I'm about to give up on modding Skyrim, ideas?

[Hooded Wolf]

As you probably can imagine I'm incredibly frustrated, I just want to play a modded Skyrim. I've modded it extensively but every time I fix an issue another one comes up. The game crashes at the menu, it freezes on the loading screen, it crashes 30 seconds into gameplay. I don't know how to diagnosis these problems without spending hundreds of hours reading and rereading every mod page, installing, and reinstalling every mod and even then I'm sure inevitably things won't work optimally. I've downloaded all of the tools I can find but none of them seem particularly helpful - loot, TES5. I'm a novice modder so perhaps I'm not using them efficiently. I'm using Nexus Mod Manager, I don't use an ENB, I make extensive use of SKSE and FNIS. I really want to play Skyrim again it's been years since I've played the hell out of it on my Xbox 360, before I had a solid gaming rig. At this point I consider myself lucky if I get the game to run half-well for 5 minutes, and as of this moment I can't get it to run for more than 30 seconds in-game. How do I diagnosis this, is it just painstaking, time-consuming work? 

[Bananacombo]

Try these.

 

Use BOSS or LOOT to sort load order.

 

Download and install unofficial patches. 

[lordofthedread]

Clean your masters with TES5Edit

Use Wrye Bash and make a Bashed patch

Use Mod Organizer and keep your Skyrim folder clean.

[CGi]

First of all:
Don't enable all mods at once. Enable all ESMs, start the game, let everything intialize, save, quit, load again, wait 1m, save, quit again.
And then enable at max 5 mods, load the game, let everything intialize, save, test what gives and if everything is ok enable the next 5 mods. Rinse and repeat. if then something goes wrong, you got an way easier time finding the mods that's causing the problem.

And as already mentioned: Bashed Patch, TES5Edit cleaning and Loot. MO is only recommended if you got the spare time to get used to it, else go with NMM. Going without any Mod Manager is not recommended unless you go fully manual since TESIII and know what you're doing.

[NickNozownik]

Post your load order and papyrus log here. Preferably in a spoiler if it is really long.

Always read mod's requirements and possible conflicts, don't forget to run FNIS after installing a mod that requires it. Some combat overhaul mods can bloat your saves because they don't remove scripts from enemies that you left behind ages ago. I don't know how good your PC is, maybe all those 8k/4k texture mods are causing trouble.

 

Unofficial patches are OK to have after you'll make modded Skyrim more stable, but they're not must have mods.

[Cock Sucker]

First of all:

Don't enable all mods at once. Enable all ESMs, start the game, let everything intialize, save, quit, load again, wait 1m, save, quit again.

And then enable at max 5 mods, load the game, let everything intialize, save, test what gives and if everything is ok enable the next 5 mods. Rinse and repeat. if then something goes wrong, you got an way easier time finding the mods that's causing the problem.

 

And as already mentioned: Bashed Patch, TES5Edit cleaning and Loot. MO is only recommended if you got the spare time to get used to it, else go with NMM. Going without any Mod Manager is not recommended unless you go fully manual since TESIII and know what you're doing.

 

^ this dude is right.. I got 100+ mods in my skyrim... start a new game save and my game screams bloody murder >.< lol  do it a bits at a time and my game works fine.

 

[Haloeye]

Hmmm. I'll have to try that next time I forced to restart my game because my saves stop loading. 
I use LOOT and FNIS religiously pretty much, I've used TESV to clean my master files, and now have begun using a save file cleaner. 
But at the end of the day, I earnestly think there will always be just something 'off' since I don't use Bashed Patches or anything manual since I am not particularly handy

at getting technical and going file diving. Still, the community on this site has been excellent with it's patience an the amount of 

veterans who do try and help as many has they can.  :3

[Hooded Wolf]

I really appreciate the feedback I'm going to give reinstalling all of my mods a shot in small increments. Do I have to use a fresh game or can I use the one I already started? I'm only about 2-hours of gameplay in. Performance doesn't seem to be an issue even though I use a lot of high res mods, however I'm on a laptop so that may effect things. Windows 10, 8GB RAM, Nvidia 860m, i7

[Sailing Rebel]

I would strongly recommend looking at the STEP guide. This is a fairly intensive modding exercise but the result is a game that is about as stable and playable as anyone can hope for.