JedahDemon

Tiger you have been a colossal help to someone trying to get their bearings and figure out the ropes for modding skyrim for the first time. I thank you a million times!

This is a bit off topic but regarding this, since the high res texture packs do have an ESP for them does that mean I don't actually need to load them for the textures to appear in game?Sorry I was assuming you had extracted them to loose files. If you do that (recommended) with BSAopt, the ESP files are not needed. I feel like such a noob so I really appreciate all the help you've given me so far. For the high res textures, are they all contained in the Skyrim - Textures.bsa? Just wanting to make sure I do this correctly, once I do it, it's not hard to figure out what to do from there. I already had BSAopt downloaded but I was a little concerned using it, as far as I understand you just open the BSA with it, select *.*, click apply, then click Unpack?

This is a bit off topic but regarding this, since the high res texture packs do have an ESP for them does that mean I don't actually need to load them for the textures to appear in game?

Well I don't really have that many extra mods, after I installed the core mods from STEP and then most of the mods from STEP Extended it came out to well over 100 ESPs already (somewhere near 140). After that most of my stuff is immersion related, a few overhauls (that are often 5+ ESPs on their own), armors, followers, a few extra quests, some hairs, etc. Most of it I could get rid of, doesn't mean I want to though and it all starts to add up really quickly. I do appreciate the responses, though it's a little off point from the question I asked. I'm not concerned with whether or not I should merge mods, or remove mods as the case may be, I'm merely asking if it is safe to merge the ESPs in each section into a single ESP per section, or at least a few ESPs per section that way it cuts my mods down from 150-ish before anything after STEP down to 10-30-ish.

So I'm pretty new at modding and all so this may be a fairly noobish question, but I'm trying to reduce my mod load count as I'm starting to get dangerously close to 255 (currently at 250). Is it safe to merge all the mods included in each section of STEP or will this cause major conflicts?