The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. To look good and play good on a low end PC

-- A quick update is the change of the title, there was someone who made complaints (lol) but now I decided that this was merely a guide to get more stability, and by chance improve a bit the performance, so yeah
And as a reminder I guess, since I got into Skyrim SE this little guide stays here just because it remembers my time on getting into modding and stuff, mostly sentimental value, but one does not know if someone could need something like this outside guides on "get everything on low and hope for the best" and because only few guides mention certain tools even if almost everyone knows about them on the Nexus--

My PC CAN handle Skyrim now with near to zero problems (notice the near, I don't make miracles) {notice the time the guide was posted so by that one can know what kind of a PC i had then compared to know, you can do it, be patient if you're reading this and want to get a better PC}
SO there are few guides over the internet that promises miracles and that stuff and much of them are for at least a medium end PC so it gets out of the way, yes, I'm talking to you Grass on Steroids. But what I will give you is my work to get Skyrim to run better on my PC, it took me days and also weeks to find the best solution and also note this: the stuff I'm going to put here are NOT my mods neither my work to improve, I'm just letting you know what mods gave me better results and what mods I am currently using.

And now it begins, hope you get this as a useful guide and you know, any feedback or comments are appretiated and as a finla heads up, this is not entirely for a PC that can't run Skyrim even at 20 FPS, it's low but playable, so I think that is the minimal threshold on what to expect when modding the game.

A bit of a prologue

As some kind of prologue I would like to include this video from Gopher as a basic intro to modding Skyrim (Very nice video btw) it helped me to get on the modding community, now I'm near zero error chances on having a Crash To Desktop or errors on savefiles
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QinA4qD6hXM

Da basics

As everyone knows, most, if not all of the games from Bethesda are modable (in PC they're the reason for the mods popularity lol) In that case after you run the game in default settings you might first wanted to get everything on the lowest and of course it looked like sh** just like the first pic i took


Some might think its ok if the frames are good but they were merely ok, to be more specific between 15-20 wich i can accept but in a fight with magic or against a dragon it sucks trust me
So, if turning all the stuff on the lowest didn't help like me or if you are willing to take it to a better state then follow this

It may not end up looking like the following picture but it will run smoother or look better while performing good

The next to do

I don't know if it's "ok" to mention another guide in another but to accomplish my goal on getting a more playable Skyrim i primarly visited this awesome guide http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=222933354
It will explain the most important things to do by yourself and what do they do to your game, also some of the most important things to do in your .ini files (Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini)

Now I'll put some useful pages in wich I found help on getting the right mods, but after I'll get to the point of adding mods, this is the step on changing the .ini files
Now, this is an important question: Would you like shadows in your game? Because they will use a lot of your CPU costing you some good amount of frames, speacially depending on your system

The INSS - Improved New Skyrim Shadows has the solution for you, it guides you on how to get better shadows in various settings, scaling from low to ultra and specifying for medium or low end PC's and for specific ultra builds, I'll put a link on the three of them and a photo to make an example (All of the photos belongs to defosh369, nice guide bro!)

Low-Range PC
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/19632/?










Medium-Range PC
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/283/?










For Ultra settings
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/7638/?










Now at first glance you can't probably tell the difference between Low and Mid-Range settings but trust me, it IS a big change specially on the performance, it's up to you to choose what type of shadows you want, I personally use the Medium settings, but now I'm using the Low settings since I saw a decrease on the performance

The Modding part

For this section, first you need to backup all of your Skyrim (Yes, all of it) wich is located at C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim but since the mods only changes the Data folder, is recommended that you only backup the Data folder, but for myself I backed up the whole game to avoid a full re-install (wich I ended up doing once)

Now, after a backup was made it's time to head to the center of the modding community the Skyrim Nexus (http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/)
This will be the first step on getting a pact with Satan, so yeah, brace yourself and go create an account

Now what I recommend is to install Mod Organizer since it applies the mods virtually and not directly to the Data folder which can help you with your life and get you out of pain
You can get it here: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/1334/?

