Modding and the Inevitable Migraine

[alaterdate]

You'd hope it'd be a simple process. Drop some files here, change some text there. But no. It isn't always so simple. Mod Managers, whether made for specific games or entire Engines, help tremendously—when they work.

Inevitably, I spend many hours troubleshooting and trying to inject files. Doing foolish things and hoping my computer doesn't break because of it. Eventually, I get it to work.

But I never remember HOW :^]

Back in May I bought Dragon Age Inquisition GOTY edition for PC. Of course, since I now had the game on PC, and the only good part about PC gaming is mods, I had to immediately mod it. It nearly killed me. It took so long and was so painful. Just for what? A handful of hair mods?! Lol. I got it to work thoug, someway, somehow. Except my PC was really shit at running it so I never played past the prologue-y part.

But now I have a dedicated gaming laptop (runs TS4 smooth as a newly paved road). I have no clue how to get mods working on Frostbite again. The Frosty Mod Manager just will not launch the game at all on my laptop. I have tried various things (admin privilege, folder hierarchy, manually creating file paths) NADA. Quite tired of trying at this point, but I'll have to come back to it eventually when I get to DAI in my replaying of all three games.

If you can't get mods to work, why don't you just play it vanilla? Well, I could just do that on PS4. Bought it on PC specifically to use mods and be a beautiful, ultra-powerful character and speed through the game to see the story stuff again because if I actually want to spend 100 hours fighting randos in the hills I would do that.

Now DAO I got the mods to work thanks to DAO's mod manager. With a caveat. I had transferred my save files from my desktop to my laptop and when you try to load a modded save it needs to access the mods that were already in it or it won't work (you can force it to run, but who knows what will happen). So I applied the same mods and some more because of course I can't help myself now that I know I can run many. Loaded fine, tried to leave Arl Eamon's house and it crashed. He was holding me hostage for gay dating his psuedo-nephew and ticket to unbridled political power I just know it.

Simple solution I say! Restart the whole damn game afresh :^) Not a problem, I love the game and would enjoy playing it once more. But then again, I was so close to the end of that playthrough and I just got the DLC bundle (after 9 years) for cheap.... Couple hours later I got all my mods in and the game loaded perfect and I could walk out of Eamon's house and travel the map, wonderful. Until it finally crashed :^] Ah, lovely. So I can play it perfectly fine (and as gayly as I like) until, suddenly, it will crash. Now I'm not even sure this is a mod problem or a windows problem (Windows 10 you suck thanks), but as long as I'm beautiful and powerful I don't mind saving even more frequently than I already do and launching the game about 20 times a play session (which are hours long sessions to be fair).

Perhaps I should record somewhere, for my future self, the long string of weird computer shit I had to do to make these things work. A little personal troubleshooting guide. But I already forgot.
In conclusion, computer stuff gives me a headache.