Purge and Rebuild - Hapless Idiot Needs Hand Held

[Jexsam]

My Skyrim has begun displaying disturbing graphical oddities that resemble a GPU issue, however no other game I have tested has displayed any issues similar to suggest the GPU is indeed the problem. I can't rule out a GPU issue at this stage, but there are other concerns. Mainly, my Skyrim install itself is bloating horribly, full of mods I never touch, ancient versions of script-heavy mods I'm too afraid to try and update, and altogether outdated tools. I have decided, for only the second time in my ownership of the game, to purge and reinstall from the ground up.

I have a series of questions regarding different steps I should take and new tools I might benefit from. I want to take this step by step, though, so as not to get overwhelmed.

The first step will be saving characters. Which brings me to my first questions:
 

1. Can someone provide or point me to a walkthrough on how to save a character's head?  I'm using RaceMenu 2.9.6.
2. Will saving the head through RaceMenu also preserve other sliders?  I guess basically what I want is presets, which I'm pretty sure will have all that information saved in them by default, but I'm utterly clueless.

The next step will be ripping Skyrim out in total - that I'm pretty sure I can handle.  But once a vanilla + DLC copy is back on my HD, I'll be coming back asking about tools and utilities that need to go in before any mods touch the install.  I keep hearing LOOT and MO, which I'm pretty sure replace BOSS and Wrye Bash respectively.  But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

 

PS.  I don't have to tell y'all this but moderators, if this belongs in Tech Support, please move it there.

[Content Consumer]

My Skyrim has begun displaying disturbing graphical oddities that resemble a GPU issue, however no other game I have tested has displayed any issues similar to suggest the GPU is indeed the problem. I can't rule out a GPU issue at this stage, but there are other concerns. Mainly, my Skyrim install itself is bloating horribly, full of mods I never touch, ancient versions of script-heavy mods I'm too afraid to try and update, and altogether outdated tools. I have decided, for only the second time in my ownership of the game, to purge and reinstall from the ground up.

I have a series of questions regarding different steps I should take and new tools I might benefit from. I want to take this step by step, though, so as not to get overwhelmed.

 

The first step will be saving characters. Which brings me to my first questions:

 

1. Can someone provide or point me to a walkthrough on how to save a character's head?  I'm using RaceMenu 2.9.6.
2. Will saving the head through RaceMenu also preserve other sliders?  I guess basically what I want is presets, which I'm pretty sure will have all that information saved in them by default, but I'm utterly clueless.

The next step will be ripping Skyrim out in total - that I'm pretty sure I can handle.  But once a vanilla + DLC copy is back on my HD, I'll be coming back asking about tools and utilities that need to go in before any mods touch the install.  I keep hearing LOOT and MO, which I'm pretty sure replace BOSS and Wrye Bash respectively.  But we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

 

PS.  I don't have to tell y'all this but moderators, if this belongs in Tech Support, please move it there.

 

To answer both questions...

 

AFAIK, Racemenu's preset slots save all character data... sliders, head shape, color morphs, everything.

If you have something like a hair mod installed and then uninstall it, I believe Racemenu defaults to the first vanilla hair on the list when loading the preset... same for colors, eye textures, etc.

 

 

LOOT definitely replaces BOSS... I was skeptical at first, more because I knew BOSS worked and I hadn't tried LOOT yet... but I've been using LOOT for quite a while now and it works perfectly.

I have no idea about MO/Wrye Bash... I only use Wrye and have never used MO, though I understand it has quite a following. I've seen several problem reports (and never actually seen a bug report for Wrye Bash), but all bugs/issues for MO seem to be solvable.

 

Other tools/utilities:

FNIS (obviously)

SKSE (also obviously)

Skyproc patchers (if you have any mods that use it) might require Java runtime updates

Depending on what body type you use, you might need various tools to get things working again. The tools should come with the body mod, though.

If your graphics card seems to be running out of memory (black and purple textures replacing things after playing for a while), I recommend the Ordenador texture optimizer 

TES5Edit is a handy utility for detecting conflicts, cleaning mod errors, and just doing general messing with mods, but for most people it's not totally necessary.

[Mister X]

I don't know if the feature of presets already is given in RaceMenu 2.9 but I think so. And it saves almost anything, colors, sliders, and it works even if you don't have the requirements, it just takes the first available resource of the vanilla game (eg if you don't have KS Hairdos and would need it, it will take a vanilla hairstyle)

 

Reverting to Vanilla Skyrim so you don't have to download anything again.

 

To avoid a bloated /skyrim/data folder use Mod Organizer. Especially for complex mod setups (as Loverslab will provide ^^) it's the way best manager out there. Even though it has LooT already built in, take LooT as external program and plug it into MO. It's more up-to-date and better configurable.

And yes, it is not that easy to learn but maybe its official guide will help you a bit

 

Next few will be SKSE (7.2b), needs special installation when using with MO. Then TES5Edit for cleaning and creating a TES5Merged patch. Next Wrye Bash for creating a Bashed Patch.

 

Yep, almost forgot this, for SkyProc patchers (eg PerMa with its Patchus Maximus) need a JRE 32-bit to run properly. You MUST have a 32-bit version of it, even though you have a 64-bit OS (Take both, if you have 64-bit OS)!!! MO only supports 32-bit yet, but they already work on 64-bit support.

 

With this you'll have your various programs to support your mod setup.

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Now, for a more stable and better looking Skyrim to work with, you'll probably want to work your way through STEP (Core, the green marked mods) or one of the other stability guides.

After this, you'll already have most of the mods, that SL Framework needs (like SkyUI and Fuz Ro D'oh), but you still will need FNIS. Also, special installation is needed for this to work with MO.