Corwin1971

Crashes at that point are almost always a missing master (you have an esp activated that relies on another file, but that file is absent from your load order...patches are especially prone to this)

Yet another vote for 3DNPC (Interesting NPCs is the title on the Nexus) You might also give Anna's NPC's a try. There are several included followers, and the main one (that the author started with) has several quests and is a female character. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/58357/?

No, optimizing textures is not the same as lowering the resolution of those textures. It's changing the compression format (thus the gain in VRAM). At the time, I used it because I only had 512Mb (!) of VRAM. That said, a LOT of mod authors warn against using these compression programs because they already possess the knowledge to optimize their textures as much as is useful, and if you brute force them to be smaller, the quality will suffer. If you're not already using them, I HIGHLY recommend Gamwich's two "Bethesda Performance Texture" replacers to achieve much the same thing with a more thoughtful application. They replace a lot of textures that texture mods often don't touch (like clothes and animals) with textures files that are usually a) smaller and b) better looking. If you get a video card with 2GB+ of VRAM (like I finally did) and use 2K textures or smaller, the need for such a program will be nil.

I've used this one in the past, and it's still available: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/13529/?

What Qarl's Texture Pack does (or any texture mods) and what an ENB does are very different, so simply installing an ENB will not make your game look like it does in the Realvision video. I believe there is actually quite a long list of recommended (visual) mods on the Realivision Nexus page, and there would be a sensible place to start if you want to recreate that look. Once you have installed any meshes (like from SMIM) and textures (too many to name; check that aforementioned page for ideas, the Nexus category, and/or various other sites for recommendations, videos and screenshots), and possibly weather and/or lighting mods, then and only then would I bother messing around with an ENB. The better your game looks, the more an ENB, or its alternatives, will have to work with. Personally, I prefer using the FXAA Injector, which is basically the same thing as SweetFx, to using an ENB. I like sharpness, saturation, don't like depth of field, etc, and the impact on performance is much less than it is with ENB. But once you've gotten everything else set up and understand the basics, it's easy enough to play with settings and/or try different templates. There are exceptions, but that's what 99% of the ENBs on the Nexus are: not mods, but configuration settings for the ENB itself, which you download from offsite. You don't have to download any presets at all if you don't want to. You can change stuff around until you get a look you like.

Then you flat-out did something wrong. The files are smaller. There's no gray area there.

Install Bethesda Performance Textures (both of them) by Gamwich. There's absolutely no reason not to. The HD texture pack Bethesda rushed out had a bunch of poorly optimized and not particularly good quality textures, and these replacers both improve the quality of the textures while reducing the VRAM necessary for most of them. He didn't touch landscape textures, just things like creatures, armor, etc.

This may be totally unhelpful, but what the heck, I thought I'd mention it. I know nothing about this subject myself, but maybe you could load MangaClub's Vivid Snow mod in the CK and take a look? That mod massively increases the quantity of particles (he (?) recommends a setting of at least 6000) Or maybe you could send him a message.

Good to hear!

If you're just looking for dense grass, you could just try "Grass on Steriods." There won't be any new grasses or anything, but thicker vanilla grasses. Unlike Verdant, GOS doesn't increase the grasses per texture, and seems (at least to me), to have a lesser performance impact. If you want to try something more similar in purpose to Verdant, you could look at: Unique Grasses & Groundcovers. Does not use the GOS tweak, and says its incompatible with it. You would set your iMinGrassSize to around 20 and your iMinGrassTypesPerTexure to 8. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/42370/? Or Unbelievable Grass 2, which DOES use the tweak (so your iMinGrassSize would be 50+) and a iMinGrassTypesPerTexure of 10. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/67478/? I would recommended using the console COC command to bop around to a few different areas like the Rift, Whiterun tundra, etc both to see how performance differs and to see if you like the look. Full disclosure: I spent 3 days doing this myself and ultimately decided that no one mod looked good to me in every area, and the wild, unkempt, waist high grass everywhere doesn't appeal to me. I'd rather have the frame rate. But that's the beauty of modded Skyrim: to each his own. Good luck!

None of your mods are dependent on an ENB, except those that make your ENB play nice with other mods (like that flora patch). True, you won't get parallax without ENB, but none of those mods require that you be using parallax. There are other ways to do post-processing effects that are less resource intensive than ENBs. I'd recommend taking a look at the FXAA Injector/Sweet FX. There aren't nearly as many presets around as there are for ENBs, but there are some, and you can use one as a baseline for your own tweaks (like if you want more saturation, less sharpness, etc.) That's my recommendation: install that, remove the ENB for now, re-activate your grass mod, and see how that looks and performs for you. You might also try a different grass mod. I didn't get very good performance with Verdant either, and it didn't seem to scale very well with iMinGrassSize. There are dozens of grass mods on the Nexus. Some of them do much the same thing that Verdant does (which is pretty much hand pick grass textures from other mods and combine them; there's no unique content in Verdant that I'm aware of.)

I've been using Chrome since day 1 of downloading from Nexus. Glad it's working for you, though.

Yes, they should. I don't know of a mod called "Weather of Skyrim", though. Maybe you mean "Wonders of Weather"? If you want to be able to find those armors and weapons in game, you'll need to create a merged/bashed patch. Google it to find instructions.

I looked at the Realvision page and now I know where you got your mod list from. :) Did you set your iMaxGrassTypesPerTexure=15 in your Skyrim.ini? That's the required setting for Verdant. Note that it's "texure", not "texture"....the spelling mistake was Bethesda's and it has to say that or it won't work. I have no idea if having that improperly set would lower your frame rate, but it's worth checking anyway or you won't see what you're supposed to be seeing.

You can fine tune these settings by opening the Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPref.ini files in a text editor. BACK UP YOUR INI FILES. It is possible to screw things up by making changes here, but don't let that scare you off. Just make sure you keep track of what you're changing so you can change things back if you have issues. In SkyrimPref, you'll find fGrassStartFadeDistance and fGrassMaxFadeDistance (and a Min line as well, but leave that alone).....the default very high vanilla settings use the value 7,000, so use that as your guide. (the higher the number, the less pop-in you'll get) Where grass is concerned, more important to frame rate than draw distance is density. You're using Verdant, which means you're using the so-called "Grass on Steriods" tweak. In your Skyrim.ini file, you'll see a line called "iMinGrassSize"...the higher that number, the LOWER the grass density. Try raising that number. If it's really low, like under 50, that is definitely hurting your frame rate. Shadows are complicated to tweak, or at least they can be. There are a ton of different settings. Just keep in mind that shadows are one of if not the most demanding thing graphically on every game, so though it might seem nice to have 4096 resolution shadows with everything turned up, it will murder your frame rate. There's a tweak guide that GeForce did (no, it doesn't matter if you don't have that brand of video card) years ago that still applies. It's helpful for showing what some of the settings do, what effect changes to them have in game, and how impactful those changes will be to your frame rate. It's a very good introduction to your .ini files. http://www.geforce.com/whats-new/guides/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-tweak-guide#1