darkmadmax

See if it aint broken - dont fix it. I agree that RPG wise Bethesda games are not that good, in fact Id say plain broken in places. But as a whole they sell well and community loves them (for good reason too) -they are sandboxes with good mod support (better than in most other games) that is their niche. If you look for hardcore rpg there is bioware games ,wasteland2 and project eternity (by obsidian btw) . none of the real CRPG been good sandboxes (Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment ,Fallout ) Consoles are actually in pretty steep decline. So are the PCs though, the future will be probably some open platforms which can run on PC and open consoles (like the one being made by Valve). Consoles games right now are too expensive to produce. PC is in much better shape there . PS4 probably gonna be the end of it for sony , xbox will do better but at the end much worse than today or a few years ago

For past 2 months I was spending much of my free time checking out the efforts produced by community since the last time I played skyrim (which was at release and in purely vanilla form), I must say even back then for me personally skyrim in vanilla state was a relatively stable game , though with occasional ctd here and there. Patched to most recent version vanilla was remarkably stable as well (I did not had a single ctd in one one 8+ hours play session) But as I started playing with a lot of mods (my installed base is around 170 mods) they introduced significant instabilities/slowdowns , I did manage trough organized approach to root and pinpoint major main causes and solutions for most of them, so here Id like to share em and hopefully get some feedback too. This article is not about the issues of intramod compatibility and load order related CTD here, but I focus on the systeml side involved in using mods and ways to troubleshoot, identify and solve CTD/ILS and performance issues . This is very much similar approach I always used as a system administrator and software developer for general troubleshooting , difference is just the scope of applications/problems. We need 3 things : tools which allow us to measure performance/CTD affecting parameters, ways to stress test our system with most CTD prone scenarios , and approaches to solve the issues once they are identified. The first step are means to monitor the game state (as far as it possible): The tools:--------They should allow you to easily see the graph overtime of the several parameters which are good benchmarks for stability/performance: - VRAM: gpu-z, sysinternals process explorer. Peak vram should be under 100MB from your max VRAMGPUZ http://www.techpowerup.com/gpuz/processexp from http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb842062 - RAM: windows task manager/resource monitor, sysinternals process explorer . Peak RAM usage under 3GB (some folks say within 2.8GB)- FPS: many tools, choose one with least footprint and most compatible one (e.g. NOT FRAPS). I use one from my videocard (MSI afterburner) , you can also use rivatuner (but it can not run at as enbboost dll). general benchmark is 30+ fps dips, with 60 fps at stable medium load (use fps limiter/vsync) . Under 15 FPS is a sign of stuttering(texture overload) and/or significantly overloaded rendering/shader engine. In some cases it could be also caused by severely malfunctioning papyrus scripts (check papyrus logs in c:\Users\<username>\Documents\My Games\Skyrim\Logs\) turn on papyrus logging in system.ini[Papyrus]bEnableLogging=1bEnableTrace=1bLoadDebugInformation=1 We need reliable process of reproducing CTD/ILS/crashes : Reproducing:------------ Now as to reproducing -my main modmanager is NMM and I recommend it over everything else because of its high reliability, which does not involve virtual file system and symlinks (as is the case with "mod organizer") .It is also very good manager for texture/script mods as it can handle file level conflicts across multiple mods and cleanly uninstalls them when needed, something which is unreliable, cumbersome and time consuming to do by hand Then you have to have "clean saves" - saves made in purest vanilla skyrim ,which never had any mods installed whatsoever, saved in safe location (indoors in an area typically not touched by mods) I do have one of my own (lvl 33 in riften orphanage), of which I also made another version with just vanilla DLC enabled. There is also several very good quality saves if you do not have your own or want more options: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/27357/? . I use very often the save in solstheim to test for TMS-syndrome (of which Solstheim ILS is a prime example -more on that in TMS guide). Needless to say you never overwrite those saves and use them to test mods load-out. Establish baseline : Have vanilla skyrim, set resolution and detail settings trough launcher. verify the parameters you want and run steps 2 to 5 of Stress Test . It is quite possible under heavy mod load you will have to reduce settings - particularly shadow detail ,AA ,anisotropy and texture detail so be conservative, or at least keep this in mind when doing heavy mod load testing. On Tweaks: skyrim.ini/skyrimprefs.ini tweaks:There are very few hand made tweaks I personally use and most of them are game play tweaks (fov, arrowtilt) . I do not recommend any extensive tweaking of those files, keep em plain vanilla if stability is your goal. Use skyrim launcher to modify resolution/detail settings. its not that there are no working ini tweaks out there, its just that most of them are sacrificing stability without (IMHO) significant gains. Core 3d party addons: I use skse +one tweak plugin as "super stable" thing I almost never turn off . It is not that I am sure that they are 100% stable in all setups, but I did extensively test them already for stability and they never failed. Onetweak can possibly be dangerous in certain setups, but skse as a whole I think is very stable software on their own (that does not automatically mean that all skse using mods /plugins are stable - not at all). Stress test:----------- The process is 1. install mods 2. load clean save3. verify general baseline (vram/ram/fps) and stability . Do not proceed further until resolving those (check VRAM/RAM section for more details)4. stress test - Flyover, spawntest. 