This is my first real dive into modding, so I've been researching a lot into the Do's and Don't before I spend more time and frustration than necessary breaking the game. The initial plan was to finally attempt to play through New Vegas, but here I got myself sucked into the idea of revisting my childhood while also being able to carry on my character's progress into New Vegas. I'm also seeing there's a lot of great story content developed by the mod community and want to be able to give them a try, but I understand that many of them either haven't been updated in years or make changes to assets that would conflict with TTW.
From the consensus I've gathered across the internet, you never want to install mods in the middle of a playthrough and you definitely don't want uninstall them either. MO2 allows you disable/enable mods, but it's not clear (to me at least) whether this is safe to do in the middle of a save or if this is the equivalent of uninstalling/installing the mod. This is one of those few periods of my life where I actually have the time to pour into this kind of thing. I get one playthrough, so I want to experience as much as I can in that one playthrough. From everything I've seen, these are what looked worth adding:
- Someguy Series (originals, only because the LE series isn't finished)
- Tales from the Burning Sands
- The Frontier (for the side content, though it doesn't sound like there's an option to skip the main quest...)
- New Bison Steve Hotel and Lucky Casino (technically not a quest mod either, but I see this one recommended a lot)
- Courier's Cache (same as above)
- Afterschool Special (a place to dump my stuff early on in Vegas, basically)
There's the obvious issue here that even if having all of these mods together doesn't cause any problems throughout my playthrough, I'll likely run into performance issue toward the end of my run simply due to save bloat. But with that aside, would it be a good idea to have these mods disabled at the start of my playthrough and then enable them when I'm ready to start them (and then of course leave them on when I finish them)? Or would I have more to worry about than save bloat if I did that? If I end up needing to cut down my list here, I'm completely open to recommendations. I'm mainly in for stories that add to the world of New Vegas and Fallout in unique and compelling ways, but if that's going to be at the expense of enjoying the base game, then I'd be content with just going with the recommendations given in the Wasteland Survival Guide.
