Greg

There really shouldn't be any significant difference between the two. The only reason GSDFan recommended downloading this one mod with a browser is to determine whether the file downloaded with Mod Organizer 2 may be corrupted or incomplete.

Just looking over your load order, you have a large number of script-heavy plugins so I have to wonder if this may be causing or exacerbating the issue.

He means to click the Manual Download button for the file in question on Nexus to download the file with your browser. Once the file is completely downloaded, go into Mod Organizer 2 and click the Install a new mod button (the second button with a CD icon in the toolbar at the upper left), browse to the folder where you downloaded the file (usually C:\Users\[username]\Downloads), and double click the file you downloaded to install it.

If I remember correctly, Merge Plugins works with Mod Organizer 2 only if you're using portable mode although the suggestion to use zMerge instead is the preferred solution.

If you level up and already have all available perks, you can simply cancel out of the perk tree and continue playing. I seem to recall that Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas force the player to pick some character attribute before being allowed to continue so you're basically up the creek if you've already selected all attributes. You may be able to work around this limitation using console commands to remove an attribute so you can select it again. Take this with a grain of salt since I haven't played Fallout 3 or Fallout New Vegas in at least a year so I'm going by fading memory.

The number of mods installed in the left pane has no bearing on the number of plugins (*.esm and *.esp) you can have installed in the right pane. You can technically have as many mods installed as you want, but Bethesda games are generally limited to 254 or 255 plugins total. Note that Skyrim Special Edition also supports ESL plugins that all load into the same slot so you can theoretically have as many ESL plugins as you want.

When you install a mod, you should see a textbox at the top showing the name of the mod being installed. You can click in this textbox to change the name so all of them have the same name (e.g. aMidianBorn Book of Silence) and Mod Organizer will ask if you want to merge the installed files into the same mod. If you've already installed the files as separate mods, I wouldn't worry about it. STEP recommends merging into one mod to make the left pane a little cleaner, but it does no harm at all if you install them as separate mods.

I just checked my STEP 2.10 install and I see I just let LOOT sort the load order without worrying about the global priority. I also poked around xEdit a bit and it looks as if most everything should be fine like this given that either Enhanced Lights and Effects is overriding Relighting Skyrim or the appropriate RS settings are forwarded into the STEP Patch (and both Enhanced Lights and Effects and the STEP Patch are near the bottom of my load order).

LOOT dropped the global priority in favor of a category-based load order, although I think you still use Load After if you need Relighting Skyrim to load after a specific mod.

If you want to disable a mod required by one of the patches, you'll need to use xEdit to remove the records in the patch overriding the plugin you want to disable and then clean masters to remove the reference to plugin you want to disable. This may be somewhat complex with some mods.

I think the easiest way to do this is to install FreeCommander and run it from Mod Organizer. If you then go into the Skyrim/Data folder, you should see the virtual file system exactly as the game sees it. If you do not see all the plugins and folders that Mod Organizer should be presenting to the game, either Parallels or Windows 10 is preventing Mod Organizer from hooking applications to use the virtual file system.

I just copied these back into the data folder and removed the timestamp from the file names. For the Dawnguard backup, use the one with the oldest timestamp since this should be the original, unmodified version and delete the other one.

All of that is pretty much meaningless and will require using something like windbg to analyze the crash dump to see if it contains any helpful information. I suggest dropping back for a moment to try to find the root cause of the crash. The first step should be to run SkyrimSE.exe from Mod Organizer from a vanilla profile that does not contain any mods. Start a new character and play for a while to ensure everything works fine without any crashes or odd behavior. If the game crashes, you may need to disable the steam overlay and any other overlays you have be using. Right click the Steam icon in the task tray, click Settings, click the In-Game tab, and uncheck "Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game". If the game is working normally so far, run skse64_loader.exe from Mod Organizer, create a new character, and play the game for a while to ensure it's still working fine without any crashes or odd behavior.

I feel as if I must be missing something because the last time I checked (yesterday), the latest version of Mod Organizer 2 on Nexus includes only lootcli.exe and loot.dll. This is just a command-line interface into the core LOOT features that supports updating the latest masterlist.yaml and sorting plugins, but it is not the full version of LOOT. The full version of LOOT has a nice UI that also exposes information about plugins that need to be cleaned or should not be cleaned as well as other information. The version of LOOT bundled with Mod Organizer 2 may be sufficient if all you need to do is sort plugins, although I've never really used it because it's not updated as often as LOOT itself.

You may try temporarily disabling any antivirus software to see if this solves the issue. If you are using Windows 10, verify that ModOrganizer.exe is not blocked (using File Manager, right click on ModOrganizer.exe, click Properties, click Unblock, click OK to close the dialog). Also note that Windows prohibits Mod Organizer's virtual file system will not work (meaning you will not see any mods in the game) if you the game as an administrator. You should not need to run any of the tools or the game as administrator anyway. EDIT: I've never tried using an external drive, but I wonder if Windows 10 may be tagging external drives as an untrusted source and prohibiting the virtual file system from working. I'm guessing on this point, but I do know Windows 10 tags network drives (NAS, SAN, etc.) as untrusted sources for whatever reason.

Mod Organizer includes a subset of LOOT that allows you to sort plugins into the correct order. The caveat here is that this is not the full LOOT application and the components bundled in Mod Organizer may be from an older version of LOOT. The mods are stored in ModOrganizer\mods if you install Mod Organizer 2 in portable mode. If you install Mod Organizer 2 in instance mode, the mods are stored in the user's AppData folder.

If you installed Mod Organizer in instance mode, your mods are installed in C:\Users\[username]\AppData\Local\ModOrganizer. If you installed Skyrim to a different path than you had it in originally, you may need to edit the ModOrganizer.ini file to change the game path.

I would install the main file normally and then install the optional file with the same name as the main file and select merge. I'm a bit confused on the instructions to hide the files myself. I initially thought @TechAngel85 had a typo and meant meshes\_byoh and textures\_byoh, but this hides the entirely of the optional file.

I have no idea what specifically could be causing a crash to desktop when taking to the statue of Mara but I don't see any evidence in your mod list that you've resolved any possible mod conflicts with TESVEdit or created a bashed patch with Wrye Bash so you should probably start there. Unfortunately you can't just drop 200+ mods into a Bethesda game and have everything work perfectly right out of the gate. You'll run into a number of potential conflicts with various mods that should be resolved. I also see you're using a 2GB video card so be sure you're using medium-resolution textures at best so you don't run out of VRAM.

I would generally install Mod Organizer and Sykrim on the fastest drive with ample disk space for the game and all the mods, but I wouldn't worry overly much about the difference in speed between a SATA SSD and the NMVe SSD. Install both on the NVMe SSD if you have plenty of space available; if not, the SATA SSD will work just as well and you probably won't notice any difference while playing.

I don't know if this is relevant to your specific issue but one potential difference is that Mod Organizer 1 allows assets overrides assets in lower-priority mods regardless of whether the assets are stored as loose files or stored in a BSA archive. With Mod Organizer 2, loose files always win the conflict.

We generally prefer to leave the posts in place so that others can benefit from your findings.

This is not valid for Skyrim Special Edition. See the wiki page for the correct INI file for Skyrim Special Edition: https://wiki.step-project.com/SKSE64#Recommendations

Thanks... the link should be correct now.

xEdit and SSEEdit are the same thing. xEdit is available for most of Bethesda's games so it's easier to say xEdit than to reference the specific name for each game (FNVEdit, FO3Edit, FO4Edit, TESVEdit, SSEEdit, etc.).