I've a very similar mod setup to you, there ARE some differences but the sort of crashes and freezes you are describing are very similar to mine. I can get a fairly reproducible freeze if I start with alternate start at riverwood inn and run out back up the hill towards the standing stones and use fire magic to kill the wolves that spawn near the road on the way & killing the bandits that guard the mine on the way and if that doesn't stress the system out I will keep going up to Helgen towards the starting cave and flame the wolves on the way there. Kills my game almost every time. I think I can categorize my crashes even better: I am getting the sort of crash where if I load a save game outside I am much more likely to get infinite load screens, it's randomish, sometimes it loads fine and if I save in a small cell, the game loads more reliably. I also notice that the game is more likely to crash in combat, especially spell casting. The game is more likely to crash if I install any new mods on top of the ton of mods I have. Even though I can force/stress the game to crash, the game can crash any where, but mostly outdoor, dungeons tend to be better. I can sometime play for an hour without any crashes but it's rarely more than an hour. I've crashed when I click "M" to show the map (once or twice), I have crashed during quicksaves. All these rather Random mish/mash of crashes, leads me to suspect a RAM issue, as it's the only explanation that can explain all the crashes. I am certain that after I discovered how to compress my textures/normals my crash problem has improved markedly. I have reduced all my textures to 1024x1024 (my mobo isn't as powerful as some, its almost 2 years old now, overclock i7 3Ghz OC to 3.6Ghz and a Nvidia 580 Gtx with only 1.5G of vram), but I am going to try reducing the other textures you have further reduced to see if that helps. Also I am going to get rid of the Z-fighting stuff and stop using SMIM to see how things go.... then disable frost/fire effect (I am already using deadly spell impart low resolution!) then step, by step remove AIMP, Dual Sheath Redux and see how things go. I will report back here. NOTE: To disable SMIM you'll need to disable the following patches too: Tobes Highres Textures 1_2b SMIM Patch AM-SMIM Patch & Wearable Lanterns SMIM Patch I do use Skyre, ASIS, frostfall, wet & cold, realistic needs and diseases, immersive creatures and skytest, I am trying to avoid having to stop using any of these because I love them too much. I haven't installed automatic variants, not looking for trouble and I am not sure how much different color cows will add to my game! I rather more bandit camps! (If only I can install Sands of Time, buggy as all hell when used with the other mods on my list, makes the game hard as hell, but I love how it changes the game! I love especially the part where you can adjust reinforcements for spawns to make battle encounters very unpredictable!) Off on a tangent, skip if you are not interested (following 3 paragraphs), I talk a little about the non-step, non-SR mods that I use that increase immersion for me, some interactions are new for most people so you may find it interesting, in any case I would be interested to hear anyone's opinion about their compatibility though: "Other mods that I am using and really really love, that isn't on the SR list are: dynamic difficulty, dynamic things, more realistic loot, autosave manager (I turn off all the skyrim.ini autosave features and just use this) & bounty gold. I think dynamic difficulty is fairly stable as I've never seen a reference to it in the papyrus logs, its a great mod that adjusts the difficulty dynamically if I am getting killed over and over again, really works (remember to turn on: ignore stealth kills or else your assassin character will get slaughtered whenever he or she gets discovered because the difficulty has ramped up too high after a series of successful stealth kills) . The mod that probably causes most script stress is dynamic things, but once again, I don't see any papyrus errors when I check, so I think it's safe, I do decrease the distance that things are checked for in the MCM menus to further decrease script stress. Once you have used dynamic things, you'll wonder how you lived without it! The fact that you can chop a tree down for fire wood and search wood piles for wood and search bushes for deadwood is SUPER immersive and a life saver a lot of the time. The last time I died from the cold right NEXT to a pile of firewood was the last straw for me, this mod fixed that! I usually have frostfall's cold affect on 1.6x to really make things hairy! I really love the random loot that I get from realistic loot, just makes more sense that bandits and other adventurers are carrying more than just their boots and weapons in my opinion. Great mod that shouldn't cause