What kind of mods make Skyrim unstable.

[MrCantera]

Hello Everyone! . My question is very simple. And that is "WHAT KIND OF MODS MAKE SKYRIM SO UNSTABLE! That I am sure to the point that people who mod are sometimes scared to quicksave open journal or map because that may CTD or just freeze. I know I am. I have spend 400 hours on skyrim just basicly moding, get to level 15 and start again with a different set of mods , repeated over and over and I just want to enjoy the dam game already with a good set of mods without having to be scared to quifksave or open journal or just engage in combat.

So back to the question at hand. WHAT MAKES SKYRIM UNSTABLE?!

Is it mods with huge EPS and ESM?
Just to many texture mods?
Too many mods that use scripts to make game more immersive? (Just look at Gophers let's play and watch him open his MCM. So many and he barely has issues which I'm jealous off.)

So hopefully people with good experience and knowlege may shed some light on this issue which I know many people who play skyrim have.

[Ball11]

Stuff like having tons of hair mods like apachii with the oblivion pack that usually causes crashes on character creation or when launching showracemenu and changing race can make it crash. plus lots of eye mods that change the default one I had two that changed vampire one and when I got vampire illness and I waited 3 in game days (when you get full vampire) it would crash CTD it was not my system just the compatibility. Plus lots of texture mods that overwrite stuff can cause lots of CTD

 

I have quite a few installed with no crashes

[Optimatikia]

From my own experience over the last year, which is pretty much the first time that I've ever played a game like Skyrim on pc or used mods to a significant degree, I can tell you that I've made just about every mistake under the sun. I initially installed just a few highly recommended ones like SkyUI and Wearable Lanterns, those worked so started installing more and went mod happy. Before long I had over 30 but the game was still stable and functioning, then I went crazy and just downloaded and installed anything that I liked the look of, overwrote stuff, had no idea that there was even such a thing as load order. I went up to over 100 mods of all sorts and the game just started falling apart - characters would freeze, armours would disappear, I couldn't save in exteriors, the fans went into overdrive in certain areas like Falkreath, frame rate would randomly drop and I was getting CTDs and freezes every few minutes if I could even get the game open. Probably the stupidest thing that I did was increase my ugrids to 7, for the sake of being able to see what was going on miles across a valley I nearly wrecked my game and it took me three days to get it back into a playable state.

 

BOSS was the first tool that I found actually helped and just sorting my load-order out fixed most of my problems. It also identified conflicting mods for me so that I could get rid of the ones I didn't really need or want, or that were causing particularly serious problems.

I realised that I had to start reading mod instructions more carefully as my character and NPC issues were being caused by skeleton incompatibility and not using FORES Idles to sort out animations. A run-through with that fixed those particular issues in a jiffy.

But I now had textures all over the place and rather than uninstall, I found Optimiser Textures and used that to sort and replace textures, this made a huge improvement to game load times and overall performance.

I was still getting too many CTDs and freezes though and so (after putting it off for ages) used TES5Edit and cleaned my mods. Another big step forward, this resolved my various performance issues in certain areas and reduced my load times to a few seconds in most cases.

Safety Load was also a massive help.

Papyrus logging helped me identify scripts that were still being called on from mods I'd got rid of, so that I could manually remove any trace of them.

I also changed my anti-aliasing method in my ENB and a lot of other graphic and performance tweaks, some of which worked and some did not.

And I keep my mods updated now, lots were still on the initial versions that I'd downloaded at this time last year.

 

I now run with 214 mods, plus an ENB, plus SweetFX, my game's performance is more than acceptable and the visual quality is superb, almost as good as those shiny screenshots everyone else posts! I do still get the occasional CTD maybe twice a day, an odd journal lock up maybe once a day, the occasional ILS on trying to enter interiors (but only certain ones) but I had those in the vanilla game anyway, and if a heavily-modded install is now no less stable than the vanilla game then I will consider that a win. I still add mods but I'm a lot more selective now, I read the instructions carefully and the user comments, and don't even bother installing it until there've been a sufficient number of endorsements and it's had at least one significant patch or update.

 

I can see why consoles are so popular, you don't have to go through any of this rigmarole, my son plays Skyrim on his Xbox and that's where I first saw it (and got hooked) but there is just so much more that you can do with it on pc. I had just started playing it and was reading some reviews when I was floundering around near the beginning getting killed or caught all the time, when I found a list of Top 20 recommended Skyrim mods or some such, and that's how I found the Nexus and got started with using mods. But despite all the stupid mistakes that I made and the time spent fixing them, I'm glad that I did make the effort because it's such a beautiful and immersive game, and quality mods enhance it so much more.

 

Next I will learn how to use Wrye Bash to make patches and merge mods. This time last year I was still using my Wii-Fit for aerobics and playing Farmville, now my 19-year old son comes to his 53-year old mother for advice on installing and configuring Skyrim mods as he's seen how good it looks on pc when modded compared to vanilla XBox.

 

(edit - initially I used Warzones as one of my early mods because it made sense to have actual battles taking place during a civil war, and not just the occasional setpiece padded out with a load of talk. However at anything higher than the lowest setting it killed my pc and it seemed just too buggy to me, the scripts were going wild; although I kept it until I'd finished the civil war quest.)

Edited January 3, 2014 by Optimatikia

[EnaiSiaion]

This is why the Worksbop doesn't allow patches. It forces modmakers to have compatibility in mind.

