Hello, folks.

I'm a total newcomer to this section. I'd been nervous about adding mods to the game after reading horror stories about games crashing, save files being corrupted or lost and more.

Finally, I had to take the risk. The glitches in my game were on the increase and getting weirder. It was crashing more regularly and frame rate was being reduced perceptibly when sprinting. Maybe this was no surprise. I've discovered 393 locations, completed the major quest lines and numerous side quests. My save files were 18.9 MB and climbing. I have nine houses full of clutter (I love displaying those gleaming centurion dynamo cores, for one thing). It had reached the point where I couldn't make things any worse by trying mods.

I installed the legendary patch and Seifer69er's save file cleaner. Here's what happened...

Before mods.

NPC conversations glitched, eg Brynjolf wouldn't talk to me except to say "Sorry lass, I've got important things to do"

File saves 18.9 MB

Several quest items stuck in the inventory.

Frame rate reduced on occasions.

Armour ratings all to [censored] (I could improve light armour more than heavy with no reasonable explanation)

Furnishings all over the place, where I'd knocked them and tried to put them right again, or else those pesky friendly basemant skeevers had scattered them all over the place.

After mods.

NPC conversations restored. They are no longer treating me as they were as initiates in the guild. Even Dirge has stopped threatening to smash my face in.

File saves 14.7 MB

Frame rate fine, even when sprinting.

Armour ratings correct

Houses neat and tidy.

Able to sell off the strange amulet, which was now a necromancer's amulet. (I couldn't before because Callixto died before he could enchant it for me)

Enchanting skill improved*.

Do I like mods now?

Too right! I probably won't add mods to alter the way the vanilla game plays right now, but you never know. At least my experience of modding has got off to a great start. You wouldn't believe how irritated I was becoming listening to the endless litany from some of the NPCs. Even Aela has stopped saying "something has shifted in the moons, sister". She now has her full repertoire of dialogue.

* This was a bonus. I lost out on the light armour which all reduced in armour value after the mod, bringing it back into line with heavy armour. I assume that my light armour smithing or skill was wrongly enhanced. I was pleasantly surprised by the enchanting skill improvement. I guess that this was glitched the other way, so that I wasn't gaining the full benefit of my complete perk tree or Azhidal's armour.

P.S. The edit is because I used a perfectly acceptable English expression and one of the words is an alternative for tap, or the shortened form of cockerel. You get the idea. My armour ratings were 'all over the place' should be acceptable. It's a good job I don't have to discuss engineering on the site because it's full of terms that would get censored, such as...I'd better not go there!

USLEEP fixes tons and tons of vanilla bugs that wreck the game if they go unchecked, many which can go under the radar but doing all it's damage under the hood and out of your sight - you have to be really looking for it.

That being said, adding mods also requires a bit of trial and error and lots of READMEing as even newly added mods can mess up a game for one reason or another.

I think the first mod I installed for Skyrim(pre-CK) was this mod that allowed destruction damage scaling(also only possible with SkyEdit).

Oh hmmm... I was in your position when I first got Oblivion though, and that game is notoriously unstable. For sure UOBP was the first ever mod I installed for a TES game. From there I added a lot of mods(eventually FCOM which took a lot of confidence on my part), and after years of doing that in OB and Skyrim, I've come to know what *kind* of mods I want in my game. Typically any that changes the game on a technical level, rarely mods that add content like quests or land(in this game I have Falskaar and Wyrmstooth).

@ cumbrianlad: Just out of curiosity, after reading your post, I went for the save tool (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/31724/) and run it on my latest save, which is small (7328 kb). The cleaned saved is 7324 kb.



I run another save tool (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/52363/?) on the 7324 kb cleaned save and this second tool found "327 orphan script instances" in it. The same second tool run on the original 7328 kb save found "No orphan scripts".



How safe are these tools? What do they do exactly? Do they do stuff that are not in the descriptions? Are their authors absolutely sure what they do?

Anyway, if you trust this tool, you might need to run the second one on your cleaned save in order to remove the orphan scripts.

ladyonthemoon,

I took a bit of a gamble but so far nothing has shown up that worries me. The bookshelves in Markarth went a bit wonky with books out of place after using the cleaner but the author had anticipated that and the fix was simple and exactly as stated in the mod description.

Since my files were so messy, I got a big advantage of over 4 MB. Personally I wouldn't have risked it if the file size was not beginning to affect game play.

If I find anything unhelpful that I could attribute to the mod, I'll be sure to let the members and the author know, but so far so good.

It did as I described above. All the effects have been beneficial so far, other than that tiny bookshelf bit that was easy to fix.

I added the legendary patch at the same time. This was a bit daft in hindsight because other things have got better, too and I can't tell with those just which mod did the trick. For instance, my weapon racks were glitch and now work. This could be the legendary patch at work, or it could be the cleaner removing incorrectly assigned weapons. I say that because I ended up with duplicate weapons that I had not made.

I'll keep my fingers crossed but it looks okay so far.

You should run the Save game script cleaner on your cleaned save then, and remove all the orphan scripts that are still uselessly active in your save.