volnaiskra

That is weird. Did it happen after you installed a particular mod? If not, then it may be that the vanilla files that contain text are corrupted. In that case, you could try deleting the files in SteamApps\common\skyrim\Data\Strings (back them up first) and getting steam to redownload them with the "verify integrity of local cache" option. They aren't very big files, so it shouldn't take too long.

Why post in a help forum if you're so unwilling to accept people's help? The problem of not all mods working is most likely caused by your perplexing insistence on running two simultaneous copies of the game on one OS.

It's likely an ENB setting. Try modifying them with shift-enter until you find the right one. My guess is it'll be one of the ones under "particle" section, and that the ENB author amplified it to make fire look good without realising that it screws up water.

Simply not true. I was experiencing frequent CTD's on startup and in-game, and was tearing my hair out trying to find the problem for weeks. Getting rid of the orange mods got rid of the problem entirely and immediately. The CTD problem was re-creatable whenever the mod loader was rearranged to produce orange boxes again. In my case, it was the various patches of CoT and RSChildren that were the culprit. I repeat: I was getting a CTD on startup 50% of the time or more, many dozens of times over several weeks. Once I cleared my orange boxes, I have now gotten zero CTDs on startup, after many dozens of startups. So at least for me, empirical evidence points to orange boxes being meaningful. Commonsense also points to it: if a mod relies on various masters that change the same records, then the resulting conflicts, and which maseter is the 'winner', will obviously have an impact on how that mod works or doesn't work. Maybe you and many others have been fortunate and haven't had problems, but to suggest that no one will have problems with mis-ordered masters is simply bad advice. The only times I wouldn't worry about orange checkboxes is when they relate to official DLC .esms (eg. a mod wants dawnguard.esm and dragonborn.esm to be in a different order).

open NMM settings and look for the "skyrim" tab

Sorry, the checkbox is what I meant. An orange checkbox means you've got masters in a non-ideal order, which can sometimes cause unpredictable CTDs. Click on a mod that has an orange checkbox. On the right of the program it will show you a list of all the master files that the mod depends on. Look at the example below: http://snag.gy/UvBhy.jpg In this case, the mod in question (BetterQuestObjectives-AFTpatch.esp) wants AmazingFollowerTweaks.esp to come AFTER BetterQuestObjectives.esp, but in my current load order, it comes BEFORE. So, I'd manually rearrange them by dragging and dropping in the left pane, until BetterQuestObjectives-AFTpatch.esp is no longer orange. Also, when you're in the game testing for stability, I recommend typing this into the console: player.setav speedmult 2000 [enter] tcl [enter] tgm [enter] This will let you fly around extremely fast, which will exacerbate any problems and make testing quicker. The first command sets the speed (choose whatever speed you want - 100 is normal). The second command lets you fly through the air and objects. The third command makes you invincible so you don't die while testing. Note that this will stress your game, so if you do it for more than a few minutes, you might get the occasional crash even on an otherwise stable load order. you may also wish to type set timescale to 1500 [enter] This will make the time of day and weather changes much faster which may further help bring problems to the surface. Also, it looks kinda cool. 20 is normal speed.

At the very least, I'd hope the poor sod who wanders the wilderness each night lighting the things is paid a small fortune in danger money :D

How hae you been installing mods - using NMM or manually copying to "Data"? If the former, have you verified that the mod files are indeed in "Data"? Have you tried running LOOT, and if so did it show the same load order as NMM?

excellent :)

Download Wrye Bash and run it. It'll show a list of mods. Look for ones shown in red. Those have missing masters, and are the reason you're crashing. Replace the missing masters and you should be fine. Mods shown in orange havea masters that are present but in a non-preferred order - you may need to rearrange those masters until the orange mods stop being orange.

The lanterns mod was the cause of CTDs near whiterun for me and a few others - in particular, some sort of conflict with the Vilja follower mod, though that made me suspect that it might conflict with other mods too. It's a great mod, but I've uninstalled it, as it seemed a bit unpredictable. Though maybe the only problem for you is that you've installed all ESPs instead of just one.

The first thing I'd do is install Wrye Bash, run it, and look for red or orange mods in the list. If you find some, then they may well be your culprit. Fixing them will take a few minutes of your time and hopefully not more (google something like "orange red colour mod Wrye Bash" for instructions). Otherwise, as frustrating as it probably sounds, you'd probably be best off deactivating all of your mods, and then installing them one or two at a time, and running the new game each time. It will be a laborious process, but it should tell you pretty clearly which mods are causing the problem.

You haven't answered my question about the load order txt files. Look in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local and count how many Skyrim folders there are. If there's only one, then there's your problem: you've got two versions of the game both trying to read their load orders from the same files. Just get rid of one of the installations and your problems will probably go away. Until then, worrying about 1.9 and other things is probably a red herring. Yes, some games work with multiple installations, but many don't. Judging by your experience, Skyrim probably doesn't. Just buy the DLCs for your Steam version, delete the other one, and you're done. The DLCs can't be very expensive nowadays. And there'll probably be a Halloween sale soon if you're strapped for cash.