5. ILS test (if ILS and /or flyover fails check TMS section of this guide)6. (Optional) playtest - test various in-game mechanics such as npcs, items,scripts, perks etc (depending on the mods you installed) If you find a breaking condition make a save as close to it as you can. use it as starting point for testing . Then there are several simple scripts to help with stress testing : night/weather cycle tests -set it and watch it change, it doesn't test weather that much but usefull day/night, NPCs going around - set timescale to 1000 Flyover. mainly to test outside areas ,fly in big circle from solutude to dawnstar, winterhold, windhelm, riften, Whiterun, Falskreak, rorikstead, dragonbridge, morthal: It tests overall VRAM/RAM, landscape ,environment mods ,dynamic spawns ,etc . It can crash your heavily modded game much faster than running at normals speed on foot, sometimes you want decrease speedmult to 500-700. if it still crashes persistently without completing the flyover path in 1-2 tries I would investigate in details (is it same area? -what mods alter that area? are there dynamic patrols there? and so on). It is stress test and if you decide that you ok with its crashing the stress its your call but you are making stability trade-off. But personally if I cannot complete clean save flyover with dynamic spawns disabled I start taking out mods. player.setav speedmult 1500 TCLSpawn Stress - spawns mobs which fight player and each other.it serves well to test script heavy mods which touch enemies and objects (like bodies). In vanilla skyrim I can spawn 4 instances of that script without crashing (that is 204 mobs not counting summons). Under mod load its 2 to 3 instances . If I cant run this script at least once with combat resolving (takes them a while to kill each other , spoiler - vampires win ) //master vampire player.placeatme 2eac1 10 //Giant: player.placeatme 936D3 10 //dragon player.placeatme F811A 2 //thalmor player.placeatme f9614 24 ILS test - load save in solstheim and travel back to skyrim. Also travel to whiterun city ,save in outside cell(e.g inside the city ,but not in buildings). Exit game completely, restart and load that save. General bethesda smoke test. Run it and open every chest, if there is any issues with items present in chest (and they contain most of armor/weapons), be it model/mesh etc it will crash on opening chest. this is more of a mod test , but it nice to do it once coc qasmoke If you passed stress test with flying colors... well you can stop right here ,otherwise there is more to the wonderful world of troubleshooting skyrim, , depending on what were results of your stress test: VRAM-----In my personal opinion this is number one point which should be addressed when going for stable setup. Skyrim has a lot of graphical data, in fact it has more graphical data than fits in your vram. For it to properly work (especially on the consoles) it has dynamical load manger , which tries to load only what is needed at the moment. but what if "what is needed" is still more than your VRAM? -well then you have "stutter" when your fps is limited by load missing textures ->render frame->load more missing textures cycle. And because that manager/renderer chain is far from perfect it occasionally lead to straight up "fck th1s sh1t" - ill better CTD" scenario. Installing a bunch of high res texture is a sure way to jack up your vram usage. In fact for me just using bethesda high res pack results in unacceptable levels of vram usage and stutter. But there is also a lot of choices and fine tuning with texture packs one can do to fine tune usage: there are different sets of textures -armor ,clutter, creatures ,landscapes ,dungeons and so forth. Installing all of them at 2k is likely ctd recipe for all but super beefy rigs (and even then you still will likely need to use enboost for RAM issue), but you can install just small set and/or one at 1k resolution or lower What is good about VRAM is that it is simple to troubleshoot , monitor and resolve. - simply run VRAM monitoring program and make sure that its usage does not peak closer than 100mb off your max vram. Typically its best to measure peak vram usage outdoors, in big cities and spawning a bunch of mobs (=textures for their armor/bodies). for purely vram isolation testing I avoid whiterun though due to many other stability issues which are prone to happen in that area( but if you want - knock yourself out running 5 instances of spawntest!) typical VRAM monitoring scenario: Aside of texture mods , there are other factors which influences VRAM - game resolution, anti-aliasing and anisotropy . Also chrome by default has hardware acceleration enabled and that uses 100-150 mb of your VRAM when its running ,and aero too (but I never use it) . I for example disabled AA and replaced it with FXAA as it saved me roughly 200 MB vram (and fxaa is faster on top of that), turning of chrome 3d acceleration freed me some more. All that enabled me to run several more 1k texture sets which improved the game looks . For dungeons though I run 2k set as there is much less overall texture load while indoors. I must mention several good looking 1024 texture mods suitable for 1GB vram, many many thanks to their authors, they are:Gamwich's Bethesda Performance Textures - http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/43921/? and http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/42360/?skyrim HD lite version http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/607/?serious HD retexture 1024k ver http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/2146/? RAM---TesV.exe is a 32 bit process which is an entry point for all data loading operations (that includes all graphical data as well). 