Would it be safe to compress all my mods?

[Tigger19]

I have the compressor but I'm afraid to use it! Would it be safe to compress all my mods I have and would it increase my game speed? :help: :P

[van Dorn]

Compression via what? And how many packages are you trying to condense it into? If you do it manually through S3PE, it is safe but a horrible idea. Whenever any of your mods become updated, you have to toss the package, find all the mods and the updated one and recompress them. It is usually, however, safe to compress all clothing in one package and usually all hair. I am guessing furniture could be compressed on a set-by-set basis as well. Also, CC Magic does something I don't really understand, but I think it would be safe to use and compress all your mods.

[Celebriton]

All my packages are compressed. It became a default setting in S3PE.

[MrUntuckable]

I've had good experiences with compressing custom content. I wouldn't compress any hacks you have though, they're updated far to frequently to have to compress over and over again.

[eskie227]

Just to clarify, compressing content, hair, clothing, objects, is generally safe and good to do. While mods can be compressed, you'll have to keep updating the original mods folder with new versions of mods, then recompress and replace that one large mod package. I would suggest that it is not a great idea to compress the mods you use. Just stick with the custom content.

[Srikandi]

This is where Granthes's CC Magic comes in handy. It will combine your mods and compress them as well if you want (optional setting), but you can still manage them individually, so updating is no longer such a hassle.

Edit: Just noticed van Dorn already mentioned it. It's not really that mysterious... it just combines your packages into single files in order to eliminate the excessive file handles issue which causes slow performance. Turning on compression will also reduce the disk size, if that's an issue for you, but slow down CCM's performance quite a lot. It also keeps a database of all the source (pre-merge) packages and retains the unmerged version, which is how you can add and remove packages... after you make changes, it just rebuilds the combined files when you start the game. Has some nifty CC management features too, like thumbnails, filters, hierarchical set tree and so on :)

[Tigger19]

Thanks for all the tips! I'll just leave my mods and compress my clothing. hair and objects :)