SSE Can a mod have too many levelled lists?

[PastChristmas]

I'm creating a mod that relies extensively on levelled Items. Trouble is I'm beginning to get worried, as my levelled items now outnumber the vanilla ones at least 7x over.

 

Having this many won't cause any issues will it? I need to create more to realise the full scope of the project, but I can reduce if absolutely necessary.

[maxarturo]

The real question is not how many level list a mod can have, but how many can the game engine handle on the system/pc is installed?.

There is no documentation from what I know about this, my answer is purely based on experience:

- The more level lists you have the more the possibility of CTDs, and especially on exterior cells, this is because on a heavy modded game with complex and heavy scripted mods that place and do their things in Skyrim's worldspace, have a huge impact on the 'Story Manager's' performance.

- If for example your level lists affects all npcs by adding armors, weapons, spells, potions, miscs, etc... and you have a vast number of assets in each category, every time you change cell or location the story manager will check from top to bottom all its 'story manager nodes' (this is something that is always working on the background), the more nodes there are in there the more the system has to process, if mods add new 'encounters' for example and those npcs are vanilla that uses all your added to the game new level lists, plus what already exists in the vanilla game, the process weight increases dramaticaly.

- Taking in account one of Skyrim's main reason of instability (SLE, SSE, AE) which is its internal conflict when the system tries to process LOD + SM (and SM + Quest) + Actors Load + Object load + any of the Player's alias functions, abilities, or whatever else could be carring, and they get at the same time at the cpu/gpu, so ctd!.

The more you add to any of those the greater the probability of random CTDs.

So, your mod will have different behaiviors depending on the system that is installed, light vs heavy modded, weak vs strong pc, healthy vs unhealthy save file.

* I once years ago had a heavy modded game with a lot of level list mods that they did gave to the game a greater vast variety, but my game was unplayable... toooooo many ctds.

[PastChristmas]

Thank you, this has given me some insight in to what could go wrong.

 

My mod totally revolves around generic enchanted weapons, so it will only affect merchants and some loot instances. Perhaps this means it won't be as destructive as I thought it would be.