32 bit proceses are limited to 3.1GB max and from what I heard skyrim in particular becomes unstable at 2.8+ of used RAM.In my personal setup this never happens, mainly because my VRAM is just 1Gb and it hit stability bottleneck first. However it is very real issue for those folks with beefier setups (2GB/3GB VRAM) Therefore I must mention very interesting solution for this bottleneck if you ever hit it:Vanilla skyrim loads all textures in its main memory before passing it to video card. That means if you running 2.5 GB of vram it will use 2.5GB of your system ram addressed by tesv.exe process just for graphics, which can easily push tesv.exe to its limits. There is a relatively well known d3d wrapper called enbboost, which among other things serves to circumvent this limit by offloading the managing of most texture data to another process (enbhost.exe). See this way your tesV.exe is largely free from having its addressable memory taken by textures . Of course that implies that total amount of your system ram is more than sufficient for both tesV.exe ,enbhost and the rest of the system(that is at least 8GB) To better illustrate that here is exact same save ,exact same scenario without and with enbboost:http://static1.nexusmods.com/110/images/110/88369-1382673566.jpg The ini file for that particular configuration(e.g. system memory offloading) of enbboost is located here http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/38649/?. As of using enbboost for purely vram issues - I never noticed much of significant impact on it, when vram is overloaded it still crashes, enbboost or not, maybe slightly less and maybe with less stutters, but my benchmark for is NO vram related crashes, which I achieve without enbboost. Before moving on the next issue, I must mention a generic approach to Bethesda games troubleshooting, and, well, in fact pretty much generic approach to systems troubleshooting: DEFFS (Disable Everything For Fcks Sake!) -----------------------------------------and then quicksort.... This is when you throw in the towel and go to mod manager, select all non vanilla ESP/esm and disable them all. Provided the save was not in one the cells added by those esp/esm the game should load fine .(yeah disabling all 170 mods in one move). Depending on the mods u disabled sure the character/quests/whatnot could be in wonky state but game should load and run. I must stress though that save should not be using any of the assets of disabled mods, e.g. if it is saved inside new building added by one of the mods it will crash. -avoid making "safe" saves in places altered/and especially introduced by mods . After that you start adding plugins back (of course while maintaining dependencies chains). 1/2 of disabled at a time. add ->load ->if it crashed disable 1/2 of enabled plugin and repeat process. when you find which half of plugins causes the crash on load you start dividing that half in half until you narrow it down to THAT MFCKER. -good old quicksort approach :smile: TMS(Too Much Stuff) Syndrome:-----------------------------also might be known as whiterun ILS (infinite loading screen), Solstheim ILS,This is when everything looks ok -your VRAM is peachy , your RAM is fine, you have good FPS and you know your script heavy mods are stable (or not even there at all). Yet you get infinite loading screen/freeze. And they typically the most prominent in those scenarios: -starting game and loading a save in the exterior cell of whiterun. -Travelling from Solstheim to skyrim-more extreme cases - ILS when changing cell from interior to exterior especially in whiterun (e.g. leaving building) What is more curious is that in less extreme cases of TMS if you load a save of an interior cell (or the less stressed exterior cell, typically outdoors) and after that load your " broken ILS save" it will magically load . And there is even ultimate insane "vodoo fix" which temporarily fixes even more severe cases(when leaving building causes ILS) -fix is opening the world map before leaving the cell(yeah its crazy but I have a save+mod load when this method is the only thing short of DEFF which allows to leave the cell - tested it over 2 dozen times, because I couldnt believe that "voodoo fix" actually works) Of course the standard "DEFFS" fix works, but trying to find which plugin exactly caused it is to no avail. - very likely no matter which half you disable it doesnt cause ILS on its own. so what causes it? -simple answer is too many mods with high game data usage. Those are typically not your script/gamebalance and not texture replacers mods. These are mods which introduce NEW stuff - new sounds, new textures (as opposed to replaced one),new buildings ,new NPC+speech (like in 3d npcs) ,new level of details mods (for terrain ), NEW weapons and armor (like immersive weapons/armor). load one of them on its own - and its fine, but reach the critical mass of them and its starts happening Personnally I started seeing ILS only after adding many content mods on top of already hefty setup of armor/weapons/encounter mods. And I want stress that its not that content mods are bad- I believr they are the best kind of mods there, because they increase replay value more so than any other mods. It is just they are the deciding factor in hitting TMS bottleneck, just like texture mods are deciding factor in hitting VRAM bottleneck see those mods with red marks? - enabling 1-2 of them together in any combination does not reproduce ILS in this particular mod load, yet enabling all of them does . I can decide which one of those I really want and/or go look for other things to disable(there are plenty of other candidates - distant details mods,sounds of skyrim,quest mods, immersive creatures/weapons/armors - all examples of high TMS impact mods) What is a fix for it? -removing that critical mod mass is the obvious answer. "But but I want keep the all weapons/armor mods, Etac, 3dnpc, falskaar ,all LODs, those 4 quest mods, ultimate whiterun and and and and...." Well you might have to resort to use the above listed workarounds, you can also try to save only in indoors areas(especially in whiterun but avoid jorvaskaar). But do know you are making a tradeoff between stability and amount of things you want modded. Why precisely skyrim chokes on that I dont know but if looking at root of vanilla data folder it takes ~5.5GB (bsa/esm/esp -thats without highrespack or DLCs). In my heavily modded variant its over 20 GB there, and then there are all additional subfolders there too. Skyrim simply is not very good at managing large amounts of data regardless whether it should "fit" (as both your RAM/Vram are not close to their limits). In fact I did extensive testing and no amount of vram usage/graphical tweaking could solve TMS when its happening. you can literaly drop your vram usage from 900mb to 200mb, your resolution too 800x500 from 1920x1200 and it will not fix infinite loading screen caused by TMS. Perhaps some young bright fella , with lots of free time and a debugger in hand could dig to the root of the issue, but alas my own days with softice are long forgotten back in MS-DOS era. That "voodoo fix" though is peculiar thing - maybe TMS could be modded out of the game if the cause is found.

