OCDCoder

Same here. I might have once yelled at my screen, "IT'S ON, DO I NEED TO WRITE INSTRUCTIONS FOR YOU ON HOW TO USE IT?!"

Yeah, I've been modding about two months, played about 12h or so of a real (non-test) game. Never made it out of Whiterun. I'm really starting to question my priorities...

Hey, come party with the naked Imperials at the giant camp. Fun times! (The giant just seemed confused.)

My funniest random bug so far was floating carrots. Only happened once. I just decided to name that Bug "Bunny." LOL My weirdest repeatable bug was naked Imperials fighting at Sleeping Tree Camp. (Reminds me, I should add that to my list of test saves.) Since I did this new build, so far, no problems aside from learning to never remove Immersive Horses, but I'm going to just run around and do a bunch of saves in various places where I hear about people having problems. There's also some 20-something step stress testing guide I found... on here? (Of course I don't have the tab open, why would I, that would be too easy.) Anyway, I'm going to run through that as well. It's basically running around to a whole bunch of places and doing things that are, IDK, known to cause crashes? Overall, given my experience with FF causing CTDs, I suspect there may be some kind of memory issue. I think I remember SLE having some kind of mod to help with that. But there's a console command you can use to clear memory, pcb (PurgeCellBuffers) and if I notice my framerate is dropping or any other weirdness, or just randomly when I think of that, I'll run that. Yeah, that too.

Yeah, I'm back into doing this because of a major PC upgrade as well. What I had done last night for testing since I've redone my mods YET AGAIN was to create a character and save it at a bunch of places I'd had problems with in the past (using the console coc for a lot of them) and then add more mods, and test again. Unfortunately I didn't realize I'd activated Immersive Horses and when I decided I didn't want it, there went all my saves. Technically I should probably disable Convenient Horses as well, but it's required for one of the CR patches on the guide I'm starting with (which is like this one but with a lot less mods - I did the entire thing in about an hour because I had most of them already downloaded) and I already know I want to use it. And I'm a programmer, I DEFINITELY know what you mean about non-repeatable problem frustration. One famous programmer solution is to undo a bunch of stuff and then redo it without changing anything and it'll work fine again. :-P Something more useful might be to look back at your recent saves, see where you've been, what items you have, what followers (if any) are with you, look at all your logs and see what was going on when you crashed, etc. I remember in SLE I kept crashing in one specific area of Whiterun and the papyrus log showed that it was trying to load a specific audio file for that type of ground.

In my personal experience, it's difficult but not impossible to EVENTUALLY get to a point where your mods play nice with either other and usually don't cause CTDs. But with heavily-modded games, it does take, at least me because I'm usually doing this late evening/night when I'm tired, time to get to that point. And there are probably always going to be cells somewhere, maybe even from the original files, that cause problems. But that would be the exception. This build is pretty stable, though, and I have played for a week or two with no CTDs. One of the big things I've found that cause them for me is Firefox. That thing has a memory leak that hasn't been fixed in the years I've been using it. Even if I only have two tabs open, it seems to be "remembering" all the other tabs I opened for some random timeperiod, I've seen it using almost a GB of memory. One day I kept getting CTDs, closed FF, and it didn't happen again. I often want to have it open when playing (I play windowed/borderless so I can alt-tab if I need to check my email or whatever), so I'll just close it and reopen it to clear out all the mess. (And I have a pretty powerful system, it's not using up all the memory when combined with Skyrim, I think it just turns into a bully or something, no idea...) Not related to this, but something I found out last night, if you install Immersive Horses, even if you never leave the LAL cell, you'll instantly CTD on load if you remove it. (I didn't mention that here, did I? I mentioned it somewhere... I'm going to make more tea.) I know the rule is to never remove mods, and this was just me testing a few new mods, but that seems a bit much for a horse mod. Convenient Horses didn't do that to me. (And now having tried both, I like it much better anyway.)

