How many mods do you think is to much to be active while playing? How many do you have active?
I personally have 149 active. Would I get better performance if I had less or does the number of active mods not really matter?

i think the more mods you have  does matter because the amount of stuff it adds in the game world so i would assume it would affect you but hopefully someone will confirm this aha

butzyyy wrote:

i think the more mods you have  does matter because the amount of stuff it adds in the game world so i would assume it would affect you but hopefully someone will confirm this aha

That makes a lot of sense. How many mods do you use?

i have 80 mods altogether but only activate 50 of them

In general I use around 90 mods. Its the weapon mods that eat up my load order. For me if I'm over 140 esp's the game will not be able to extract models and textures properly. The game will also crash more often too.

As far as literally too many, it depends on which game you're playing.  Fallout New Vegas, due to a sort of error in addressing can seriously freak out if the player reaches what is nicknamed the "magic threshold".  For most folks it's around the 150 mark that things go funny, but it is unique to each machine.  On my current PC (Win 8.1 x64) my game flips out around 160, but on my old laptop (Win XP x32) I was well over 250 before the laptop itself gave out.

Assuming you're talking about Fallout 3 and New Vegas more than anything (this is a general Fallout forum so I have to specify) you can run the risk of saves getting corrupted and script errors the more and more complicated mods you add to your load order.

You ask about performance and again, the answer depends more on the specific mods than the number of them.  It's not a stretch to call ENB a mod and it's a very strong case for even one mod being more than a system can handle if you go overboard with it.  Adding texture packs to a game if you're low on GPU RAM is another way to affect performance.

There are also many mods that add tons of clutter to cells that can cause drag on your game and decreased performance.  Similarly, very intricate or poorly written scripts can hang or loop in the background and seriously impact your experience.

It's more a question of which mods as even one can affect your performance or be considered too many.

When these little buggers start showing up lol

Spoiler:

It depends. Mostly on your rig and what kind of mods:

Mods with lots of scripts -------------------------------------> CPU
Mods with HD textures --------------------------------------> VRAM
Mods with several objects (weapons, buildings, etc.) -----> RAM

And of course compatibility is always important. And let's not forget about the dreaded save bloat. Every added object gets built into the save and every item moved from its reference point bulks it up as well. Go too far and before long you'll have massive loading times and crashes galore.

Was going to say the obvious answer: none. I'm not sure though since I've never really thought about what would be too many too haha.

All da mods but in all seriousness I would say the 135 plugins(I think) If you are talking about Fallout NV.

For New Vegas, I got to about 137 plugins before things started getting bizarre. At first I just "trimmed the fat" on my load order, deleting the single-item .esps and stuff, but later, as the staggering amount of cool stuff I really wanted needed in my game got too much, I found a little gem on the nexus.
nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/37981/? (chopped up due to my inability to post external links for a week)
Fire up FNVedit, use the "apply script" function, and you've got a new, beautifully merged esp! With this, 4GNV, and good hardware, the limit of potential mods in a game is very, very high.
For instance, I've probably got +170 mods running on about 125 plugins and everything works like a charm.

The game engine for Fallout New Vegas has quite a few issues, but instead of working to solve those problems, a limit on the number of plugins was instituted during one of the patches. There is now an ~140 plugin limit for Gamebryo which will cause the function incorrectly or just not load at all if this number is reached. In addition to that, the stability of New Vegas will decrease as the number of plugins start to approach the 140 count.

It doesn't matter how good your rig is. The engine has limitations, which is why merge patches and bashed patches are high recommended as they'll lower plugin count.

I've read 139 is the hard cap for New Vegas, but that could literally be 139 single ESP files with next to nothing edited in them. Factoring in the size of the mod and the amount of assets it changes and newly implements is a biggie, and so is what kind of features it contains in the mod itself.

I choose to use select texture packs along with terrain changing packs, and that can start to eat at your speeds in game along with mods that drastically change gameplay. I find that some mods play better together as far as conflicting and crashing, so I start making a list for new playthroughs while testing out load orders.

If your rig just can't handle the heavier scripted and performance demanding mods, it can be more enjoyable to find similar alternatives that don't give you a bad fps drop. There are alternative weather, texture replacers, and smaller features similar to mods like PN that do much more, but some people cant run smoothly.