Requiem is very similar to playing skyrim on legendary difficulty - all mobs one shot you especially early , except you also one shot them too. It also has many annoying features (like you lose stamina just by moving around , so first 10 levels are a huge drag) . it is also very unbalanced overall (though that is true for many other mods as well). later one you become still invincibly powerful and also if you know the requiem mechanics you can become super powerful from the start heavy armor is very bad in requiem. the best thing is to play archer in light armor and switch to 1h in melee. never block anything just move out of the attacks. get silver arrows for draugr in it is too easy

the scope of minecraft is 1 person indy project. that how core , what makes minecraft minecraft was made. This is simple fact. once it became big they started throwing more money and people at it , that still doesn't change that at the core minecraft is very simplistic and primitive project and its rendering limitations stem from that as well. there are plethora minecraft clone engine which surfaced all over the places after it became such hit - those things can be done by competent college student in 1-2 month timeframe, and in fact were done before minecraft. Just no one had the acumen to turn them into actual game and distribute it Variety of hardware is not what causing "glitches and crashes". yeah its harder to make multiplatform games and yeah it will have more limitations if you want to run it on xbox and ps3 as well. That still doenst make it "unfeasible" or "impossible". Not from the lack of feasibility. -but from the lack of clearly defined profits. It will be after all just another game. If you look from the business perspective what sells is game like skyrim. which is the furthest away from that approach. it would require solid investment, a company run by competent people ,and most of all well funded team of highly intelligent motivated developers, well managed over many years to produce such product. and this is an incredible rarity and no one will throw that on just a damn video game when they can make google or amazon with such team

