Divide and conquer, a faster way to troubleshoot mods

[starfire42]

A lot of people (myself included, until recently) think the only way to troubleshoot mods is to disable the possible culprits one at a time. But with the divide and conquer approach we can eliminate half the possibilities with every iteration. Here's how it works:

 

Step 1. Disable half the mods.

Step 2

+-Step 2a (if previous step fixes problem): Re-enable half the mods you disabled in the previous step . Go to step 3a

+-Step 2b (if step 1 does NOT fix problem): disable half the remaining mods.

Step 3a (from step 2a)

Step 3

+--Step 3aa (problem still fixed): re-enable half the mods that are disabled. Got to step 2

+--Step 3ab (problem re-appears) disable half the mods you enabled in the previous step, go to step 2

Step 3b (from step 2b):

+--Step 3ba (problem fixed by step 2b) re-enable half the mods that are disabled. Got to step 2

+--Step 3bb (problem not fixed) disable half the mods that are still enabled, go to step 2

Step 4. Repeat until problem is solved with the minimum number of mods disabled (usually just 1, but you may have 2 or more mods causing trouble)

 

Dependencies make this process harder, so know which mods depend on which others and keep the parent (the mod that others depend on) enabled whenever one of it's dependents is enabled. The easy way is to treat parent and dependent together as a single mod. A mod that depends on another mod will state which ones it relies on in the mod's description page and usually the readme file.

 

Finally, if you think a missing parent might be causing your problem, load up your mods in tes5 edit and it will tell you which mod is missing a parent and what that parent is.