For a while I have been trying to recreate some of the base effects found in Requiem but finding that I fall just too short so I am coming back to Requiem and I have decided to start from scratch with the things that are really important.

In my experience for role playing I have found that the essentials simply could not be ignored. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/11163/?, http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/33201/?, http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/26228/?, these three made up the essentials in my mind. Unfortunately Frostfall just doesnt seem to work. Its made well, no doubt about that, but with its resource demands getting it to function in anything but a first class rig is pretty much impossible. Fortunately it seems, http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/6745/?tab=3&selected_game=110&navtag=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nexusmods.com%2Fskyrim%2Fajax%2Fmodimages%2F%3Fid%3D6745%26user%3D1%26gid%3D110&pUp=1 looks to be the worthy successor. These guys together put demands on the player for rest and nourishment, keeping warm in the cold wilderness of skyrim and the general notion that you need to be prepared for challenges that you would find both in and outside of combat. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/44623/? adds time as a real factor in the decisions that you make, which pairs very well with the above mods.

Next on my list is NPC and animal content. Wild animals just arent any fun unless they behave realistically. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/10175/? seems to be the only mod that I know of that will work well for fixing whats wrong with animals.

NPCs are more complicated, and by far more interesting. http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12977/?, http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/31264/?, and all the 'Populated' mods, http://erkeilmods.altervista.org/skyrim/populated-lands-roads-paths-rs/ for example, make things really interesting. Get the right carefully chosen NPC mods together and it makes for a wild experience. With these I find situations were stormcloaks and imperial soldiers are fighting in groups of dozens on the road. A wide spectrum of travelers from other adventurers to traveling merchants being found on the roads. After seeing with these mods can do, not having them would make the world seem dead and empty. Plus, a great benefit i have found, if you find yourself against an enemy that you just can meet no matter what you do. Get that enemy out on the open road and your bound to find a whole team of people willing to help you out. xD Still trying to find something for behavior though, no matter what NPCs still act like robots, not sure if there is anything that can be done about that.... Something else ive noticed is that mercs dont seem to be hirable anymore... Populated lands roads paths has a feature that allows you to hire mercs but I cant get it to work anymore, odd...

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50740/? and http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/49496/? are great mods for managing all the loot in the game so getting lots of money and high level stuff isnt so trivial anymore.

All of that being said, im trying to think of other mods that I would characterize as essential. Nothing else is coming to mind but this list is far from over. i still want to look at economics mods and stuff like that to make money more meaningful rather than just having it pile up after you have all the weapons and armor you want.

I also want to have a section on here to make sense of all the patches for everything. With stuff like this there is bound to be a ton of patches and making sense of all this would be ideal.

I have to disagree with this. I use Frostfall in most of my games without issue and my computer was built in 2007. I don't know what sort of computer you have, but I'm sure it is twice the computer mine is.

You don't need a "first class rig" to run Frostfall. Your problem is not Frostfall...or your computer. Your problem is all the other mods you are trying to run at the same time as Frostfall.

I assume you have seen the http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/61621/?page? I linked it in case you have not seen it. You can find patches there for Immersive Patrols and Skytest. I don't think there is a Requiem patch for Hypothermia, but I suspect it may not need one, although I don't know for sure. I have not much experience with the other mods you mentioned but I have heard that OBIS is not compatible with the current version of Requiem and the patch for it is old and not recommended for use with Requiem version 1.9.3.

In general, patches that were made for Requiem 1.8 and above will still work with Requiem 1.9.3, but older patches from Requiem 1.7 and before will no longer work.

Are you using 2.6 or 3.0? Just curious which is your preference and whether I am the only one who prefers the simpler approach to the way things work in 2.6 vs the more complex approach of 3.0 with new perk trees, requirements for tinder, chance to fail in lighting campfires, etc.

And thats the nightmare of modding, not having a clue of what needs to be patched and if the patches even (will ever) exist. Then you have the issue of load order, good grief... As for the requiem patches page, it only shows a short list of patches available and not very many popular mods either... This kind of thing always destroys my motivations for doing these things in the first place. All I can think to do is get this last working together in harmony first, then look for something else.

I try to stay away from graphics mods because thats just a waste of resources when you are trying to get all the scripts and everything to run on time.

Yep, we do disagree. I have found in so many situations that the error message stating that the scripts are running too slow for frostfall to work correctly and lo-and-behold, the exposure level changes so slowly that it almost doesnt matter anymore. The bottom line for me is that the mod was made to be supremely dynamic but in the process it eats so much processing that it is the farthest thing from dynamic.

Mods by nature should be made to work in numbers. If I cant have any other mods with this mod then its just too demanding. Self defeating even.

I last played Skyrim in February, 2014. So, I guess, I probably used most versions, up to about 2.5 or so? I intend to get back to Skyrim soon, when I'm finished playing Star Wars: The Old Republic.

Well, we're just going to have to both disagree then. I disagree completely with your premise that "mods by nature should be made to work in numbers." Mods have only one set-in-stone, iron-clad responsibility to the mod user: to work, as advertised, by themselves, in a vanilla install.

Which is what makes modding so horrid... In the world of art the mixing and blending of concepts is usually considered a virtue. To create a system around hundreds of rigid unrelenting individuals is doomed to fail. I once proposed that modding should be managed and organized on a fundamental level and was flogged within an inch of my life for even prompting the idea. To say that a game like skyrim can be satisfying with only two or three mods is like saying that it can be satisfying with only two or three skills or sets of armor or weapons. I loved the anology that skyrim is a toilet and modders are here to clean it... xD The tragedy is that this isnt Zelda, in the old days games were developed until they were finished. Now days there is a deadline and the game is finished when you run out of time to develop.

I see mods as the salvation of platforms. Post release production is the god of games. It is the hope of life that remains after the devastation of corporate profit figures. In the end all platforms must repent, return to their origins and serve their god well, otherwise, what hope is left for them?

Oh, hush. I have 80-ish mods installed, and they play nice just fine. It took me a while to get there, but the journey was fun. Plenty of people around here have more mods than I do.

And we enjoy learning and tinkering and discovering. And people enjoy seeing just how much they can cram into the game before they lose too much performance.

If you think this whole scene COULD be managed as you describe, you're naive. And if you think it SHOULD, you're no fun at all.

Pbthbthhhhbbbt!

It called micro management... You take everything in the vanilla game and quantify it. Establish a base line upon which everything will be built. From there you can set a margin of error that the code can function in and create modules for different components. Then, slowly but surely every mod can find its space on the grid and if done correctly there would never be a need for patches because everything would already be designed as a plug and play. Its about isolating every aspect and function and groups there of and understanding what there potentials and limitations are... But hey, lets just all do what we want regardless of the big picture and dedicate a massive community to try and make sense of the chaos we create instead... Much better.

The thing that has to be understood about me, is that I have spent more than a year off and on trying to get a single game running, it that time I have not played skyrim more than shallow test characters. I am sick to death of vanilla and need a game that I can be happy with or I will never be able to play it again. So you can sit here and talk about how great it is to tinker and discover when you have your whole life set on hold because you dont even have a game to play...

Its easy to be hypocritical when it costs you nothing.