Modding Skyrim whatsoever...

[GaianKnightAlpha]

pardon this post, after a good month of fruitless attempts of game play, and then 80% of the time trying everything on the forums, tweaking and more, this is a bit of a ****fest as much as anything. If this topic needs to be moved, so be it.

 

So, is this game even worth attempting to mod at all?

 

First off, system specs. (And they won't change for at least six months, aside from the GPU just upgraded in the past two weeks. Welcome to the economy.)

 

AMD Phenom II X4 940 Quad-Core CPU

8 Gb G'Skill DDR2 RAM

Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P Mainboard

GTX 750 Superclock 1 Gb GPU (Upped from a HIS IceQ 4870)

640 Gb HD

1 Tb HD (backup drive currently)

Win7 64 Bit

 

Second off, I did start off noob and Downloaded any mod that looked nice to me, and then refined it, when I realized Bethesda sucks at coding their game engines, as I leaned back in Oblivion, and modding there alot too. Since then for the past month, I scoured this site and other Skyrim related ones, and still ended up at about 210 - 215 mods, eventually ending up with mods I thought was nice to have, keeping to the usual popular ones, refraining or removing ones that had issues of any kind, and in the end, still kept at the 210 mod area, trying to keep to either mainly UI overhauls, SkyUI related, so on and so forth, non-adult related. I wont put down a mod list, because I deleted my game entirely now, and am, as I type this, awaiting Steam to redownload game filed, for some 13 hours, before I can play Vanilla again. (Apparently using my install CD is worthless.)

 

My main contention came down to probably having too many mods, but also because something in either the leveled lists made bringing up menus far too finicky and CTD prone, opening 'containers' causing the same, or opening up to chronically make saves, because I developed a pathological fear of the game crashing if I even breathed at the screen here, on my end. So now, I'm reinstalling the game, as per above, with the likely intent of just using the unofficial patches, and maybe seriously nothing else. And I still wonder if I can even play the game without crashes, even AFTER I upgrade the entire system to an AM3+ / i5 or i7 system, given the number of threads and sources saying even 15,000 dollar water cooled systems, aren't enough, against what I am being forced to accuse of, of a nigh poorly coded game engine system.

 

Maybe it comes down to WHAT constitutes as a stable game base to play with, or at what point I just chuck my copy into the refuse bin, and go back to Star Trek Online. (Of whit I mention, given that games buggy history, but one with nigh never a crash or true ill begotten problem, in comparison to this game, as I've been forced to judge by, so far.

 

So, and so again, in addition to me being told to stick a sock in it, 'is' this game worth modding at all, under my current specs, or 'any' advanced specs. Saying all this, I 'want' to play this game, and get more out of it, than originally intended, given what was presumed of being able to mod this game for, but I'll base my proper final decision, on responses, if any, I beget from here.

 

This isn't an attack on any modders here. This 'is' a question if modding is a good idea, at all, for me, or at all period. Given my poor experience so far, I have to ask this. I have to. One can't let go, by bottling all in, after all. Call it all, what you will.

[bben46]

There is no magic bullet to make a modded game work. Your problem seems to be expecting an amateur hobby to equal the professional standards of a game where people are paid to get it to work. Modders are mostly amateurs. they are not paid for their work and often have never programmed anything before. So the quality of mods will vary greatly - some will be a problem no matter what you do. Others will be rock solid. Some will just not play nice with certain other mods no mater what you do. The best advice I can give is to read the documentation of every mod thoroughly before installing it. Read the forum for that mod to see what kind of problems other users have had and what they did about any problems. Learn to use the utility programs - Wrye Bash, Tes5Edit, Boss or Loot. And, make regular backups of your data folder when you have a working game.

 

Even then you will have crashes. We do all we can to minimize the crashes, but they still happen. And not all are caused by mods. The game itself can crash because of low RAM or trying to read a bad spot on the disk. A background process that has nothing to do with the game can suddenly decide it must run right now and cause a massive slow down or crash.

 

Crashes are part of the modding experience - and a part of playing with mods is finding ways to minimize crashing. Expect to spend time going through the various forums, Nexus, Bethsoft and others to track down fixes to problems. Look in my sig - I believe I spend more time getting things to work than actually playing the game.

 

If you are not willing to do all of this, then maybe mods are not for you. But if you are willing to put up with the hassle - the game is far better with mods when it does work. :thumbsup:

[Georgiegril]

I have a crappy graphics card and currently 4 gb ram (I had 6 until a stick died, soon to be remedied.)

I have been playing Skyrim with mods for years now. I almost never crash. Right now I am using about 60 mods. My game is pretty and smooth, but I know better than to use ENBs or fx mods due to my hardware. I do use lots of pretty mods like SMIM and Water and Flora overhaul, though customized and with a texture optimizer. I use Interesting NPCs, Inconsequential NPCs, Skyre and lots of armor/clothing/weapons mods.

The key, IMO is to take the time to learn your own computer's limitations, read extensively about any mod or tweak or utility you might use and make changes one at a time. It usually takes me about a week to set up a game (free time, not a week straight, lol.) but after that I play with only a rare bit on tinkering.

If you are not into doing all the background learning and don't have patience to make changes one at a time, then I would suggest that modding is not going to be fun for you.

This is not a criticism. I imagine your free time is pretty valuable to you; it is logical to spend it in the way that gives you the most satisfaction.

 

If you decide you want to pursue it again, I suggest that Gopher's video tutorial series on modding, and/or the STEP project wiki, may be useful to help you increase your success and decrease frustration.