Mod Trade Off: Settlements or Quests?

[Moksha8088]

If I load up on mods to improve settlements and consume system resources that way, will it detract from my adding the quest and character mods that I really love in a game? I especially have the Settlement Transfer Blueprints and the Sim Settlements in mind with this question for mods in my next playthrough.

 

I want the settlers to have a nice place, but I really do not want to spend my time building things. Quests and character interactions are where it is at for me.

[Deleted2433418User]

Actually,you´ve made the right choices when your aim is questing.. SimSettlements and Blueprints don´t interfere with various questmods and Characters and you get the benefit of settlements without the tedious building..I suggest you leave it at that.. concentrate on what YOU like ... the beauty of mods is that you CAN.. without them though. you´re screwed.. :-)

[TheSpaceShuttleChallenger]

The good news is that it isn't so much of an either-or tradeoff as you think. I've got, at the moment, about thirty settlement-related mods and well as a few dozen character and quest mods. So far there has been very little incompatibility and no issues whatsoever with system resources getting stretched too thin. Most of the stuff that affects settlements really does only affect the settlements. You might have some workload problems with settlements in dense areas (ie; Hangman's Alley and Bunker Hill) but if your computer can handle the optimization nightmare that is downtown Boston in can probably handle a heavily modded Sanctuary with ram to spare.

[tomomi1922]

It is not the right trade off. The right trade off resides within the mod count limit of 256. It counts the total .esp files. Try to avoid mods that give you 5-6 .esp (if you can help it). I have 2 weapon merged packs: Doombased and Skibad's weapon packs. Each, with 1 .esp, offers about 5-6 weapons. That is 5-6 .esp saving if you are to download each weapon individually. This goes with outfits and all other mods.

Most of the mods out there do not really add much to your "total resources" unless you are struggling for disk space. Honestly, without that game engine limitation (in indexing mods) I can load up 500+ mods and it will not slow my game down. The number of mods alone do not mean a lot to the game, but the type of mods. Large texture mods will transform the way things look (and performance). Like the Official HD Texture Pack DLC, that thing is a mod, and it is 50Gb. Mods like changing reload animation, or weapon damage, or make you jump higher totally do not affect performance at all.

 

In a perfect world, all mods will work together and without CTD. But in reality, the more mods you install, the higher chance you get for conflicts and also high chance you get an incompetent creator. I am a very incompetent mod creator. I create stuff and test them. I don't know if it may conflict with other mods. If you use my not that is not fully tested, you may run into problems. So it is important to find an experienced creator to download from. It's not too hard to tell. If a mod have tons of endorsement, and creator has many mods under his belt, he seems to be a reliable one. Look under bug section, are there many bugs, did the creators address them, or at least they put as "known issues"? Check the Post section, see if people praise or complain? Check the installation/uninstallation instruction to find anything special? Because mods don't always just plug and play. And creators didn't write a bunch of notes to annoy us.

 

So I say, mod quality instead of quantity. You can have both quests and settlement building. Just don't go download every single mod out there without even looking. Body skin mods don't add into your mod counts at all (as they are only mesh an d texture). The base CBBE mod has one .esp to fix the neck seam (that you can even do without).