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F4SE Script management, FPS & Lag (Looking for assistance)

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Hi all!

I'm currently playing a fairly heavily modded profile of Fallout 4 using Horizon and Sim Settlements in concert with each other. I know very little in the way of how scripts actually work but here's my situation/question.

Settlements
- 6 to 12 based entirely on Sim Settlements plots and resources
- Other Minor settlements built around Horizon farms, outposts etc
- Red Rocket is my Horizon "Main workshop" and has no plots or real settlers

So what happens is, on occasion, settlements will start to lag and fps drops majorly (Usually if I'm building plots or plots are upgrading). Sometimes leaving will help, sometimes not so much. Usually a restart of the game will make everything silky smooth again and all is well.

My question is: Firstly, is this because of scripts running in settlements? Secondly, is there a way to mitigate this at all? And finally, should I be concerned about script limits (Like max that can run at once etc).

EDIT: If there are visual settings in SS that can help, which are best to lower/turn off? (Clutter, lights, visitors etc).

I understand modding has an effect on gameplay and I'm not aiming to be like "Ugh... My game is broken, modding sucks and these mods are lame" as you see in so many places! :)

I'm more looking for information on how scripts work and what I can do to lessen their impact on performance. (Shorter visits to settlements, spacing out upgrades etc). Are there any tools that help with scripts running simultaneously?

Appreciate your thoughts folks, and like I say, I'm well aware that heavily modded Fallout can be a pain in the butt. I'll take the slight performance hits from time to time in exchange for awesome settlements/gameplay. :)
 
How many Settlers & how many Plots are in the settlements when slowdowns occur? Which locations?

What are your PC's specs? Which mods are being used? Especially if there is Scrap Everything or similar, no matter how good the PC is likely there will still be loss of performance when using Scrap Everything.

On my own game I can get to about 15 Settlers and 30 Plots while still having good performance. I can get to about 20 settlers and 40 plots while starting to have moderate drops which can be tolerable when just visiting the settlement but potentially problematic if raiding it with Conqueror. At 50 plots the performance tends to be too annoying in general. Of course this can change a bit if the location is in a busy spot with a lot there already or if it's empty, this is for emptier locations like maybe one of the triangle of death spots where I am ignoring the other 2 and am not using prebuilds.

I do not use Scrap Everything, these numbers would likely be much lower if I did.
 
My largest settlement (Where I hit slow down) is Starlight with 20 settlers and homes/jobs for all.
The other place it hits is Sunshine Tidings where I have a lot of advanced industrial but only 12 settlers with vanilla beds.

Honestly, my PC is old and drab so it struggles sometimes anyway. Suffice to say its about 8 years old and in need of upgrades.
I don't use scrap everything any more, learned about precombines the hard way!

I was just wondering more about the scripts and how/when they run, stop etc. And whether they can be managed better through gameplay or tools.
 
Horizon seems to me like a script heavy mod but I haven't used it since with my large load order it'd be a huge time sink to patch everything to work with Horizon. Though it does look pretty interesting I unfortunately have limited time to play and I also try to put time into creating things so for the moment I decided not to use Horizon.

I was just wondering more about the scripts and how/when they run, stop etc. And whether they can be managed better through gameplay or tools.
Mod conflicts/Load Order issues can make it worse but the main thing that affects these are uninstalling mods mid playthrough since the scripts & related data stay behind on the save(Bethesda made the assumption that players would never uninstall mods during a playthrough). I avoid uninstalling anything aside from if I'm at a point of being willing to restart on a new game if needed.

I would try the low setting on performance wizard and turning down Shadows/Shadow Draw Distance. If the GPU is also 8 years old I'd try using a monitoring software like MSI Afterburner to check if VRAM might be running out which is possible if the official HD DLC and/or many texture mods are in use.

If you use a lot of texture mods-You might want to look into the Textures Repack Method used in BRB Modlist. When the Textures folder in Fallout 4/Data gets much above 10GB or 20GB most systems will see some performance loss. If the texture mods are 4K textures you might want to consider changing to 2K/1K.

The game also runs much worse on Hard Drives, you might want to consider an SSD. Smaller ones have come down in price quite a bit, though I recommend trying for a bigger one if you can so as to have a reasonable amount of space to work with. If it's possible you might want to consider upgrading, since 8 years ago puts it at 2012 so I think that is either GTX 600 or 700 series with Intel 2000/3000 series or FX 8000/9000 series. RAM might be DDR2, since my laptop from then had that.
 
Thanks for all the assistance there!
I don't use any texture mods (except for the Rustbelt Flora mod) but I'll mess with the shadow draw distance and see what happens.
As far as I'm aware I haven't uninstalled anything in this playthrough so fingers crossed that's not an issue.
On the tech side of things, I'll have a look at the monitoring software.
Thanks again!
 
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