lordmonkus

Are you using Nexus Mod Manager or Mod Organizer to download and install mods ? If you are then the compressed downloads should be on your hard drive, just check your mod managers settings to see where they downloading to. If you are downloading and installing manually and you didn't keep the zips it may be awkward to backup your mods. Some mods are simple esp files and can be easily backed up but some install textures and meshes and those wont be easy to back if you do not have the zip files.

There's no real short answer for you but I can give you some links to point you in the right direction. Start off by reading the Achieve Smooth-Performance SKYRIM with 255-Plus MODS guide by Alex y Taina. This will help you with making sure your Skyrim runs as smooth as it can. Just throwing a pile of mods into a game can make it very unstable no matter how beastly of a system you are running. That guide is gonna point you over to the S.T.E.P. guide which will have a great list of mods to at least give you a very good looking solid base to work off of. Once you have read and followed those 2 guides then you can think about a weather and lighting mod along with an ENB. These two will work off of each other because certain ENBs are designed to be used with specific weather and lighting combinations. Here is a great ENB comparison you can go through and find one that suits your tastes. Link. Fortunately you will have a powerful enough of a rig to handle pretty much any ENB out there. Hopefully this gets you started on what you are looking for. Edit: I noticed in your system specs you didn't have an SSD listed. I have zero experience with stripe raid so I do not know what the performance of it is like in comparison to an SSD. I have my Skyrim and Mod Organizer files installed on an SSD and the load times are greatly improved over a traditional HD.

Open the console with the tilde "~" key. This will pause the game and allow you to do all your editing without all the movement and weapon swinging / punching.

Wow, I got the first vote. I voted none of the above, nothing against any of them but after trying out the full ELE package by JawZ I will be sticking with it. Hopefully he releases here on Nexus soon, by far the easiest to use and most balanced lighting of all the options. By balanced I mean not too dark or bright in certain areas, it just seems to find that balance between game play and looks. I have used all of the ones listed and they all have their positives and negatives.

As a person with only 1 gig of ram (Radeon 7850) I can say you should be just fine with all the mods you listed. The stuff that will have an impact are lighting, texture and enb mods. From my personal experience I would say limit textures to the Bethesda high res pack or equivalent. Enb is gonna be tough but look for ELEP Enb by Jawz on this site. Lighting you can try different ones and should be fine, I use ELE made by Jaws as well. For better looking characters and npcs I use Windsong Skyrim Character Overhaul.

I hope you find ELEP + ELE to your liking, these will cover all your lighting and weather needs since the ELE package includes the weather as well as lighting. From all my testing and re testing it was the best performance to looks ratio I could manage. Having garbage shadows was just such a turn off I have to have ENB installed just for that reason. ELEP and ELE are made by the same guy JAWZ so it's designed to work together and perform as well as it can. If in the end the ENB is a no go I would probably recommend CoT for weather and ELFX for the lighting and going with a SweetFX for some extra graphical punch. One other side benefit I have found with ELEP + ELE is there seems to be much less need for any computability patches than CoT or Pure Weather and the other lighting mods out there (just my personal experience though).

I kind of figured you didn't want an ENB due to performance and that's something I have been struggling with with my recent game rebuild. Finding the right ENB that runs and looks good is tough. That is why I made the recommendation of ELEP and ELE. I found the performance of this combo to be the best without going back to a very old ENB without enboost support. As much as I like ELFXs look it does come at a little performance cost where the ELE setup doesn't seem to have any impact at all. Just for reference my system is a 3.2 GHz AMD cpu 6 core, 1 gig Radeon 7850 graphics card and 8 gigs of ram. All the ENBs I tried murdered my FPS except for a select few and those that didn't murder my frame rate always had something I Just didn't like for one reason or another.

