skanderbeg53

Akatosh, thank you very much for your quick reply, it kind of all makes sense now! Yes, I understand that adding stuff on top of the STEP list will be on me to figure out, but do appreciate your insight and information greatly. Onward through the mod!

I'm also finding the STEP guide both a blessing and a curse. Blessing, because as I go through and pseudo-benchmark each section, I'm amazed at how fast and stable gameplay is. One cannot help but admire and appreciate the hours and hours of testing needed to make something as complex as STEP so stable. It's a curse in its arcane complexity. The biggest problem I'm having seems to be understanding Mod Organizer's organizational principals vs STEP. I end up with two big questions: 1) STEP is very specific about loading the mods in the prescribed order. So far so good; but then we're supposed to run LOOT at the end of things, which prescribes a different order. I know running LOOT will reorder the esp files in the right pane. Is it then necessary to try and match that order in the left pane? If so, that seems to negate the benefit of installation order. If not - what a relief! Re-ordering 200+ mods takes a long, tedious time. So after running LOOT, can I leave the left pane alone? 2) The other issue that STEP seems to not mention (or mentions somewhere I haven't seen), is additional mods. STEP is a good start, but if I want a body replacer, or different eye options, or something not what STEP would deem "lore friendly," like armor mods, player homes, apachii hair, bijin mods that dare make the women attractive, etc, I assume the install order is not necessarily the preferred location. Do I alter the mod location in the left pane to attempt to match up with the LOOT order in the right pane? Do I leave the new mods where they fall in the left pane (unless they're textures that obviously need to be in a particular location to work - based on the STEP sections, maybe?) and trust LOOT to handle the ESMs for me? And what about adding an ENB? Mostly I'm puzzled by the first question the most. Any guidance would be greatly appreciated! PS: STEP has "Clothing and Clutter fixes" installed in (for me) Priority 12, and "Weapons and Armor Fixes Remade" at priority 28. However, MO says that "Weapons and Armor..." needs to load before "Clothing and Clutter." Who's right?

Thanks, Dragon King.

I'm going through the STEP guide, and am down to the last section (finally - it's taken many many hours to go through this, thanks to quirky internet). I'm pseudo-benchmarking after every section by starting a new game and noticing the fps as well as the general performance. Kudos to the people who put this together - my game has never run faster. I still have micro stutter, despite all efforts to smooth it out - but it's not terrible. I'm looking forward to an actual playthrough, though I must say I enjoy killing that bloodthirsty Imperial Captain again and again, like a bad Groundhog Day scene. And now the fun/confusion. The guide says to load all the mods in, in the order they're listed in order to avoid conflicts and load order problems. Which is all well and good, until I get to the part about running LOOT, which invariably suggests a different load order. Should I go with the LOOT order, which is generated, or the STEP order, which I assume was arrived at via painstaking testing? In one particular case, with Smooth Blade Draw and Sheathe, there's a LOOT Meta Rule Instruction that says AOS.esp needs to load *after* ADS.esp. If that's the case, why did AOS get installed and loaded before ADS in the first place, and why would you create a LOOP Meta Rule to fix what seems to me could be avoided altogether by simply having loaded ADS before AOS in the first place. Where does an ENB fit into all this? Finally, I want to add mods like Caliente's Better Body, hair and skin mods, eyes, and custom armors. If I the STEP order is what is best, and I run LOOT, then my whole mod order is going to be messed up. Help! I know it's a lot of questions, but I've tried to answer most of them myself; just got stuck on these basic issues. And thanks again!