Plugins & Mod limits - Noob question

[wastedwandered]

After loading up my game & having a near stroke upon seeing my character bald, her & her companions all naked, and about 90% of my settlement gone except for a few trees and paintings I noticed pop up msgs listing the mods I'd previously installed since I first started playing (Like the first time you start up a game after installing a mod and you get an alert notifying you)

After the game had listed a few of the mods I got a Windows notification saying Fallout had encountered an error and had stopped working. When I went back to NMM I noticed my "active Plugins" was in the red (O.O) and said Fallout wont start...or something similar. So I deactivated a mod that I hadn't used much, and the problem seem to be resolved. So i'm hoping my solution was the correct one for the issue.

 

Anyways....this has made me realize I'm now at the limit of mods I can download :sad: Unless there's some solution other than the drastic action of removing some. So my question...is there a way to consolidate or somehow reduce the number of plugins when you reach this point? Is there some clever folder reshuffling that can be done, or any other methods?

 

Apologies if it is a blatantly dumb question

 

Cheers :smile:

[Deleted3082751User]

The Hard Mod Limit is 255 Esp and Or Esm Files (this only applies to ESP or ESM files, you can potentially have an unlimited amount of bsa files or loose files however.) the reason is because the load order is in hexadecimal format, 255 = FF, it cannot exceed FF because then load order would then be in triple digits (the form id that is, which is what determines priority in mods, imagine having a thousand esp files, the highest mod in the load order would have extremely low priority, so low in fact that it may as well not be installed, this would also make all master files redundant as they are always at the very top of the load order, which has the lowest priority, not only that but their will inevitably be many problems with this, mod conflicts being 1 of them).

 

256 Mods = 100 in hexadecimal format, this would confuse the game most likely. and thus render all 256 mods redundant (they simply will not work at all or have many problems)

 

however their are ways to exceed this limit, but they require someone who knows what they are doing, and especially requires someone who knows exactly what each and every mod they have and will have does, as the main issue will be mod conflicts, even though they will all be placed into 1 esp file, they can still easily conflict with each other, due to the records they edit.

 

the method, is called Fo4Edit Merged Patch, this essentially puts all mods into 1 mod, basically this will put all esp content into a single esp, thus making all mods only count as 1 mod. however its not as simple as that. if a mod contains a bsa file, the bsa files must be extracted and repacked with the same name as the merged esp, hence the reason why esp files have the same name as the bsa file that they are using.

 

typically bsa files contain scripts, textures, meshes, and basically all content a mod would absolutely require, the merged patch for each mod would need to know the exact file paths of the content

 

so yea, if a mod contains just an esp file that does direct edits to the game, then you could easily merge all of these into a single esp without much issue, just make sure that the mods you are merging are not conflicting with each other, the best way would be to check each mod, and decide which edits you definitely want to appear in game, and delete the conflicting entries from another mod. however as said above if a mod contains loose files or bsa files, then the process becomes harder.

 

just for confirmation, i have successfully merged 500 mods in both skyrim and fallout 4 before, just to prove my knowledge on the matter. however i am no expert on this matter, all i know is that i have done it multiple times before with success.

Edited October 24, 2017 by Guest

[wastedwandered]

  On 10/24/2017 at 7:39 PM, twistedfatal said:

The Hard Mod Limit is 255 Esp and Or Esm Files (this only applies to ESP or ESM files, you can potentially have an unlimited amount of bsa files or loose files however.) the reason is because the load order is in hexadecimal format, 255 = FF, it cannot exceed FF because then load order would then be in triple digits (the form id that is, which is what determines priority in mods, imagine having a thousand esp files, the highest mod in the load order would have extremely low priority, so low in fact that it may as well not be installed, this would also make all master files redundant as they are always at the very top of the load order, which has the lowest priority, not only that but their will inevitably be many problems with this, mod conflicts being 1 of them).

 

256 Mods = 100 in hexadecimal format, this would confuse the game most likely. and thus render all 256 mods redundant (they simply will not work at all or have many problems)

 

however their are ways to exceed this limit, but they require someone who knows what they are doing, and especially requires someone who knows exactly what each and every mod they have and will have does, as the main issue will be mod conflicts, even though they will all be placed into 1 esp file, they can still easily conflict with each other, due to the records they edit.

 

the method, is called Fo4Edit Merged Patch, this essentially puts all mods into 1 mod, basically this will put all esp content into a single esp, thus making all mods only count as 1 mod. however its not as simple as that. if a mod contains a bsa file, the bsa files must be extracted and repacked with the same name as the merged esp, hence the reason why esp files have the same name as the bsa file that they are using.

 

typically bsa files contain scripts, textures, meshes, and basically all content a mod would absolutely require, the merged patch for each mod would need to know the exact file paths of the content

 

so yea, if a mod contains just an esp file that does direct edits to the game, then you could easily merge all of these into a single esp without much issue, just make sure that the mods you are merging are not conflicting with each other, the best way would be to check each mod, and decide which edits you definitely want to appear in game, and delete the conflicting entries from another mod. however as said above if a mod contains loose files or bsa files, then the process becomes harder.

 

just for confirmation, i have successfully merged 500 mods in both skyrim and fallout 4 before, just to prove my knowledge on the matter. however i am no expert on this matter, all i know is that i have done it multiple times before with success.

 

Thanks for the reply, and I appreciate the detail and the way you've explained it. Im probably a bit guilty of being greedy after transferring from PS4 with it's mod limitations as I have almost 3 times what I could have, but there's just too many awesome mods on here that it's hard to keep the number of them down. It makes perfect sense that there needs to be a limit for everything to still function so I'll need to be a bit more selective with mods, but with your answer I now know there is a way if I really need.

 

I'm way too much of a noob to think about doing something like that now, but down the track I might look into it a bit more.

 

Thanks again for the info.

[Deleted3082751User]

i dont blame you for being greedy, their is an insane amount of very nice to have mods :), its the sole reason why i used to merge my mods, so that i could have loads of mods, but the problem is, the more mods you have the more potentional for game instability. fallout and skyrim's engine are just simply fragile, (we must bare in mind, that these games are strictly made for consoles through and through, that severely lack pc optimization). but i can defintely see where you are coming from, moving to the pc, now grants you a plethora of mods that will make a huge difference, literally night and day difference. but yea, i would get used to only running 255 mods for a while, so that you can learn how to make your game stable with many mods, and then later down the line, i would start reading tutorials in how to use fo4edit to merge mods. its a time consuming process and can make the game far more unstable, but as said it is defintely possible to run an extreme amount of mods, it would just require much more effort on your behalf to make the game stable with so many mods.

[SirTwist]

You can merge a few mods together and use just the merged mods. Cal at Dirty Weasel Media on Youtube walks you through, with Mod organizer, how to do this, using both FO4Edit Merge Patch, and even Merge Plugin. Both are be Mator, and found through nexus and the Skyrim section. And you can have even more mods that way. I do warn that it can make a mess of things, as well. When you use Merge Plugins, check for errors. It should also give compatibility, etc. Just use caution, and work with it. And only merge similar mods with similar mods.