It's all about trial and error of your favorites for me, winding down what you really like and finding a good balance of visuals, features and gameplay enhancements to satisfy your play through. The less plug-ins the better at the end of the day.

Slightly off topic, but I find the visor overlays in PN get seriously laggy in-game with my load order. I've over 110 active plugins. Anyone else get laggy visor overlays when switching from 3rd person to 1st when wearing helmet and when taking helmet off?

What's the difference between plugins and mods anyway?

Every plugin is a mod, but not every mod has a plugin

The plugin is a file that actively affects a change in the game, almost always in .esp or .esm format.

user2501 wrote:

How many mods do you think is to much to be active while playing? How many do you have active?
I personally have 149 active. Would I get better performance if I had less or does the number of active mods not really matter?

I have had more and I have had less. Sometimes the more ran better than the less. It mostly has to do with Scripts and calls for assets and poorly configured mods with dirty edits that cause more stress to the load order / game as opposed to a "personal plugin limit".

There are ESP/ESM. BSA and "loose files". Each take their toll on the game as you add them. There is an actual max for the plugins (ESP/ESM) that cannot be broken. I believe it is 255 total (take away for the main game and DLCs and packs as well as all other mods). This isn't the total that can be run. Only the max theoretical limit that can be run. Many run into issues somewhere around ~130 - 140 plugins. With plugins above your personal limit you can run into script misfiring or not firing at all. Activator (E button) might not activate a door etc. Conversations might not activate, etc.

Some "merge" their mods together into one mod. (not a patch. A patch can be thought to "smooth" over conflicts and make a clear "winner" ). This is risky. You need to know what you are combining and why. Best practice of merging mods is merging complementary mods (say multiple "patches" for a mod that an author made. say dlc patches for that mod etc.) instead of random mods to get the plugin limit lower. Another excellent merging option would be armor, weapon mods and other non scripting mods. With merging keep in mind that if another mod is expecting that mod to be in the load order it might not work and you can end up with a CTD

There is a total texture/meshes that can be ran. This can vary depending on the "cell" you are in. Large texture packs might work well in small cells but if massive mods are installed might cause you to run into a texture limit. Strange color, missing meshes, textures floating triangles and other graphical glitches might occur. Graphics Cards with larger Vram help as well as machines that are faster but you will run into a max textures that can be thrown on the screen. One of the first signs that I experience is a slowing of distance rendering or rendering far later than it did before. Showing my rig is starting to choke on the textures (however it can be anything that is running scripts, assets etc. hell it could be a process from something other than the game .).

Someone that I know experiment and suspects that even the BSAs that are loaded might lower the total plugins available for your particular hardware and mod setup. I Personally believe BSAs help for stability but takes away from the "personal plugin limit".

Bottom line. You will need to experience these for yourself to come up with your own "personal plugin limit" then go back and tweak some .ini, merge some plugins, create a patch etc to move further.

Quote :

There are ESP/ESM. BSA and "loose files". Each take their toll on the game as you add them. There is an actual max for the plugins (ESP/ESM) that cannot be broken. I believe it is 255 total

Incorrect, man. That's the theoretical limit for Skyrim, not Fallout 3/NV. Who play with over 140 plugins anyway and enjoys a stable game? Few people I should think.

A few years back, a Nexus user named Xaranth actually went to the trouble to test load times across cell borders using loose files and then after archiving most of his loose files into a BSA. I could be remembering totally wrong as it was quite some time ago and I really don't feel like searching for it, but he even graphed the results and all.... end result that I remember is archiving loose files had no significant impact on framerate or loading time.

The test "course" was loading a save game at the Novac hotel room and running to the gate at the Repconn test site.

I've also read and been told that even inactive plugins somehow affect performance and the magic threshold. I know from my own experience that once I'd crossed it, simply deactivating a plugin fixed the issue more or less. It's also said that bsa archives called by active plugins also count as activated plugins.

I'll echo what ritualclarity says about knowing what you're doing when merging plugins. Anything beyond basic items like weapons or armor and their placement I recommend against trusting a script to automatically merge.