@OP I know you said non ENB but im gonna throw my recommendation of ELEP ENB along side Enhanced Lighting for ENB, get the v49 weekend release further down the page for a nice all in one installer for NMM or MO. I have tried all the weather and lighting combinations listed so far by others and this combo is so far the most balanced in terms of both looks and performance. Like I said I know you said non ENB but I have been so impressed with this setup I have to say at least give it a try and see for yourself if it suits your tastes. The ENB at least gives you the added benefit of non horrid shadows and ENBoosts benefits. Just another option to consider.

I really wish I had something to offer this project other than my support from the sidelines. This is going to be awesome and I cannot wait to see it done.

Bump in hopes someone with an answer might see this and be able to help out. Googling for an answer I couldn't find anything.

I just made the switch over from NMM to Mod Organizer and in the Known Servers list there is only one server showing and I was wondering if there was a way to fill the list with all the servers to choose from to add to the preferred server list.

@Doseoso: Are you talking about Depth of Field ? If you are there is the mod Dynavision that does exactly that without the cost of the ENB. On a personal note the single best reason to ever use an ENB is simply for better shadows. I have yet to find any other way to make the shadows in Skyrim to look anything close to acceptable. Now I am in no way saying there is no other reason to use or not use an ENB. ENB has its benefits and downsides and it all comes down to personal preference. I just use a SweetFX setup with ENB just for shadows and ENBoost at very little performance hit though there is some it is within acceptable limits on my system.

Try Inconsequential NPCs. Just at a quick glance this would seem the logical place to start.

I'm just saying my experience with Locational Damage matched up with what the guide said and I have read the same elsewhere.

I just found it caused crashes on me, as soon as I removed it no crashes. It seemed to be whatever was calculating where the hits were landing (I'm guessing scripts but I wont say that for a fact since I don't know) I have also read somewhere a long the way from other people saying the same thing. I guess it's it's one of those "your mileage may vary" cases. The Skyrim Stability Guide page here on Nexus has it as a mod to not use (down at the bottom under Mod Stability). I guess it depends on how many other script heavy mods you use along with it.

Weird, unfortunately I can't help any further with your issue.

Were the 2 screenshots taken at the same time of day ?

I wouldn't recommend using Locational Damage at all. I've tried it and causes crashes. That was my experience with it at least. Deadly Combat is what I use and its good.

Did you install any esp files with the other ENB you tried ? Also try using http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/7804/? to clean out your ENB install and remove any folders relating to ENB / SweetFX and start over again.

Yup that's what I said :laugh: It's not the mods themselves that will bog either of those systems at all but the combo of 4k textures and one of the heavy hitting ENBs. The only mods that I can even think of that may cause any frame rate issues would be any of the ones that add a ton of NPCs so you have to push a lot of polys around.

I run with decent textures along side a stripped down ENB just for good shadows and a nice looking SweetFX. But yeah a great looking ENB adds a lot to the game. Unfortunately my pc isnt strong enough for a good ENB.

It can enhance the look of the game dramatically but it also is probably the single biggest performance hit to the system with a heavy config. Edited for wording.

ENB is a .dll plugin that adds / enhances graphics with features such as ambient occlusion and lots of other post processing effects. ENB isn't a mod like standard Skyrim mods at all, here is the website for it to read up on it link, also do a mod search for ENB here on Nexus and you can see all the different presets available for it. Another thing to check out to learn about ENB is Gophers series on youtube link here. Some ENB setups can be very light weight on the system and some others with all the features turned on can be extremely demanding on the system.

Either of those systems should be able handle almost anything you throw at it. The number of mods aren't the problem when it comes to a smooth frame rate. Texture pack and resolution along with an intensive ENB will be the biggest hits so go with whichever system which will handle large amounts of 4k textures and ENB graphical effects.

Have you taken a look at ENB Basic ? Not sure if it's more stripped down than you want but I would think you might be able to just turn on the stuff you want and not change any of the lighting. Disclaimer: I am not an expert or anything near it when it comes to ENBs, my system isn't quite powerful enough to really run them.