Additional mods after guide

[mulliganplummer]

I have wondered this every time I follow one of your guides, when the guide is done and everything runs smoothly, can additional mods be added? No really model/texture mods, but odds and end, like a city/town overhauls, player home, followers, new races, different bodies(CBBE, UNP, 3BA, etc), different skin textures. even some mods that might spice things up a bit, like TAWOBA, new outfits, etc. Will these work? what should be done if there is a conflict?

[DoubleYou]

Other mods may or may not work. Pay attention to the mod page descriptions which typically will tell you what mods they are incompatible with. Things changing landscape or adding buildings will likely be incompatible with loading the gid grass cache, so make sure you disable that (you can still use it to make grass lods with DynDOLOD). Be aware that these mods will also require regeneration of lods. Body mods will require care for compatibility with the provided body mods, and you may need to remove those in order to replace them. And remember to rerun Nemesis if you do so. Mods adding new weapons and outfits likely will need to be added to the leveled lists.

Adding mods is not within the purview of the guide itself, but we do try to give guidance if we are able. That being said, we would be spectacular nerds to know about all mods out there and their compatibility status with our guide. 

[Greg]

I also recommend installing the guide and verifying everything works correctly before installing any mods on top. Once you are ready to add additional mods, copy your current profile to a new profile and add your mods to the new profile. The general idea is to keep the Step profile unmodified so you can fall back to it if necessary.

[mulliganplummer]

On 4/26/2022 at 6:54 AM, Greg said:

I also recommend installing the guide and verifying everything works correctly before installing any mods on top. Once you are ready to add additional mods, copy your current profile to a new profile and add your mods to the new profile. The general idea is to keep the Step profile unmodified so you can fall back to it if necessary.

great tip thanks

[ButchDiavolo]

On 4/26/2022 at 2:35 AM, mulliganplummer said:

I have wondered this every time I follow one of your guides, when the guide is done and everything runs smoothly, can additional mods be added? No really model/texture mods, but odds and end, like a city/town overhauls, player home, followers, new races, different bodies(CBBE, UNP, 3BA, etc), different skin textures. even some mods that might spice things up a bit, like TAWOBA, new outfits, etc. Will these work? what should be done if there is a conflict?

As I said before, (rather negatively and off-puttingly I think, sorry about that) after you finished the STEP guide and made sure that is at least working as it should, you can basically add as many mods as you like. The only issue is that there WILL be conflicts and errors. When these occur you will have to decide which mod takes precedence. Load order on the left pane is extremely important in that case. You can move around the mods in the left pane until you are happy with the results. Creating a Bashed Patch with Wrye Bash can help fix problems, but you need to know what you are doing. So if you want to go that route, read up on how Wrye bash works. I sorta-kinda made a "guide" of working with Wrye Bash would work in the other post.

Just (another) word of warning: once you start adding mods on top of STEP, you run the risk of turning modding into a "hobby", instead of actually playing the game. i.e. I currently have 523 mods in total (144 ESMs+ESPs and 563 ESLs active in total). It took me about 6 months to get everything to work nicely together. Having knowledge of the likes of SSEEdit and Wrye Bash (maybe even Creation Kit) are more or less required for that.

In short, you will have to think of what your want to achieve for the game. Add one (or a few) mods at a time and test if things still work. Then work on resolving conflicts and other issues. And don't go overboard or add too many similar mods. And be prepared to get frustrated