also done both of those things dar mator smash, i've noticed, actually overwrites some things badly and doesn't necessarily level list things correctly unless you go in and manually fix things, and doesn't actually connect anything the way it needs to with the linking/chaining feature. unless you go in and manually connect all of the records together since it's still not a fully supported program in that regard. mator himself warns about that, and i watched his videos about it. i'll try it and see if using it's patch will even work or not. and actulaly, you do need those patches with perkus based on what i've found because perkus messes with weapons and human enemies/anything with a weapon or armor. anything not being touched by those two things is left completely unchanged, which includes things like creature changes. that's what i've found in the perkus thread/forums. which leads to another problem i've discovered. any patch, be it bashed, TES5merged, patchus maximus, asis, (mator i haven't tested yet) i can load the game once and it'll be fine. if i quit the game and try to play again later it's a ctd before the menu shows up. but everything plays perfectly fine for one play session that lasts for hours. i'm seriously confused by this i have to say.