The Skyrim Virgin... What Mods... Advise Please...

[JohnRandolph]

I usually wait till a game like Skyrim is finished being supported before playing because it usually helps with all the bugs and many of the issues that are going to arise are already well discussed and all the DLCs are included. I just got the Legendary Edition and am going to play it for the first time, which I've been dying to do since it came out.

My machines specs...

AMD 8350 with Hyper 212 EVO
Asus Sabertooth 990FX
Crossfired MSI 6950s Twin Frozer 2 (each has 2G of ram)
16G Corsair 1866 Ram
120G Force GT SSD
3 1920x1080 monitors which I intend to Eyefinity to 5760x1080 or 4800x900 (I am well versed in playing games with Eyefintiy, played Oblivion and F3 and New Vegas all at said resolution... although rusty:)
W7 64bit

 

So, hardware isn't really going to be an issue.

My reason for posting is that I would like a list of what each experienced modder considers essential mods for Skyrim with stability working together as the top priority. I've read, with great chagrin and disappointment, that the game seems to be more console friendly than PC and is rather lackluster without mods. And I've also just been reading a thread by RS13(I think that was his name) about how mods have ruined Skyrim(for him) and this brought back horrible memories of trying to get Fallout 3 mods to work earlier this year. The question basically is, what mods really enhance the gameplay more than hassle of their occasional CTDs? Yes, I know, save often, I usually have over 1000 saves with those mentioned games by the time I'm finished, and 3-4 hours is just fine between crashes because that usually is just a good time to take a trip to the bathroom and refill my drink.

Also, I will be using the UI and vert- fixes for Eyefinity at http://www.wsgf.org/dr/elder-scrolls-v-skyrim/en. Let me be clear on one thing above all else, playing with Eyefinity is mandatory, it is not optional in any discussions... :smile: I upgraded my system over the last 3 years with Eyefinity in mind starting with a very meager built. Eyefinity Oblivion absolutely stunned me 3 years ago since I'd never really played a RPG like it, or any games in general for several years before that. My 'meager' Athlon2 640 with 4G of ram and a 5770 was able to play it with my triple monitors at a reasonable framerate(grasslands really caused problems until I learned to tweak). Needless to say, I am absolutely in love with these types of games in Eyefinity and I can't imagine playing Skyrim or future games without it. If you haven't played these with some sort of multi-monitor then you really owe it to yourself to spend the money for another video card and another 2 monitors and give it a try that way. Really, I would rather play vanilla Skyrim, with no mods whatever it's problems are, than not play in Eyefinity.

Anyway, what mods work well together and enhance the game greatly? Also, if you could put them in load orders that have worked for you. One thing I've noticed is lots of usage of acronyms, please note that I'm a newby to Skyrim mods, so use their full names the first time... Like BOSS, NMM and MO(Mod Organize?) as examples, I have no clue as to what they are when I've been reading through several threads. I'm looking for like 10-20 at most(rather than 100-200) that are basic and lots of you folks agree work well together for my first playthrough and to learn what is what in general. Then I'll look into 100-200 next time when I've got a pair of 7970s or a 9970 sometime in the future Played it a bit last night(thought I would play it on master level right off and got my ass whipped several times at this bandit camp and fighting this dark conjurer(now that's close enough! I warned you!) after talking to this wandering bard) and then tested it a bit at 5760x1080 which runs fine(before ini tweaking) except for the horrors of the UI at that resolution! I'm starting to work on the fixes for Eyefinity first and hopefully in the next day or two get the mods together to start testing them. Now that I think of it, I'm sure there are probably several threads for this type of thing already so any links to good threads of that nature would be appreciated... :)

One other question, specifically to anyone with experience with AMD systems and 8350s. I just recently got my 8350, up from a Phenom 2 980, and was wondering about some OC info. Would disabling 4 of the 8 module/cores in the bios(which I have done) help in keeping power usage down while OCing? Has anyone actually done this successfully with a difference or know of a thread in some other forum that discusses this type of thing? I got the 8350 since my upgrade path has long been married to AMD and I've notice since playing New Vegas last year that the GPU usage for my 6950s is much lower than I'd like in many areas(second part of downtown NV with the big flashing light casino), and in F3 in the Alton mod it was almsot unplayable near the airplane crash(if anyone knows what I'm talking about with that mod). My thought was to get the 8350 and crank it up to 4.5, which it does just fine. But the power usage goes through the roof when monitoring it with a Kil-O-Watt. And I am sure that everyone here knows about sitting down to play and not stopping for like 10-15 hours in a stretch. That is kinda hard on the electric bill along with my 6950s. Is it possible to disable those other 4 cores, since they are really not used much at all, to save power consumption when cranking it up? Anyone know or can point me to information about this?