I'm almost certain that it's the first problem greyfox mentioned. Basically, you need an alpha channel in your normal map. This alpha channel doesn't affect transparency, as you might think, but actually tells the game how to use specularity on your texture. White areas in the alpha channel will make things ridiculously reflective, while black areas will make them matte (and greys will be in between). If you save your normal map without an alpha channel, the game will make it shiny by default. For something like wood, you want it pretty matte, so I'd suggest just making the alpha channel entirely black, or very dark grey. The key is to save the texture in a format that supports alpha channels (eg. DXT3, DXT5, 8.8.8.8 )

So everytime you install a mod you copy it into both Data folders to see if it works on each? Or you separately install using NMM for each installation? What's your process? I'm finding it hard to understand how you're juggling these two versions. Either way, I'm not sure why you keep both versions installed, especially as there's a chance they're getting muddled together. Clearing up that would definitely be my starting point. How many Skyrim folders can you find inside C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local? If only one, then that's probably part of your problem. Skyrim stores its load order in C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Skyrim, and if both versions of the game are trying to use the same folder, then you'd probably get the problem you're getting. If so, do yourself a favour and ditch the non-legendary installation. You may be able to activate the legendary installation on Steam if you want the cloud saves and automatic updates (that's another question: is your legendary version up to date with version 1.9.xx? )

I'm confused. I've downloaded the lattice and picket fences, but they're just dds files whose folder structure doesn't match anything in vanilla. What am I supposed to do with them? EDIT: ok, I downloaded real wood textures and that does the trick. I still don't know how they can pull it off without installing a mesh, but I'm glad it's working.

Any kind of combat? Or might it be particular spells, enemies etc.?

What are you using to install mods (eg. NMM)? And could you elaborate on how you separate the two games? For example, are they on different drives, and are you positive that the correct mods are in each of their data folders? If I were you, then the first thing I would do would be to delete the Steam version and/or activate the legendary version on Steam. Having two versions simultaneously installed would just create needless confusion and may be asking for trouble imo. When you say you reinstalled the mods, did you just copy them over from an old installation folder? I wouldn't do that. I'd start afresh and redownload your favourite mods, and find some good new ones. That's what I did after I returned from a 2 year hiatus. It was a lot of work but it was worth it. Many mods require the 1.9 version, and various other big mods, including SKSE, have been updated over the months.

I have no idea, as I've never edited a NIF before. I'm just working with the dds files. I've opened up an instance of the texture in the Creation Kit (shown below). What should I look for? My guess is that it's a decal and therefore doesn't have any meshes in the first place, but I don't know for sure. I guess setting "alpha" to "blending" instead of "testing" sounds promising. But isn't that the sort of thing that should be done within Photoshop and/or the nvidia DDS plugin interface, and not the Creation Kit? If I make this change, will I need to store this information in an .ESP? http://snag.gy/2EYMn.jpg

I guess my question is: what was the reason?

The problem with most ENBs is that their authors usually abuse the bloom and saturation, making for a gaudy-looking end image that is eye-catching on first glance but can become sickly sweet while playing. If you can find one that is tastefully restrained in those areas (or tweak the enb files yourself to reduce bloom and saturation), then you'll thank yourself, as ENB makes numerous genuine improvements to the lighting quality of the game. Shadows will always look poor though - that's just Skyrim. The main .ini setting to tweak is fShadowDistance, and changing this won't harm your game. The main thing to remember that the lower the quality of the shadow, the further into the distance you'll get shadows. Conversely, higher quality shadows will mean that shadows disappear sooner as you look into the distance. I prefer to have semi-decent shadows up close even if they disappear closer ahead of me, and I find that a setting of fShadowDistance=3000.0000 works pretty well for me. You can also experiement with the iBlurDeferredShadowMask setting, raising it to blur the shadows. I find the the blurrier the shadows are, the less horrible they look. Start with 3 and go up from there. I don't think this setting will impede your performance much either.

I'd keep my eye on the CoT and realistic water patches, more so than the actual mods themselves. Some of the CoT patches can be merged using tes5edit, and others may not be worth the hassle Personally, I wouldn't use any night patches from CoT (or CoT patches) at all. ELFX does a better job on its own in my opinion (ie. it makes fires etc. still bright), and you can tweak your ENB to make night as dark or light as you want by lowering/raising the ambientintensity and directintensity (and ambientcurve and directcurve) settings under [ENVIRONMENT]. That would allow you to potentially remove one or more pieces of the CoT puzzle.

Seriously? So it's ok to have mods with female genitalia all over the top downloads section, but male genitalia is a no-no? :geek:

Try deleting C:\Users\Rumpelstiltskin\AppData\Local\Skyrim\loadorder.txt and C:\Users\Rumpelstiltskin\AppData\Local\Skyrim\plugins.txt (back them up first!) and seeing if that helps anything. Also, double-check your fodler locations in the NMM settings, or try reinstalling NMM.

I assume most people use the Steam version. Just make sure to launch the game using the SKSE exe and you'll be fine. Loot on its own isn't quite good enough. Try Wrye Bash and look for orange or red mods, caused by some mods requiring their 'master' mods to be in a different order than how you have them. Red mods mean there's a required masterfile missing, and will guarantee a CTD on start, and orange ones will often cause one too. You can use Wrye Bash to manually drag and drop the appropriate master mods until the oranges go away.