best add on number

[Dimetime35c]

okay so i can see there are TONS of mods and add on for this game. trying to run them all at once wouldnt be even close to possible for even the best pc. what is a good number of add ons to have? at which point does the number of add ons start to cause to much issues and crash the game? im not asking about which add ons are best to have. just would like an idea of the number other people use. ive been getting crashes and freeze ups.

[sumghai]

I use around 20~30 mods.

However, most of them have been heavily pruned down to the bare essentials - I often delete mod parts that I know I will never use in the future (e.g. fuel tanks, since I'm happy with the stock ones).

Some mods also consume much more memory than they should (e.g. ISA MapSat), so the quantity of mods isn't necessarily a good metric for determining how many add-ons a particular install may support before running out of system resources.

[HeadHunter67]

It's not about quantity, it's about size.

Given the limitations of the 32-bit Unity engine upon which KSP is built, you'll find that crashes begin once your GameData folder creeps past 1.5GB, becoming more frequent as that folder increases in size. Once you've got 2.0BG+ in there, it's likely to crash when loading the game. Remember that the Squad stock parts are present in this folder already, and account for nearly half of that limit.

So, anything more than 750MB of additional mods increases the risk of unexpected crashes.

[PolecatEZ]

okay so i can see there are TONS of mods and add on for this game. trying to run them all at once wouldnt be even close to possible for even the best pc. what is a good number of add ons to have? at which point does the number of add ons start to cause to much issues and crash the game? im not asking about which add ons are best to have. just would like an idea of the number other people use. ive been getting crashes and freeze ups.

Dude, this is exactly why I'm doing what I'm doing.

I've taken the best mods and stripped them down to the bare bones. Total load for B9, Firespitter, Quantum Struts, KSPX, NovaPunch, Infernal Robotics, KAS, and a few other minor ones now comes to about 300mb total, with about 500 or so parts. I'm in the middle of adding Remotetech and Mechjeb capabilities, as well as re-balancing everything to be in line with Kerbal Space Program and not "realism". It will be a tiny patch applied over everything that does the job, so I don't have to mess with licensing.

Oh yeah, and intuitive reorganization as well (all RCS related stuff in Control, for example).

My issue with mods in general has always been "cheat creep", however modders choose to justify it. They tend to make the stats on their stuff "just a bit better" than the base game's, leading to basically "Why don't you just use a cheat code instead?" On the other hand, you have the reality buffs that insist on making things very hard on the general populace, despite having really cool stuff. Either way, not in line with the overall game vision. Then, after about 800 hours (so says steam) of using only stock parts, I decided to try mods. Dear god, my game designer instincts took over and I just started seeing potential everywhere. Three main issues crept in:

1 - Redundancy - Every modder and their mother needed to make their own fuel tanks, tiny landing struts, boxy looking probe cores, boosters, etc that all did basically the same thing. A helping handful were truly unique, however.

2 - Balance with Base Game - Bearcat Boosters, I'm looking at you...'nuff said. Some things were obviously done to be creative, like Wayland's stuff which I love, but other stuff was very insidious in their monty haul creep.

3 - Feature Creep - Does every modder need to invent their own resources to do everything?

The funny thing is that the biggest resource hog is KSP itself. Their parts alone take up 700mb or so, half of that number is internal cockpit components for your command modules. Not much I can do about that. Digging through the internals, my hat is really off to the B9 creator for his efficiency...his stuff got trimmed too though, mwahahaha...

Anyways, results forthcoming probably by this weekend. I worked out how to do the patcher to kill stuff. So far I'm most of the way through the catalogue...1100 parts and 1.8 gb is trimmed to 500 parts and 275mb. A few mods were already so stripped that you can just download them straight without patching need (Kethane, for example). Other's, while beautiful, were beyond help (sorry Soviet Parts Pack and Kosmos Stations). There are also a few that I'll implement in the CORE Patch later as they become more mature.

Anyways, hope that was a good answer. Now back to sorting...

BTW, if anyone knows a way to get items to arrange alphabetically in the catalog without changing their folder structure, let me know.

[Motokid600]

If I delete a part in gamedata and I have the game still running will that be a problem? What I want to do is go through each and every part and ask myself "Will I ever use it? No? Delete.." ( backup of course ). It'd be nice to look at the parts in game so I get a good idea instead of staring at the file and asking that same question.

[Greys]

That cheat creep is probably due to really poor conveyance as to how stock is, everything's so unrelated and the relations that do exist are in curves, it's hard to really compare much stuff. I've put a lot of effort into measuring the stock containers (pre.21) in order to maintain that my stuff is volumetrically similar to stock containers, but then trying to compare engines and mass/volume v. thrust v. isp @ atmo v. velocity and considering the volume density of the fuel it takes, it's all just a lot to consider.

Motokid600, when KSP boots up it loads everything it needs from GameData into RAM, this is largely seen as one of KSP's biggest problems. But untill you close the game or reload the database, any changes you make to the files are completely unrelated to your experience.

[Motokid600]

Ty Greys that's exactly what I needed to hear.

[Greys]

Keep in mind, when a craft is loaded (which now happens when you load the persistence file and view kerbal space center) any craft which contains parts that cannot be resolved will be arbitrarily deleted without your consent.

[BES]

Personally im annoyed by the way the game loads up add-ons ... it should NOT have to load up every single one of them on start up... things could be loaded on the fly instead ...and shut off if not needed.

Seriously ...its a 32bit program with mod support but your restricted to a small amount because it has to load up every single file before hand and use up all the ram in a 32bit space..

I have 16GIGS of ram and a 64bit OS ..so its even more annoying ..

They need to find a better way to handle things ..

I have a bunch of cool mods I want to use but the game keeps crashing because it keeps hitting the memory limit..

so thanks for the info ..I will try to reduce the mods I have to 20 or less...