Hi, folks,

I picked up Skyrim around the time it first came out, then pretty quickly I decided to hold off on getting into it too much until mods came out to fix a lot of things about the base game I didn't care for. The lack of utilities for mod cleaning, checking for conflicts, etc. at the time as well as mods breaking as new patches came out also made me feel it was better to go back to modded Oblivion until the dust settled.

In any event, I picked up all the DLC for 50%+ off during the recent Steam sale and since it seems like the mod scene has matured quite a bit I'm starting to think about getting back to Skyrim. I already know about SkyUI, the Unofficial Patches, etc. to address a number of issues I had with the original game. I'll likely have more questions about specific mod recommendations at some point since I really miss the old stat system and don't like the perc system, but I know there are plenty of options for that.

However the first thing I like to do is make sure all my optimization and utilities are in place before doing anything else, so I can check for things like conflicts and actually understand what mods are doing before installing them.

I've been able to pick up some things from the forums and elsewhere, but I'm looking at this from the perspective of coming from Oblivion (and Morrowind/Daggerfall before that) and given my relative inexperience with Skyrim modding and what's different in the engine in general I'm not quite sure what some of the equivalents are in Skyrim utilities so I'm hoping to be pointed in the right direction.

So here's what I've been able to piece together so far with respect to what I had in Oblivion and what's available in Skyrim:

Wrye Bash (Oblivion) -> Wrye Bash (Skyrim) - so far so good

TES4EDIT (Oblivion) -> TES5EDIT (Skyrim) - also good so far

OBSE (Oblivion) -> SKSE (Skyrim) - sure enough...

BOSS (Oblivion) -> BOSS (Skyrim) - on a roll...

Now things get more murky...

TES4Gecko (Oblivion) (for merging) -> TES5EDIT only, plus the TES5EDIT merge script mod, in Skyrim? Am I missing anything?

OBMM (for BSA extraction/manipulation/extraction) - > ??? in Skyrim?

PyFFI (Oblivion, plus PyFFI 2.1.10+ nice toaster scripts for safe mesh optimization) -> ??? in Skyrim?

TES4LL (Oblivion, for LOD landscape mesh/texture generation) -> ??? in Skyrim? (is this still needed in the new engine)?

TES4LODgen (Oblivion for LOD objects) -> ??? in Skyrim? (again, still needed in new engine?)

LandMagic (Oblivion, fixes minor land tears) -> ??? In Skyrim? (are land tears an issue in the new engine?)

Fast Exit (Oblivion/OBSE) - > ??? in Skyrim? (Is CTD on exit still a problem with modded Skyrim like it was with Oblivion?)

Silent Voices (Oblivion/OBSE) -> ??? in Skyrim? (Is rapidly disappearing unvoiced text an issue in unvoiced Skyrim mods?)

OBGE (Oblivion) -> Is there an equivalent graphics extender in Skyrim?

Anything else specific to Skyrim I'm missing with respect to optimization of resources or utilities?

Also, is there a good guide for INI file tweaks so I know which are safe to play with and which to avoid? I found some stuff on the Web but the same pages were also recommending things like a utility to scrub save files, and I've seen on the forums here that isn't recommended.

Thanks.

Fuz Ro D'oh by shadeMe: http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1365775-rel-fuz-ro-doh/ and http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/14884/

Gecko is still in development, avoid save "cleaners", avoid INI tweaks that mess with things that claim to be changing "memory allocation" and whatnot, OBMM == NMM, Bash is still Bash, OBGE doesn't have an equivalent (there were talks about that early on but nothing ever transpired), PyFFI has no equivalent (the mesh format is still being worked out)

I'm guessing it won't be terribly important anyway. As of Fallout 3, the meshes in Bethesda's games were optimized much better than they were in Oblivion. It the same holds true for Skyrim, there'll only be a very marginal improvement in performance, it at all. Probably not enough to justify the time it will take to go through all them all.

The mod merging script for TES5Edit is likely to be the only option for awhile.

Look for one called BSA Browser - it handles extraction nicely. If you can work with the cryptic interface, BSAOpt works well too.

These have no equivalent yet. Mesh support isn't really far enough along yet to be able to get a PyFFI done. The LOD system for the game is vastly different and so far no automated tools for generating the information exist (BTW, it's not a new engine, same clunky old one as before, just better optimized). Land tearing still happens, but nothing like LandMagic exists yet either.

Not necessary. Deleted records won't cause a CTD at exit, but they DO still cause them during gameplay as they always have. The game itself simply exits to desktop now, no need for an SKSE plugin to provide this.

Not implemented as an SKSE plugin, no. There are numerous ENB plugins though. I can't tell you more since I don't use any of them due to the enormous performance hits they all have.

As far as the rest, definitely worth repeating. Avoid ini tweak sites. 99.9% of them are clueless idiots who have no ideas what the settings do. Save cleaning doesn't exist either despite a few utilities claiming otherwise. All they do is catastrophic damage to the save instead.