New support request

[menmaatre]

After getting to stage 2.I "clothing & items" of STEP 2.2.7 I started getting endless loading screens. was mostly using 1024 options for texture packs but installing almost everything on the Core list including the infamous 2k Skyrim Realism Overhaul. Now starting fresh install of skyrim and STEP from scratch. Thing is I want to be way less ambitious with texture mods this time but also want to be comprehensive: environmental textures, items, character and NPC textures.

 

My "Must have" bottom line texture intensive mods are:

 

Patches, fixes and Interface:

All unofficial patches including all DLC but hearthfire

Sky-UI 4

XMPS skeleton

FNIS behavior

A Quality World Map with Roads (not sure if this one is problematic)

 

Environment:

SMIM + Skyrim HD (lite) + Water + Climates of Tamriel (with various weather add ons like supreme storms, lighting, etc) + Skyrim Floral Overhaul + Trees HD + Realistic Sun + Lorkhan's Vision Moons, stars & galaxy + HiRes road signs + point the way + realistic smoke and embers

 

Characters and Creatures:

Beards + Brows + Birds and Flocks + Birds of Skyrim + Bellyache Creatures (not Auto Variants) + Superior Lore Hair + 101 Bugs + XCE +

 

Khajit mods: I wanna be a big bad kitty cat sneak thief/assassin!

SC Khajiit Improvement males only + Better Beast Races + wild eyes + Khajiit war paints

 

Clothing & Weapons, clutter & Misc:

Weapons DeLARPification + Elemental staves 1K + Nightingale prime armor + detailed rugs + Radiant unique potions and BOOZE + soul gems differ + Wet and Cold

 

Non STEP Mods must haves (please tell me I can!):

Sneak Tools

Book Covers of Skyrim

WIC cloaks and/or Cloaks of Skyrim

Realistic Needs Diseases

Frostfall Hypothermia

 

Other Options: These are some Options I really also like but could live without any one of them if need be:

SkyBirds = this one looks really big and don't know if it add much over BoS + B&F

Male and Female body and face replacer mods (haven't decided which yet)

Footprints

realistic snow

visible windows

Lanterns of Skyrim

Sky Falls + Sky Mills

Real Ice

Realistic Snow

aMidian Born book of silence (this one scares me a bit )

Immersive Armors (non STEP I think)

 

IF all this is not already too much the question is what other texture mods should I add. I'm most concerned about the big environment/landscape packs as well as a few mods to expand cities. I don't know which of these would add much "must have" improvement over what I already have including the official hi res DLC and Skyrim HD. What are the relative merits of these?:

 

ruin clutter

Serious HD

Skyrim Realistic Overhall (maybe too much for my system?)

HD Misc items

Tobe's Hi-res

Enhanced distant Terrain original and #2

Distant Detail

HD Enhanced Terrain

High Quality LODs

Beauty of Skyrim dungeons

Terrain bumps

 

Most of the other stuff in the STEP lists I can live without.

 

I'd love to know what anybody thinks about any of this. sorry if this post is too long, I'm new to the forums. Thanks!

[mothergoose729]

hey there menmatre. I am going through a similar process, and have been testing things out for weeks. I am not done yet, but based one what I have learned, here is what I know about textures and STEP:

 

The VRAM limit for 1gb cards, at least my 1gb cards, is pretty high with textures. The SRO 1k/2k, with HDDLC optimized 1024, and the HDDLC pack 1 can all work together. Nearly all of the miscellaneous texture re placers can be added on top of that so long as you use the low res versions of each. I have forgone Beauty of Skyrim - Dungeons and the HD Serious and HD2k packs. I don't recommend terrain bump or any of the LOD re placers for the time being, because they add an incredible amount of burden to your system. Skymills and distant terrain are all stable, even if a bit of a frame sink, nearest I can tell. My system can't handle Vurts at the moment. I don't really know how it effects the game, my guess is a lot. Use with caution. I can say with some confidence that a full, unadulterated install of book of silence and all associate packs is A-ok. Its a pretty small burden because there is rarely more than a handful of actors on screen at a time, and when there are they are almost always in interior cells. I also have been using bellyaches meduim res version and W.A.T.E.R meduim, SMIM with the half size textures but full mesh high poly mesh replacements, Visible windows, and XCE, better beast races (low res) and coverkhajits 1024 res versions. With all those installed you get some occasional choppyness, uncheck HDDLC 01 and most of that will go away. Tentatively going to say all those textures are safe with 1gb cards, and this is without doing any optimizing or compressing.

 

The HDDLC pack 01 had the weapons, armors, and actor normal maps. In particular, XCE really shines with the HDDLCs 2048x normal maps for NPCs and PCs face and body textures. It also had the HD effects, so you get better smoke, steam, moss, and spell effects like lightning and fire. It will shave a couple fps though and I am not entirely sure that it doesn't lead to instability with other mods present. Manaully unpacking and removing the effects folder might be a safer bet.

 

Something to note here, skyrim is not a stable game even at vanilla. I have tested so much with so many mods and been very confused as to why I get crashes. Recently figured out that skyrim crashes on its own even with no mods installed. I am currently working out a way to figure out how many mods you can add without making skyrim MORE unstable, but for the meantime, that is my best guess.

 

I am unsure about a few STEP mods, so I would test them yourself or leave them out:

 

Footprints

Wet and Cold - (have some reason to think it adds to instability)

Bring out your Dead

Improved Puddles (I think it causes some weird behavior with diverse priests.

Unkown Enchants

[rootsrat]

I moved your posts to more appropriate area.

 

@OP: Please edit the thread title to a more suitable one, as I gave it a generic name of New Support Request.

 

Thanks

[phryxolydian]

Hopefully your system will be able to cope with all that. Skyrim Flora Overhaul, Frostfall and some other mods you list are very heavy to the CPU if I'm not mistaken, although I'm no expert. I recently uninstalled Birdsofskyrim myself when it was pointed at me that it's very CPU intensive..