installing new mods. I learned the hard way too.

 

For the mods you have listed: Better Vampires has been my favorite vampire overhaul and I have never had issues with it. There are some features from some other vampire overhauls that I would love to see, but BV has been the most complete. Convenient Horses was a neat idea, but since I don't ride horses very often I removed it. It seemed resource intensive although it did what was advertised. Enhanced Blood Textures works fine for me, although I had to install lower res textures. The original textures bogged me down. I can't play without SkyRe, it's become my favorite overhaul. The caveat for SkyRe is to read the documentation, the biggest problem I noticed is folks not installing correctly in the first place and then not starting a new game. There are a lot of changes and tweaks. There's also an unofficial patch for it now.

 

I've stayed away from the other mods mentioned mainly for the same reason. I have my game running fairly stable and don't wish to upset the balance.

[jbezorg]

Some skyrim.ini tweaks that you can try.

 

 

http://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/894681-skyrim-script-lag/?p=7176247

[jbezorg]

For multi-core processors

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/articles/1153//?

[JayTongue]

 

 

For the mods you have listed: Better Vampires has been my favorite vampire overhaul and I have never had issues with it. There are some features from some other vampire overhauls that I would love to see, but BV has been the most complete. Convenient Horses was a neat idea, but since I don't ride horses very often I removed it. It seemed resource intensive although it did what was advertised. Enhanced Blood Textures works fine for me, although I had to install lower res textures. The original textures bogged me down. I can't play without SkyRe, it's become my favorite overhaul. The caveat for SkyRe is to read the documentation, the biggest problem I noticed is folks not installing correctly in the first place and then not starting a new game. There are a lot of changes and tweaks. There's also an unofficial patch for it now.

 

I've stayed away from the other mods mentioned mainly for the same reason. I have my game running fairly stable and don't wish to upset the balance.

 

Oh, well that's comforting to know about BUM, guess I will download it and see if the program is easy to figure out.

 

Regarding SkyRe I feel like that's a whole other topic in terms of combat mods. I'm trying to figure out which would be best for me, Duel, ACE, or Deadly Combat. I'm not so sure about SkyRe because it changes a lot (as I have learned) and it would conflict with anything involving the perk trees and such? I also don't want a combat mod that will enable the enemies to 1-shot me, that doesn't sound appealing to me at all so that's something else I need to do some research on.

 

And thanks for letting me know about Better Vampires especially because I was looking into that and the other vampire mod Belua Sanguinare. I guess the only to see what's going on is to install the mods and hope for the best. Although I have been standing in Riverwood since I first started the installation process of some of those mods you see in my load order.

[JayTongue]

In that second nexus article you linked I see it also contains the info you posted from the first link so thank you for that jbezorg. I will make those skyrim.ini changes in a bit and I will probably do the steps shown in the decreasing script lag section after I download two or three of those script heavy mods. Unless I can just do it now beforehand.

[Girl]

It's fine to be cautious about installing mods, especially script intensive ones. 

 

I've had some of the mods you've listed as well, like Footprints and Wet/Cold. I've since removed those mods as I found they were really bogging down my game with errors and not functioning correctly. Although they were good mods, I decided that I could play without them at the gain of more game stability.

 

I would recommend reading this as well: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/32363/?

 

I have my own system now for when choosing mods, I think about if I will end up using it often or little. I also tend to read various comments from other users about the mod to see if there are issues with using it.

 

I would definitely recommend Boss Userlist Manager as I've used it for quite some time. I have it set-up in a category style, so esps for armors are grouped with armors, interface esps are grouped together, etc.

 

 Going to have to give a +1 to Better Vampires too, I still have it and have not had any problems with it.

[JayTongue]

Damn, Footprints and Wet & Cold look like two nice mods to have together, or maybe it was because I watched a video talking about having those two mods.

 

Since I'm going through this list of mods I have written down one at a time I will probably notice which one is causing an error, well hopefully, if it comes down to it. Is the category style automatically sort the mods in those groups or can you manually organize them how you want it?

[Girl]

Damn, Footprints and Wet & Cold look like two nice mods to have together, or maybe it was because I watched a video talking about having those two mods.

 

Since I'm going through this list of mods I have written down one at a time I will probably notice which one is causing an error, well hopefully, if it comes down to it. Is the category style automatically sort the mods in those groups or can you manually organize them how you want it?

 

Manually organize.

[JayTongue]

Alright cool, suppose I will try to have some fun with those categories

[Groovtama]

Footprints is not really as error throwing as WetandCold, you can use Frostfall and GetSnowy does nearly the same as Wet and Cold effect wise, GetSnowy is script free and Frostfall is more error free but also script heavy. You just lose the npcs equipting stuff.

The rest of the list is not really so script heavy, real clouds just spawns alot of particles, or situational active mods, shouldn't stress alot.

jbezorg ini stuff is still recommended.^^

[JayTongue]

Thanks for letting me know about those two mods. I will probably be installing Get Snowy soon and Frostfall later in the future, but I will avoid Wet & Cold for now. Now I'm just tinkering around with BUM and setting up the BOSS userlist because I think I have to do it?

[Veladarius]

I have been having Real Clouds throw a lot of errors for me. I stopped using Wet and Cold some time ago for the same reason.

[JayTongue]

Uh oh.

[Broccoli]

Here's a tip 

 

Don't always download the highest resolution texture pack that's available such 2K,4K or even 8K textures since that might add stability issues on the game and it will crash alot.

[gaz770]

Here's a tip 

 

Don't always download the highest resolution texture pack that's available such 2K,4K or even 8K textures since that might add stability issues on the game and it will crash alot.

 

But

 

 

That's the sad part you need to avoid some mods.

[HeavyDude]

If you have 2GB of VRAM you don't have to be so careful about texture resolutions, just don't go over 2k. But for me, I'd choose lighting mods and other gameplay/immersion overhauls over texture mods any day.

[johnnyboy88]

Actually. Just thought I'd mention. Wet and Cold was recently updated to v1.31 (29sep2013) . All the scripts were reviewed. Here's a post on the performance and stability

[JayTongue]

Yeah I am reading that post now. Now idk what to do, will probably download the mod and give it a shot. Regarding the high-res textures I have read from the STEP team that it is best to use like 1K textures for exterior areas and 2K textures for interiors and characters/npcs so I will follow that.

[psammeticus]

I have been sticking to lower res textures without issues. I once made the mistake of using 4k for a whopping 30 seconds before bogging down.

[ShadowstepZ]

If you want to avoid script intensive mods, you shouldn't play Frostfall. Its scripts are running every second, and I think everywhere, interiors included.

[Guest Spikes]

i don't see many heavy script mods on your list, unless you updated it. Seems fine to play, just a couple things that i do.

 

I found that i don't really need ihud, i disable compass on my ini.

 

i unticked the beth texture updates (have them on Skyrim still, so Skyrim won't redownload them every time) and installed a 1k texture pack of the big 3 in nexus. If i want an armor to look better, i'll just install a texture pack for that armor. Skyrim doesn't need to work double time, 1 to load the beth testures and 1 more time to replace them. and 1k great mod > Beth's quick patch work any time.

 

All in all, list seems fine, start playing and enjoy. And plan what you want to install next mihihi.