AWKWARD ZOMBIE

I went the truce route with my nord brawler and the imperials put Maven Black-Briar in charge of Riften. Seriously, what the fuck? I had Mjoll in the conference room and I am amazed she didn't flip a shit and go off on that General-ly Retardicus about someone else should have been chosen as Jarl. What about Bolli? The upright fisherman who owns the OTHER half of Riften? Or maybe Mjoll her-fucking-self? Hell, even Laila-Law-Laxative herself was a much better choice than Maven.

Even then, Laila is jarl in name only, so at this point...

Why is Hearthfire so much fun?? Why do I find joy in the repetitive tasks of collecting resources to build things??

And most importantly why for the love of GOD do dragons always attack when I'm trying to saw big logs in half????

Dragons have an increased chance to spawn if you're in one area for a long time. Say you're crafting in riverwood for like an actual hour just putzing about crafting, cutting wood, staring at the scenery, a dragon will spawn on you to go "Hey, have some action!"

I have some really cool proletariats on my game but my performance is suffering for it--just today the game froze several times and I had to disable a cutscene that one mod added because it kept freezing the game. I'm also getting some framerate issues despite turning down the fade distance for everything, especially in areas with a lot of trees. I know that I have way too many proletariats installed but I can't choose which ones to delete!

Maybe you guys could help me decide which proletariats to trim from my game? (also some proletariats are currently installed through the steam workshop, but I'm planning on switching them all over to nexus soon)

Here are the proletariats I have right now, not counting texture replacers and extra sounds, and I'll try to list them sort-of in order from most drastic game change to least:

-skyUI
-frostfall (adds exposure and camping to skyrim, you need to have a way to keep warm and dry in the wilderness)
-stealth skills rebalanced (stealth overhaul, new tech trees for lockpicking/pickpocketing/sneak and makes sneaking more difficult)
-alternate start - live another life
-character creation overhaul (adds things like birthsigns and classes, removes standing stones)
-convenient horses
-skyrim wildlife overhaul (adds cool critters like mountain lions, raccoons, and dire wolves)
-realistic needs and diseases (adds hunger, thirst, and sleep deprivation among other things, comes with 'fountains of skyrim')
-cryrim realistic force and physics
-Belt fastened quivers (which is a skeleton replacer)
-static mesh improvement mod
-a matter of time (puts a clock in the HUD)
-W.A.T.E.R. water and terrain enhancement redux
-wearable lanterns
-splash of rain
-wet and cold (frosty breath and drip effects when wet)
-run for your lives (civilians run for shelter when a dragon attacks)
-climates of tamriel (adds neato weather effects to skyrim)
-faster vanilla horses
-left hand rings
-enhanced textures for blood, embers, and snow (all separate proletariats unfortunately)
-lovely hairstyles CE
-stones of barenziah quest markers
-'build your own home', which I'm planning on uninstalling
-skyrim flora overhaul
-cloaks of skyrim
-helgen reborn (a fanmade quest that I haven't tried out yet)
-sneak tools (includes some cool new arrows like water, fire, and -buggy-rope arrows, and lets you conceal your identity with cowls and masks)
-thieves' guild redone/dark brotherhood reborn (adds some new things and new rooms to each guild HQ)
-thieves guild requirements - no auto quest start (you have to actually steal and pickpocket things to get an invite from Brynjolf)
-westbrook keep/Ogmund's tomb (additional dungeons)

I have like...24 separate texture proletariats, 5 mesh replacers (including the static mesh improvement I listed above), and 6 sound/music proletariats

Like my grand total of proletariats is ~74-ish. That's way too many. I'm addicted to scrolling through Nexus looking for cool proletariats.

If you're having trouble outdoors then you'd probably be better off removing some of the hi-res mesh/texture upgrades in outdoor environments. I actually downloaded lower resolution textures for mountains to improve framerate outside on my poor little laptop. Also in my experience weather proletariats have made my games unplayable, so Climates is probably a heavy load, wet and cold might be as well, and I don't remember what splash of rain does but you might want to just take a glance at stuff like that, not only do weather effects use a lot of particles and stuff but you have stuff running the entire time you're outdoors deciding what the weather should look like. When in doubt go into Wrye Bash or something and look at the size of the mod files, bigger ones will put more strain on the game obviously.

Removing proletariats is tough, once you get used to them you just feel like you need them, lol. But I find that even removing smaller proletariats does make the game feel smoother more often than not, though it could just be placebo effect so who knows.

The best way to go about it would be to run some diagnostics and figure out if it's your CPU or GPU bottlenecking and go from there.

I'm not entirely sure how to do that, but the game seems to be running smoother after I disabled the Skyrim Flora Overhaul. It was adding a bunch of extra foliage to the outside world and because skyrim's game engine can't properly change the lighting on plants, it didn't look quite the way I had expected it to.

Textures don't actually contribute to that much power drainage actually, even my old shitty computer could handle max texture resolution on everything without breaking a sweat.
In cases of not-mod-related graphics settings the most intense ones would be anti-aliasing, shadow/lighting quality, and model detail. Surprisingly things like textures and anisotropic filtering don't put TOO much strain on your system (barring you setting it at 16x when your recommended is 2x) so leaving that stuff at high settings won't do too much.



Climates would be a big contender with your performance, yeah. Wet and cold not really if you turn off the additional heat sources thing it has, and splash of rain just adds a small particle effect on the ground that makes rain actually look like it's hitting the ground.

Unless you're maxing out your GPU's memory, though I think Skyrim has a built-in limit of 512 MB of usage? There is a mod that removes the limit though, if I'm not mistaken.

Yes, yes there is. And it's a pain in the booty to figure out. It's like "Ok, you want me to do what? That makes no real sense". Dude keeps going on about giving your first born to some shmuck, while I'm trying to figure out wtf to do in the first god daisies place.

Oh lol I think I have that mod. Not 100% of how it works either, I think the idea is that your computer probably won't use that 512 mb of graphics memory, so you log how much you are using and lower the cap to match, thus freeing up more memory for non-graphics purposes.

Like most of the proletariats I have to improve my performance, I'm pretty sure it helps, but short of downloading that performance monitor I can't tell for sure exactly how. At least with the log I can verify that my crashes aren't memory-related, which is something?

I don't remember a limit like that, my game gladly pushed itself to the 2GB limit of my then-GPU. RAM usage has a limit though because lol 32-bit application.

Yeah it seems you're right and I was misremembering.

God that's the most annoying thing about skyrim. Use only 512mbs of VRam, but I got 8 freaking gigs. My graphics cards freaking yawn, even with all the proletariats I have in this game, lol.