Luinithil

It's hard to tell if a mod is dirty or not just by looking at it alone. For this reason, I'd say that go ahead and clean UNLESS the modder specifically says not to, and tell the modder that their mod has dirty edits. Wild edits can be hard to spot as well since you can hardly tell it's there-- unless it's modding something very specific, and you see an edit to something else that has no relationship to what the mod is doing: odds are that IS a wild edit (better to confirm with modder too though). If you find later that cleaning the mod DOES give rise to issues, report it to the BOSS team so they can take the appropriate action in the masterlist and tell the modder as well, though usually the modder will have likely said that the dirty edits are there for a reason and are thus not "dirty", as in the case of the Unofficial Patches (it's why they always tell you to leave those alone).

Check out Skyrim Revisited if looking for mod recommendations or what you might like, and exact details on how to get them all running together smoothly. Odds are you'll end up using many of the mods in there. And yes, follow what Georgiegril said. Apart from BOSS, I would also use TES5Edit to clean all my mods, particularly the Bethesda masters (except Skyrim.esm-- never touch that). BOSS will also tell you what mods need cleaning as well as list bash tags, but it's generally good policy to clean all plugins new to your setup, since BOSS will not recognise every mod, and sometimes not every mod that's dirty is reported as such. TES5Edit is also useful for checking if a mod needs bash tags, and making a merged patch, which will merge conflicting records which you can then modify/override as necessary-- if you're going to merge leveled lists however, don't use the merged patch for that. Use Wrye Bash to merge conflicting leveled lists into a bashed patch. The bashed patch can also import and merge mods into itself where possible to save on ESP slots. If using NMM to install, I recommend you switch to using either Wrye Bash or Mod Organizer-- Mod Organizer is my personal favourite and Skyrim Revisited uses MO as its mod manager of choice, but Wrye Bash is also excellent and has been around longer. When you're more comfortable with TES5Edit, you might even try merging multi-ESP mods into a single ESP with TES5Edit. Last word of advice: back up everything before you make a major change to your mod setup. And keep your mod downloads around; they'll be very useful if you need to reinstall anything. Feel free to PM me if I lost you on any of that. Happy modding!

Maevan's Mature Skin mod, Navetsea's textures....

Might be a mod that's making the vanilla bug (yes, objects vibrating and flying around really IS a vanilla fault in some cases) worsen-- do you have anything that changes statics's locations such as More Interactive Items? That mod can sometimes make these things go a little... crazy. Also, post your load order and mod list.

You don't need a mod to get your skill level and perks back. Just use the Skyrim Perk Calculator and Respec tool, get a BAT file with the appropriate console commands to get back your character level, and individual skill levels (adjust to match actual skill level where needed) for you to start with. Then you can modify that bat file with the needed additional console commands to get back the spells you already learned, attributes, all your gear and items (make sure to get the right FormIDs and quantities), gold, etc. Start a new game, redo your character, get through Helgen with NO MODS ON, make a save at level 1 outside Helgen as insurance policy against when you next need to restart your character, then use your BAT file in the console whenever-- I usually do it after I'm done speaking to Alvor because MQ tends to be fragile. You can add your mods before or after using the BAT file but I usually do it after I've used the BAT file and made a save, again so that it's easier to restart of one of those mods decides to make trouble. I've done this more than 10 times, and nearly have it down to an art by now LOL. Revealing already found locations, flag completed missions and currently started quests, etc.? Can't be done with the console or other means without risking breaking your game again, I'm afraid. COC might help you with the locations, but again, I don't think that's very safe. Otherwise-- yeah. Use BOSS on your load order, TES5Edit to clean your mods of dirty edits and merged patches, Wrye Bash for bashed patching, and make sure to have a good mod manager to hand (Wrye Bash is a good one, or Mod Organizer)-- NMM's conflict detection leaves much to be desired, I'm afraid. You can avoid Steam updates to your mods by subscribing to Steam Workshop, getting the mods, save the relevant files outside of \Data (I say to do this because I can't remember if unsubscribing removes the files from your computer as well)-- then turn off Steam's auto-update for Skyrim files and mods; to be doubly sure, unsubscribe from the mods you have so Steam can't change things on you, and make a note of where those Workshop mods came from. You can then use your mod manager of choice to manually install those Workshop mods like you would any mod from the Nexus. Finally, use SKSE if you haven't already--it has a feature that allows you to reduce savebloat and Papyrus errors by mopping up orphaned onUpdate events (caused by unclean uninstallations with scripts still running) in your saves. Install SKSE, create an SKSE.ini file with these lines in it: [General] ClearInvalidRegistrations=1

Interesting ideas here. You might want to ask this over at the official Bethesda forums Skyrim Mods section, since many of the modders who use the CK and TES5Edit (or they actually built/actively work on TES5Edit) hang around there very often.

