Load Order

[fallnfrmthelight]

I recently reformatted my HD, and chose not to backup my Oblivion mods, because I wanted a fresh start.

I've spent the past couple days downloading and installing a large number of Oblivion mods that I believe I will enjoy, either from past experiences, or recommendations from friends.

I tweaked a handful of them with Tes4Gecko, and packaged all of them as omods.

Finally, I got to load order. I ran my list through BOSS, made the suggested changes, then rebuilt my Bashed Patch. A quick run through the tutorial dungeon reveals no major crashes, but that's obviously not enough to test the viability of a load order. So I am posting it here as an attachment, so those of you more experienced than I can take a look at it and offer your wisdom :)

 

Let me know if it looks good, or if there are things I should change. Sorry for the huge list :x

[dezdimona]

General Load-Order Guidelines

Here are the guidelines that I adhere to, personally.

 

~ Unofficial Oblivon Patch should always be first on the list. The fixes are great, but most aren't essential, so if a mod overwrites them its not a big deal, and the fixes have the potential for screwing up other mods if loaded later.

 

~ Offical Content (DLC's) should be loaded last, until you complete all quests associated with them (that includes buying all furniture for the houses and whatnot). Once they're complete, they can be safely moved up in the list. This is especially important for Knights of the Nine, which will have some fairly major problems unless loaded last (unless you get the UOP for KotN)

 

~ Major overhaul mods (OOO, Frans, MMM) should be loaded near the end. That gives you the most complete experience with any of those particular mods. It also lets you carefully choose which other mods to load afterwards... only move mods that you know will conflict and that you want the changes from. For example, I have Improved Soul Gems below OOO because I know that OOO changes the icons of some of the SG's, and ISG needs to be below to show through.

 

Some people will recommend putting larger mods first, but personally I disagree. There are a number of mods out there that make minor tweaks, and loading after a large mod will end up completely overwriting a chunk from one of the bigger mods because of the way conflicts work in Oblivion (even one minor change will take precedence over the entire record... for example, simply tweaking the speed of a weapon can cause every stat of that weapon to be retained to vanilla levels if loaded later).

 

So basically, it stacks up like this...

 

Oblivion.esm

Unofficial Oblivion Patch

<Minor Mods / DLC's (Post-Completion)>

<Major Overhaul Mod/Mods>

<Mods that specifically conflict with overhauls and need to take precedence>

<DLC's (Pre-Completion)>

 

 

 

Expanded Load-Order Guidelines

by dev_akm

 

I would extend this to include:

 

Oblivion.esm

Unofficial Oblivion Patch

<Weather/Environment/Sound Mods>

<Minor Mods/New Items/Houses/DLC's (Post-Completion)>

<Major Overhaul Mods>

<Mods that specifically conflict with overhauls and need to take precedence>

<DLC's (Pre-Completion)>

<Quests>

<Compatibility Patches/UOMP/Merged Leveled Lists>

 

And a special-case warning for Knights.esp (Knights of the Nine) -- you may not be able to move it earlier than some other mods (some people have had problems after moving it before OOO, for example).

 

That's basically the structure I use and I have 140+ mods working well together.

 

Another way of describing this (posted by DMan77):

....

Oblivion

unoffical patch

Deeper realism mods that add sights and sounds

added content like weapons/items

gameplay changes, like 'must eat and sleep'

The OOO type

the 'new begining' type mod..

................................................................................

................

[fallnfrmthelight]

General Load-Order Guidelines

Thank you, dezdimona, but I am familiar with how load orders should generally be organized. I am posting this here in hopes that someone can look over my load order and look for any specific problems that I may have overlooked.

 

It appears that something is quite wrong, afterall. Upon arriving in the first town I visted other than the Imperial city (Cheydinhal), I noticed that no one is doing anything. Everyone is just standing in one spot. I can attack them, and they don't fight back. They don't do anything. It's like the entirety of their AI is simply gone.

 

Also, occasionally creatures and enemy NPCs from FCOM exhibit similar issues, where they don't recognize my presence and engage in combat for quite some time before I am near them. It is not as severe as the Cheydinhal issue, but still annoying. I'm a 2.8 ghz dual core, 3 gigabytes of ram with a 3 gb page file, and a 3 GB/s 1 TB Hard drive, so I don't see why I'm getting these delay in AI load times, or in the case of Cheydinhal, no AI at all.

 

Anyone know what could be causing this?