DocClox

I'd organise them so the order in the left/middle pane follows the order in the STEP guide. That gives you the same overwrite priorities as installing following STEP without MO. But then I'd run LOOT and reorder the middle pane as needed based on MO's analysis of LOOT's ordering. If that makes sense. So a bit of both, really. Mind, I'm new here. The old hands may tell you differently.

I've been thinking about sound overhauls. I don't use them myself. The vanilla sounds never struck me as particularly lacking, and so I've never really looked at any sound mods. That said, I can imagine how a good soundscape could really boost immersion. So I'm considering testing some of them. My only concern is that I don't want to greatly add to the workload imposed by my heavily laden MO profiles. With textures and scripts I have a reasonable idea of the likely consequences of loading a new mod. With sounds I don't really know what to expect. Will large sound files hammer performance like large texture files do? Or are generally low-overhead? I'll probably create a test profile when I get home tonight and see what happens. Still, I'm interested to know what others here see as the pros and cons of sound overhauls.

The default NMM installer in MO has a bug in it. There's an NMM downgrade patch on Nexus that fixes the issue.

I think part of the problem with Loot (to the extent that there is a problem anyway) is that there are multiple valid solutions to the problem of generating a valid load order. So Loot can generate something radically different from Boss and still be correct. It could also generate a different load order from different starting positions for the sorted mods and still be correct in each case. We've grown used to thinking of BOSS' load order as the One And Only, but we may need to rethink that mindset. It also seems that LOOT is doing what I always assumed BOSS did and reading the .es? files to determine the needed ordering rather than relying entirely on rules. Where it does fall down, as Kuldebar says, is where there is a necessary ordering that can't be inferred from the plugin files. For instance, I recently created optimised texture BSA archives and linked them to dummy esps to let me order them correctly. Except there's nothing in those files to tell LOOT where they need to go. So every time I run LOOT I need to put my dummy esps back where they're needed. (At least until last night when I finally worked out how to add metadata correctly). But basically, LOOT rocks!

I don't think MO has any particular opinion on your load order. What it complains about is if the order in which mod folders are applied when creating the Data VFS. If the VFS ordering is such that assets wouldn't load in the way suggested by the load order in the right hand pane, then it complains. That's a point that could probably be explained with greater clarity by MO. I know it took me a while to realise what it meant.

Well, that's better than nothing at all. If only in so far as you can't do much diagnosis when you CTD. Can you try shift-F12 in game to temporarily disable your ENB? If your ENB jumps upwards that will point a way forward. If not, well at least you'll have eliminated one possible cause. [edit] Never mind. I misread your post. I could have sworn you said you were using one the chunkier ENB presets.

Nope, just use it to start a new game. You'll begin in a prison cell with the facegen menu. When you've picked a race and a face, activate the statue of Mara in the cell, and she'll give you a menu of possible starting points. As I say "camping in the woods" gets you close to a vanilla startup, without having to slog through Helgen. Don't go for "caught illegally crossing the border, or you'll end up back on the cart :) Or pick one of the other options that sounds interesting. Starting as an Imperial or Stormcloak soldier can work well, although I tend to start with "attached and left for dead" if I'm not going camping.

Have you tried having Wrye Bash scan for UDRs? The carts issue happens when (I believe) when mods add things to the player at the start of the game. You can probably sidestep this with Live Another Life, assuming you've played the vanilla opening at least once. The "camping" option is a good one to hook back up with the MQ quickly and painlessly. Apart form that ... nothing leaps out immediately.

As far as I understand it, you get the same load order regardless of whether the esps are checked or not. You even get it complaining about dirty edits in plugins that you're not actually loading. So far as I can tell, it treats ticked and un-ticked files exactly the same.

That seems like a very strange load order. I'd expect the Unofficial patches to be up at the top and the STEP and Bashed patches to be at the bottom. Have you tried running Loot on that lot? It might help a lot.

I think it's a bit of both. If you have lots of big textures you're going to run out of VRAM and then your performance will drop like a stone. But if you're only considering polygons per second, then meshes are what do the damage. Basically (assuming my understanding is correct) there are two separate failure modes here, and we really need to be aware of both of them.

Sure. I'm not saying it's bad. Just throwing my opinion in for what little it may be worth. Although if opinions are going to be divided, maybe it would be better in a pack rather than STEP proper.