Perks Unbound (with DLC support). I'd use the above mod instead of PerQ. Not to diss contributions from others, but if you look at PerQ, it was made a month before the CK came out in February last year, and hasn't been updated since so DLC support is lacking to say the least. More importantly, pre-CK mods likely have many issues since the files they produce are corrupted or otherwise non-compliant with the way the CK does things. Check it in TESVEdit or Wrye Bash-- you'll probably see strange things with the version number or a lot of out of order subrecords.

because of a bad version number? it's a bit over reacted no? COT doesn't use any script, just uninstall it if you want and revert back to or do a clean save, if you are so afraid about what must going on. there is endless list of post on Nexus about people with load order problem, CTDS etc. because of really bad mod poorly coded or crafted, i'm pretty sure COT won't do anything "horrible" to your game. many of us are using V3 from the first release without a glitch. @@ Oh Divines. Please, please do your research BEFORE you say things like this. If I had a US dollar everytime I posted something to debunk this kind of thinking over on the Facebook page for CoT, I'd be richer by around $10 by now and be able to buy myself a copy of Dragonborn! FYI, when you look at the plugin file (TES4 record)'s header info in xEdit, only one of two numbers should be present in the file headers generated by the CK: valid TES4 record version numbers for Skyrim are 0.94 (most older files) or 1.70 (after recent versions of Update.esm); anything else and you have an indication of trouble. See this UESP wiki page for more details. Worst case scenario: Skyrim will refuse to load the mod and crash, especially with version numbers that are higher than Skyrim itself supports. So if you see something like 0.85 in the version field when examining the plugin in xEdit, that's an improper version field, which shouldn't happen if you made the plugin with the CK. Hence it's usually a good indicator that the plugin has been made or edited in a 3rd party tool that isn't the CK or compliant with it, e.g. TESSnip. Hence Wrye Bash will report any mod with a version number that isn't any of the above as corrupt. If you look at the earlier posts in this thread, Sharlikran has stated that the version number in the corrupted CoT 3.0 was 0.85-- practically a sure sign that an older version than the current dev-alpha release of TES5Snip was used to make the file; he has also said that the file had NOT been through the actual CK. Use of older versions of TES5Snip has been documented as having problems with handling compression data since it can't process it, resulting in loss of data at random throughout the file, corrupting the plugin. Because there's no way to figure out exactly what Snip-- well, snipped-- from the plugin, the only real solution to the problem is to thoroughly check over, and possibly rebuild the mod from scratch in the CK if the situation calls for it-- ideally the mod should be rebuilt completely in the CK to avoid anything left over from Snip like out of order subrecords, etc.. This time around the work on repairing the damage apparently is fairly easy, if very tedious and has been done successfully-- but if you look at what Sharlikran's earlier post said he found, many important records got trashed very badly and thus renders this mod unsafe for use in the current form you have installed, period. Wait for the corrected v3 to be released.

no just uninstall the v2.1 and then install 3.0 and PLAY Unless you've been using the botched version of 3.0. Then you WILL need to use a new game. Or at least roll back to the last save you made before upgrading to the bad 3.0.

Actually, no. No. Just no. Your game's hosed, I'm afraid. The problems may not be apparent now but at some point, they will be. Bad data doesn't create good data.

Why use the Steam Workshop version when the old 2.1 version on Nexus is still up? They're the same as far as I can see, minus the texture resolutions, and the Nexus one is the full version anyway.

Dunno about the TES5Edit issue, but I remember reading that editing in Snip, at least the previous versions before 4.4.0.a (like what jjc seems to have done) causes you to lose info (around 1-9 bytes) from the file at random. When you resave in the CK the CK fills in that info with null bytes or its own info-- which likely isn't what the modder intended at first and thus corrupts the mod (bad data). So no, resaving in the CK is not sufficient to solve the problem. Of course, Sharlikran can answer this better, so I defer to him in the details. ETA: Found the relevant post here: http://forums.bethsoft.com/topic/1399944-wipz-tesvsnip-44a/page__view__findpost__p__21489694

That's good to hear Sharlikran. Kudos to you for being so fast with the fixes!

Current favourite is Grey Haven (house in Winterhold) and Brilliant Breezehome and Burrows. The latter may be too... developed for your tastes; but you can always get the house-only version.