Now the first thing you should check are some of the mods listed here:
http://www.ign.com/boards/threads/all-skyrim-mods-that-you-need-if-you%E2%80%99ve-a-low-end-pc.452456602/
And here:
https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?/topic/877642-getting-the-most-out-of-skyrim-on-a-lower-end-machine/

NOTE: You don't need all of the mods listed there, you have to choose wich ones work for you and wich ones doesn't do anything

Now first things first the mods you should install:

• The Unofficial Skyrim Patch

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/71214/?
-Notice this is the Legendary Edition wich needs all of the DLC's but I'm putting it first since I think everybody has the DLC's up to this point-
What this mod does is that fix all of what was needed to be fixed and Bethesda didn't fix (lol)

• Skyrim Project Optimization

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32505/?
The next mod (I think it's mentioned before on the two links to check on the mods) it's one of the most important performance mods
This mod help you to not render things that you can't see so your hardware don't overheat with some heavy mods
(Pics by rgabriel15)

• Skyrim Performance PLUS

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/6387/?
This mod will help you in the outside, wich lowers the quality on some effects like snow, falling leaves in the Rift, storms and rainfalls, basically it lowers the particle resolution of things that doesn't leave a very noticeable change but it comes in sepparated versions in wich you can put together without issues
(Pics by Vergis)

• The Bethesda Performance Textures

These two mods helped me to go from low or medium textures to high without problems
It reduces the textures to a point where it doesn't cost too much performance and where it doesn't look like the so called "potato textures"
It comes in two different packages, I haven't tried to put them in one package and I don't recommend it
(Pics by Gamwich)
For armor, clothes and weapons
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/42360/?
For animals and creatures
http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/43921/?

• Remove Interior Fog V2

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/29253/?
The title of the mod says it all, it removes the fog on caves, houses and, hell all of the interiors, sure it will be noticeable but also will be on your framerate. Plus, in my personal oppinion it makes the interiors better looking
(Pics by rgabriel15)

• Beauty Of FPS Project

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/75345/?
I can't explain what it does correctly but it makes changes to some files like Shorter grass, shrubs (?) and pebbles. Real grass ground texture, sun glare, LOD, skin texture for females and so on, but as in the pics the graphic quality looks kinda bad but the lightning looks good I guess that does something apart from changes in textures.
So you should check it out and see what results give you!
(Pics by thelawfull)

• Memory Blocks Log

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/50471/?
Now this is the real deal this is a life saver since some patches (I don't remember their names lol) says the same, that it will help you on preventing CTD's (Crash to Desktop) and infinite loading screens this one did the job for me. I'm putting this as the author says:
"MemoryBlocksLog is a SKSE plugin that writes the sizes of the two memory blocks DefaultHeap and ScrapHeap to a logfile whenever more memory is committed to them."
It's a must I think, plus here's a video from Gopher if you have some questions (It's featured in the mod page too)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37xAMUQc1oY

An important thing to do while modding

These are some tools that I personally use to help me while modding. I will list the tool with download link and if I can find it a guide for the tool

• TES5EDIT

Download: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/25859/?

This is a very useful tool wich helps you on cleaning ESP files (The plugin files on most of the Bethesda's games)
The primary purpose of the tool is to clean the ESP's from ITM files (Identical to Master) wich can cause issues like freezes, CTD's or corrupt save files. The files that NEEDS to be cleaned are the Update.esp, Hearthfire.esp, Dawngard.esp and Dragonborn.esp wich are files that, you can say, are the base game.
I strongly recommend watching the videos that are on the mod page (there are too many of them to post here), wich are the guides for the tool to use properly and to clean mods that need cleaning
How to know what files to clean? LOOT will indicate them

• LOOT

Download: https://loot.github.io/

LOOT also comes with ModOrganizer
LOOT is a tool used to sort the load order of ESP's but it also does more than that, it puts the mods in the order that they should be to not cause errors and also points you what mods need to be cleaned with TES5EDIT and those that could generate errors and so on

• Save Game Script Cleaner

Download: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/52363/?

This little tool is the real MVP because it cleans your save file from scripts that mods would've left on its uninstall and also cleans from unexistent variables and reset objets moved by havok physics, after making the changes to the save file it will create an automatic backup to prevent you from getting problems for deleting something that didn't needed to be deleted
It's a life saver trust me

• Optimizer Textures

Download: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/12801/?

