Alright so assuming I have a very strong system what is the estimated number of plug ins that can be active w/o a noticeable hiccup in processing speed and crashes. We'll pretend their all compatible.

I've seen people running well over 100 mods at a time in their games. I'm not there yet, but I've already got over 30 plug-ins in mine.

It depends almost entirely on which ones you're using. Some mods use alot more resources then others. But if you've got a nice hard drive with a nice fast CPU and some fast memory, you should be fine.

I suggest looking for texture mods. It really adds to the immersive nature of FO3. Here's the one I use.

http://fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=12056

I'm told that around 250 is the absolute max, I've never even come close to that. I haven't ever broken 100 but, again thats what I hear.

i think 255 is the magic number. but if you use garybash, you can merge some and just deactivate them so they dont count towards the limit. i reached my limit in OB a long time ago but havent gotten there so far in FO3

Yes it is, and that includes the Fallout.esm and all of the DLCs. There's also a limit on active files that includes BSAs as well, though I'm not sure what that is.

Made a mistake XD Ignore this.

Edit: actually I can add something.

As said, it depends on your actual specs and what mods you are running. Running an open world game without any skipping is next to impossible. If you have an SSD, then you should see very little due to procedural loading.

255 is the magic number but really just ridiculous, I mean is there 255 plugins you just can't the play game without? (Rhetorical Question)

Here's a question then, what happens when you exceed the 255 limit? Does the game not launch? Does the > 255'th fail to load? Or...? What happens? :shrug:

that is a good question indeed, i remember seeing a picture on nexus of someone who had a lot of plugins he wasn't specific on the number but when he went to load his saved game it sayed NULL :shrug: who knows maybe someone should test this?

Do to the way it is programmed, the game can only register up to 256 mods (slots 0-255 with slot 0 being taken by the fallout esm) I forgot the exact reasoning for this.

It stems from the binary numbers 00000000 - 11111111 with the latter adding up to be 255 in base 10 (128+64+32+16+8+4+2+1). So I think that the game will just crash upon trying to load a save or start a new game as i believe it will freak out about the number of activated mods, not knowing what to do, and rather then potentially causing damage, it will just crash.

The first two digits of every form ID are variable, and are set to the load order number of the plugin that introduces them. It prevents two plugins from ever trying to introduce two objects with the same form ID. The form IDs are in Hex, meaning they use a base sixteen with numbers 0 through F rather than 0 through 9. 2 digits in base sixteen means the total number of possible digit combinations is 16 * 16 = 256. So if you add more mods than that, there's no way to compute the form IDs. I'm pretty sure you get a CTD on starting fallout, though I've also had some experience with people that topped out somewhat lower than that, in the mid to high 100s.

The FOMM programmers probably wouldn't allow a mod over slot FE (254) to be selected. Slot FF is reserved for in-game dynamic references, so no mod there. So the theoretical range is 0-254. The Practical range is another story. Depending on the mods, you may never get above 140 or so with major problems - or so i've heard, no matter how great your hardware is. The executable can only allocate so much RAM.