Yeah, I assume that's the exact same thing I did unless that mod just REALLY wants you to experience that confusion at least once while using it... (I want to ask who'd even want/need that symbol, but I say that about a lot of Skyrim mods I've seen so I try not to judge. But why someone would want it THERE by default, THAT I just don't get.) Glad I was able to help!

Oh, I had that! Drove me INSANE trying to track it down. I THINK it was the Matter of Time mod, some option in there to show you some kind of symbol related to the day or something bizarre like that. It should be in the area where you toggle all the symbols/times/dates/etc. (Is there an option for a second symbol on there? If so, I think that was it.) If that's not it, LMK and I'll check on my other computer (no Skyrim on this one) and see if I can find it.

Ha. :-p I can't play a game without Frostfall (with all the most hardcore settings), it just doesn't feel right. That start was tough, though. At least there was a camp with a permanent bonfire, though I've actually been wondering if there's a mod to turn those off. Her story went a really interesting way, though. She was exploring the area and found... wow, I'm totally drawing a blank on which shrine that was. Anyway, there she found a book called "The Importance of Where." That night, she got attacked by, no lie, something like 15 wolves. Remembering that book, she scrambled up on a rock where only one of them could get near her at a time and killed all of them. That left her with enough pelts to make warm clothing, a cloak, tent, basically everything she needed. She carried that book with her the rest of the game, feeling that it had saved her life. Thinking of her, though, it seems like the SSE version of Frostfall is a bit harsher. My Bosmer was dressed in nothing but rags, but could still leave the fire long enough to try to find supplies, or hunt for food. The night she killed all of those wolves, she made her clothing that night in near darkness and was able to sleep up on that rock away from the fire, but mostly safe from the wolves. In my recent SSE game, Faendal was trying to teach my Breton to like the outdoors (yeah, not so much) and took her camping, and even dressed in the warmest clothing, they could barely be away from the camp for a minute or two before she was freezing to death. She did better when they moved more north toward Whiterun, but still couldn't sleep without a fire. Although come to think of it, I wasn't seeing their breath like I am now. Something is seriously wonky in my game. I'm liking iNeed, but I played SO many years with RNaD that I'm having a bit of a time getting used to it. And didn't that one give you empty bottles if you drank wine or ale or something? And you could get bottles of spring water in inns? After escaping Helgen and getting into Riverwood, she's practically dying of thirst, but has to go to the inn and purchase a waterskin before anyone will give the poor thing water. And does that well in Riverwood work for anyone else? The one in Whiterun does but that one doesn't for me. Also, assigning a hotkey doesn't let her drink from a stream, I have to click on an empty waterskin in her inventory. That's what I get for ignoring Skyrim for a couple weeks, my entire install goes all wonky on me. *Sigh* Time to spend another Saturday redoing my mods.

LOL I doubt he'd appreciate it much. And actually before him I was using another Khajiit follower from Interesting NPCs. It's weird, they're my favorite race, though I've never wanted to play one, just hang out with them. (Given that I often play Bosmer, I was saddened to find out about their history with the Khajiit, but her issue was with man because she started out in Skyrim beaten and abandoned by bandits (by the Sea of Ghosts, with Frostfall - seriously hardcore survival challenge), and the Khajiit was fascinating, a lot of the things he said seemed rather Buddhist in nature. (Qa’Dojo - unfortunately often hard to find.)) Re: CoC, not just pen and paper, but props. Especially fun to make for CoC games! I did everything from book pages to matchboxes to having him take a date to a film that was playing during that exact timeperiod, giving him a printout of the actual playbill for it, and watching the film on Amazon. (I also made him banish a demon using a ritual involving a Latin chant that had to be chanted for 5m with no pauses and no mistakes, which he did while I was running around him screaming and cursing and throwing things at him. SO much fun! Ok, sorry, going way off-topic here. Well, not completely. Then we bought Skyrim. His character has been hanging around at Miskatonic University since 2011.)

