Help me mod Skyrim?

[Aereldor]

Greetings,

I've recently been dabbling in Skyrim mods, and came across Confidence-Man's Natural Lighting and Atmospherics for ENB, and loved the way it looked. However it brought my machine to a crawling 10-15 FPS, and uninstalling it lead to a series of crashes whenever I tried to load a game. This happened even after I disabled everything except for the base game, so I decided to do a complete reinstall, as well as installing any mods after.

I'm looking to make my game look something like what the aforementioned ENB has to offer, but preferably without a similarly ridiculous performance drop, and was hoping someone could recommend a set of compatible mods I could use. Also, I'm not a fan of the exaggerated depth of field effect in the ENB, but I do enjoy it in moderation.

My specs are as follows-

• CPU
  Intel® Core i3-4160
• Motherboard
  Gigabyte GA-B85M-D3H
• RAM
  Crucial Ballistix Sport 2x4GB 1600MHz DDR3
• GPU
  MSI GeForce GTX 960 2GB OC
• Storage
  WD Caviar Blue 1TB 7200RPM HDD
• PSU
  Seasonic ECO-430

I'm looking specifically for graphics mods, and I've already resolved to install Sounds of Skyrim, Open Cities, SkyUI, and the usual character enhancement mods.

Regards,
Aereldor.

[minibois]

I would recommend you to use Mod Organizer, because if the mod is not what you want (or give you 15fps) you can easily delete it and not have any problem (high chances that when you removed the ENB you removed some game files too)

[squirrl]

I would recommend you to use Mod Organizer, because if the mod is not what you want (or give you 15fps) you can easily delete it and not have any problem (high chances that when you removed the ENB you removed some game files too)

Unless it's updated recently ENB stuff can't be organised with it (It only manages stuff in the Data folder)

Other than that though, i recommend it too.You won't overwrite any files directly and can change the order of mods so that certain ones take priority over others.

 

What resolution are you running at? 

[tek inpektor]

With an i3? Skyrim is pretty CPU instensive...

[Aereldor]

Unless it's updated recently ENB stuff can't be organised with it (It only manages stuff in the Data folder)

Other than that though, i recommend it too.You won't overwrite any files directly and can change the order of mods so that certain ones take priority over others.

 

What resolution are you running at? 

1080p. A stable 60fps is the target, but I can live with 45-60.

[Aereldor]

I would recommend you to use Mod Organizer, because if the mod is not what you want (or give you 15fps) you can easily delete it and not have any problem (high chances that when you removed the ENB you removed some game files too)

I was using Nexus Mod Manager, but it wasn't possible to organize that particular ENB through it, so I had to install (and remove) it manually. Probably screwed something up somewhere. 

Oh well, reinstall's almost done.

I think you guys may have misinterpreted the question. I know what I messed up and I'm not looking for a fix. I'm looking for a recommendation for mods that will run well on my PC, preferably from someone who has already used a similar or identical set of mods and had a good experience.

[Aereldor]

With an i3? Skyrim is pretty CPU instensive...

Never had any problems until I installed NLA, and that was a GPU crusher. In fact, it hasn't held me back in any games, not even hitting 100% in the middle of Novigrad in The Witcher 3.

[Kinda Bottlenecked]

I recommend a realistic hope enb for low end machines.

[Jerakl]

You start out hoping for 60 FPS.

 

I ended up with 20 FPS in Riverwood. I'm happy.

[Misanthrope]

The ENB shouldn't affect you too much. What you wanna look out for is texture size (you only have 2gb of vram so you wanna use 1k textures or 2k at the most for smaller stuff like armor, nothing bigger than that) as well as script heavy mods (Frostfall usually adds a lot more to the processing cycles and could easily bog down your i3 chip for example, most mods now do a good job in letting you know if there's any new scripts or not) and the last offender that would kill your performance is grass mods: there are some "performance friendly" grass mods out there but they do not look as good, usually the best ones like Verdant completely and utterly kill performance, stay away.

 

Other than that you should be good to mod whatever you want. I'm sure you already have a climate mod and lighting mod to go with the ENB, don't forget static mesh improvement and some texture mods.

[Aereldor]

The ENB shouldn't affect you too much. What you wanna look out for is texture size (you only have 2gb of vram so you wanna use 1k textures or 2k at the most for smaller stuff like armor, nothing bigger than that) as well as script heavy mods (Frostfall usually adds a lot more to the processing cycles and could easily bog down your i3 chip for example, most mods now do a good job in letting you know if there's any new scripts or not) and the last offender that would kill your performance is grass mods: there are some "performance friendly" grass mods out there but they do not look as good, usually the best ones like Verdant completely and utterly kill performance, stay away.

 

Other than that you should be good to mod whatever you want. I'm sure you already have a climate mod and lighting mod to go with the ENB, don't forget static mesh improvement and some texture mods.

Started from scratch several times. Running just the Natural Lighting and Atmospherics ENB with the vanilla game would more or less kill performance in a second.

[Aereldor]

Think I managed to get something decent running with the following mods-

• Photoreal ENB (performance)
• Skyrim Flora Overhaul
• HD 2k Textures (all)
• Static Mesh Improvement Mod (SMIM)
• Realistic Lighting Overhaul
• Climates of Tamriel
• Realistic Water Two
• Watercolour for ENB

 

I've also installed some non-graphical but large/CPU intensive mods-

• Open Cities Skyrim
• Sounds of Skyrim
• Alternative Start
• Realistic Needs and Diseases
• Skyrim Unofficial Patch

 

Needless to say, the game looks gorgeous. I can get a consistent enough 60FPS, with occasional drops into the low 50s and high 40s, but those are sporadic and almost unnoticeable unless I'm staring at the counter the whole time. However, the smooth framerate was at the cost of halving the render distance that came with the ultra preset, so yeah, no uber-long-distance LOD for me.

Thanks for all your help. Do you have any further tips as to how I can improve my game? (Please don't suggest SkyUI, I've tried to get it to run with the ENB and they just won't play well together).

[Praesi]

You need :

 

-Nexus Mod Manager

-TES5Edit

-SkyrimSKSE

 

There are Torturials on Nexus.

 

Its tons of work and it took me 12 hours to get 75 Graphicsmods work together without crash.

 

Impossible to right it down here.

[kennon3715]

Do what i do. Download whatever the hell your heart desires, and if it crashes, delete it.

[Jerakl]

You need :

 

-Nexus Mod Manager

-TES5Edit

-SkyrimSKSE

 

There are Torturials on Nexus.

 

Its tons of work and it took me 12 hours to get 75 Graphicsmods work together without crash.

 

Impossible to right it down here.

 

Don't need those.

 

ModOrganizer is better TBH.

If you know how to use it it provides the same utility as NMM. It's just better all around IMO. Mind you I haven't used it in a while.

[Aereldor]

Do what i do. Download whatever the hell your heart desires, and if it crashes, delete it.

Winner!