Ranged sneak archer/xbow is an ultimate killing machines with no weak points. yet whenever I think about how to balance it better I inevitably run into that huge elephant in the room - DRAGONS See if we make archery weaker without huge investment that means that all non archer characters are automatically hosed against dragons. if we make it weaker across the board it still screws them even though archers themselves are worse .Like its a lose lose situation because game early on does not give you option to bring dragons down without ranged weapons. How to balance it? Give dragonrend in the first dungeon? give some special anti-dragon arrows? Poisons? "throw bolas" power?

Any names? Cause i'd like to follow them and watch their inevitable crash and burn. There is a company making such a engine for quite a while http://www.vworld.fr/GB_vworldterrain.html .There was an attempt to make a game based on it (it was mmo called dark and light), and while there was not much of game out of it all (main reason it failed too) the world was absolutely stunning ( I was in closed beta of it). Like breathtaking literally - seamless world you can see for hundred of kilometers, with forest , terrain, mountains and rivers. All proceduraly generated too Most computers grind to a stop when trying to render a minecraft world a fraction of the size of Daggerfall. Admittedly, that has to do in part with the limitations of Minecraft's java-based engine, but it also has to do with the limited memory capacity of PC's and the constant background operations which keep them running. I dont want make harsh judgements but such statements imply that you are relatively unfamiliar with technology aspect of such things. It is not a question of technical feasibility -it is quite feasible and been for quite a long time but a question of a company investing high amount of resources into making such a product. After all procedural generated world which is stunning and amazing still does not make a game all on its own and I kinda have to chuckle at comparisons to minecraft - because it is small project (by amount of time and code involved, not by income it generated), made by 1 person , in quite a short time and was experiment in a cube sandboxes, all in all which was quite remarkably successful due to many factors . But considering it a good software example for the limits of technology yet alone any sort of mark in this area is laughable. Presently on the market there are quite a few products right off the shelf capable of displaying 3d terrain in high detail and in large scale - planetside engine, cryengine are some of those if we want game engines specifically

Well you have to also take into account that both arena and daggerfall were made by a very small group of people working also at the same time on 3-4 other titles. And not only making game iteself but also making literally all the things for it - including 3d engine, game engine and tools to manage all the assets Games like oblivion and especially skyrim are made with huge budgets, huge dedicated team, using 3d party game engine and tools (so bethesda themselves do nothing but creating the game and art assets) That is not to say diminish the achievement that Skyrim is amazing game in its own right , but speculation on whats possible and whats not should be made taking into account many technical details with proper care and understanding. its is quite possible to make seamless world size of daggerfall /arena and even much bigger with modern graphics , in fact its not only possible there are commercial projects with this technology on the market right now

Id love to see proceduraly generated sandbox recreating the whole of tamriel again(as in Arena) or a very detailed region (as in daggerfall) with modern technologies. alas it probably wont happen since this is not the way Bethesda makes games (they are still good game nevertheless though)

Man i just spent like 2 hours troubleshooting this exact issue, and then I find this post and I read open your map turn in it - I am like wtf this is voodoo shaman dance. BUT IT WORKED! - i could load whiterun from jorvaskaar even though I ctd like 3 dozen times and couldnt load it before (unless I disable all mods). this also works for ILS from solstheim. i dunno wtf and how but it works and I tried so many things (and yeah including enbboost etc etc and so forth) Great thanks !

