Some advise for a less graphically intensive version of Masterstroke for lower end PCs.

[AbaddonBlack]

I just started playing Masterstroke after like two days worth of downloading the modlist with an autoclicker. When I first jumped in I noticed almost immediately that my RTX 3050 is not built for this kind of lighting and textures. It is still totally playable, but it lags when I try to look around too quickly and such, so i figure it must be because of the new trees, grasses, and upsclased textures for everything that is causing me trouble, but I am such a noob in modding that when I tried to remove them the game just refused to cooperate, y'know, the ground turns pitch black and stuff, so i must load the backups and tolerate the lags. Could anyone well-versed in this sort of stuff, already have some experience in downscaling this modlist or similiar help me a bit? Just a few suggestions for what hardware demanding mods to take out that does not make the whole thing collapse. Here are the mods present, minus the patches and fixes, if it's any help.

 

Edited March 26, 2025 by AbaddonBlack

[AbaddonBlack]

The problem is nonexistent while i am in dungeons and houses. So those mods are not an issue.

[Demonwise]

 

5 hours ago, AbaddonBlack said:

The problem is nonexistent while i am in dungeons and houses. So those mods are not an issue.

 

While I am not familiar with Masterstroke (is it just a mod list?) I am familiar with using quite a lot of graphics mods along with post-processing like ENB. While 4-8K graphics mods can be quite a hit to your gpu and your fps, the true killer is mods that introduce new geometry and lots of it. So anything that is adding new grass, new trees, new clutter, that can all cause quite an impact on performance as well. It will affect not just the gpu for something like rendering hundreds of thousands or millions of blades of grass but also the cpu if you have mods that add a lot clutter because (like cheese wheels) they are treated as individual entities.

 

The reason you don't have the problems when your in a dungeon or a house is that those areas (referred as cells) are substantially smaller than an exterior cell. Your gpu and cpu are trying to calculate and render far, far fewer things while in a house or a dungeon. 

 

If your outside and your taking hits to performance I would start with potentially trimming any mods that may be adding new things like trees or grass. Just look for any mod that is adding a large 'quantity of something'. After that, if your still having performance loss, I would start looking at the texture mods. Do you have any 8K mods that could be 4K instead, 4K that could be 2K, or 2K that could be 1K.  Downscale some of them in order of your preference and then see if that helps. 

 

When you're removing or disabling mods it is very important to make sure whatever you're disabling/removing isn't required by some other mod. As incredibly inconvenient as it may be, you'll have to do some research. If the mods are all available on the Nexus then it could be pretty simple as, quite often, when your on a mod's page under the 'Requirements' dropdown it will show what other mods are dependent upon that mod. That can help but if not you may be in for a lot of research. That really can't be helped. Anyone who has ever done a heavy amount of modding knows all too well the time and effort it can take. That is why mod packs are nice but if you have to start picking them apart for any reason including performance reasons then this is the slog that can come from it. 

[Grey Cloud]

How is this a Skyrim tech support issue?

This is a problem with wabbajack and user error (caused by lack of knowledge).

Take it up with the author of the modlist.

 

1182 mods and 1039 plug-ins yet you say you are "such a noob in modding". 🙄 I've been modding Skyrim since 2016 and currently have 508 mods and 437 plug-ins. Approximately 100 of those are followers.

[AbaddonBlack]

On 3/26/2025 at 11:15 PM, Grey Cloud said:

How is this a Skyrim tech support issue?

This is a problem with wabbajack and user error (caused by lack of knowledge).

Take it up with the author of the modlist.

 

1182 mods and 1039 plug-ins yet you say you are "such a noob in modding". 🙄 I've been modding Skyrim since 2016 and currently have 508 mods and 437 plug-ins. Approximately 100 of those are followers.

Never in my life had it occurred to me that there are people who logged into this site of all places to bitch.

[Grey Cloud]

2 minutes ago, AbaddonBlack said:

Never in my life had it occurred to me that there are people who logged into this site of all places to bitch.

Never in my life had it occurred to me that people would stupid enough to use wabbajack then come looking for help on a site which doesn't deal in mod packs.

 

I'll bet you spent more time formulating the above sentence than you have on learning how to mod Skyrim.

 

Enjoy your badass, 1100+ mod game.

[AbaddonBlack]

4 minutes ago, Grey Cloud said:

Never in my life had it occurred to me that people would stupid enough to use wabbajack then come looking for help on a site which doesn't deal in mod packs.

 

I'll bet you spent more time formulating the above sentence than you have on learning how to mod Skyrim.

 

Enjoy your badass, 1100+ mod game.

An active user as well

[Just Don't]

4 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

Never in my life had it occurred to me that people would stupid enough to use wabbajack then come looking for help on a site which doesn't deal in mod packs.

Sadly this is the scenario for most premade modlists and modding forums, personal insults aside. Those who know how to mod rarely use premade modlists (or know how to modify them just fine on their own), while people who frequently use premade modlists lack the modding knowledge to modify them successfully.

 

Doing some modding on your own before jumping into the Wabbajack prebuilt modlists would definitely help you solve this on your own, but it takes time and effort. The next thing you can try is asking for help (questions about wabbajack or collections don't fare well here as you might have noticed already). The next thing you can try is wing it and hope for the best (and this will likely end poorly and you'll have to undo and redo a lot of steps in the process).

 

Honestly it's a mess of a situation and I won't be sitting here for minutes looking at another person's +1k mod count to try to come up with a solution. But since I already posted I'll tell you what I'd do. First get a program to monitor CPU/GPU/RAM usage while you're playing. An FPS counter isn't enough to know exactly what's making your game struggle (the exterior vs interior cell comments are on the right track for sure). I think current NVIDIA/AMD software have this capacity, there's also Skyrim Performance Monitor, or  good old MSI Afterburner + RTSS. Plenty of videos or written instructions covering how to set them up properly. Once you have that ready launch the game with all your mods and walk around some usual locations (Riverwood, Whiterun city and around the exterior, Falkreath and Riften are good places to check). Pay attention to your system usage, if you notice your GPU is constantly reaching its maximum VRAM you might benefit from using less texture mods or mods with lower resolution (in case that modlist uses 4k textures, consider 2k, if it already used 2k for everything maybe one of those 2k-1k textures will help). If you notice it's your CPU maxing out constantly and getting frame drops it's likely because too many draw calls are in that area, so using less mods to add things to exterior locations would help (less complex trees/plants, less lights, lamps, structures, especially around or near cities, etc.). If the modlist uses SMP you could check which settings it's using and tweak it or disable it for NPCs/most actors if that's not the case already. If it has ENB, Reshade or Community Shaders you'll have to check which effects are in use and try disabling some to spot the most resource intensive ones and compare with the effects on/off and make changes until you're satisfied with the looks and performance of your game. Likely many more things to mention here but I've been writing for too long already.

[Grey Cloud]

10 minutes ago, Just Don't said:

so using less mods to add things to exterior locations would help (less complex trees/plants, less lights, lamps, structures,

This seems to me to be one of the biggest faults with mod packs - using multiple mods to do the same thing just to boost the mod count for the 'more is better' brigade. e.g. the things you mentioned and not using AIOs (and similar for interiors).

 

 

[TotalScarebear]

You can use this to downscale all the textures in one click-

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/90557

 

Well, not quite one click, and it is a little tricky to set up from memory. Will help with the stutters and will still look good.

[Tamashi085]

so I know its already been a year and you might have already deleted the mods, but you can change graphics by going to the download folder (your mod folder) >> tools >> Bethini Pie (for me but just look for a bethini) >> Bethini.exe (run it), change the settings as you please.