Can mods f*** up your rig?

[interfer0n]

After many hours of frustration and torture of trying to stabilize Skyrim with mods, I gave up due to the countless amounts of random-quick CTDs.

Now I turn to Witcher 2 and I was able to pool 20+ hours in without crashing. But now my PC wants to be a little b**** and crash to desktop after wanting to meditate to dawn during the night at Vergen.
I only have two mods installed: Combat rebalanced and more talent points. They're on the top 5 mods on Nexus...

 

What infuriates me the most is that I went back to the exact same spot where I meditated, and I didn't CTD anymore.

My rig is a 4 month old Asus ROG laptop (specs):
Intel Core i7 4710HQ @ 2.5GHz
GeForce GTX 970M 3GB (w/ latest drivers)
16GB Ram

Solid rig. I'm able to run very intensive games (AC Unity and Dying Light) on max settings with great FPS. Now that I think about it, I haven't crashed ONCE from these two games.

But I played these games before I started modding Skyrim (ENB and lots of visual mods). Could these mods have screwed over something? In other words, could they have f***ed something up with my VRAM? Because now I'm starting to crash (only once yet) on Witcher 2.

Edited May 14, 2015 by interfer0n

[Purr4me]

what does EMB do is the appropriate question.

 

Think about the games default settings, controls and tweaks. They are designed for that game and across the board of all systems.

 

ENB's are not, it's trial ware, so beware.

Mod's don't damage systems....users do.

[NiteBeast]

It's highly unlikely any mod could damage your hardware. I won't say impossible, but it is seriously improbable.

 

First the mod needs to break out of the sandbox of the game, or find a way to exploit the sandbox. Then they have to get past the device monitoring circuits that protect most modern video cards. It's why you can overclock these days and when you go too far you'll blue screen or freeze and need a reboot but you won't fry your card outfight.

 

If you are having crashes it is far more likely to be related to some other software, driver, antivirus, etc. The running state of the PC when you started the game can also be a factor. If you've just ran a bunch of software for hours then decide to jump into game you may get issues. Reboot before any serious gaming session, and if you are comfortable doing so use something like Game Booster by Razor or manually manage your services. I can play Skyrim for hours on end and rarely CTD or freeze so it is possible, I have 241 mods in my load order currently and I run an ENB.

[Deleted3507349User]

I've got an an older ROG laptop (a G750) and the games are rock-solid...mostly. I can't remember the last time Skyrim CTD'd. Oblivion, on the other hand, gets a bug up it's arse every once in a while.

 

Long story short; mods are extremely unlikely to damage your computer. The can (and do) cause your game to be highly unstable, though.

 

About the only way I can think of that a mod could do any actual harm outside of a game would be if it had malware in it. Nexus does a great job at stomping that sort of thing out.

[interfer0n]

Thank you all for your replies. I'm not entirely technical savvy, so apologies for any ignorant statements. However, I do follow directions very strictly. So you can be guaranteed that there shouldn't be any conflicting mods.

 

When I installed and modded Skyrim for the very first time on this new laptop, I did not crash. Even after pooling 50+ hours and did not crash a single bit. But I messed around with some textures (fixing neck seams), and now all NPCs ended up with black-white checkered faces. Only one thing that I rarely follow up with is backing up my files. So, I had to reinstall the vanilla game and delete/reinstall all of the mods...

 

Now this... this is where I started experiencing crashes and issues with mods. (For example, Immersive Armors continued to reconfigure repeatedly.) I'm not exactly sure why this started to happen, but I assume I might have uninstalled something incorrectly. But I've been told that simply deleted the Skyrim folder in steam\common\ should be fine. Other than that, I don't know the cause.

 

Frustrated, I uninstalled/reinstalled Skyrim and mods the third time. Mods seem to have less problems, but the crashes remained. I don't get crashes often, they just simply occur randomly throughout gameplay. But, one crash is too many for me.

 

Looking at the papyrus log did not help. I also used Skyrim Performance Monitor to see my VRAM usage; it hardly passed 2GB mark. No overheating hardwares (using HWMonitor). Conclusion: a possible mod conflict? But what sort of mod would cause a game to crash "randomly". Random as in simply walking in the forest, or riding a vanilla horse to Riften. In other words, I wasn't really performing any specific actions relating to any mods to conflict with.

 

It can't be a memory block issue as well. I checked the logs and it hardly reached the 256MB block.

Edited May 14, 2015 by interfer0n

[DrNewcenstein]

First, vanilla Skyrim is buggy. If you have Skyrim.esm, there's a conflict. This is "The Bethesda Experience", and it's an intended part of gameplay.

 

Second, it's a laptop, so I'm assuming it has only one physical hard drive. Whether or not you have the game in Program Files on C: drive is inconsequential - you're using the same physical drive and platters and read heads as the system, and when Windows decides it wants total control of them to scan for updates or DRM management, your game goes buh-bye.

 

Third, you undoubtedly have Immersive Creatures. While it's a fabulous mod as far as the concept goes, the execution is somewhat lacking, in that it has trouble deciding whether to randomly spawn 10 wolves, 10 bears, 10 spiders, or 10 Goblins in the adjoining cell's Random Spawn Marker. Try disabling Random Encounters for Immersive Creatures, see if that helps. If you also have Immersive Weapons, you may be getting a spawned Bandit with a Dwemer Control Rod, which is buggy at times. Then again, I've gotten CTDs whenever someone entered the cell with the vanilla Dragonborn Nordic Bow, so it's back to point #1 - vanilla issues.