Hello from Spain,

I bought Skyrim Legendary Edition some months ago. Now I'd like to start playing my first game. I played Oblivion on PC. To be honest, I think that I spent more hours trying mods than playing the game actually. Back then, I learnt the basic use of Wrye Bash, Tes4edit for cleaning mods, the tool that automatically sorted the load order (I can't remember its name right now), another soft that could make identical images of the installation folder of the game, which made much more convenient for the user to mess with mods in a dedicated image of the game and few other programs that could optimize meshes, textures, compress bsas.

I've been having a look at other threads and so far I think that I need all of these:

Tes5edit

Wrye bash

Loot

Unofficial patches

Anything else that I really should consider? I wouldn't like to install a bunch of mods. I just would like to get a game as stable and bug-free as possible. The stability of the game is a big concern for me. From my experience in Oblivion, I remember that the more mods installed, the worse the stability. Also, disabling all autosaves (from both the in-game settings and the .ini) was recommended.

Besides a stable and bug-free Skyrim, I wouldn't mind to enhance its visuals if my hardware can support the enhancement, of course. You can check my signature for my system specs, being the most relevant an i5-3570K CPU and a nVidia GTX-670 2GB graphics card.

Thank you for your time.

Regards.

Hola Bsuksesfool. Como estas?

If you're concerned about stability and being bug-free I recommend doing a http://wiki.step-project.com/STEP:2.2.9 install, either Core or Extended. It's what I did and my Skyrim install runs smooth and crash-free on a mid-range desktop.

There's other ways but that's the one that's worked for me.

Assuming you have a 64-bit OS and a decent amount of system RAM, you should be able to run the Bethesda HD texture packs with that video card. They're available through Steam as a free DLC. It ran very nicely for me on an i5 3570K with a GTX 560 Ti video card with 2 GB VRAM (I've recently upgraded the video card).

If you're just starting out with Skyrim, I'd recommend playing with just the unofficial patches for a while, to get a feel for the game in a near vanilla state before deciding what you want to change with mods. If all you're going to run is the unofficial patches, you really don't need Wrye Bash just yet, IMO. You'll want that later as your mod list grows. Do get and learn TESVEdit, though, so you can clean your DLC master files. You may as well go ahead and get LOOT as well so you can get used to using it.