I would really like to upload my new town mod to Steam so am hoping that I can compress the BSA enough to do it.

Steam's upload limit is of course 100mb. Or as I understand it the Creation Kit's Steam upload limit.

My BSA packaged by the Archive that comes with Skyrim is at 221mb.

Compressed with the Archive it goes down to 109mb.

I am pretty sure I have seen larger mods then mine up on Steam. So I am wondering if there is a program that will do a better compression job in packing my BSA and help me to get my mod up on Steam?

Is that 221mb counting the .tga files for facegen you have in the bsa? If so, drop those. You don't need them and you'll probably be able to get archive.exe to compress you a file that will fit on Steam.

Ah thanks! I keep forgetting to remove those.

Ha just posted the same on nexus, I got nosy with your BSA too

Shezrie is that all the resources you are going to need though ?

I am just asking because your future plans sound a bit more ambitious than what you have currently, and any further resources included would then make any update to the file on steam no go if it got larger at a later date

Yes I guess with the kind of expansion planned it just won't fit on there period. I will be adding a LOT more resources. So I would be wasting time trying to get it up there now. I had hoped to get at least just the first version on Steam, that is better then none. Especially as I have been telling the folks on Steam that follow my work about the town.

Unfortunately removing the TGA files didn't make a big enough difference in the size. I have a few resources in the current file that are not used in the mod yet, that I could remove and try and get the file size down. But maybe not such a good idea after all.

What a shame, my other mods are on Steam and that is where I know the most people. But it is more important to make this town, very likely the only town I will be making for Skyrim, hopefully on scale with my Oblivion Pell's Gate.

That is a good thing as there is a lot I did that I had to learn for this town, because we didn't do it in Oblivion. Skyrim modding is so much more complex, but then it is a more complex game obviously. It took a mammoth effort to put this little town together, much more then it would take to make the same thing in Oblivion.

So knowledgeable people poking around in the files will help tell me where I went wrong and how to improve.

<.< >.> is this for real? I've had mine packed up with Falskaar this whole time. If they're unneeded I'll definitely cut them from the next build. I guess they're an intermittent step for arriving at the dds then, aren't they...