Questions about mod collections

[jmattern74]

Hey all, I've modded before, but gave up for a spell after my heavily modded Skyrim SE version kept CTD and I didn't have the patience to dig through 200+ mods to determine the culprit. Coming back to the scene after a couple of years, the idea of mod collections seems like a great one--it sets up the mods pretty much for you, and theory, they have already been tested and will all work together!

 

HOWEVER, after some searching around, it seems surprising to me that a lot of pretty basic questions (basic to me, anyhow) don't seem to have answers anywhere I can find. Frankly, a lot of these may seem like 'well, DUH!' questions, but you never can tell--I've been tricked before by stuff i figured would be obvious, and I can't be the only one. So here goes: I have some questions about how mod collections work, and I would greatly appreciate answers from those who are smarter and more experienced than I. Links to supporting materials/videos/articles/more info would be greatly appreciated as well--I have probably missed some stuff in my searches!

 

CAN ANYONE TELL ME

 

--When you use a mod collection, can you add other mods on top of the collection after you have installed it? I assume this is the case, but it would be nice to hear definitively; I also assume that adding more mods could make the current collection unstable or broken. However, I feel like a good collection could at least act as a baseline and save you some time, since you already know that all of the mods in the collection should work and work well together. That would make finding a mod that breaks things much easier, wouldn't it, since you could limit your searches to just the ones you added AFTER the collection?

 

--Can you use more than one mod collection on the same game (the same individual profile for a given game, I mean)? Again, I assume you can, and I assume that it could cause the same issues as described above, but it would be good to know for sure.

 

--Can you turn off mods from a collection that you don't want to use, or is the whole thing a package deal? Once again, I assume that the answer is yes you can, and I also assume that doing so could again break things, but I dunno. Again, if things did break, you would know pretty quickly which mod was the culprit.

 

--This last one is more for Skyrim specifically. Most of the collections I have seen appear to be a collection of the favorite mods of whomever put the collection together. Has anybody created collections specifically for some of the more difficult systems (I'm thinking FINIS, SKSE64 and so on) that so many other mods use as a base set? The idea being that you use the collection to get, say, FINIS set up, and then can layer other mods of your choice on top of that so that the basics are taken care of by the collection. Or are there too many variables in other mods for that to be feasible?

[jmattern74]

BTW, I apologize if this is not in the right forum; please feel free lot let me know where it should be posted if it belongs elsewhere!

[Tannin42]

> When you use a mod collection, can you add other mods on top of the collection after you have installed it?

 

A collection is just an automated way of installing a set of mods so yes, you can add other mods or even additional collections on top.

But of course when you do that you may have to do more "manual" modding, e.g. you might see conflicts between the mods from the collection and the stuff you added on top. When you have a large collection and don't know what half the mods do, solving conflicts can get extra tricky.

 

> Can you use more than one mod collection on the same game (the same individual profile for a given game, I mean)?

 

yes. As above: understand collections as just an automated way of installing mods and making adjustments to them, it's nothing you couldn't have done installing mods regularly, it just would have taken more time and knowledge.

 

> Can you turn off mods from a collection that you don't want to use, or is the whole thing a package deal?

 

yes, you can. However: as long as a collection is active (enabled on the mods screen) it will occasionally check whether it is fully installed and if not (because you turned off a mod) offer to "finish the installation".

To get rid of that you either have to

a) fully "unsubscribe" from the collection, as in: you disable the collection entry in "Mods" but keep the included mods enabled

b) go to the collections screen and set the mods you don't want to use to "Ignore", that way the collection remains enabled but will no longer notify about that specific mod

 

> Has anybody created collections specifically for some of the more difficult systems (I'm thinking FINIS, SKSE64 and so on) that so many other mods use as a base set?

 

That I can't answer, there's just so many collections and I haven't reviewed them all but I would imagine there'd be collections to act as a baseline for further modding.

[jmattern74]

Thanks for the help! I suspected these, but it is nice to hear it more definitively. Also, thanks for the advice on 'ignoring' mods from a collection that you don't want installed; this is exactly the sort of thing that I wouldn't know to do, and I suspect that things would get annoying quickly...

Edited May 19, 2022 by jmattern74