What is the ideal Plugin Number??

[Operational Otter]

I know Vortex says not to exceed 250 ESP's with up to 4096 Light Plugins. But what is the ideal number for the best and most stable performance? Just as few as possible?? I recently learned how to merge plugins and would like to remove the small performance issues i am having. (the occasional stutter)

[Chaosium]

Obviously the less you have, the better it is

[Sabaithal]

Plugin number doesn't matter. The contents and load order does. I run well over 300 plugins and my game is quite stable (a bit of recent unidentified stuttering aside).

Though since you can only have so many ESPs you have to pick and choose what you want, and what you can convert to an ESL (not all can be converted smoothly). There's also merging plugins, which you won't know if it works until you get ingame most of the time, and bashed patches but I don't know a thing about those.

Generally as long as you use some kind of load order tool (like LOOT) and your mods don't have any major conflicts your game should run smoothly. Should. Depending on what the contents of your mods are, they might add more processing load to the game, which usually just means more RAM usage. I would look up "fallout 4 ini tweaks" if that is your concern.

[LArc7thHeaven]

For me it's 270 ESP and fallout won't start. It depends on the system but 250 is safe cut number. ESL is virtually your friend but not all plugin had esl support especially the older one

[Sabaithal]

Originally posted by LArc7thHeaven:

For me it's 270 ESP and fallout won't start. It depends on the system but 250 is safe cut number. ESL is virtually your friend but not all plugin had esl support especially the older one

To expand on this, generally you should only convert smaller mods to ESLs, preferably without the use of scripts due to load order issues. A mod that just adds a new rifle for example should be fine, as long as it doesn't distribute that rifle to the level lists (and even then it might work).

[Operational Otter]

Thanks for all the replies, I usually run a Merged(FO4Edit) and Bashed Patch. I sort my load order with vortex, then Loot before launching. I get these stutters, yet no drop in FPS. I have turned my ENB off and on alike. I even removed all ENB related files. I was certain it was Modern Firearms, and War of the Commonwealth. Yet removing those too did not help at all. I have started cleaning my load order up going through my mods one by one.

Originally posted by Sabaithal:

Plugin number doesn't matter. The contents and load order does. I run well over 300 plugins and my game is quite stable (a bit of recent unidentified stuttering aside).

Though since you can only have so many ESPs you have to pick and choose what you want, and what you can convert to an ESL (not all can be converted smoothly). There's also merging plugins, which you won't know if it works until you get ingame most of the time, and bashed patches but I don't know a thing about those.

Generally as long as you use some kind of load order tool (like LOOT) and your mods don't have any major conflicts your game should run smoothly. Should. Depending on what the contents of your mods are, they might add more processing load to the game, which usually just means more RAM usage. I would look up "fallout 4 ini tweaks" if that is your concern.

RAM was my concern for a while. Then i realized that even the Vanilla game was eating RAM, well with my stupidity, i had installed a new SSD, yet i didn't run the software for it, upon doing so, i can run FO4 modded, and ofc the windows processes. and only use 50% RAM. I have tried a lot of INI tweaks and even use the Fallout 4 configuration tool. I run EVERY other game on ULTRA with 0 stutters. I can run AC:Odyssey with Reshade on ultra and get 60 FPS. I run SSE with 400 mods with no stutters and all the texture, enb and reshade needed to make it look like next gen. the only issue i have with that set up is that the game freezes if i use the carriage system. Which i never do because i prefer immersive traveling.

I know its mods, because the Vanilla game runs fine. And i know the purists would say "play with no mods" But i have logged hundreds of hours on the vanilla game. I am just unable to pinpoint what the issue is? I need to look into checking mods for conflicts. I can use FO4Edit for that can i not?

[tulle040657]

Originally posted by Mista Big Nips:

I know Vortex says not to exceed 250 ESP's with up to 4096 Light Plugins. But what is the ideal number for the best and most stable performance? Just as few as possible?? I recently learned how to merge plugins and would like to remove the small performance issues i am having. (the occasional stutter)

As long as you do not go over the max number of plugins of each type, it's not the number that matters. What matters is the plugin itself and how it interacts with your other plugins that is what determines how stable your game is

There are tools that allow to merge plugins and other tools that help you resolve conflicts, if you use them you can pretty mush have as many mods as you like

[Sabaithal]

Originally posted by Mista Big Nips:

Thanks for all the replies, I usually run a Merged(FO4Edit) and Bashed Patch. I sort my load order with vortex, then Loot before launching. I get these stutters, yet no drop in FPS. I have turned my ENB off and on alike. I even removed all ENB related files. I was certain it was Modern Firearms, and War of the Commonwealth. Yet removing those too did not help at all. I have started cleaning my load order up going through my mods one by one.

