RabbitB

Just popping back in here to say that I'm still fiddling with this pack to get it working well. I appreciate the effort that went into collating all these mods, but a tremendous amount of work needs to be done, creating a manual merged patch so that these mods will work together properly. There are lots, and I mean lots of conflicts. These conflicts have led to lots of little bugs that require tracking down and fixing, and so far one bug I simply cannot figure out a fix for. Codsworth is not a usable companion--once you have him follow you, you can't use 'talk' anymore, which means no conversations with him, and you don't have the ability to send him back to a settlement. Not unless you take another companion so that he gets sent back automatically. If he gets "knocked out", you also can't repair him. He glitches and you can no longer interact with him. I haven't tried it, but you might be able to recover him if you leave and wait long enough for him to just default back to Sanctuary. So far it seems that the only mod that really messes with him is Atomic Radio, but it doesn't seem to make any difference if it's activated, so I'm thoroughly stumped on this. The other huge bug I encountered, but have found a fix for, is all the world object flickering. There are a lot of mods in this pack that modify the overworld, and the bUseCombinedObjects ini change causes massive LOD/rendering issues anywhere the world was changed. The fix for this was installing a pre-culling geometry remover mod and putting it as late as possible in the load order. It'll absolutely kill your performance if you don't have a monster rig, but it's the only actual fix aside from removing all the culpable mods.

As a followup to my last post, it appears I might have fixed it, but there are no guarantees (I tried to get into several long combat situations). I had Steam validate all the game files, of which 7 failed, and it appears to no longer crash. Immersive Main Menu was removed during the validation (Steam replaces its installed file with the original), so it could potentially (if doubtful) be the culprit, but I don't want to tempt fate, and as it's not a very important mod, I'm not going to reinstall it.

So, I've followed the guide up to part 6, and while I was testing by just going into the game and walking around a bit, I decided to test further by getting into some combat, and I've noticed that the game will have a guaranteed crash somewhere within the first 30 seconds of combat, when fighting human enemies. There doesn't appear to be any crash when faced against animals or creatures. This is on a fresh save, where I slogged through the intro yet again, so I could test without worrying if there was conflicts not related to the current mods.

I want to say thank you for your guide--I'm going through it and putting together my load order now. Honestly, it's an unpopular opinion, but New Vegas is the only game I can play unmodded. Fallout 3 and 4 require lots of modding to make them fun, and thorough packs like yours greatly reduce my time investment to get these games into a playable state. All that said, instead of removing those mods, have you considered turning them optional instead, with a note about the potential issues? That way, anyone willing to take the risk, can still install them.

I know this is from a few months back, but I just learned about the guide the other day, and I too found myself getting to around 150 plugins and everything falling apart. That said, I've put together a lot of load orders over the years, and that's not out of the ordinary. That's about where it always starts to glitch and crash. I was just hoping I suppose, that the guide would stay close to that limit or would have instructions on exactly which plugins to merge. Looks like I have my work cut out for me. I have 20+ plugins to merge or remove.