Thanks in advance for any responses and advice and info.

 

 

 

[N7R]

I only started Skyrim on pc a few months ago (always had it for xbox) and have got my game quite stable and looking quite nice.

Just an example since words are hard to show what I mean by 'nice':

http://static.skyrim.nexusmods.com/images/6583367-1375576801.jpg

I get easily 40-60 fps in open world, load times are good, and crashes only happen if I purposefully break the game (like spawn literally 36 bandits in front of me and try to fight them all at once in a heavily modded section of the game haha).

I don't think there is any golden set of mods that will guarantee a 100% stable non-crash expereince. Thats not to say you will crash but from everything I've read about how Skyrim was made for 32 bit and it's limitations of only able to use 3.1 GB of ram it's going to be a tradeoff of stability for making the game better sadly. I highly advise once you have the Legendary Skyrim downloaded to your pc from steam to make a backup of that vanilla state of the game. So if anything goes wrong in the future of your modding expereince you can simply revert back to a clean install of skyrim quickly and add mods back in instead of having to delete everything and redownload again from steam. I can really only post what mods you may like to use on my own personal preference (so if you hate some of the things I listed it's what I prefer to use, and currently have installed, not what you may care for) but after I had to nuke my Skyrim and start over since I was a little crazy the first time around adding mods here is the list of mods I install first.

 

When I redid my Skyrim I created a nice little notepad for the order of mods I wanted to re-install, here is just the first half of it:

 

 

Skyrim mod Install Order


=============================
[1] Scripts
=============================
SKSE


=============================
[2] Unoffical patches
=============================
Skyrim
Hearthfire
Dawnguard
Dragonborn
High resolution Patch
Sound Propagation

=============================
[3] User Interface
=============================
SKY UI
Race Menu
Race Menu pre-cache killer
Immersive Hud
Quality world map
Time on Loading Screen
Customizable camera
DYNAVISION

=============================
[4] Characters / Races
=============================
UNP or CBBE
Better Males
SG Female Eyebrows
Dark Beards
All Hair Mods (like SG hair pack, Apachii Sky hair)
The Eyes of Beauty
Temptress Race
Succubus Race
Cherry Race

=============================
[5] Essentials
=============================
Skip Intro
Uncapper <- don't need if you have Legendary edition
Live another life
SPERG
Achieve that!
Bag of Trash
Bandolier Bags
Better Skill and Quest Books Names
Wearable Lanters
See you sleep
Fight or Fly
Better Quest Objectives

=========================================
[6] Animations / Character Enhancements
=========================================
FNIS
Sit Pose
Catwalk
Female Running
Bow Animations
Pretty Idles
Pretty Combat Idles
XP32
Enhanced Character Edit

 

 

Obviosuly everything I listed in the character and Animations category are optional and based on my personal preference, most of the others are more popular and used by many. Pretty sure other people will look at my list and be like "lolno" and that is fine. You will have to scoure the nexus and find for yourself what you'd like for I cannot tell you really if it would be for you. I am a complete sucker for character creation/spending a long time on the race menu tweaking my character exactly how I want them to be before I start a new game haha. You might not care for character creation in the slightest so those mods may not be for you.

 

This list is only the first half. The rest of my favorite mods to install from my notepad goes on from sections 7-14 which has stuff like texture mods, spells, armor, new lands, and so on and so forth but sicne you wanted only the essentials those are what I install first if I have to redo my Skyrim folder. I leave textures after I get the main stuff done becasue I then make a backup of my Skyrim folder again as a 'starting setup' so if anything goes terribly wrong with the memory intensive installs of texture mods I can revert back. Also a good way to test performance and really see what texture enhancement mods really suck the life out of your pc.

