How many mods is it safe to have

[motocross1224]

Is there a good stopping limit for mods, because I'm not sure if it's good to have to many.

Dose it matter or am i worrying to much?

[WoogieMonster]

The more you have, the higher your chances that something will go wrong. If you're asking for a safe number, the only reasonable answer is "none." If you're asking the limit, I believe you can install as many as will fit on your hard drive, however you can only activate 253 of them (something vanilla to the game uses 2 slots, giving you a total of 255).

The most I have seen posted here on the Nexus was 300 installed and 240 activated.

[GenghisKhanIT]

WoogieMonster is absolutely right.

 

That said, I can add that if you use small, specific mods to alter aspect you want to improve, conflict chances are very small even if you use a lot of them. It is my own case, no problem whatsoever.

 

Add a couple of wide mods altering world and/or leveling and chances increase quickly.

 

Add a major overhaul like Fran's, MMM, OOO, and conflicts with the smaller ones are quite predictable .

 

 

Hope it helped.

[Martinus1982]

You must also take into account your RAM mods add stuff to the game which is more things for your PC to remember and thus uses more RAM Im sure all OPs use virtual RAM to help compensate but this is limited by the amount of hard drive space and the limit the OP sets its self to use.

 

1gig of RAM is what Bethesda (recommend) for TES4 Oblivion alone and SI and the official plugins work well with that if you are useing XP but if you have 2gig of RAM then the game should fly

 

If you are using Vista then i would (Recommend) 2gig of RAM and more is better.

 

eg...I was using XP had around 50 mods including SI and the official plugins and OOO with 2gig of RAM a 400gig HD an AMD seliron 3500+ and a Gforce 7500GL the game ran nicely and was almost in full setings I then upgraded to a new machine with an Intel core2 EXTREME quad-core processor a Gforce 8600GL 600gig HD and 1gig RAM and Vista :( the game runs crap with less mods active in minimal graphics setings *starts to cry* so im now waiting for my new RAM to show up

[Kythrius]

It isn't as much the number of mods as what they do.

[Vagrant0]

Typically, you can have more content adding mods (quests, shops, areas) if you refrain from using larger mods which affect many things. It should be noted that most mods made in the last year or so have some compatability with OOO, or Frans built in, so using one of those shouldn't cause too many problems. It's when you combine OOO, Frans, MMM together that probablems usually happen. If you stick with only one of those at a time, any problems should be minimal. You may also want to just avoid MMM entirely, despite how good it looks, many people have reported significant problems when using it. Other mods you should avoid are ones which use OBSE and affect fundimental systems like combat AI, NPC scripting, and similar "flashy" effects. While there are a few good exceptions, most of these mods are aimed at just making themselves work, and will conflict with many other mods. Deadly reflexes for example, while it adds some neat effects to combat, interefers with many other mods, and causes either conflicts or other serious issues. I'd be tempted to say that nearly 10% of the OBSE related problems people report are due to just this mod.

 

What you might want to do is get yourself a good save to work from, only load mods that need to be active at game start, play the game for a few hours, if everything works right, make a backup of your datafolder and your saves. You can then use this backup as a sort of fall-back point should any mods added later cause issues. You should also add one mod at a time, and not save over previous games until you've made sure that mod works, before adding any more mods.

[madman132]

The sheer Number of Mods you have on your Computer can not be used to predict if and when your Game is going to bbe unstable. When two mods conflict, there will be some issues, even if this two mods are the only ones you have.

 

A Good advice would be: Dont activate Mods you dont need. Be Careful though when de activating things: Remove anything you want to keep from any Companion/Place/House/Castle/whatever. These Things will be gone forever if you overwrite your Savegame with the Mod deactivated.

[PaperTiger74]

Try to use only safe mods. What "safe" is can be debated. When I download a mod I try to evaluate it's safety (and compability) by looking at how many times it has been dowloaded, how many ratings it has and if there are a lot of bug reports in the comments page (or forum thread if such exists). Currently I have over 100 mods running; one big overhaul (MMM 3.5.5b) and several OBSE dependant mods. The game is still as stable as when I ran it vanilla style. I have the occasional crash to desktop, but so does most players (tip: make it a habit to quicksave every 10 minutes or so or use a mod that automaticaly does just that). Optimizing load order is of course essential. There's no general rule here as I see it. If you use the unofficial patch, put it at the top, just after the .esm files. The rest is a matter of common sense. Always read the readme file that comes with the mod before installing. If there is no readme, that could be bad sign.