[ArtMurder]

ENBs, lots of high def texture mods, and anything designed for an older version of skyrim will cause problems in my experience. ENBs tend to not cause crashes so much, but certian graphic cards will butcher them, even really nice expensive ones. High def texture mods only get to be a problem if you do like 2k~4k or higher, and lots of them. If you install the entire 2k texture pack high def version and the entire book of silence high def texture pack, you will likely encounter problems. I tend to avoid using anything over 1k for anything but armor/weapon textures.

 

Some script heavy mods, like warzones, footsteps, and wet & cold can cause issues if you use a lot, I personally use footsteps, wet & cold, and frostfall and have no problems at all, but if you use more then a couple script heavy mods they start to get problematic.

 

Also, avoid to many mods that add NPCs, if you have more then say, 15~20 NPCs around in open world cells crashes tend to happen a lot, even if there is no conflicts of any kind.

[chanchan05]

I'd say there are too many factors to say exactly. The capabilties of your PC for one. If you are pushing it too much, it will become unstable, even if the same mod set is stable for another PC, but with higher specs. The set of mods you are running is another, if you are overwhelming the script engine.

 

This is why the Worksbop doesn't allow patches. It forces modmakers to have compatibility in mind.

 

Which IMO isn't appealing. If patches weren't existent, how can we use overhauls like SkyRe and Requiem which change so much in the game to make it a lot better. Immersive College of Winterhold is another awesome mod, but the changes it does to the College makes it incompatible with another awesome mod (Enhanced Lights and FX), and is fixed with a patch.

 

Also, avoid to many mods that add NPCs, if you have more then say, 15~20 NPCs around in open world cells crashes tend to happen a lot, even if there is no conflicts of any kind.

 

I'd say more like 25+. I've watched an 8vs8 battle of Stormcloaks and Imperial Soldiers right outside Dawnstar c/o Immersive Patrols, with the Khajiit Camp nearby with no CTDs. The vanilla Civil War quests also could have easily 20 or more NPCs in that given cell/fort at a time.

Edited January 3, 2014 by chanchan05

[TheShrubberyKing]

I've been having a similar problem. Every time I level up to level 15 with 70% of the experience bar until level 16, I get the CTD on save bug. It's happened for multiple characters now, and it's driving me bonkers. The player.kill fix is only temporary for me, as in that play session. I'd like to not have to do that over and over and over again every time I want to play the game, so I'm wondering if there's any other way. I've tried every fix I can think of, even going so far as to get rid of my ENB, using the ReVanilla tool, cleaning my mods using TES5Edit and sorting my load order with LOOT. I'm running out of options here. My save file is almost 15MB. THIS ONLY SEEMS TO HAPPEN WHEN I REACH LEVEL 15.

[Ellderon]

Texture mods are the most stable ones, as it's just a file replacement that's easily reversable. You can go crazy with them.

 

The biggest problem will probably be script-heavy mods, so watch out for those.

[Thallassa]

This is why the Worksbop doesn't allow patches. It forces modmakers to have compatibility in mind.

 

 

Can only assume you're joking on this one. Especially as your own mods have patches for each other :P

 

On topic: Mods with scripts are not unstable. Mods with poorly written scripts are unstable. See? An example is Birds of Skyrim vs. Wet and Cold. Birds of Skyrim only uses one script - it's actually a vanilla script so it doesn't even have to package it. But that vanilla script is so buggy that the mod is considered unstable. Wet and Cold uses dozens of scripts, many of which were written by isoku, almost all of which were written by other modders, but it's still very stable (assuming your cpu can handle it) because the scripts are written well and are well optimized.

 

Also mods that try to do too much and touch every record in the game, tend to be much less stable! Because they interact with other mods in unpredictable ways. Even if that is "in scope", there can be stability issues, like with Civil War Overhaul (which is still pretty stable considering that apollodown doesn't have proper training in scripting; his scripts are still apparently ok or at least fix themselves). And then there's something like Frostfall where even though Chesko is a professional coder, the mod is so big that it can still have stability problems (although by itself it's fine, it's only when combined with other mods or on a low power cpu that people see issues). The real issue is mods that go *way beyond* scope, like a weapon overhaul that adds a ton of new magic effects and quests, or a few perk overhauls one could think of. These are much more likely to have unexpected incompatabilities, or sometimes the mod author is trying to do something he doesn't understand as well as what he originally set out to do. (And I suppose this is the problem Enai was trying to get at).

 

The biggest issue with stability isn't the mods though, it's user error. Yes, some mods are just bad, (you can see the list here) but the vast majority of mods are perfectly stable when used correctly. The biggest mistake I see people make is not keeping in mind the memory usage. Skyrim can only use 3.1 GB of RAM and VRAM without ENBoost. It also can only hold a certain amount in reserve without SKSE's memory patch enabled. Failing to do either of those things correctly will lead to an unstable game (with enough mods) and the fault is entirely that of the mod user. (or of certain mod authors that suggest incorrect ENBoost settings or package incorrect SKSE.inis... which I've seen).

 

Also what some users don't understand is the more NPCs you have, and the more unique armor, attacks, and AI you give them, the more memory it will use. Exponentially so. Eventually you run out of the 10 GB ENB can give you, all told, or maybe your computer doesn't have 10 GB total memory available in the first place, and then you have problems (usually random CTDs).

 

Likewise, the number of people I see trying to use two mods that do the same thing (like, Duel and deadly combat, or RLO and ELFX) is pretty high. And then users using mods that don't do the same thing, but are incompatible anyways (like Flora Respawn Fix and CCOR, or CCOR and Skyrim Immersive Creatures) and therefore need a patch (of course there's no way for the user to know that, which again, is again what Enai was trying to get at).