 

Here are the last important things to keep in mind when you mod in Skyrim:

 

• I Install these mods with NMM (Nexus mod manager) that can be download here on the nexus. It allows you to add mods to your game flawlessly so highly recommend it. I do not do any steam workshop mods since I beleive they try to auto update themselves and that cna mess with you Skyrim game if you ahve things perfect. New updates that you didn't want could break other mods or cause lots of problems.
• Cleaning the game using a program such as Tes5 Edit is also helpful as it can help performance.
• After you have a bulk of your textures/very graphic intensive mods you can download a program called 'texture optimizer' it really helps with load times and sometimes performance with no quality loss but smaller file sizes which means less usage of ram
• Using a program called BOSS helps sort your load order, which it's not perfect it helps sort the load order ot your mods best it cna to fix any conflicts to allow the game to run properly and not crash
• Wyre Bash is a program that is best used when you really start getting a ton of mods, it can create a bashed patch which will merge multiple mods together letting you pass the mod limit skyrim has, but you have to have a lot of mods to hit the limit lol
• Youtube is a great resource to see mods in action. Many youtube series that do weekly mods really show you a wide extent of various cool mods you may like. When I first got Skyrim on pc I spent an entire week watching a weekly Skyrim mod series downloading everything I wanted for my Skyrim. Also many tutorials on a lot of the tools I listed above. This is a great youtube playlist to start with: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLE7DlYarj-DdhDG41roBVJfNCqvO5MmKP

 

 

Hope this helps, I'm no expert on anything but took the time to learn the tools, clean my game, and run a lot of performance tweaks/tools to get the game running perfect. It can feel like a lot of work but the payoff of having a fully modded and beautiful Skyrim in the end that runs well is worth it.

 

Good luck :smile:

 

 

 

 

 

[Rennn]

Even with that rig, hardware will be a problem in Skyrim if you add ENB. Skyrim is not efficient, and the engine functionally breaks once you add too many graphics mods. No matter how beastly a dual Titan rig is, it would still lag like **** in Skyrim with certain ENBs, and it would still crash with too many HD textures. Skyrim's engine is awful. You may as well come to terms with that now. It's not even fully compatible with anti-aliasing (you'll get white outlines on certain objects). Downsampling can avoid the antialiasing problems, btw.

 

Having said that, I recommend you avoid most mods at first. Ten hours into the game, you should have a reasonable idea of what you want to change and how much performance you have to spare. Until then, use mostly tweaks and bugfixes like the Unofficial Patches ( http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/19/? ), SkyUI ( http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/3863/? ), or simple graphics mods that don't hurt performance.

[Dubnoman]

Since you are playing with mouse and keyboard (I assume you are since you played Oblivion on PC), get Sky UI. That is a must. Also, get convenient horses. Using horses in vanilla Skyrim is s#*&#33; lol. Convenient horses has a lot of customization to be had, including increasing the speed of the horse when running and sprinting, giving it more stamina so it can sprint longer, and giving it more health so that it doesn't die so easily.

[DeltaWulf]

One thing to definitely take into consideration and remember is that, regardless of your own PC's specs, you're going to be locked into the 3.1gb maximum RAM wall. Skyrim is a 32-bit application, not 64-bit, so it won't recognize more than 4gb. You can run Skyrim pretty comfortably with any set of (non-conflicting) mods installed properly and get fairly good stability without having to worry about too many frequent crashes except in some certain cases that are typically easy to troubleshoot and repair. The main issue that you'll come into, if you're like me and like to bring as much graphical and horizontal gameplay expansion as possible in as you can, is the 3gb RAM barrier.

Some things you probably want to avoid, as mentioned above, are things like ENBs or too many combinations of high-definition (2-4k resolution) textures. Personally, I wouldn't use ENB at all. It doesn't really add much except some "graphical improvements" that are only really useful for screenshots. Most of the time they make things look way too oversaturated or the DOF ruins things during normal gameplay. As far as HD textures, those are definitely good to use, but just be careful not to over do it or else you'll quickly find yourself overloading your 32-bit limitation.

Load order is also very important for Skyrim, so be sure to get ahold of BOSS (a simple google search should bring it up) and the Nexus Mod Manager to help with organizing your .esm/.esp order. NMM is nice in that you can download mods directly to the appropriate folder and it prevents mod conflicts by overwriting files that are already present and also preserving the mods installed under that in case you decide to uninstall the overwriting files. Basically, you don't have to do any of the work involved with installing any of the mods. I'd also suggest picking up SKSE, a requirement for most mods.

