I saw legendary Skyrim for $20 at Gamstop. If I switch back to playing it on my workstation, what 3rd party mods are worth getting? Where do I get them? How many can be loaded at a time? My workstation is designed for CAD, Photoshop and gaming. So hardware is not an issue. I have all the modules for Skyrim on my Xbox 360. I want to start the game as of Day 0 and level back up. I don't need advlt mods for it. My wife and baby would not be happy with them. So just PG rated mods like the game is now.

Where to start from...

I consider the unofficial patches mandatory to any skyrim pc installation. Besides bugfixing however, http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/users/684492/?tb=mods&pUp=1# has also created a good deal of plugins that fit just right into the game. Then, there's SkyrimHD, AmidianBorn Book of Silence and the rest of http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/users/571605/?tb=mods&pUp=1 creations, Langley's Texture Workshop, Xenius Character Enhancement (lore friendly face & body textures), content mods like Wyrmstooth, Falskaar, Moonpath to Elsweyr and many others....

There's no such thing as a definitive mods list. If I posted mine and told you "here, download these 250 mods and slap them on Mod Organizer/NMM" it wouldn't do justice to what highly talented people have shared with us over the years, which I just don't happen to be using, because either I'm not aware of them, or they don't fit to my own sense of context... modding is a very personal thing.

Best to look around Nexus and choose for yourself. Yes, you'll feel like a kid in a toy store, but it's part of the process

SkyUI. It isn't the #1 mod of all time by a safe margin on Skyrim Nexus for nuttin'.

I consider it an indictment of the poor design of the vanilla UI.

That one too.

I worked with ATI and Gigabyte on getting a stable chipset and video firmware for software and game testing in 3D mode. The 6970 firmware fixes were to the temperature controls on its dual fans. I also replaced all 13 chassis fans with Panflo 30dB fans. This 6970 is considered the quietest gaming adapter on the market for its performance. The workstation has been very stable since day 1. It runs quiet and very cool. I have yet found a game that can max out my workstation. So adding mods will not be a problem.

Interesting 250+ mods? Do they each get installed separately or part of a pack? After the base install, do I do the game patches before SkyIUI? What is the order for the installation? Does the site have a place to pay the designers for their work. I remember sending the engineer who wrote Hypercache $25. He e-mailed me in amazement that no one ever sent him money. He made many fixes for me to improve Windows 3.1 caching by 450%. It would be interesting to complete all the broken quests on the Xbox 360 version.

You can load up to 255 esm/esp files at a time. There is a 255 limit hardwired into the game engine. If you want to load more you need to merge them. But depending on your system and what mods you are using, you may run into a practical limit before that, since it is easy to bring even a good gaming computer to its knees with the right combination of mods, since some affect performance more than others.

If you are thinking of installing a lot of mods, I'd recommend taking the time to learn either Wrye Bash or Mod Organizer to install and manage your mods. Either is better than NMM. I prefer Wrye Bash, but Mod Organizer seems to have more users. Wrye Bash is kinda old school.

You should sort your load order with LOOT, unless you really know what you are doing and do a manual sort, but even then, LOOT is a good place to get a basic load order that you can tweak yourself. Remember the "rule of one", when two mods affect the same entry, only the last one loaded has any affect in the game. There are various ways to merge such changes into a single patch that loads last so you can get both of them working together.

There is a mod called Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE) that you will want if you are installing a lot of mods. It is necessary for many script based mods and it has its own "ini" file that changes the way memory is used by the game that can make your game more stable with fewer out of memory crashes. There are also various SKSE plugins (.dll files) that can be added to give the game additional features, like uncapping skills, as one example. These SKSE plugins are not esp/esm files, so they don't count against your 255 limit and they are not loaded into the game so they are much easier to manage.

You may want to clean your mods, since some of them contain unintentional records that are identical to the records in Skyrim.esm (of one of the official DLC esm files), which are harmless unless they load after a mod that makes intentional changes to these records. You can clean these types of "dirty" edits with a tool called TES5Edit.

You can download mods from Nexus. It is the primary place for mods. You can also get some from the Steam workshop, but I prefer to just use the Nexus site. You can get all of the unofficial patches there. Those fix literally thousands of bugs from the vanilla game.

Everyone has their own favorite mods. there are thousands of mods available and many of them are good. Some of them might be a bit buggy, but you can read the mod description and some of the posts on the Nexus site to get a pretty good feel about how stable the mod is and whether it has any major problems. You do have to take some of what some people say with a grain of sale because a lot of people's complaint about mods result from user error and improper installations or conflicts with other mods the particular person is using. But once you get the hang of how mods work, it is pretty easy to tell the difference between someone's legitimate complaint and someone complaining because they made a mistake in the installation. I usually do a fair bit of research about a mod before I install it.

