» Wed May 07, 2014 7:19 am I’d like to get some support from here on what I should be loading with Skyrim to get better stability in my next playthrough.
I’ve recently come back to Skyrim after a couple of years and must have forgotten a lot about how to keep a game stable, as I’ve taken 2 characters to level 30 over the last two months with different setups before realizing the game has become a buggy, unplayable mess. That’s not to say some of these bugs haven’t been entertaining. Occasionally I will load while on horseback, before the horse and I start flying, Meridia style, taking us high up and across the landscape before dashing us on the Haafingar rocks. I also get a guaranteed crash-to-desktop when trying to enter Dawnstar’s White Hall, giving all Pale related quests a new frisson of danger and challenge for the hardened player to fail in new and unexpected ways.
I just want to be sure I’ve not left anything out this time. If this next game goes fubar too I would find it difficult to try again.
Optional wall of text follows:
The first game in February I rushed in and installed a hundred mods just using the Nexus manager and Steam subscriptions. I didn’t spend any time cleaning or thinking about compatibility beyond a couple of patches and Bash. Given that I used to spend three days setting the far more stable Morrowind up, this was clearly a BAD IDEA. “Blood on the Ice” in Windhelm was so monstrously broken that I couldn’t enter the city again (no great loss). I also couldn’t absorb dragon souls after Ustengrav. While I could cope with the CTDs, that was a brick wall for that character.
The next game in April, I learned more about TES5edit and installation order. I cleaned everything, used LOOT, set the masters in order, added some SKSE plugins, removed some problem mods, as well as finding every “compatibility patch” I could feasibly add – pushed the total to 155. I made sure never to remove anything midgame and to avoid large updates to mods, and spent a day fine tuning and cautiously adding extras after finishing chargen. Only I reach the same point and experience the same crashes and more, including the bug with Dawnguard because I can’t dismiss my mod follower(s).
I’m not using any texture mods or ENBs, nor do I mess around with uGrids. Skyrim looks OK with the default to me. I will try and use ENBoost’s memory patches this time, though.
Here is a checklist of things I want to do this time:
· “Stress test” at the start, flying around at high speed and immediately check whether Dawnstar is OK for me this time.
· SKSE 1.7 “alpha” with the following settings/plugins: sheshon’s memory allocation, Fuz Ra D’oh, Nitpick, Cell Stabilizer, Safety Load, and Autosave Manager.
· No ini tweaks unless they are needed by a mod
· Mod Organizer instead of Nexus Mod Manager; keep Bash too of course.
· No huge overhaul mods like Requiem or Skyre
· Stability ENBoost
Am I missing anything, or would you suggest something else? I'll post a mod list once I've finalized what I want to include this time. I really want to get it right this time 