As far as the specific mods go, here are some recommendations that I can profess to run stable and well, and are well-worth their space:

Quality of Life improvements: SkyUI, A Quality World Map, Race Menu, Skyrim Community Uncapper, High Quality 3D Map
Unofficial Patches (must downloads): Unofficial Skyrim Patch, Unofficial Hi-Res Patch, Unofficial Dawnguard Patch, Unofficial Hearthfire Patch, Unofficial Dragonborn Patch
Notable gear/weapon/armor mods: Immersive Armors, Immersive Weapons, JaySuS Swords, Wearable Lanterns, Cloaks of Skyrim, Bandoliers, Bags and Pouches
Notable Immersion and Graphic enhancement mods: Climates of Tamriel, Skyrim HD 2k Textures, WATER, Enhanced Blood Textures, Splash of Rain, Footprints, Inconsequential NPCs. High Quality LODs
Animation Mods (be careful when installing these so you don't get overwritten/wonky animations): FNIS (always loaded), XP32's Maximum Skeleton, The Dance of Death Killmove Mod, Dual Sheath Redux, Immersive Animations

From experience, you can run all of those mods together safely without having to worry about hitting your RAM limit. I'd highly recommend at least installing a few of the gear mods, if not all of them, because the assortment of equipment in Skyrim is somewhat narrow (in my opinion), and you'll be very glad you installed the Wearable Lantern and Bandoliers mods for their nearly infinite utility in game.

And, as mentioned above, the unofficial patches are pretty much requirements, so definitely install those, along with SKSE and BOSS. You will want to make sure to launch Skyrim through SKSE rather than the original vanilla way so that your mods will function correctly as well. On the NMM, it has the option to do so in the top left that you can conveniently set to default and launch the game from there with SKSE every time.

EDIT: I also forgot to mention a particular "patch" called ENBoost which helps optimization a lot when running HD textures. It's worth downloading and using. Don't forget to read the installation instructions carefully as it's not a mod and needs to be installed manually, along with the required ENBSeries files.

Edited August 5, 2013 by DeltaWulf

[JohnRandolph]

First and foremost, let me thank you guys for your replies.

 

Since my last post I've played around with the Widescreen Fixer and Flawless Widscreen programs that I've used for many other games, The link up top, for anyone who is interested, just needs to have all the text I accidentally included in the link, it does work. Also for anyone who is intersted, Widescreen Fixer does work but still has some issues and Flawless Widescreen works... flawlessly. It is even designed to work with SkyUI because it has a checkbox to turn on the changes for it. I then played Skyrim for about 10 hours as Rennn suggested. I must say up front that I am rather disappointed in the game. It's still nice but it's really been dumbed down and simplified compared to Oblivion. I'm not sure what everyone thinks of New Vegas compared to Fallout 3, but the actual mechanics and complexity of the NV were increased. With Oblivion to Skyrim complexity has, for the most part, devolved. And not just in the mechanics. I've played up to killing the first dragon and becoming the Thane of Whiterun and getting Lydia as a companion. Granted, I've read in the guide I have that there are a whole lot of companions compared to F3 or NV but Lydia is barren as most of the terrain I've travelled compared to the companions in F3 or NV. I'm not expecting a life story or quest for her but something like, "how did you get to be a housecarl" or even a simple "so, what's your story" with a little bit about her. I make the point that there are many more companions because they can't do lots of stuff with all of them but really, just a little background please. Perhaps that's not that important but immersion and role-playing are why I play these. Anyway, I'm hoping.. praying for all the mods to make it more than a little bit better. I'm not looking for them to make a new game but I really hope it's improved over what it is right now. I could go on an on about things I've compared to Oblivion(enchanting, spell creation, dialogue, and no NV hardcore like mode etc) and found utterly lacking but that's another thread I guess and I assume that Oblivion vs Skyrim threads and 'point out what is wrong with Skyrim' threads are all over the place and is why there is such a huge number of improvement mods.

 

@ Rennn... No disrespect intended but this is what I was talking about, what is an ENB? I gathered after looking at the unofficial patch pages that there are ESMs and ESPs and those have to do with those the Bethesda DLCs and the unofficial patches. My guess is that an ESB has to do with some sort of graphics improvement or modification by how you and the others here have used the term. And thanks for the play it a while first advice, that was a good call. Is there a sticky posted like glossary thread? If there isn't one then it would be an good idea for someone to make one or some general advise for newbies like myself, including the general terms. How do you do that downsampling you mentioned? As in the CCC(I have AMD cards) or in the ini files?

 

@Dubnoman... I was planning on trying that horse mod when I saw it, thanks. I hated in Oblivion when a horse would run off when it was attacked, I recall chasing my horse, who was being chased by a bear and then they ran into some trolls for over 20 minutes one time... then he was killed.

