New to modding

[jjennings]

You'd think I would have come across this sooner since I loved Morrowind and liked Oblivion. Any advice as to how to start out? I've done a little research on how to download, not quite there yet. I have Oblivion, but now I want to go out and buy another copy of Morrowind before Skyrim comes out. I'm just a little lurie...sorry, don't know how to spell that, about downloading a bunch of mods when I don't know which ones work good together. Is there just one official mod that contains them all? Any advice would be great, thanks.

[iansaltman]

Most mods will actually work very well together. Any incompatibly issues should be easily resolved by using BOSS for Oblivion as well as Wyre Bash. Another thing you will need is OBSE (For Oblivion, obviously) and MWSE (Likewise, for Morrowind) As long as you aren't bogging down your game with SO many mods, it should be running fine. If you occur problems and think it's your load order of mods, check this forum here.

 

-Ian Rambo Lewis :)

[DragonAviator]

You'd think I would have come across this sooner since I loved Morrowind and liked Oblivion. Any advice as to how to start out? I've done a little research on how to download, not quite there yet. I have Oblivion, but now I want to go out and buy another copy of Morrowind before Skyrim comes out. I'm just a little lurie...sorry, don't know how to spell that, about downloading a bunch of mods when I don't know which ones work good together. Is there just one official mod that contains them all? Any advice would be great, thanks.

 

Add them one at a time run and test. Disable if you have even minor problems. It's very easy to download and enable lost of mods, and literally kill your Oblivion installation with conflicts.

 

Slow and careful pays off. Not all mods are well written, and even the mods from acknowledge authors can be very picky about what they will run with. Just remember no author can write a mod that will run on your PC and in your very individual configuration. I manage a large carefully crafted mod, that is designed to run on vanilla Oblivion, and does not need any companion mods (other than HGEC body mods) to allow a player to complete it's Quests. A lot of the better mods available are similarly crafted. The player community adds these mods to their very individually built gaming PC's, and in most case expects them to run faultlessly, without first identifying existing conflicts, and other operational problems they have been tolerating on their PC's for a long time. Quite often the new mod is not 'the straw that broke the camels back' it's just Oblivion saying I cannot manage any more mods!! Anything over 200 mods is walking the edge of a razor blade, even on carefully built gaming machine. So keep your gaming build simple and clean.

 

Cheers

 

DragonAviator

Edited September 6, 2011 by DragonAviator

[bben46]

With well over 20,000 mods on TexNexus alone it would be impossible to test every mod with every other mod. Compilations are not a good idea as a problem with just one mod in a large compilation makes that compilation useless. However, there are lists made by individuals of long load orders that worked for them.

 

Look at the top 100 lists (there are more than one) to find the most popular mods which are usually the most stable. Pick the ones you think you will like and install them one at a time then TEST them every time.

 

Recommended tools for working with mods.

 

OBSE (Oblivion Script Extender) Required for many mods. http://obse.silverlock.org/

 

OBMM (Oblivion Mod Manager) #1 mod tool http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2097

 

BOSS (Better oblivion Sorting Software) For automatically setting load order http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=20516

 

mTES4Manager - allows multiple copies of the game - so you can gop back when it messes up. http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=35263

 

Wrye Bash - Advanced mod tool, somewhat more difficult to install and use but does a lot. http://tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=22368