How do people...

[joemodda]

How do people have so many mods on a save file without the save over-inflating in size?

There are people with 200+ mods on a save and they spend 100+ hours on that file, yet their save file size is less than 7mb.

I've got about 110 mods on my save file with 80 hours into it. My save file is about 10mb. This matters because a smaller save size means a more stable game size.

 

Is there something I'm doing wrong when it comes to installing mods? I use OBMM when I can. Other mods that don't have omod support I copy and paste the mods into my data folder.

 

What is their secret?!?! :confused:

[Jagermh]

Avoid savegame bloating, doing things like changing where things are and dropping items everywhere (outside crates) means that the savegame has to record that.

 

also, don't use "placeatme" it bloats savegames

[Smooth613]

Certain mods contain more information too. Sometimes this is a bad thing. A "Dirty" mod has unwanted and unneeded edits and need to be cleaned. They may also have a script that didn't properly close or delete certain information when it should have. This is bloat. You can check in your OBSE.log for potential bloat. If mods have crazy amounts of strings OBSE will leave a warning in the log so you can investigate if need be. Such as below...

WARNING: substantial numbers of string variables exist for the following files (may indicate savegame bloat):
   All Natural Base.esm (871 strings)
   Toggleable Quantity Prompt.esp (320 strings)
   EnchantmentMastery.esp (118 strings)

 

That may indicate a problem that you need to report to the mod creators and you should probably clean save without those mods on occasion too. Or completely remove the troubled mod.

 

I also clean and PyFFI all of my mods and meshes. I use TES4Edit for cleaning. Wrye Bash also has a function to Remove Bloat.

[joemodda]

I just disabled a couple large mods. My save file went to about 8mb. I'm sure none of my mods use the "placeatme" or any other possibly bloating commands.

I checked the OBSE log, there as no mention of bloating.

 

I think the problem is that I have large mods. I disabled the Elyswer land mod and a few large Unique Landscape mods. I went so go play and I can save my game normally. Lucky me.

But an 8mb file size is still no good :confused: Aside from the UL mods, the other large mods I have are Midas magic, and all the components from FCOM.

 

How do I deal with large mods taking up save size?

[Jagermh]

How do I deal with large mods taking up save size?

 

I don't know of any more ways to help with that but I just tell my computer to harden up and take it, mine runs only choppy after cell changes and the rest of the time its fine.

But thats because of my multiple gigabytes of mods not my savefile. (3176 kb) XD

[chakaru11]

You kow, most of the time it's not the large mods that bloat saves. It's the dozens of small ones that add single items or changes.

 

There are two ways to get rid of random armor and weapon mods while still being able to use the equipment:

 

1,) Make your own mod and add all the weapons and armors.

DO not add all the single esps for the weapon and armor mods! Instead, create your own mod for that, find the meshes and textures for the weapons and armors and add them manually. This way you can even add enchantments etc. Place them in a chest in the textinghall - it saves a lot of space, since the game a) only needs to load one esp instead of dozens which add one armor or one weapon and b) there aren't dozends of chests strewn around cyrodiil but only one that isn't even in the Tamriel worldspace.

But I'd advice you to really do this manually - merging equipment mods does not solve the problem, since all the chests are still there and merged mods tend to be buggy anyway.

 

2.) Enchanting armors and weapons

As soon as your character has enchanted custom armor or weapon, it's ID changes and the esp t hat belongs to it is no longer necessary and can be deactivated. Of corse that only works for the one character and has to be repeated every time you start a new character. Hence, I recommend version 1.) That takes some time, because adding meshes and textures to an esp is a little tiring, but it helps un- bloating savegames.

 

 

Aside from that I agree to what has already been said: do not just throw stuff out of your inventory randomly, since it does not disappear and just clutters the worldspace and bloats the save. I recommend the Midas chest spell from "Midas Magic Spells of Aurum" - it's such a neat little thing and helps keep Tamriel clean! xD