 

@ N7R... What are your machine specs so that you can play at that incredible level of detail in that screenshot? For my machine, other than a few studders every onece in a while, I have prety much been able to run ultra at 5760x1080. I did disable the 4 cores of the 8350 and OC to 4.5(tested for a while today at 4.6 and it does seem to use less juice) and upped my 6950s to 840/1325 in Afterburner and it's running very playable. I'll probably have to downgrade some of the ultra settings and AA and AF to get graphics improvements to run well I guess. Also, thanks for the YouTube links, during my mass download of mods I'm going to get those too.

 

@ Deltawulf... What is the best way, or is there a way, to keep track of how much memory you are using? What is the difference between A Quality World Map and the High Quality 3D Map? I've noticed, while downloading(I'm editing this), that some of the mods like the HD 2K Texture pack haven't been updated in around a year, when you played with them last were Dragonborn and Dawnguard out? There are a few like that.

 

Before I posted the other post I went through the Top list of mods and found 37 of them I thought would be useful or add to the game to my liking. Every one of Deltawulf's mod suggestions were one's I now have open tabs for so I am going to take the plunge and download those that he mentioned and start playing around with them tonight, starting with those first three lines of links from Deltawulf along with the Skyrim Performace Monitor(nobody mentioned that one, any comments?). Since I know that without them the game is... weak at best, I am going to put off actually starting to play seriously until after a good 3-4 days(at least) of mod testing to get the basic things added and some graphics enhancements(it really does need some). I don't have a problem with losing the 10 hours I've already because I didn't really understand the perk system, which is much more like F3 and NV than Oblivion and requires some planning beforehand(which I can do now that I have a feel for the game). If your looking at this then keep an eye out for this thread because if I have specific questions or problems I'm going to put them here and I'll need your help.

 

Here are a few I've been thinking about that there has been no mention of...

 

UFO Ultimate Followers Overhaul

Civil War Overhaul

Interesting NPCs

Falskaar(for after the main game is mostly over)

 

These seem to be more designed to enhance the depth of the game. Since I wasn't aware that this was lacking before I wasn't interested in them and willing to do the possible work to get them working well. Has anyone used these? Good, bad, known problems?

 

Again, thanks for the replies so far, they are exactly what I was looking for, a list and your opinions.

Edited August 6, 2013 by JohnRandolph

[kleinstaff]

SKSE

Sky UI

all 4 unofficial patches

UFO , EFF or AFT

player headtracking

Dance of death

Deafly dragons

life another live

showracce menu cache killer

racemenu

 

Those are mandatory no question about it

 

all the rest is what you fancy

you can turn this game into a high fantasy hardcore imersive game , into a dark gothic horror story or a japanese anime game

chouce is yours

just make sure you read the mod description about compatility first and get your load order right

other than that go ahead surf around the nexus there is so much to choose from

Edited August 6, 2013 by kleinstaff

[Rennn]

ENB is a relatively popular graphical enhancement mod for Skyrim. There are about a thousand different presets made by the Skyrim community, but all share the same weakness; they're terribly optimized and will crush even amazing video cards. I don't use one... I messed with ENB for months before deciding it simply was not worth it.

 

Downsampling is quite straightforward for a Nvidia card, but I don't know about AMD. It's an effective method of rendering Skyrim in a higher resolution (like 4k, 3200x1800, or 2560x1440) and then scaling the image down to a regular monitor of a lower resolution. It's the best form of antialiasing, especially for games with touchy antialiasing support like Skyrim, and has the added benefit of making the entire screen clearer and more accurate. However, it also comes with a noticeable fps impact. I lose about 10 fps downsampling from 1440p to a 1080p monitor on my GTX 660 GC. You'd have to look up a guide to get it working in the CCC.

 

 

UFO is great... I never play without it. It generally makes companions more balanced and less annoying. They level more effectively with the player as well, so they won't die repeatedly every time they meet an enemy in high levels.

I've never tried the Civil War Overhaul. I was waiting for most of the bugs to be fixed.

Interesting NPCs is very cool, but unfortunately there are also a few times where it breaks lore. The voice acting and writing is consistently great, but I can never decide whether I want to keep it installed since a few of the new characters are just odd.

I've never tried Falskaar.

 

 

 

I'll go over the most common abbreviations.

 

ENB - A popular shader and graphical mod with poor optimization.

 

UNP - A popular nude female body mod.

