VulcanTourist

What is the purpose of the GND directories that can be found in Meshes\?

The Underground Bathhouse has sinks, toilets, showers, and even a steam/sauna room. Or is it the Leveler's Tower that I'm recalling? Or both? Anyway, it's been done, just not by Bethesda.

If there's a limit to the SIZE of a BSA, it's not going to be some arbitrary value like all of the ones you initially postulated. It will be based on some pragmatic limit imposed by the way the BSA parsing system was implemented, meaning that it will be some "even" binary number, like 2048 or 4096 GB. Have you considered that "size may not matter" and that the real limit might be the count of the files inside the BSA?

You don't specify how you are managing those mods. How you do so will determine the best way to back things up for use after you've reinstalled Windows and the game, etc. Thanks to the Windows Registry and other unavoidable evils, there is no practical way to back up software that is actually INSTALLED into Windows. That is not true for "portable" software, which is fully independent and can be uninstalled and reinstalled simply by deleting and restoring their directories, but portable software for Windows remains a rarity, especially from big publishers. The problem with this: you can't back up software information locked away in the Registry (at least not trivially), and even when software uses independent configuration files they truly are "independent", scattered willy-nilly all over the freaking place depending upon the psychotic whims of the developer. Even aside from the horror of the Registry, trying to find and back up the state data of all installed software is a PITA. So... you will be forced to reinstall and reconfigure Steam and whatever mod manager you are using, at the least. You could probably manage to avoid having to re-download all your Steam games, and there are several ways to do that: (1) use Steam itself to create a Library on the external drive and move everything to it, (2) move the entire SteamApps directory elsewhere yourself and then create an NTFS junction or symbolic link, where SteamApps used to be, to "point" to the new location. In either instance there would be a bit of extra work after you reinstall Steam to make it aware of the alternate location, either defining the Library location in Settings or deleting the default SteamApps directory and recreating the junction/symlink. With respect to mods, I can't help you at all without knowing how you manage them. If you're not using Vortex, I probably still can't help much, as that is my current familiarity. Mods managed by Vortex can be backed-up fairly easily by saving certain Vortex sub-directories. The Vortex\downloads directory contains every mod you've ever downloaded (and not explicitly removed), and the Vortex\<gamename>\mods directories contain all the currently installed mods. It would probably be better to save the entire <gamename> directories, though, as those also contain other metadata you probably want to keep. Reinstalling Windows is not at all a painless task, and the more software you have the more painful it gets. I have hundreds of applications installed! I've been carrying forward and upgrading the same install of Windows, for this reason, since the days of Windows XP. I'd sooner slit my wrists than have to reinstall AND reconfigure all of it!

It's very rare for me to disable plugins. The only times I can recall doing it were for momentary troubleshooting or because Vortex/LOOT informed me that a plugin was "redundant". Even then, I need to know what the behavior is with respect to loose files in case it matters. This might be enough to dissuade me from my unpacking project, if the loose files will not be managed as I expect.

I did misunderstand, if that was part of your intent. I wouldn't have thought of it because that is mostly if not entirely an obstacle created by trying to manage mods manually rather than with a management tool, and I wouldn't even consider modding this game without a manager. In my original post, I was envisioning unpacking BSAs in the mod manager's staging folder to make the loose files part of what will be managed, in place of the BSA, not simply manually unpacking them myself into Data and deleting the BSAs from there. That tactic would cause Vortex, at least, to throw fits about the interference. What I had in mind would likely require reinstalling the unpacked mods, but I thought the mod manager would treat them normally beyond that (at least until an update). Do loose files from a mod whose plugin has been manually disabled still remain "deployed"?

That does sound different than the furniture scaling issue, but are the tankards they're holding the vanilla game ones? If they're a replacer tankard model (and I know at least one exists, seen a screenshot), then it might be an issue caused by that and still more similar than not to the scaling issue. I know almost nothing about animations, but I haven't read anything about animations themselves altering scale; there are mods that alter scale prior to animations, but I've never read of animations themselves being able to do it.

Furniture Height Size Fix Enhanced The simpler solution, however, is simply to keep the height/size of your followers and NPCs within a very small margin of 1. Children are the unfortunate exception, and that seems to be the primary focus of the above mod.

Unless I have substantially misunderstood the behavior of BSAs and loose files as plugin dependencies, this is not true. The files referenced by a plugin always get loaded into memory and assigned the same mod index regardless of the physical origin of the files. The only issue here is precedence. The files in a BSA are somewhat hidden from an otherwise transparent process, where a capable mod manager like Vortex can inform a player about file conflicts and help him make correct decisions about precedence, even irrespective of load order. If everything originated from a BSA, then load order - mod indices - would be the undisputed King of Precedence and nothing else would matter, no other executive decisions could be made aside from choosing load order. I don't want load order to be the only deciding factor of file precedence in my game. Load order's value is in determining record precedence, which cannot be determined any other way, unlike file precedence. Now, having files unique to a particular mod all grouped together and tied with a bow is a convenience, but it's a convenience that I can easily duplicate with loose files by seeking them out in the mods' staging directory. If I find a "deployed" loose file whose origin or purpose I cannot identify, I can just as easily find it in the staging directory and understand its purpose as I could if it was grouped in a BSA. The staging directories become my BSAs. My concern is my convenience and workflow and not that of other mod authors. Loose files add little to no risk for me personally because I'm capable of avoiding stupid mistakes. I won't attempt to persuade others to abandon their own convenience for publishing and "tech support", but neither should they expect me to forsake my own if I find BSAs an impediment to my process.

