I am very much a lightweight in comparison with John, Phil and Raybo. They have been hammering the game for far longer than I have. True powerhouse players and loadorder masters.
Attached is my rather short modlist. Only 148 items total at this point. One weird thing that you will note is that I treat everything as a mod. Even batch files, even the FO4 Script Extender. Every single one gets tagged and bagged and (literally) copied to/deleted from location with a game/profile change. One exception: the godrays.txt batch file, which is the default batfile that every single one of my games runs on load. That one batch file saves me two mod slots as well as tweaking godrays according to BRB's instructions. Three if I wanted to have longer power lines (which don't bother me much any more).
It has been hand-sorted and is still very rough. If you look at it in detail you'll notice some things:
1/ No sorting mods. With the issues I've been dealing with for 6-odd months, I decided that all sorting mods were a pain in the arse. With them went DEF_UI as no longer required, and AWKCR - which I generally only used for sorting and included a bunch of stuff to support other mods that I had no interest in adding to my game.
2/ No Creation Club DLC. While I have it, I have yet to give it a whirl. It can wait/not important.
3/ Some of my stuff is a few versions behind. I dislike upgrading when my game is stable.
4/ The ad-hoc groupings are all over the show. They need more work - far too fine-grained, I will eventually cut them down to: non-esp loose files, DLC, master-files, Sim Settlements, crafting/settlement changes/items, companion changes, game flavor additions and changes - and after that, stuff I'm evaluating or working on myself.
5/ You see no patch files to allow mods to work nicely together. On the whole I do not believe in them. There is one, it comes with and is hidden in the Wall Pass-Through Power Conduits: that one patches it to work nicely with PCPO. Everything else had better (in my book) run perfectly out of the gate or it will get dumped. It's also the author's responsibility to make it simple and easy - I'm not turning my life into patch-hell, no matter how awesome the result might turn out to be.
6/ I have 137 actual mods (or mod-like things, hahahah so small!
) which I consider staples. They are the basis, the core, of every one of my playthrough games. Other stuff is testing only. If I am not particularly interested it won't make it into the core loadorder - if I find that I'm forgetting to use it, it will be removed from the core loadorder. That's why this modlist is currently so small.
7/ UFO4P.
Massive kudo's to the team who do that, however three things ended up with it being excised from my LO for the foreseeable future:
a/ The way it treats shipments (breaking them down to base items immediately upon putting them into the workshop) - that alone is a pain in the arse for building a new settlement, one mistake and *poof* goes your very convenient and expensive shipments
b/ Accidentally breaking precombines at Taffington Boathouse
c/ The debacle with breaking the Nuka World merchants
Any one of those is a 1% niggling doubt (more like 10% for the shipments biz) - all three is a resounding "no" from me. Other's mileage may vary. I personally prefer a stable core gameplay rather than risking it. Especially when only the latest version is ever available - that shows a mentality of "each patch is perfect" which has been demonstrably proven not true.
So the thing with all the above ^^^ is that with this still rough-and-ready unpolished loadorder I've had only one CTD with this 2-month-old game. That was a special case - work call-out so paused the game, dealt with that for a few hours, went to bed - next morning I realized and un-paused *CTD*.
It's not some awesomely wonderful list. Simply an example of taking the time to make a stable core gameplay. It's a work-in-progress, attempting to create something which suits a particular player's preferred style of play. Tastes will change with time, it'll grow bigger and smaller. The core is what matters - everything else revolves around that.
Because this core is lightweight I don't currently need to bake my game save. Only 30-60 seconds with the whole lot enabled at once and a new game is up and running at the mirror. I fully expect that by the point of 200 mods, I will be having to bake my game like the hardcore players do. Especially once I get into the more script-heavy mods that are on my list of things to test out. (Some of the DLC and Conqueror!)
This is what the guys have been saying. It's all about discipline. Start with a stable core, the exact mods don't matter - test and slowly add things to that core. Make it yours.
Rather than jumping in and *grabgrabgrab* at random *kaboom* and you have your problem: CTD after 5 minutes of walking in a straight line.