The 128 load order problem & solutions to fix it

[cornbreadtm]

I'm creating this tread as a way to create awareness and to also help other fix the problem.

 

Not sure how many of you know but Skyrim has a 254~255 (depending on your luck lol) esm/esp limit built into it. But after 128 mods or 7F on the load order list mods with scripts and MCM menus start having problems.

 

To fix this, all you have to do is rearrange your mods but this can be a lot harder for those how don't really know what goes where or what might conflicts with what. Also if your leaning on the 255 wall it can be a whole lot harder to fit all of your scripted mods into the 128 area without conflicts.

 

Generally any mod with an MCM menu and quests should be above 7F. BOSS is great to go off of but once you go over 128 you have to use your better judgement.

 

Clothing and armor mods generally only have armor and construction(forge) records on there esps so they can be sorted anywhere best to not waste the 128 space and move them under it to 80/129 or lower.

 

For a lot of people that just solved the problem but for the rest of you who have mods not so easily moved without conflict you can post your load order and I can sort it for you.

 

Some mod authors have noticed this problem and put band-aids on it so its less noticeable. Some you can still notice today. I'll give you a couple examples:

 

When the TKdodge and TKcombat mods where first released with MCM menus by Tktk, they had the noticeable problem of resetting the button you configured in the menu on game load. You might have not noticed this problem if you had less than 128 mods for people with more it was very noticeable (BOSS sorted it pretty lower on the load order) but Tktk fixed it but the mods are still noticeable better higher in the loader order above 128.

 

Ms leeches, Vampiric Thirst's configurable feeding, blood level and ability listings reset on load currently if you have it under the 128 mark. BOSS sorts this mod pretty low on the load order as well for good reason since it's easily over written by another mod causing the mod to not work properly. It's best to keep this mod fairly close to the bottom which can be hard if you have too many mods. You'd have to crack open Tes5edit and check everything you put in front of it making sure its not over written anywhere.

 

Helmet Toggle by Maniczombie has the configuration problem along with a couple of weird hair changing colors problems if left under 128.

 

Here's another post on the problem if you want more info, or if a permanent solution is found. http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1462394-relz-skyui/page-7?do=findComment&comment=23032032

[gregathit]

256 is the hard limit on the total number of esm\esp\bsa files for Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas.  I don't doubt Skyrim has the same hard coding limit.  Since the Skyrim.esm is obviously required at all times, this leaves 255 open slots for DLC and mods.

 

However the "soft limit" is a function of your OS and your computer specifications.  For some with high end machines, they can get pretty close to the hard limit.  For others with middle of the road machines, they are lucky to get half that limit.

 

Scripts don't matter to the soft limit to start the game.  However scripts DO matter a very great deal in performance (FPS) during the game.

 

As to the coding issue in MCM - I have never had time to mess around with it, so it very well could contain some errors.  Then again, it could be that MCM is fine, folks are just hitting their soft limit and mistaking MCM as the culprit.

[Veladarius]

I know in Oblivion I could not go over about 160 esm/esp's as mods past that would never show up in the game but I don't have that issue with Skyrim. I have been running at or near the hard limit for about 6 months without issue and even most of the SexLab mods I run start at about B0 (177). I don't think I have a high end PC (i-5 2500K and a 7850 2gb) and I run an ENB and still get 45fps outdoors. Probably 65% of the mods I have installed have been in place since March (only reason it was not longer than that was my NMM had a meltdown) and I don't really run BOSS anymore and instead just place things manually. One thing I have done that most say don't is I have modified my ini file quite a bit by adding all the multithreading commands I can find.

[cornbreadtm]

@gregathit - Most people fill their load orders with clothing/weapons and other mods that just primarily change keywords. These types of mods can be placed in the game without reducing performance as long as the changes are clean. The problem is when they add lots of mods that do more than that; ie adding mods with SKSE required.

 

The 7F/128 mods problem actually has nothing to do with how many mods your rig can load but instead appears to be based on a papyrus load problem involving the SKSE and SKYUI.

 

Not enough testing has been done to reach a clear conclusion because this problem has been discovered fairly recently and not many modders run with a full load order and may not even have noticed it.

 

I mostly just made this thread because a lot of people on this site have load orders in the 200 area and a lot of the technical help they get is to use BOSS while that is good advise, If they sort the wrong mod under this limit they will have problems and its best to prevent this with awareness. Since pretty much all of the Sexlab mods use SKSE scripts, if they sort their mods properly there might be less bugs that the authors can't reproduce.

_

 

Actually I've done some further testing. It's in the area of SKSE and SKYUI being the culprit but at the same time since 70% of mods use it in some way it makes this a bigger problem than it would have been in say Oblivion or fallout.