Originally posted by Sabaithal:

Plugin number doesn't matter. The contents and load order does. I run well over 300 plugins and my game is quite stable (a bit of recent unidentified stuttering aside).

Though since you can only have so many ESPs you have to pick and choose what you want, and what you can convert to an ESL (not all can be converted smoothly). There's also merging plugins, which you won't know if it works until you get ingame most of the time, and bashed patches but I don't know a thing about those.

Generally as long as you use some kind of load order tool (like LOOT) and your mods don't have any major conflicts your game should run smoothly. Should. Depending on what the contents of your mods are, they might add more processing load to the game, which usually just means more RAM usage. I would look up "fallout 4 ini tweaks" if that is your concern.

RAM was my concern for a while. Then i realized that even the Vanilla game was eating RAM, well with my stupidity, i had installed a new SSD, yet i didn't run the software for it, upon doing so, i can run FO4 modded, and ofc the windows processes. and only use 50% RAM. I have tried a lot of INI tweaks and even use the Fallout 4 configuration tool. I run EVERY other game on ULTRA with 0 stutters. I can run AC:Odyssey with Reshade on ultra and get 60 FPS. I run SSE with 400 mods with no stutters and all the texture, enb and reshade needed to make it look like next gen. the only issue i have with that set up is that the game freezes if i use the carriage system. Which i never do because i prefer immersive traveling.

I know its mods, because the Vanilla game runs fine. And i know the purists would say "play with no mods" But i have logged hundreds of hours on the vanilla game. I am just unable to pinpoint what the issue is? I need to look into checking mods for conflicts. I can use FO4Edit for that can i not?

For reference, I run well over 300 mods, and most of my game settings are either on low or high (textures high, shadows and godrays low, ect, good balance for performance without too much quality loss), and my game usually runs about 3gb of RAM (out of 32) despite me allocating 8gb for the game to use if it needs it in the ini files.

[Incunabulum]

Originally posted by Mista Big Nips:

I know Vortex says not to exceed 250 ESP's with up to 4096 Light Plugins. But what is the ideal number for the best and most stable performance? Just as few as possible?? I recently learned how to merge plugins and would like to remove the small performance issues i am having. (the occasional stutter)

No more than 256 .esp/.esm and no more thatn 4096 .esl.

Its not how many you have here, its how big they are and how well packed they are.

[Nemo]

I know this thread is kinda old but I know the actual technical limitations of the engine, so I thought I'd throw my thoughts in for anyone else who comes across this topic.

So the *technical* limit to the number of mods you can have is set by how the engine refers to objects, what's typically called a form ID. This is nothing more than a 4 byte positive whole number. Up to Fallout 4, the Creation Engine only used the top 8 bits (the top byte) of this number to identify which plugin (esm/esp/esl) the object's data is in. This limits it to 255 total possible plugins. The other 24 bits (3 bytes) are used to identify the specific record (recipe, armor, npc, what have you) within that plugin, called the object index.

However, the game itself uses a plugin slot (Skyrim.esm, Fallout4.esm, etc), as do each of the DLC packs. Additionally, the game uses the very last slot (255, or 0xFF) as the player's save file. This reduces the number of plugins you can have by one more. So basically 256 - 1 (Game) - 1 (Save) - x (DLC installed)

The engine was updated in Fallout 4/Skyrim SE to support what they call "light" plugins. The way this works is that it reserves one more of those 255 slots above (in particular: 254, or 0xFE, right before your save), and splits those other 24 bits in half. The upper twelve bits represent the index of the light plugin, and the lower twelve remain for the object index. To my understanding, no light plugin slots are reserved, allowing all 4096 available values to be used.

This gives you a maximum supported technical limit of 256 - 1 (Game) - 1 (Save) - 1 (Light Plugin Reservation Slot) + 4096 (Light plugins) - x (DLC installed). If you're too lazy to do the math, it's 4,349, minus however many DLC you have installed.

Whether a particular mod arrangement is stable on the other hand, is way too complicated to sum up. A mod could be absolutely massive but make virtually no changes to the vanilla in game world (Think for example Shivering Isles or Dragonborn) and thus wouldn't have any effect on those areas, whereas other mods may be absolutely tiny but is constantly present throughout the game (Such as SkyUI) and will always have an effect on your performance. You could theoretically use the maximum number of plugins and still have a completely stable setup, but it'd take a LOT of hand-tuning on your end to make sure everything played together nicely, but I can't even begin to describe how much of a workout it'd be.

Let's just leave the tl;dr to this: The more mods you have installed, the more work you'll have to put in to make it stable, but you can install up to ~4.3k mods. It's an exponential curve, though.

[Fake]

The correct answer is 42.