I think it looks very nice. The only problem I have is the one I have a lot of these things: I've never really looked at the sky in-game and thought "that doesn't look very realistic". Just to be clear: I've never thought that about sky outside the game either. But you know what I mean...

The order doesn't matter. FNIS creates havok behavior files which Wrye Bash knows nothing about. And FNIS itself doesn't add any esps, so there's no overlap. Of course, if you have a mod that adds an esp as well as introducing new animations, then you need to do both. But the order still doesn't matter. [edit] Only read half the question :) The FNIS mods only add the FNIS tool folders and the base behavior files ready for modification. So again, ordering doesn't matter. As for the .tri files, are these the ones in overwrite->meshes->cache? I don't know for sure but I've been assuming they're left over from ENB. Certainly I've been deleting them when I find them. It doesn't seem to have affected anything

mmm... I was wondering about graphics drivers. If the problem started around the same time as an upgrade, it may be time to break out DriverSweeper or whatever it's called these days.

I have two profiles: one of them uses Cloaks of Skyrim, the other (for reasons I don't want to get into) does not. The trouble is that I have a common mod in both profiles with an NMM installer that allows you specify to Cloaks support. If I install it with cloaks support it breaks one profile. If I install without it breaks the other. So I ended up installing the mod in question twice, renaming one to add " - cloaks" to the name. It's a reasonable use case for the "rename" option.

Out of curiosity, have you tried moving the plugins to an MO folder and creating symlinks to them in the data folder? I keep meaning to try this myself and see if Skyrim still works outside of MO. If it does it might be a solution.

I wonder if it's worth submitting a change request/patch to LOOT to handle symlinks correctly? We'd still need a plugin/app to create the links (since Tannin wants MO to run without admin rights) but it might be the cleanest solution. From a STEP perspective, anyway.

Similar issues here. One encounter saw my PC collapse into bleedout, and then after a while it says "you still have some life left in you". After which the bandits are suddenly non-hostile for no reason I could make out. I also had a case last night. A new and somewhat under-prepared PC meets a thief on the road, briefly toasts the blighter, and then goes sprinting back to the protection of a follower. At which point the thief decides he isn't hostile at all. Which I could almost write off as "immersion" if I wasn't convinced it was a bug. I love the idea of DA, but I don't think it's ready for prime time yet.

I agree with phazer. The fact that your memory fills up at O/S start time suggests that it's not a Skyrim setting. Things to consider: Check your services and see if anything's installed itself along side a software update of some sortConsider the possibility of a boot sector virus. I had one for years that caused all sorts of weirdness. I only found it when I went to re-isntall my Linux partition and had to set Grub up again.Hypervisor viruses can be hard to detect by conventional means as well.memtest86 might be worth looking at, just in case there's a problem with the hardware 'course, you've probably thought of most of that anyway...

Just tried this one out. I've only really seen Winterhold so far (Frostfall, Realistic Needs, Live Another Life and fast travel disabled without an axe - I may be there for a while ). Anyway, initial impressions. Externally, I love it. Winterhold looks like it might have actually once been a mighty city rather than a collection of peasant huts providing services to the College. It's all a huge improvement. I like the layout, I like the ruins and the additional services seem sensible and balanced. Internally ... everything is so clean, it makes my hands itch. I've always been a fan of the dirty, cluttered look of vanilla Skyrim. The mess makes the place seem more lived in and less like a construct in a computer game. That said, I know there are some people out there who can't look at all that clutter without wanting to reach for a mop and broom. I couldn't say that the clean-up was a bad thing ... but personally, I find it distracting. Oddly enough the Immersive College of Winterhold mod bothered me for the exact same reasons. Maybe it's just a Winterhold thing :) Obviously, I want to see the other locations before I make up my mind. Right now though, I'm genuinely in two minds about this one.

Ah, I see. I did misread that, didn't I? In that case: what rootsrat said :)

These are prettier. Probably easier to see too. Which may or may not be an advantage, depending on how you like your game.

Well, the vanilla versions don't look much like grapes, and can be pretty hard to spot. I think there's some in the room where you rescue the Dibellan Sybll IIRC. So I suppose that would be the point of the re-tex. Although personally, never having been particularly bother by the quality of in-game grapes, I think I'll pass on this one.

The ones you install through mod organizer will override the ones you install into Data. The data version will still be there, but the MO ones will take priority in the MO's VFS [edit] Note that the first version you installed will still exist on the disc. So you'll be storing the textures twice. Which may not be a problem if disc space is plentiful...