UESP Forums

I have been having conflicts with mods and load order. Getting to be a minor headache. BOSS was recommended to me. So, does any one use it and is it reliable?

Yeah, it is. It recommends the best order to load mods in to prevent that sort of thing.

Don't know how to re-arrange the order though...

I've used it for a little while, and it is reliable. Gopher has a great video on it here (the part specifically about BOSS is about 10:20). I agree with the point he makes, though, that BOSS isn't a replacement for knowing how load order works, and he spends the first ten minutes on load order in general.

This ties in with rearranging the order, as you can create User Rules to override the default BOSS ordering for particular mods. For instance, I have a rule to make sure Automatic Variants is last. Other times, when you run BOSS, it'll flag certain mods as Unrecognized Plugins, which are left unsorted. To get those sorted, you create a User Rule to place a plugin in a particular group, such as Items, Landscaping, Magic, etc. These groups are all listed in the Masterlist tab in the User Rules Manager. It's a fairly intuitive UI, probably easier than I've made it seem.

Well, I tried it out for a month and have come to the conclusion that there are too many mods for Skyrim now and the Boss team is way behind adding them to the master list. I tried setting my own rules with limited success.

At this point its easier for me to set the load order in NMM and go from there.

I mean, they obviously won't be able to get everything, that'd be crazy. But they do manage to get most of the popular ones, and so it's at the very least a good launching point

It does recognise a lot of mods, and I think it tells you which it doesn't in the log (the only ones it hasn't recognised for me are compatibility patches for OBIS).