 

CK - Creation Kit. The most widely used official mod tool for Skyrim.

 

ESP - Elder Scrolls Plugin file. It's a common mod type, made within the Skyrim CK. Anyone with the Creation Kit can create and save a mod as an ESP. An ESP must be activated in Skyrim's launcher before it will take effect in the game.

 

ESM - Elder Scrolls Master file. It's a rare but important file type that can be modified by ESPs.

 

BSA - This is the type of "container" Skyrim uses to store a lot of important stuff, like meshes and textures.

 

CBBE - The other most popular nude female body mod, competing with UNP.

 

CLO - Custom Lighting Overhaul. It's a mod that allows the player to tweak Skyrim's lighting in the game.

 

RCRN - An HDR lighting overhaul for Skyrim, and a popular alternative to ENB.

 

ELFX - Enhanced Lights and FX. A lighting mod for Skyrim that adds many more dynamic shadows and lights to many parts of the game.

 

FNIS - Fore's New Idles in Skyrim. A fan-made utility that allows custom animations to be used in Skyrim.

 

SKSE - Skyrim Script Extender. An essential tool for Skyrim, which simply allows modders to use more complex mods. Every Skyrim user should have this installed.

 

SkyUI - A popular User Interface mod for Skyrim, which removes the console interface and replaces it with a more PC friendly interface.

 

HD DLC - The official HD texture pack for Skyrim, available for free on Steam.

 

BOSS - Better Oblivion Sorting Software. I know this isn't Oblivion, but it works for Skyrim as well. The name just stuck because everyone was used to calling it BOSS. It changes the order in which mods are loaded, to reduce conflicts and compatibility problems while using several mods.

 

 

 

I don't agree with Kleinstaff about Deadly Dragons... I wasn't very pleased with the changes it made. It's considered a great mod, but certainly not mandatory.

Live Another Life is great, assuming you've already seen the vanilla intro a couple times. For your first time playing, I recommend you avoid it.

 

I'm also going to take this chance to recommend my own distance detail mod. http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/17984/?

Edited August 6, 2013 by Rennn

[Urtel]

My turn) lol)

So, im more in realism and immersion. Since you are going to play first time, im not shure, if you want that. But in my opinion, the earlier you start, the better)

So my list of mods is about more realistic, role-playing and lore-friendly mods

 

Realistic needs and diseases - you need to sleep, eat, drink.

Frostfall - no way you can wander in the snowstorm without warm clothes on you. Build a campfire, use a tent for yourself and your followers.

Touring carriages/Scenic carriages - say no to fast traveling. Use carriages and travel in real time.

 

I wouldstrongly recommend SkyRe / Requiem or any other massive overhaul. But this is probably not for the first playthrough.

 

Climates of Tamriel - a good weather mod

Waves - a mod that adds waves on the sea of ghosts shore (Captain O'bvious)

 

Economics of Skyrim - makes prices depend on the hold and resources in the hold. (not shure, if it is up-to-date)

 

Better quest objectives

Even better quest objectives - This two mods make a journal description, not a follow-the-arrow.

 

As i said, it is probably not for the first-time playing. But may be you will like some of these.

[bben46]

Install and run the bare game before adding anything - Play through the intro until you exit the cave ( you will know when you get there) as many mods have problems with that intro part - there is nothing you can do with mods that affect that part anyway as it was intended as a tutorial as well as an intro. I haven't seen any problems with PC cosmetic mods there though, so you can go ahead and make your character look like you want before doing the tutorial sequence. :thumbsup:

 

After exiting the cave - Make a permanent save with no more mods. Then start and test to make sure everything is working properly without mods. Now, exit and add your mods a few at a time, testing after each small group. - piling on a bunch of mods all at once will cause more problems than the time you think you will save. When you get the mods you want working - or at least not crashing when you try to start - Make another permanent save before continuing. These are where you come back to for troubleshooting WHEN your game screws up so badly you don't know if it's a mod or what.

 

A mod manager is not required, but is recommended. The most popular is NMM, Nexus Mod Manager

SKSE IS required for many mods - it is not a mod and does not install like a mod, and must be started every time you start the game - so be sure to read the instructions.

BOSS is a tool (not a mod) for setting load order - which can be very important with mods. Again read the documentation to see how to install and how to use it.

The CK - Construction Kit is not needed to play the game - only needed if you want to make changes to the game or create your own mods.

 

Always read the read mes that come with mods for any special instructions on installing, uninstalling and using that mod. :D