If you want a list of mods, I will tell you some of my favorites (all downloaded from Nexus) in no particular order:

Unofficial patches (all of them)

Flora harvest respawn bug fix

ENBoost (requires the latest Skyrim ENB Series downloaded from Boris's site)

Requiem

Apocalypse

Wintermyst

Frostfall

Wet and Cold

SkyUI

Less Intrusive HUD

iHUD

Warburg's Paper Map (note has some compatibility issues with some mods that add new land masses like Falscar and Wyrmstooth, so if you are using those, you might want to use A Better Map, or whatever the other main map mod is called)

Skyrim HD

SMIM

Skyfalls

WATER

Climates of Tamriel

Skyrim Flora Overhaul

Expanded Towns and Cities

Immersive College of Winterhold

Spell Crafting

JK's Skyrim

Convenient Horses

Touring Carriages

Even Better Quest Objectives

Violens

The Notice Board

Timing is Everything

Alternative Start

Point the Way

I have a very stable load order that I can play for many hours without crashes with good FPS, no lag, except in one or two spots in Markarth where JK Skyrim adds tons of clutter, the FPS drops to about 20 for a couple seconds. Everywhere else I get near constant 50-60 at 1080p. I've got a decent rig though and am not using an ENB. Some of my mods, JK's Skyrim in particular can have a big impact on performance if you don't have a computer than can handle it. Sounds like you've got a good PC though, so you should be fine.

Edit: And none of the mods on my list are any less PG than the game itself. I don't use any "advlt" mods in my Skyrim load order, since I am not using a body replacer. Most body replacers have clothing and no clothing options that you can select when you install them. In general, you are not going to find a lot of "advlt" mods on Nexus, other than the body replacers, which will have underwear and nvde options. There is another site dedicated to "advlt" mods and most of the real advlt mods go there.

They're separate installs -mostly. When it's not just meshes/textures but plugins (.esp) too, LOOT handles the load order, while Wrye Bash ensures they work nicely with each other.

As for the unofficial patches, there's a certain load order that needs to be applied:

Skyrim.esmUpdate.esmUnofficial Skyrim Patch.espDawnguard.esmUnofficial Dawnguard Patch.espHearthfires.esmUnofficial Hearthfire Patch.espDragonborn.esmUnofficial Dragonborn Patch.esp[Your other ESM files]HighResTexturePack01.espHighResTexturePack02.espHighResTexturePack03.espUnofficial High Resolution Patch.esp[The rest of your mods]

Also, pay attention to what Turija wrote about TES5Edit & SKSE. I'm currently on anti-inflammatory medication for my leg and I tend to forget things

Photoshop CS6 can handle 75 pictures from RAW to JPG a minute with 3 auto processes on this workstation. The 1000W power supply easily can power the 6970 for gaming. The Intel i7 has chipset offloading to the 6970 for all graphics. The only limitation might be Skyrim is not fully 64-bit to take advantage of all the RAM. I wonder if Skyrim can do multithreading across all the i7 cores? That has been a [censored] of mine for game development for years. No multithreading to take advantage of all those cores. Not many games are 64-bit. Atkara, thanks for the load order list. I don't like Steam. They micromanage too much. I had problems with them in the past beta testing games and they said I was cheating. Turija how much ram are you using with all those mods?

I don't think Skyrim uses more than 3 threads -but I could be wrong. After the first outcry, Bethesda made sure the executable is large address aware, but even then, it will crash at ~3.1GB of memory usage.

This is where ENB comes in with it's host process. It essentially takes processing off Skyrim and can expand up to whatever memory you can afford to allocate. It will also expand to multiple threads if necessary.

http://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:ENBlocal_INI/Memory has a very good guide on how to configure ENB's memory section or the standalone ENBoost (an older version acting as a dummy video card if I'm not mistaken)

What Turija mentioned about SKSE (besides it being utilized on a number of mods) has to do with the way Skyrim configures it's initial memory pools. Their size is just too low, even on the vanilla game with the highres DLC active. Adding the following lines to your SKSE.ini, should give you enough overhead:

[Memory]DefaultHeapInitialAllocMB= 768ScrapHeapSizeMB= 256

There are a few other SKSE ini tweaks you may also want to use. Here is a link to a https://steamcommunity.com/app/72850/discussions/0/540740500921363665/?l=germandiscussing what the SKSE ini tweaks are and what they do.

It is also a good idea to manually clean the DLC after first using automated cleaning with TES5Edit. Yes, Bethesda's own DLC are full of dirty edits. Here are instructions for http://afkmods.iguanadons.net/index.php?/topic/4110-manual-cleaning-skyrim-master-files/.

I also use ENBoost to manage graphics memory. It took a while to get the ENBlocal ini tweaked properly, but once I did, it worked great.

My 6970 has 3GB of RAM on it. The workstation has 16GB. I have never had an issue with software or games. My wife and I were talking about my next build. We are both programmers. I am starting to learn C#, CSS, HTML 5 and ASP.NET. Might get a visual studio MSDN license. So 32

GB of RAM, two 6970s in cross fire and another monitor. Still researching the best chipset for the new i7s. I have been talking with Gigabyte about it. I have done testing from them in the past. I need a board with two x16 slots for video, separate bus for x8 for SAS RAID, I saw a three x16 board but two were tied for x8. I did consider going back up to my alma mater and designing another motherboard. Last one was $1500 to build. Sold it for $4000.

So I can clean the DLC. Thanks to all for your great advice.