I am actually in the process of compling data and testing various mods, I didnt quite finalize the testing procedure , but I did detailed analysis of the mods with tes5edit, I also now understand much better the mechanics of combat and encounters alteration made by mods (and subsequently the deficiencies of the vanilla system and also flaws not addressed by those mods) MOD Name GMST Combat Styles Scripts Magic Effects Perks Spells Init Quest Weapon Notes Deadly Combat X X X X X X Stagger block from timed blocking, seems like a more clean version of DUEL DUEL-Realism X X X X X X DirtyEdit Custom Effects is combined with scripts ERSO AI X Overrides default combat styles ASIS-combat X A lot GMST but only that SkyRe_Combat X X X X X Stagger on block, block,reach, regen,effects on hit etc SkyRe_EnemyAI X X 4 GMST and override default styles (close to erso) Combat Remastered X X X Fairly advanced custom effects for combat LNPC Named NPC Custom Magic Effects Custom Weaps Custom Spells Custom Shouts Custom Projectiles Custom Perks Custom Combat Styles Notes Rebirth Monster X X X X X X X X X Overrides NPC and LNPC with buffed custom effects,some borderline OP StrongEnemyExtreme X X X X X X X Mechanics same as above but only for nameds. many brokenly Overpowered NPC ERSO NPC X X X X X Stock perks, protected npcs,Stat boost SkyRe_EnemyScaling X X X X

It actually reverse. ENB boost optimizes SYSTEM RAM usage. it offloads the texture loading to separate process so tesv.exe has more ram to work with before it reaches 3.1 GB limit. If ram is your bottleneck enb boost is perfect, but if you capping on VRAM enbboost is not magic, it might make the system a bit more stable , but it will still ctd when hitting vram cap. Probably best scenario for enboost is if you have 3GB vram and wants to use lots of 2k texture mods - those will easily push tes5exe toward 3gb limit , but enboost will offload that of tes5 p.s. of course that implies that your total system ram is at least 8 GB to begin with - enboost switches load from tes5.exe to enbhost, but that still means you need total amount of system ram to accomodate them both

at I just said but in different words). Lol. you know that 2k textures are one the fastest way to get a ctd if you run out vram? - like i can make skyrim super unstable with nothing but pure texture mods . yep maybe if bethesda wrote better memory manager you wouldnt have ctd (it would still slow down and stutter though), but there is also simpler solution - like being slightly aware of the resources skyrim and mods you apply use and moderate them accordingly. or if you can bother with that - just run vanilla, if that isnt stable there are more issues with your system than skyrim or its mods

I agree with your other points, but there are other games as moddable as Skyrim. None of them have quite as large of communities, but Neverwinter Nights 2 and Half Life are extremely moddable. Ill give you NWN (not sure about NWN2) - it had very good mod support (and large community as well) . But thing is it is an isometric RPG with focus on story driven gameplay . Its not explorable sandbox like bethesda games As of HL2 (and the other FPS ilk like Unreal,Crysis etc) - those are FPS centric engines. Which is very barebones as far as actual " game" - sure you could make skyrim on HL2 engine (or crysis) - it just will be enormous undertaking comparable to the making of original skyrim itself Bethesda games provide a sandbox modding platform - complete with scripting and AI. Sure is not perfect , but it is very powerful given how much there is . Its one of a kind modding sandbox , the other sandboxes are do everything from scratch (like gary's mod or minecraft)

Seems like a very promising project. for smaller cities imho there no better mod than expanded cities complete, but no complete big cities mod . there are several whiterun, windhelm and solitude replacements but none as comprehensive as your mod. in fact the only decent solitude mod I found has major bug with hall of the dead - by the way do you make sure it doesnt bug your mod as well? - solitude has some changes when its capture by stormcloaks and that breaks many solitude mods there

Denial? Look I can run vanilla skyrim for 8 hours straight without single CTD. I have a bunch of scripts and stress test to test stability as well (thigns liek spawning selection of mobs , flying ,etc) . so vanilla skyrim is stable - there is no issues with that Now as I start adding mods stability might decrease . - there are many way to cause CTD and main reason with just texture/model mods is running out VRAM/RAM. As long as you never hit the limits skyrim is relatively stable. There are content heavy mods with many bugs (like bad navmeshes) Then there are script heavy mods- they are typically quite harmless on their own if they dont have bugs, but if they do they can cause crash. Skyrim as mod engine is not as stable as skyrim as vanilla game that is true, but with proper mod selection it is quite stable and quite playable. I have over 200 mods installed right now and there are ctds per 1-2 hours of open world play (main reason my vram is low and I decided to not sacrifice texture quality for less CTDs), there is not ctds in building or dungeons. But fact is with all imperfection with mods skyrim is only game which supports such extended modding, you can complain all day but there is no alternatives (beside other bethesda games).