How Many Mods are too much?

[piddy3825]

Hello,

I was just going thru my Fallout 4 folder and the numbers indicated I currently had 79 active mods and 59 plugins installed. It took a lot of trial and error to get all these to work together so the game wouldn't crash and yet there are still so many more mods to check out and so many being introduced everyday.

So, how many mods are in your FO4? Which do you think are best?
Your thoughts and feedback greatly appreciated

[AeonsLegend]

I try to keep mods to a minimum because they usually affect the game. Loss of textures, loss of functionality. If you don't have a powerful machine it can affect loading times or game stability even more. All the way to CTD's. I have about 15 mods installed. Most of them small. Before adding more I will remove at least 5 of them.

[Boombro]

Don't look at the mod count at say " can my game handle this?" Because it always the wrong answer.

 

First of all, what do the mods do? Are heavily scripted? Are the small bug fixes? Add perks? Add gear? Change looks of NPCs? Tweaks? Grass?

 

I have about 70 eps, but 10 are from the same mod that changes loot, one is remove fog, three add outfits etc they are hardly heavy. You can have about 800 of those and they will never break your game.

 

But you can have just three mods, and they will crash your game. It all up to what they do.

 

The mods you should always be on watch for are mods that add a lot of NPCs in one area, more than one heavily scripted mod that runs in background, a mod that was made for an older version of the game, a mod that was badly scripted, a mod that edits leveled list without using scripts (we don't have software to make patches.) A mod with dirty edits.

 

And always pick what do you want from your game, not matter what good your rig is, you can't have a ultra, super looking game with many amazing heavily scripted mods and crap ton of flora all around.

[AeonsLegend]

Good luck finding that one mod that broke your game if you have 800 of them.

Edited February 5, 2016 by AeonsLegend

[Wicketklown001]

Doesn't fallout 3 and skyrim have a hard limit on number of plugins? Something like 255 if I remember right. Or was that overcome somehow (I seem to remember it being a limitation of the engine though so I don't think it was). Fallout 4 is based on an updated skyrim engine so it probably has a similar limit. (note texture replacers and such don't have a plugin so they don't count toward this limit).

[Moraelin]

Well, the address space for item IDs physically doesn't have space for more than 255, including EPs and such. It's just the first two hex digits in the id, remember?

 

So, yeah, if you have 800 mods, then it's the last 545 mods that broke your game :tongue:

 

PERSONALLY however, I like to be on the safe side. It's only 255 if Beth's code ALWAYS uses unsigned numbers. If not, 127 is the safe maximum.

 

Now I don't know what's the case for FO4, but I seem to remember that people were having problems in the 150 or so range for FO3 and NV, which would indicate some code that used the default signed.

 

So, anyway, short non-nerdy version, 127 should always be safe, 255... well, it depends on how they programmed it, which frankly none of us knows. Above 255, just no. Not physically possible.

 

I like to play it safe, so personally I keep it under 127. You know, just in case.

 

EDIT: BTW, that's counting only .esp and .esm files. Batch files, texture replacers, sound replacers, etc, those don't really count, since they don't need to reserve a chunk of ID numbers.

[robhartman9]

when I saw the number 255 in this thread the first thing that popped into my head was Hexadecimal? I have installed and tested fire alarm systems where the device addresses are in Hexadecimal. The limit for 8 bit device addresses on a loop is 255. I thought this was a 64 bit system?

[piddy3825]

Thanks for the feedback,

Nice to know that I still have some room to install more mods and very good points about what goals are in mind when installing a mod. I do make it point to only install one mod at a time and launch the game each time before installing another mod, especially when there are lots of shared files being overwritten, 'cause at least that way i can narrow the problem down to those specific mods involved if the game crashes or wont start.

[TheOriginalEvilD]

I just make it a habit to weed out the ones that don't end up making much of a difference. I always end up with a bunch of weapon mods but I'll gravitate to one or two, so I just delete the others. I got FO3 to the point that it wouldn't run for 5 minutes without crashing but I never did figure out what mod broke it. This time around I'm using NMM, which is a first for me. In the past I've always handled my own installs with great success, but the NMM is so highly recommended and it's pretty easy so I'm giving it a go.

[gabrieldragonking]

more,more,more can get enuf

with out the mod this game is DEAD the minute the divition is sold(so more is good)