mods-to-try "checklist" action

[drproximo]

so I'm fairly new to mods, and I made a level 54 character pretty much unplayable just by installing the Unofficial Patches, not realizing that any mod to an existing game is a bad idea. lesson learned, I'm have a new playthrough going with a handful of interesting mods, nothing too drastic beyond "Live Another Life", but every now and then I see another mod I'd like to try. but I'm not going to abandon my new playthrough and start another just to try them out, I want to get some worthwhile play out of this one first. I know I'm not going to remember all the mods I want to try. also, some mods require a fair bit of preparation (I'm really considering trying Personalized Music, but I want to do it right, so I'd want to devote some time to picking some music for all of the various folders, and the format conversion and file renaming is also a hell of a time investment).

 

I could create a bookmarks folder in my browser and start saving them there, but that's not really what I use bookmarks for. as of today, I'm going to click "Track" on any mod I'm considering for future use, and I'll check my list of tracked mods when I'm going to start a new playthrough. but, again, that's not really what the "track" feature is for. I'd like to see an icon added to the "actions" toolbar, where clicking on it adds that mod to a list of mods you're planning on using, just not right now.

 

since I am, as I said, relatively new, I hope I'm not asking too much or just missing something entirely.

 

edit: would also like to add that this feature would also be incredibly useful if, when you decide to grab your saved mods, there's a single-click that would start all of the mods installing if you're using NMM (something that the tracking feature doesn't offer).

Edited May 21, 2014 by drproximo

[Oubliette]

When I come across a mod I'm interested in installing later, I hit the "Track" button at the top of the page. This will then created a tracked file list you can look through when ever (though it's sorted by latest update) as well as creating a "tracked files" tab on the Nexus front page you can look through to see if any exciting changes have been made to something you're holding off on getting.

 

Now onto the mods during a save game issue. Usually I ignore any questions about this because there's a lot of people out there not willing to do the legwork required to do this successfully but you seem like a good investment. It is possible to add mods to an ongoing save, so long as you are aware of the risks (have a backup of the character saved from before the mod was installed and be aware you might lose hundreds of hours of playing if you have to revert to it) you also need to know what kind of mod it is (some mods like mesh replacers can be hot swapped at will, some that require heavy scripting really can't) and how to properly test and clean an ongoing save if/when trouble arises.

 

The following is standard trouble shooting for mod issues not pinned to a single mod (this is why you test every single mod in your install as you go, individually and with all your other mods - to pinpoint problems at the mod from the very beginning).

• First - have you verified your game files through steam and updated to the latest patch?
• Second - uncheck all your mods, start a new game, save after the chargen. This will be your 'tester save.' Do Not Overwrite or Delete this save.
• Third - Enable five mods.
• Four - Go into game with your tester save. Run from one end of the game world to the other. Go into a few cities. Interact with a few things that are mod related. See if anything crashes.
• Five - No sign of german names? Repeat 3-5. It crashed or something's not right? Go to step 6.
• Six - something crashed? uncheck one of the five mods then go back to your tester save, repeat step 4.

Continue until you have found and fixed your name change error.

 

And finally one last tip: make lots of saves. I let the game auto save every time I enter or exit a building and make a manual save every hour of playing or so. I keep 5 or so saves in rotation and every week or so abandon the oldest one to the 'archives' in case I need it later. If my saves folder gets crowded I simply snap up my older saves, zip them and save them to a safe place. Having them, like having a clean save file for testing purposes, can really make the difference between needing to start over because something went wrong and not having to.

 

Good luck.