any problems. Also makes the game a tiny bit easier... but it far from offset all the other difficulty mods that is running at the same time, so the loot doesn't unbalance the game. You'll have more scrolls and potions though... but with ASIS and Skyre and HLE... you'll need them! Also makes them almost impossible battles more possible with tactical use of the extra loot you have. The other mod that I like using is Professions, I don't care for the actual "profession" part of the mod, which you can pretty much all but turn off via the MCM, BUT the mod allows you to adjust and allow game-time passing when doing tanning, smithing, skinning animals (works just like hunterborn without the hassles), haggling, chopping wood, mining, cooking, alchemy-ing etc. Really plays well with realistic needs and disease & frostfall. Makes the game super immersive. (Tip: You will need to decrease the default "how much time passes for the activity": by 50% to 75% or else time passes too quickly during these activities and you go thirsty/hungry/cold too quickly.) The first time when you go to the smithy to smith a load of stuff and finishing when the day becomes night, you will thank me for the satisfication you'll get for a hard days work done! Things like smithing feels real now, rather than just a menu option that occurs in frozen time!" Before this mod, I used to increase my hunger and thirst rate in RN&D but with this mod installed the default settings are perfect, I do increase the time it takes for cheese & veges to rot to 14 days and 10 days respectively to make it more realistic. Now: you will run out of food in a realistic way and finding food in a bandit camp will bring you much more joy!! One other mod I use is the Become a Bard mod, which if you want to be a bard, makes for great immersion, makes all them inns and taverns useful again, not just for the bed! Other immersion mods I've tried and have decided it's not worth the bother are the encumbrance mods, just makes the game frustrating, once you are frustrated you start installing make "things" lighter mods... then you wonder why bother in the first place! I've found the "unrealistic" carrying capacity in the vanilla game with the "unrealistic" weight of potions, ingredients & weapons, balance each other out quite realistically! One thing I can contribute to this conversation for my setup anyway: In the past before I started meddling with my mods again, the setting that had made a difference was decreasing the shadows further to 512, I use an ENB and even though the shadows were slightly blurry the ENB enhancements to the shadows makes the shadows pleasing to the eye anyway even at 512 or 256, this and turning off the shadows on the grass made a significant improvement to my fps and stability (without much difference to the visuals). Also increasing the grass density number from 70 to 128 with grass on steroids installed (vanilla goldielock version if you need to save on more memory or SFO version if you system can handle it.) also helped by keeping the visuals of dense grass but helping with performance. Interestingly it was never the ENB that causes instability, it decreases the fps but even with it off, the game will crash when it wants to at the same spots. Makes sense since the ENB shouldn't add to the texture memory used and in turn shouldn't increase RAM usage. As long as I've written an essay anyhow, I can make one more irrelevant recommendation, it took me forever to find the perfect ENB for me and I just want to share (its my first ever post on this forum! So give me some slack!): Try Unreal Cinema ENB, it's unbelievable, makes the game so cinematic, I've tried all the top 30 endorsed ENB and this is the one I'll be playing with for a long long time to come. It's perfect. Keeps the vanilla colors scheme mostly (no over saturation which I don't like), with a little more sepia, the letterbox vignetting & grain just works, even though I hated both for other ENBs. Works well with RLO, amazingly well, I did adjust the dungeon brightness up a little in the ENB settings though. The dungeons are perfect now. The DOF is slow like a camera lens, I would normally hate this too but it seems right for some reason for this ENB (you can use another DOF to your liking of course). Even though it says it's not a "realism" ENB, I think its by far the most "realistic" ENB I've tried, in the context that it looks just like a movie. Performance isn't bad either, I get 32 fps on my old setup in most places, so it's going to run fine on newer mobos. (Come to think of it: the film-grain effect actually help mask much of the 1024x1024 lowish textures that I am using, making them much more realistic and masking any blur that I get when things come up close) One other thing: don't use the enbAA as this turned my game into a slide show, use the cheaper edgeAA dlls instead.