Oh, yes, I know. I'm a huge Jason Momoa fangirl, can't WAIT for Aquaman! I've been trying to resist porting that follower to SE because honestly, unless I have a universal translator, he's not REALLY Khal Drogo. But the thing I really like about him aside from, well, Khal Drogo (Skyrim is so lacking in male eyecandy and I haven't gotten far enough into a game to even begin to think of going to track down Kaidan), is that I started him at Level 30 and gave him stats and perks that made sense. (Which worked really nicely with Followers Can Craft.) My usual follower before Inigo came along was always Stenvar (although I'd forgotten how whiny he is without the dialog overhaul - dude, you're a Nord, WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS SO COLD??!!) and it makes zero sense that he's at or near the same level as my weak low-level characters. Him or any of the followers. And yeah, first time I played with a combat overhaul, I was also getting mauled by the mudcrabs. It's what reminded me of that mod. And reminded me of the time I was trying to show my husband that AD&D was an awesome fun game and not this thing just for nerds, so he spent half a day creating a character only to have him killed by rats in 5m of playing an online single-player adventure I found. (I switched to Call of Cthulhu and played loose with the rules there (as well as expanding a lot of the pre-made scenarios) and won him over, thankfully. Although I did once randomly attack him with rats just to mess with him. LOL) I always clean anything that LOOT tells me to, so that wouldn't be a problem. But another reason I want to streamline is I'm tired of patching patches for patches' patches, especially when I don't want to use something that's in one of the CR patches. I need more compatibility in my life. Modding is only fun when you actually get to play the game. (No offense, Lexy, this is an AMAZING guide and you do AMAZING work trying to get it and keep it stable, but I know I don't have to tell you that keeping up with it and trying to figure out issues is exhausting. I can't imagine when you last had time to just sit down and play!)

They annoy me in general, stupid little things snapping at my heels, I've had them chase me practically into a different hold, and in areas with huge concentrations, either couldn't get my followers to stop fighting them or couldn't do anything that you can't do in combat because I was pretty much ALWAYS stuck in combat mode around those things.

Oh, thank you! Missed that somehow. You know, I've never even looked closely to see what that mod is. The name makes me think of GoT, although that's sun and stars. (Or to be more proper: Shekh Ma Shieraki Anni). Yes, I'm the one that posted the image of my Nord in Bosmer armor that included the Khal Drogo follower I made for SLE, don't judge. :-p Not really related, I'm thinking if I'm going to spend yet ANOTHER weekend troubleshooting mods, I need to seriously cut back to basics and then start adding back the ones from here I want. I've been modding for over two months now and have yet to play a real game. I was looking over TechAngel85's guide (other simpler STEP recommendations welcome as well), and just died laughing at the inclusion of a mod called Chicken Butthurt Minimizer AKA Immersive Eggs. It makes sense, though. I was sitting at Alvor's & Sigrid's table and thinking that it looked way more like an ostrich egg or something. Poor chickens. LOL Although I'll definitely not forget to include Critters Ain't Snitches after seeing this. And Peaceful Mudcrabs because **** mudcrabs.

A couple of weird things. Since when do couriers come into a house to deliver something? I have the Moon & Star courier randomly coming into Alvor & Sigrid's house, even the basement. (And it's especially weird since my character JUST got out of Helgen, but it's delivered to The Dragonborn. She's going, "Um, who?" DEFINITELY a quest in need of a delayed start.) Edit: And now the courier is just standing there on their porch... Also, strange graphics thing, if I turn the camera away from him and then back, he's briefly bald and his clothing color/texture is slightly different. Not just once, but each time I do it. I haven't changed anything in the game since I last played, and I never experienced random NPC temporary hair loss. And I'm not overloading anything on my machine. (And I can't see into the distance from where she's standing, so it's not an issue with distant terrain overloading my graphics card.) Additional Edit: Ok, Sven's just standing in the middle of the road, too. This is all a bit creepy. Also, should I be seeing her breath in Riverwood? I don't remember it ever being that cold there. In past games, I don't remember it happening until my character started heading toward the Windhelm area or similar. And Frostfall is telling me she's warm, or at least warm enough. She's walking around in a dress just fine. Wow, so much pondering of pronouns when talking about in-game stuff. LOL

