In my quest to kill my game via the crushing weight of a thousand mods, I've obviously hit the mod limit, even with merges. As the internet suggests many times it's somewhere around 130-ish. But Nexus Mod Manager lists "total plugins, active plugins, total mods, installed mods, and active mods."
For me, each one of these numbers is different, and I can't seem to nail down which one it is that is most important... the plugin number or mod number? Does anyone know with certainty which is the most important to keep below the limit? (Sometimes a singular mod can have more than one esp, for instance.)
Thanks

I have gotten a max plugin number of 157, which was about 141 mods. After that the fallout universe begins to...change.

If you have mods like FOOK,PN,WRP,WMX that require 100 patches to work with eachother and other mods, then you will have a low mod count, but a high plugin count.

I think it's counting the ESPs that aren't even activated, which is annoying and extremely weird. I'd heard something about that somewhere on the 'net but I didn't really believe it at the time.

I've also heard that the game will wig out over plugins that aren't even turned on as well. I'd make backup folder and pull all the ones you're not going to use out of the data folder. I highly suggest merging "like plugins" to get some more mileage out of mods. If you don't know how, I can explain the process how I've learned it. It's worked so far.

@Evmeister How does one merge plugins?

@stoobygacks For New Vegas you'll use FNVedit to do your merging, however I've heard of Wyre Bash as well.

Basically what you'll do is load the mods you want to merge in the FNVedit, when you start it up it will give you the option to select the plugins you want to work on. From there you'll will right click on a record category such as Armor, Container, NPC, Race, and click "Deep copy as Override into" it will prompt you to select a plugin you want to copy the records into or make a new plugin. Create a new plugin and it will copy the records into the new plugin. Repeat that process with all the records from each plugin that you're trying to merge into one.

Then, and I haven't does this part yet, you'll want to load the plugin up in FNV CK/GECK and then save it. The GECK should fix any lingering issues. I recommend doing this more so for basic mods like More Perks which there's actually a merge patch already out there for it. So armor mods, clothing mods that simply add things in but don't edit NPC's would be a good start.

Also, using this process means you won't need the plugins active that you merged into a new plugin, so I what I did just in case, is I created a plugin backup folder for all the stuff that I made a merged plugin for. For example, I merged all of FCO plugins into one. I put all the plugins in the backup folder.

Hope this helps, I found the instructions for doing a merged plugin on the Nexus Forums, maybe if I have time, I might make a video. I'm no expert so the way I'm doing it could be wrong, but it seems to have worked so far.

I've been using a merge plugins program and it seems to be working but I haven't played enough yet to have really put it to the test.

If I remember correctly, there use to be a program that would merge plugins for your for Fallout 3. Not sure if there's anything like that for FNV or FO4.