Plugins.

[Blinkybubs]

How many plugins does this game support maximum?

[Alex]

Two limits:
254 full plugins (ESM and ESP)
4096 light plugins (ESL)
Then, you can have an unlimited number of mesh and texture replacers, or, rather, only as many as there are meshes and textures.

But the engine will probably croak long before you hit that ridiculous ESL limit.

[Liquid Inc]

the game supports up to 255 ESP/ESM files. That count however includes all of the files in it's total, including Skyrim.ESM, Hearthfire, dragonborn, etc..

ESL, is something like 4096, but the chances of hitting that cap is slim so i've never read up about it's maximum. i may have this one wrong, and it might be a lot higher.

That said, i believe the latest update made changes to this count?

[Alex]

Originally posted by Liquid Inc:

the game supports up to 255 ESP/ESM files.

No, it's 256, but 1 is the save and the other the "merged" ESLs, so it's actually 254 free slots.

Originally posted by Liquid Inc:

That said, i believe the latest update made changes to this count?

It was two thousand-something before.

[Liquid Inc]

Originally posted by Alex:

Originally posted by Liquid Inc:

the game supports up to 255 ESP/ESM files.

No, it's 256, but 1 is the save and the other the "merged" ESLs, so it's actually 254 free slots.

I've always considered it 255 because of the save, but otherwise yeah. you could never "use" 255.

Originally posted by Alex:

It was two thousand-something before.

Never looked at the ESL count much, but i thought it always was 4096?

[Alex]

Originally posted by Liquid Inc:

Never looked at the ESL count much, but i thought it always was 4096?

The patch notes say that it was doubled to 4096:
https://elderscrolls.bethesda.net/en/article/4ORD7tshfmHUN8H4ULSgE4/the-elder-scrolls-v-skyrim-special-edition-creations-update-patch-notes

[Corinze]

Oh-man, time for another hex tutorial, as a construction guy I love these, don't forget about the magic number zero.

[Altbert]

Skyrim Special Edition can have a maximum of 256 non-ESLified plugins:
Decimal: 0 to 255
Hexadecimal: 0x00 to 0xFF

0xFE (254) is reserved for light plugins (ESLs)
0xFF (255) is reserved for save game and temporary data

Base game masters take up 6 slots: 00 Skyrim.esm, 01 Update.esm, 02 Dawnguard.esm, 03 HeartFires.esm, 04 Dragonborn.esm, 05 ccbgssse001-fish.esm, and 06 ccBGSSSE025-AdvDSGS.esm. Slots 05 and 06 may change numbers depending on other installed Creation Club content. So, actually the game has a maximum of 248 additional non-ESLified plugins.

As of SSE v1.6.1130 the maximum number of light plugins is 4096. Prior to this version it was 2048 light plugins.Ofcourse you can have an unlimited number of asset replacers without an accompanying ESL, ESM or ESP. Then you can also have a unknown number of SKSE DLL plugins if they are not accompanied by an ESL, ESM or ESP.

[Death Approaches]

re: ESLs it's set so high because lots of people are not technical and don't want to use console commands, or feel that stuff "breaks immersion" or whatever, so there are thousands and thousands of tiny <1k "mods" that are just a single console command or a papyrus invocation passing parameters....

[Corinze]

Good info Altbert, as always, nice and simple. If ya'll talked about the skse .dlls in the past, I missed it, that is good to know.

[Altbert]

Originally posted by Death Approaches:

re: ESLs it's set so high because lots of people are not technical and don't want to use console commands, or feel that stuff "breaks immersion" or whatever, so there are thousands and thousands of tiny <1k "mods" that are just a single console command or a papyrus invocation passing parameters....

I agree up to a certain point. There are just a few console commands that have a Papyrus equivalent, With scripts you can add conditions upon which these commands can be executed. With console commands you can't. Many scripts may be less than 1K in size, but it has to include additional code to execute a command, whether it's an event that has to be triggered (e.g. a keypress) or something else. It's not that simple!

[MustDy]

Originally posted by Death Approaches:

re: ESLs it's set so high because lots of people are not technical and don't want to use console commands, or feel that stuff "breaks immersion" or whatever, so there are thousands and thousands of tiny <1k "mods" that are just a single console command or a papyrus invocation passing parameters....

This is also not true for ♥♥♥♥ ton of mods that simply add not so much stuff.
For example, most armor/closing mods are light nowadays.
Then, rebalance stuff can be light. You can, in theory, do it via console - go modify each bandit you meet.
Followers are light too, if not heavily voice and/or with own quests.
Patches for complex non-light mods are usually also light, as often do not contain its own records at all.

So while there are 'tiny mods which are replaceable by bat', they are tiny fraction of actual light mods base.

[Death Approaches]

why would you rez this? And there ARE thousands, literally thousands of egomaniacs who put more time into their splash graphic than their ~20k mini-mod single-variable mod you could do with a console command, but not all gamers are technical, nor want to be, they don't care about console commands, papyrus functions, CK/xEdit, etc. they just want werewolf form to last 3x as long... so, enter EgoManiacDoucheNozzle's Werewolf Extender v.2.05 Pro Gold!

Same goes for vanilla texture/mesh/scripts/etc mods; unless there's new definitions for objects NPCs races factions etc you don't NEED the .es? just the archives to supplant vanilla content, and you can merge them into a singular set, because of the concept of last overwrite... but again, most are not technical, they use the placeholder to control when something overwrites something else via load order, so they use up lots of mod slots for these kinds of mods. (most don't even eslify them but whine to the creator to make an esl version for them, it's the world we live in. If something isn't the way you want, complain!)

Trying to come up with 254 esp/esm is easy, but finding 4096 esl actual content mods is going to take someone a LOT of effort, I'm not even sure such a high count exists; I've gotten as high as 1600 (I have a kitchen-sink build that's 2200-ish but it's unstable and unplayable still) and that's using graphical mods, which I normally do not use because I want Skyrim to look like Skyrim. Without graphical placeholders, just content, it's incredibly unlikely anyone can hit the original 2048 cap; hence, it was extended because of a non-technical user base.