How many mods can Fallout 4 handle

[ToiletGanker]

How many mods can I install fallout 4 before it starts to crash

[lockinhind]

Originally posted by Leongwd:

Originally posted by Jollyfingers:

could be different things... even that all mods are ok, just loaded in the wrong order.
or one mod got updated, but another one that it relies on was not.

too many mods mostly means: too many for the user to handle, not the game. at some point you lose track about which had to be updated, what dependencies are between them.

So how do i load the mods in the correct order?

Nmm and theres a tab

[Rando Calrissian]

Somebody should create a plugin extender, if it could even be possible. Like F4SE.

[cerebus23]

Get LOOT that will sort you mod order, and tell you about conflicts and compatibility patches. LOOT is not as developed as skyrims so it is not as helpful but it can find issues.

Get FO4edit it will load all your active plugins and error if there is any problems, then you can see the problem file in the log.

If you do all that and still cannot locate the issue, disable half your mods, see if the game runs fine, start a new game to do this and see if you force it to crash with half your mods loaded, if it still crashes reactivate the first half and disable the rest and repeat, keep doing in halves and keep testing until you narrow down the problem file/s.

[Phase_verocity]

I have 220 active mods and 292 light marked active mods. so you can have way over 255. You need vortex or something similar to do it. Basically using vortex, filter the esp's so that you can only see 'could be light' mods. Then make em all light one at a time.

[hawkeye]

I don't think they care after 3 years.

[Phase_verocity]

maybe not but i don't see any games coming out that are as much fun to mod.

[tulle040657]

Originally posted by Phase_verocity:

I have 220 active mods and 292 light marked active mods. so you can have way over 255. You need vortex or something similar to do it. Basically using vortex, filter the esp's so that you can only see 'could be light' mods. Then make em all light one at a time.

That was not true in 2016 when this thread was made

[ToiletGanker]

Originally posted by Phase_verocity:

I have 220 active mods and 292 light marked active mods. so you can have way over 255. You need vortex or something similar to do it. Basically using vortex, filter the esp's so that you can only see 'could be light' mods. Then make em all light one at a time.

Cool, I'll keep it in mind if I do another playthrough of fallout 4 again

[Lucifer69]

Once you get into advanced modding, you can have a mod list in excess of 1000. I don't mess with merging as much as I used to, but I still have a 1109 mod list merged down to 108 plugins. Just don't try merging big mods, like Sim Settlements, unless you like breaking the game.

Merging patches, assuming you need a bunch, is an easy way to cut the plugin list. The hard limit is 256 plugins, however Fallout4.esm must be loaded, obviously. ESL now takes up a slot as well. The true number is actually 254 plugins. If you use all DLC it's 249 additional plugins. There is absolutely no way to go over this. Period.

For ESL's, you'll likely get crashes or other issues if you have more than 200 installed with an already near maxed mod list. Getting more technical, it just depends on the mods, though the true limit of ESL's is much higher if it's possible to even have that many.

[tulle040657]

The engine supports up to 4096 esl files

[lockinhind]

Originally posted by tulle040657:

The engine supports up to 4096 esl files

I wouldn't recommend that many though.

[Phase_verocity]

Depends on the computer you are using. I'm up to my 512th esp/esl at the moment with my laptop with a 1660ti in it and 9th gen intel cpu. Only 12 of them are esl 289 are light esp turned on. Runs at about 30fps at the door of diamond city when you first enter with nearly every texture being 4k. I have tonnes of different monsters. Thing i've learn't is that you are better off not changing any of the precombined meshes. Same goes with any mod that does that. I had it running today for over 5 hours but my laptop crashed. (not the game). Not happy with ASUS with that one.

[crypticmetaphor]

just lube her up real good and you would be surprised how many you can fit in there. just take it slow and be careful, make sure any products you use are compatible with eachother. Ease yourself into it. Maybe try just a few, at first, but then youll be comfortable fitting an enormous amount of them in. It can be intimidating, at first, trying to imagine using that many all at once, but trust me. The pleasure you get from their combined girth is incomparable to any vanilla experience you've previously had.

[Swordgun]

Question is too broad. Mods can be a lot of things, you can have thousands of vanilla asset replacer mods and it will not affect the game at all. You can replace pretty much all assets, textures, meshes, skeletons, materials, etc.

You can have esl/esl-flagged esps and those can be up to 4k. And 255 esp plugins.

When it comes to plugins though, the game might have issues going through them and it might affect performance, even if the plugins were empty and contain no real data. Just the fact that the game loads them can affect performance. This was fixed in Skyrim Special Edition by a mod, not sure about FO4 though.


Edit: in case you replaced world meshes, you NEED to regenerate the precombines, otherwise you'd get crashes and the performance would suffer greatly.

[Lucifer69]

For the above, Creation Engine seems to struggle at 350 GB worth of mods. There's a number of things that will happen when your archives, scripts, and new ref counts hit a certain point.

The number of mods isn't important as long as you stay under the limit. It's what those mods do that is. Break a single precombine and you can easily kill the game (get's even better when you break them all with scrap everything). Add a single weapon and you can have hundreds before you get issues.