You want to load both and the ideal order for this is that the all-in-one mods with gazillion changes should be on top and the other mod with specific changes that you like should be placed at the bottom of that one or a bit lower in the category so that the settings it has conflict over the previous one will be overriden and the effects you prefer will be made active. Hence you also have another mod that has the ideal carry weight property you prefer. For instance you have a realism mod which has a lot of changes, some of them may not fit your liking for example it has very low carry weight formula which you don't have a taste to. The load order within a category tackles the same effects or settings which are also present on other mods you have (if you have). Gameplay changes and bug fixes are ideal when after everything else is loaded for it'll stop any issues or provide a fix for those already loaded up above it. They will either replace or add new items to game.īOTTOM: Two categories which have a mass effect to cause issues are gameplay & bug fixes should be placed at the bottom of the order. MID-LOW: Armor, clothing and weapons goes here for these are your preferences that you've added that make your game so appealing to your taste. MID-HIGH: Quests go here because there are supposed to be standalone mods which have little impact to the global settings of the game. If there are scripts within the ESP files normally they are configuration or loaders and does not make major impact on the game settings. TOP: These are right after the ESM files they are as follow: textures (re-tex), models, animation, user-interface & audio for they cause little to no conflict. Problematic in the sense that it may cause conflict the most mods.
Since we already have re-grouped the mods to a fewer number of categories we will now state positioning of the categories from safest to problematic. The other files which are tagged as "for sorting" means you need to differentiate which is which so that you can properly load them accordingly and minimize the after effect of CTD or entry conflicts. As such anything relating to animation, graphics & models are grouped, same with the others.
What we have done is those categories which are similar should be grouped together. Let us understand first the categories of mods and what they may contain or may not contain (will use NV Nexus categories) but I’ll not place too much detail just enough for you to get a basic idea with the current 24 categories. Upon experience with previous games and with similar fundamentals when it comes to handling multiple mods you can have your own load order with little or no conflicts to each other. I’ve gone through almost all files within Nexus to test if it’s good or will it satisfy my curiosity or need, before I used a load manager which auto-sorts everything for me which on most occasions due to the enormous amount of mods it seems to crash my game even with the auto-sort and updating unless I use my exported working load order.
But all-in-all it all comes down to whether your game will experience a CTD (crash-to-desktop) or not. Most people use load order managers to handle positioning of the mods they’ve downloaded whether it be automatically sorted for them or manually done.