I don't know specifically if this is the case with the mods you are talking about but, for example, there are a couple scripts you can apply to keep static objects from flying around when you load into a cell; basically the script tells Havok to ignore that particular item. It's one tiny script that fires once when you first load into a cell, but if you have a lot of them, it does become a cumulative thing. My intent in asking the question was to understand not why a mod would have just one script but rather why a mod would choose to put its one script inside a BSA rather than leaving it loose?

I've taken a realistic view of the process. I look at what the mods do and how they do it, and then decide whether they're a risk that warrants installing each one with its own testing phase. Simple follower mods and the like I might install with reckless abandon, but mods that have active elements or worldspace edits deserve more scrutiny. I set out with the goal of trying to create with Vortex and SSE the modded game I always wanted in SLE and never quite got, because Nexus Mod Mangler mauled it to death (during its fatal dance with virtualization). I spent at least a year modding SLE, and I've far surpassed in SSE in a few months what I was doing in SLE. I credit Vortex with some of that success. It's not at all bug-free, but it's been playable enough that I've racked up hundreds of hours and all the Steam achievements that I never got with SLE. I'd be a hypocrite if I told even a newbie that he had to install every mod one at a time with a lengthy testing period.

I have 171 of the suckers currently, and a surprising number are tiny, just a few KB. As often as not I'm finding scripts embedded in them, which someone else had recently told me was a bad practice (but didn't explain). I even have a few that have just one file in them, and it's just a script. What's the motivation for doing that?

*sigh* This conversation depresses me.

Do you know if anyone has profiled and compared CPU usage during compression versus simple file I/O and how they affect the game's startup time? I suspect that with a recent-generation CPU the former wouldn't have much impact, and I am indeed loading the game from a PCIe NVMe SSD. Even if it did extend the startup process, I think I'd still choose to unpack them all unless there's some other good argument yet unspoken against it. The benefit to me of being able to more easily explore, search, and find files when they're loose is worth any extra delay to startup. Startup takes mere seconds compared to the hundreds of hours I spend playing and modding.

I'd expect that as a potential given, but it doesn't worry me much. I didn't think to mention it because it's not an important consideration to me.

Is there any functional or technical reason why I shouldn't unpack the BSA files of mods that still use them? I don't see any personal advantage to them, rather they are an obstruction for me. Since a BSA is just a container that duplicates the paths that the files it contains would referenced from if they were loose, I don;'t see any functional harm to mods by unpacking them, and doing so makes it easier for me to deal with certain conflicts as well as easier to learn. It might make updates of mods that contain them a bit more work, but that seems a worthwhile tradeoff to me.

If you're using LOOT standalone, what mod manager are you using? It's not Vortex, and you're missing out on the extra capabilities it enables. I understand familiarity is seductive, but this is the integrity and stability of your mod list, more important than life itself! If, gawds forbid, you're still trying to use Nexus Mod Mangler... just don't. Stop. That is your first (unsolicited) advice. Regarding your question, I've never heard of merely changing plugin load order being capable of corrupting a saved game. That sounds like a ridiculous claim to me. That said, ATF - I have never used it - has an enormous number of scripts, and trying to update it or worse yet remove it mid-game would be Very Bad. The more likely consequence of changing its load order is that it simply breaks some functionality of AFT or another mod, if there are any conflicts. Second (unsolicited) advice: there are other follower managers like Extensive Follower Framework and Netherworks you might consider... the next time you start a new game.

Ummm... what you describe is "hard" for the majority of players. For a mod list of 400+ plugins (and more that have none), that is a job that will stretch on for months of problem-solving, bug-fixing, and fine-tuning. That isn't even close to an Easy Button. What would make it easier is an end to kitchen-sink mods, now that Light plugins make them non-essential unless the disparate features are interwined and interdependent. It's much easier to make executive decisions and/or troubleshoot later if a mod does just one specific thing very well rather than a bunch of things.

It's been common practice for some armor/outfit modders to create in-game shops or showrooms for the outfits they create. Even SoS has such a shop! At the very least, there's always an in-game container placed somewhere. This can be quite useful for anyone interested in an outfit collection to become quickly familiar with all the choices and bits and pieces. However, the strategy comes with consequences: worldspace and other conflicts. The more such mods with their own showrooms - or even just placed chests - that one installs, the worse the potential conflicts become. Why didn't it ever occur to anyone to collaborate and create a single outfit showroom, a single worldspace edit, that individual outfit modders could then extend by adding their own rooms to it? A single point of conflict, rather than multiples, not to mention a single place to go in the Skyrim world, rather than scattered all over? There wouldn't even have to be a worldspace conflict at all if the location was its own isolated cell or worldspace, only reachable via a teleport spell.

9600K CPU, 32GB DRAM, GTX 1070 8GB VRAM. Won't be rebuilding again for quite some time, in spite of me despising the cases I chose for us.

I'm still debating its value "in my head"... is my head high-poly? There's going to be a performance hit for a higher density mesh and I'm already suffering too much framerate loss in outdoor areas. The visual difference to me isn't striking enough to warrant losing more. Then there's the redesigning that would almost certainly have to take place. For the same reason I'm reluctant to commit to EFM even though I'm not pleased with the limited expressions even with Expressive Facial Animations installed.

I myself don't yet fully understand how all the audio bits and pieces fit together.

I will gladly give you the recipe so long as I get to keep the one I made.

If you think it's possible that you will ever want to also consider Expressive Facegen Morphs SE, now would be the time to do both since you will already be on the hook for adjusting your player head anyway if you switch to High Poly Heads.

I am leagues better at deferring than you. I teach a course at CalTech and have a late-nite infomercial. Would you like to subscribe to my newsletter?