 

After testing by moving around my esps, any mod that uses the high heels system needs to be placed before the 128 mark. I wasn't able to get it to activate the heels effects placed on modded shoes no matter how much I played with it. You can place the effect on with the MCM menu but going through the esps master to add the effect defeats the purpose of the modder adding the effect natively.

 

So any mod clothing or armor mod with the hdthighheel.esm as a master should be placed above the 7F/128 mark. Along with mods like Dwemer goggles and wearable lanterns that have scripts and MCM menus.

[cornbreadtm]

I know in Oblivion I could not go over about 160 esm/esp's as mods past that would never show up in the game but I don't have that issue with Skyrim. I have been running at or near the hard limit for about 6 months without issue and even most of the SexLab mods I run start at about B0 (177). I don't think I have a high end PC (i-5 2500K and a 7850 2gb) and I run an ENB and still get 45fps outdoors. Probably 65% of the mods I have installed have been in place since March (only reason it was not longer than that was my NMM had a meltdown) and I don't really run BOSS anymore and instead just place things manually. One thing I have done that most say don't is I have modified my ini file quite a bit by adding all the multithreading commands I can find.

 

Yeah, it's more about the types of mods you use instead of how many. I haven't gotten under 200 mods in a while... along while if I put the unmerged esps in I'd have close to 400 mods

 

I had my sexlab mods in the 160-170 area for a while had moved them when the BOSS masterlists started adding them. Use to have them in the 50s area on my load order before that. Didn't know why my mods started to act funky. Some times actors would act funny or not get the mods scripts attached to them. Kept hopping in and out of Tes5edit looking for conflicts and what not. But everything just fixed it's self when I moved the mods back. It's not all sexlab mods that have problems just the ones that MCM menus(not even all the ones with these) and scripts. In the 160 area Sexlab defeat triggered almost randomly for me. When it was working fine before in the 50s lots.

 

A lot of what I thought was conflicts and compatibility problems seems to be solved by placing some mods above 80. As I move stuff around and see them working fine... it's honestly annoying in retrospect. A lot of the mods I removed thinking that there was some hidden scripting mod limit can be placed back in since they where just in the wrong location and work fine for me now. Yeah, annoying.

[Expired6978]

@gregathit - Most people fill their load orders with clothing/weapons and other mods that just primarily change keywords. These types of mods can be placed in the game without reducing performance as long as the changes are clean. The problem is when they add lots of mods that do more than that; ie adding mods with SKSE required.

 

The 7F/128 mods problem actually has nothing to do with how many mods your rig can load but instead appears to be based on a papyrus load problem involving the SKSE and SKYUI.

 

Actually I've done some further testing. It's in the area of SKSE and SKYUI being the culprit but at the same time since 70% of mods use it in some way it makes this a bigger problem than it would have been in say Oblivion or fallout.

This is potentially an issue with registration serialization, when the SKSE co-save tries to save handles it has some issues with roll over when it goes to shift the mod index.

 

*handleOut = (loadedModID << 24) | (handle & 0xFFFFFFFF00FFFFFF);

 

should be

 

*handleOut = (handle & 0xFFFFFFFF00FFFFFF) | (((UInt64)loadedModID) << 24);

 

form handles typically look like: 0x0000FFFFAABBCCDD it ended up saving 0xFFFFFFFFAABBCCDD in case of mod ids greater than 0x7F, so when it resolved on load it would break some of the registrations, it's not a huge issue if you make sure to re-register on game load, but otherwise it is an issue which is resolved for the next version, unfortunately I do not have an ETA on the next version.

[cornbreadtm]

You could shoot them an email with your findings. Couldn't find a open forum page for them myself. but yeah if you draft an email detailing your findings about this problem might get a few of them back on the horse to fix this up. They haven't updated since Skyrim updated to 1.9 and I haven't seen anything from them lately.

[Expired6978]

You could shoot them an email with your findings. Couldn't find a open forum page for them myself. but yeah if you draft an email detailing your findings about this problem might get a few of them back on the horse to fix this up. They haven't updated since Skyrim updated to 1.9 and I haven't seen anything from them lately.

Don't think that'd be necessary since I'm part of the SKSE team. I implemented the fix some time ago. All versions up to and including the current version suffer from this bug. It will be fixed in the next release.

[cornbreadtm]

 

You could shoot them an email with your findings. Couldn't find a open forum page for them myself. but yeah if you draft an email detailing your findings about this problem might get a few of them back on the horse to fix this up. They haven't updated since Skyrim updated to 1.9 and I haven't seen anything from them lately.

Don't think that'd be necessary since I'm part of the SKSE team. I implemented the fix some time ago. All versions up to and including the current version suffer from this bug. It will be fixed in the next release.

 

 

That's awesome news! Well it off to find the next problem in Skyrim then.