I was having that same problem even in SLE and it turns out to be a slider that I think is called "age" maybe? (I don't have the game open now.) For some reason, I had to put that somewhere in the middle. It doesn't seem to affect anything having to do with age (maybe it does in combo with other sliders like complexion and such) but having it all the way to the left always gave me cheeks with sharp points up toward the eyes. For everyone having problems with the CTDs and Frostfall, I didn't use the version linked in the guide, I did the changes myself following the instructions from a video someone posted here a little while back that included Wearable Lanterns. (Sorry, I'd search, but I'm supposed to be out the door already.) I haven't had any CTDs at all from selling stuff or doing anything else, I just had to disable ALL of the version checking in SkyUI to get those errors to stop, not just the ones it said to disable. Maybe the one on Nexus was ported some slightly different way?

BTW, does anyone know which mod gives NPCs random magic powers? Given how the Nords feel about mages, it seems really strange to see half the Stormcloaks in Helgen using magic (not to mention it makes the fight through Helgen take FOREVER on Legendary mode) and having Faendal using a hunting bow that shoots magic arrows is just... weird. I looked through the descriptions of a ton of mods, and narrowed it down to, well, way too many to test.

Regarding Immersive Citizens, I understand your reasoning, but this is the first time I've ever been able to play with it and I'd be really sad to see it go. So far the only conflict I've seen mentioned is Dawnstar and I'd honestly rather remove it and see if one of the other overhauls is compatible. (I've always used either JK or ETaC and loved both, but back then, neither were compatible. Not sure about now.) Having said that, I did read at least part of the Reddit thread, and I see the arguments against it. As for the patches... I hate to ask this, but would it be possible for some of your patches for you to upload a zip file of the mods you include? I was able to make my own NPC Retexture Merge patch since it only contained a few mods and you listed the order, but I'm not sure what, if anything, you might have changed in those your version of the mods I merged. And I don't want to use Immersive Armors, which means I can't use LOTD Patches Merged or Lexy's LoTD SE Conflict Resolution without having to fix a ton of errors or making my own, and there are A LOT of mods in there and I don't know what you might have done to them either. I had cleaned the errors from Conflict Resolution Merged because I don't want to use Sofia or Mrissi, but didn't think about that and ended up overwriting my changes when you updated that one. It would be so much easier if merging a zip file of your versions would mean not having to fix errors every single time we update. If there's some reason it would be a pain, I completely understand, but otherwise, if you could give us a zip maybe even just for those few, it would be so much easier when you did updates if we could just download the zips, remove the mods we aren't using, recreate the patch using the mods in the zip, which would include any tweaks you might have done, and then check THOSE for errors. I've been using Racemenu for a while now with no issues, except that I can't get body paints/textures to work. They don't seem to show up anywhere. Has anyone gotten it to quit showing the errors for Itemcard and Bottombar? I swear I wasn't having a problem with that before, or at least it was only happening once. Now it's happening pretty much every time I open any of the menus. May I ask why the switch? I admit I've never used IH, but I've used CH a lot (back in SLE, haven't managed to get far enough to need a horse yet now) and really love it. Along the lines of "if it ain't broke," this isn't really my place to say, but I very meekly suggest that we quit adding and removing things and focusing on getting everything stable as-is. (Except for little things that don't affect half the mods in the game. I love the new bathing mod!) There's been more than once that I've started a game and played for hours with no problems, then did updates and suddenly started having problems again. I LOVE LOVE LOVE this guide and want to keep up with it, but I spend so much time upgrading and testing and changing things that I've had to start over with a completely new, clean game I don't know how many times and haven't even been able to get my girl out of Riverwood yet. That said, I know this is driving you far crazier than it could ever be driving us, and I know you're doing everything you can to give us a stable game. Please don't take any of what I said as anything personal, I could never in a million years put something like this together. The frustration is just that it's awesome, and as of my last update a couple days ago, everything seems to be working. But I'm trying to keep up with the guide this time because last time I got too behind with the changelog, things got so out-of-sync when I was trying to update that I ended up basically having to start over. But just to end, let me say again, THANK YOU for doing this. This guide is amazing and I'm so looking forward to finally playing a real game with it!

