12 replies to this topic

[coldsyn]

My honest advice?

If you tried all that you could, and still recceive crashes, its time to nuke your skyrim, and reinstall completely.

Trust me when I say the stress of trying to play a fun game that crashes too many times just when you're having fun is far more than just starting from scratch and reinstalling your mods again.

 

My second advice. If you go on ANY mod that has a bunch of unanswered bugs with no fixes from the mod author, or any mods that have like 6 foreums flooded with users complaining of ctd and bugs, thatt the mod author neglects to fix, or even if you see that the mod hasn't been updated since 2012, and this mod uses a lot of scripts.

My advice is to 

stay away!

It means that mod is more or less going to give you issues as well. 9 out of 10 the reason you ctd so many times, is propbably because you're using one of those mods that are having issues that went unaddressed. If you see there is no bug or forums on the mod site, go into the posts and see what others commented. A locked comment section is also a severe red flag something is going down.

 

Mods over on the loverslab side (besides sexlab) are also bound to give you your heaviest crashes.

Heavy scripted mods, or mods that add a whole bunch of npc to your game will more than likely cause crashes.

 

This is the true way to have a fault free skyrim game, just because skyrim within itself is buggy.

Even with USLEEP you're still bound to have crashes the more of these types of mods you have.

 

Skyrim is severely outdated as well, and we all know bethesda is known for being buggy programers.

Your best bet is to ensure these things are in order before things go wrong.

 

With that being said, you may find that you download a mod, it goes fine for months, so you download 50 more mods, only for your game to all of a sudden start ctd; that one mod you thought was good could be starting to bug out again.

 

 

Also, these guys: G.E.M.S Gameplay Enhancement Mods for Skyrim.

A good bit of them have severe issues; whose website isnt even active anymore when you click their logo.

 

Its a high probability that they could also cause ctd; I swear by their hunterborn mod, and never had issues.

 

Also, with that all being said sometimes its literally not even the mod author Sometimes its just the mod users, as they do things like install a script mod manually---never do this, this is bound to give you issues, making it tougher to uninstall, and if so not all scripts might be removed, you'll need to go search for those. I cant tell you how many times I read a weird off the wall issue a mod user was having that I had no idea how to fix---like they'll say everytime they jump up in the air, they crash, despite the fact that their mod that they used was a realistic needs mod not even touching jumping. Things like this is also a problem, and can easily overwhelm mod authors who don't know who to help first. Sometimes not even other mod authors will help them solve their mod's issue either, and so they're at a loss for words like everybody else.

 

 

Use a mod manager---vortex, nmm, mo, anyone just use one. The only mods that are ok to install manually, are ones you're certain wont give you issues like realistic needs, 

a house mod, clothing mods, ect.

 

Even mods like Bruma beyond skyrim can be installed manually, but mods like wet and cold, I wouldn't install manually. Hopefully this paints a clearer picture

really wise and valuable advice for mod users, very thanks! 

[anjenthedog]

fyi, the only "mods" I ever install manually are 

 

a) racemenu presets

b) bodyslide presets

 

because both are generally simplistic in file/folder structure and I know where things go, AND because they don't really impact the game in any way aside from when used to produce output. (they're basically external resources)

 

All others >>> mod manager. 

[sattyre]

If you are not absolutely meticulous in how you go about installing and recording what you've installed, you should never install any mod manually in this day and age.  There are still some people who swear by manual intallations, but they are few and far between.... and they tend to be very meticulous.    I don't even recommend installing SKSE mods manually anymore.  Presets or bodyslides as anjenthedog says are pretty harmless.   

I definitely recommend any mod manager over manual installs, but MO-2 is in my opinion, the best mod manager for Bethesda games.  I have heard people swearing by Vortex, and I guess it is a pretty good mod manager, but it is also made for all games.  MO-2 is very specifically for Bethesda games and it does an incredible job and after the shock of the initial change-over is quite user friendly.

One thing i see a lot of is people just willy nilly piling on more mods.  If you don't know how to resolve conflicts, you are pretty much limited to around 130 mods with only a bashed patch, give or take depending on the mods, (The actual range is probably 40 - 150), after which your games stability will drop into the toilet.  If you use a smashed patch, you can probably increase that number and maintain some kind of stability.  If you know how to resolve conflicts you can usually get to the mod limit easily enough and have a very stable game, (255 esps/esms).  At 255 mods, I would be very surprised to get a ctd in my game ever.  I regularily am running over 450 active esps without issues, because I spend hours in xedit resolving conflicts.

I never remove esps from my modlist during a game so I rarely end up with orphaned scripts.  I do check periodically with the resaver, but usually there is nothing for it to remove.

My advice is to stop piling mods on top of each other if you don't know how and are unwilling to learn how to resolve conflicts.  Use  Mator's Smashed Patch and Wrye's Bashed patch and stick to under 150 mods and have a stable game that is fun to play and not constantly ctding.