This tool can help your VRAM to not get a big load, it compresses texture files like TGA and DDS to a more optimized and less heavy file
It also can reduce the texture size, going to 512, 1024, 2048 and 4096 -NOTE: you can only make it go down-
It also resizes the textures without loosing quality and making them more lightweight

• Merge Plugins

Download: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/69905

Because if you have many mods the performance goes down obviously, with this you can merge things such as armor and weapon mods together in a single ESP file which is even better because loading 10 mods is not always a good idea when you can safely turn them into 1 mod

• Skyrim Configurator

Download: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/814

With this tool everything is made simple when doing graphical configurations, you get the access of doing it on the .ini file in a more graphical and user-friendly program, it's highly recommended for people that either don't want to mess with the config files or just want to know what it does when changing certain parameters in the ini

• BSAopt

Download: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/247/?

As an extra this tool helps when you want to unpack a BSA (Bethesda Softworks Archive) to loose files, so you can optimize the textures of the file or to do whatever you want with the files included in the mod because this here seems to be the MVP sometimes, not always recommended but if knowing what and how to do, such as the things one does in the Fallout 4 Texture Optimization Project you can archive the same, unfortunately I do not seem to know of such thing done in Oldrim, but still reading the description of the mod one can guess how to use it and in what to use it

Encore

So this is the end of my humble guide, my game ended up looking like this


And adding the Vivid Weathers Mod with like 2 frames at lost it looks like this





But my game ended up also performing at a more stable framerate, consisting on 15-20 FPS in a dragon fight with some extreme magic use as well as sometimes in normal fights involving magic, overall the game runs at 20-35 FPS while being inside and outside.
A little heads up: in the outside it gives a more unstable framerate but in between the 20-40 wich is a win-win for me while on insides being at a constant 25-30/35 FPS

So I hope this guide helps you young traveler on your journey to get a more stable yet beautiful Skyrim

Extra section

As an extra I would like to include the ENBoost wich is a patch for memory limitations of the game, some optimizations and other fixes.
The name says ENB and a ENB usually makes for a visual overhaul and thus this means a lot of performance getting down the sinkhole, I put ENBoost at the final because it didn't helped me much but it can help somebody, that's why it has some popularity so yeah here are the links you need

To download ENBoost all you need is here: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/73618/?

This is a guide from S.T.E.P. about ENBoost: http://wiki.step-project.com/ENBoost

[XamPac]

Yo Slave, it may be caused because there are very high textures wether mods or in the game in general. I've encountered the same issue when I'm running out of VRAM, but if you have like more than 2 GB of VRAM then I guess it's time to clean a bit more the mod list.
With many mods at the same time the framedrops may not be normal.

[3455555555555555555]

I am sorry if it is not a good place to ask this but i've encountered a problem with my game dropping to 50fps from 60 when there are many people on screen. Is it normal in Skyrim?

[XamPac]

Kyo it's nice to see that someone found this useful.
Thanks for the feedback!

AdminBurger for me the Realistic Lighning Overhaul went as a cosmetic and in some places was performance hungry but it's always recomended.

[XamPac]

Uh Evil Atheist, I didn't even know of your existence and I recently viewed your guide, nothing compared to mine.

If you say ther is no sense on posting another guide then why did you post yours? And if it's a copypaste, can you show what is copypasted compared side by side on my guide? So that I can say that is not a copypaste (This last thing was serious lol)

you added some random bullshit that will not help with performance. Yo at least with my stuff it looks nice whit minor performance loss while your guide just says "800x600 is great and low and pixelated textures too"

[Kyo]

Evil atheist doesnt know me and is just crying, don't pay attention to desperate attention seekers.

[VILLAGE PILLAGE ⊕]

Still, there isn't any sense in posting another guide.
This is a copypaste of parts of my guide, the most rated FPS guide and you added some random bullshit that will not help with performance.

P.S Kyo is a retard, period. I know him and he suffers from chronical bipolar disorder.

[Gourmet Footjob]

I would go with a realistic lighting overhual and fog remover mod, increased fps

[LuvM3Damon]

my computer runs skyrim with 160 mods on ultra with 50 fps

[Kyo]

awesome guide, u didnt steal shit from Evil Atheist, what a crybaby, your guide help me a shit ton, thnx Paco

[XamPac]

How did I stole a guide configuration? I did this while adding the links on nexus, not based on any guide or even stole stuff from another guide and I did mention the guide I "used" as help. And I think you lack of arguments on how I stole your "configuration", I saw your guide and I don't see similarities since YOU share your .ini and in here I am based on mods and what they do, not using the same config (which is not good to use another exact .ini file), I use my own config though.