BTW, I deleted almost everything except stuff that I knew was vanilla from my Skyrim directory yesterday and let Steam fix it to see if it got rid of a couple of stupid problems I was having. (I was even smart enough to zip it up before adding stuff to it again this time.) If anyone has the same problem I did with Wrye Bash saying it can't find a game to manage, you have to actually run Skyrim once, not just the setup part, but into the actual game menu. Then it'll find it. Apologies if this is covered somewhere else in the guide, but I was testing all the apps when I added them to LOOT (or in this case, just making sure the path I'd already added was still correct) and it took me forever to figure it out the first time and almost as long to remember what I'd done to fix it that time. (And I did search the thread, if I missed it, well, I've been brain-dead for about a week, it honestly wouldn't surprise me.)

My issue was that I was getting all of the circular reference notices people reported here. I tried disabling a couple of the mods it was bitching about and it would just find others to ***** about. I haven't looked since then so maybe there's a fix for that or something (like possibly in that image you posted above).

Trying to start my game and remembering that LOOT is all messed up, I think my only option for the evening is to go grab some food and drink like a fish. At least I fixed my ENB. (Somehow the original files had gotten deleted out of the SSE directory. Probably something I screwed up when playing with the ENB manager.)

I guess I could have actually looked, couldn't I? *sigh* I seriously need some sleep. (I've had insomnia for weeks.) But first, I think I need dinner. And beer. (BTW, your username always reminds me of Killian's Irish Red.)

Oooh, that's harsh... (BTW, if you use SOS, there's a full version on LL that goes with Tempered Skins for Males, the one I use because it gives men feet... Just found it, though. Haven't tried it so maybe I should actually get back to you on that...) Elvenwood! I loved that mod back on SLE! Unfortunately the framerate drop was HORRIBLE. I seriously seriously need to get with it and make my Bosmer so I can try all of these cool Bosmer mods I keep finding. (Well, first, I seriously seriously need to quit messing around with mods and actually play a real game with my Breton...) I'll check out the settlements one, I always love new locations. We already have Soljunds Sinkhole, though, although with it being a single mod, it's easy enough to disable if this one's better.

Ok, your problem beats mine. I'd probably have to say your problem even beats my naked Imperial problem from a while back. LOL (You know, years and probably thousands of hours playing SLE, I've never once seen the headless horseman.)

I just looked at my old SLE install and I didn't extract them then and I made a ton of mods with it, so I guess it doesn't matter. (All for personal use, I've never been brave enough to upload any.) But especially since I started looking at house mods last night, I'm really wanting to get back into modding again. I went ahead and extracted the scripts because why not. It's weird that the directory structure is backwards, though, source/scripts instead of the other way. I'm not sure if I should fix that or not. Huh. I wonder if something changed with SSE. I looked at some of the scripts and the ones I looked at weren't compiled, so it's right that they're sources. It doesn't mention the directory structure for those, though. I guess if it's packaged that way, the creation kit knows where they are? Thanks for looking that up for me, I'm seriously brain-dead today. :-) All of this (mostly) because I'm trying to figure out why bShowTutorials=0 in skyrim.ini doesn't work any more. (My enb also isn't working right. No idea how I messed that up either, or if it has to do with that update we did recently.)

Thank you. I'm thinking it's nap time for me... What about extracting/not extracting the scripts? I'm happy following this guide, I'm just wondering overall what the difference is.