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The 255 mod limit


snarfy

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Well it looks like I'm about to hit the limit. At 250 mods now!

 

I was wondering what the general strategy is for being able to use over 250 mods. Do I need to merge my existing mods somehow? For example, I am using 26 MMM mods. Can those be merged into one file? What about the 30+ unique landscape mods? I do have Wrye Bash installed, and created a bashed patch for All Natural, but there didn't seem to be a way to suck any other of my installed mods into that.

 

Thanks

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Well it looks like I'm about to hit the limit. At 250 mods now!

 

I was wondering what the general strategy is for being able to use over 250 mods. Do I need to merge my existing mods somehow? For example, I am using 26 MMM mods. Can those be merged into one file? What about the 30+ unique landscape mods? I do have Wrye Bash installed, and created a bashed patch for All Natural, but there didn't seem to be a way to suck any other of my installed mods into that.

 

Thanks

 

Why only 255? It's such a random number!

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0-255 is 256 different options in programming. I don't really know how else to phrase it. It's a power of 2 and a multiple of 8. Those are both important in the world of programming and very basic level computer function. Basically, they allotted a certain number of bytes to dictate whether or not a mod is "on" (1) or "off" (0). It's a small part of the overall game file, and it easily could have been larger, but hey, it's Bethesda. :rolleyes:

 

 

As for the topic, if you've already made a Bashed Patch, there is not really much more you can do.

 

Perhaps, merge a bunch of similar mods that don't contain conflicting information into one big mod with Tes4Edit or something? You know, like if you have a 20 different skimpy armor BBB HGEC mods you can merge them into one big "sexyclothes.esp" mod?

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The 256 (hex FF) mod limit is one of 2 limits you may run into with mods - the other one is the total number of mods, activated or not, in your data folder. It seems that the game looks at all of the mods in the data folder on starting, and decides whether to load them or not. If the total reaches a particular number somewhere over 400 it will crash. The easiest way to deal with this is to move any unused mods out of the data folder. Or, if you use Wrye Bash, activate the ghosting feature which hides unused mods from the game.

 

Both of these are hard wired into the game engine and cannot be changed - The storage space allocated for addressing mods is set at one hexadecimal byte (FF) which is either 255 or 256 depending on how you deal with zero. A byte is the smallest usable chunk of memory in a computer. The next value up from FF would be 2 bytes which would give us hex FF FF or 65,535 which would have given us far more space for mods than we could possibly use. And tie up a chunk of space in memory that would be mostly empty. Personally I think 256 should be sufficient. Try removing some of the mods you aren't really using to free up some space if you can't merge them.

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