[Damo]

JSGME is essential for installing mods as it lets you know if there are any files being overwritten by certain mods. It's prudent to pay particular attention to this as certain mods will cancel out others through file overwriting and may cause instability and CTD's. When I first started installing mods (not that long ago) I started with GWX and started adding things on top through trial and error and suffered a lot of incompatibilities but once I started sifting through the warnings in JSGME I started to see where the problems lie. Now I've been able to tailor certain mods to work with each other or 'merging' as it's known and I use Winmerge that compares text files next to each other so you can see where the differences are and edit them. This is advanced stuff for you at the moment but it didn't take long for me to get on top of it.

Some things to remember is to always install mods while you are in port, never mid patrol and if you do make any changes manually, backup your original files. A lot of people create a separate or copyinstall so that if anything goes tits up you can overwrite your install back to a stable point, or you can just copy your 'data' folder somewhere and use that as a backup as most mods make changes within that folder.

One thing that I found when I was new was that mods seem to be posted all over the place like here in the downloads section, filefront, mediafire, etc. and it's hard to keep track but by reading the forums exstensively you'll eventually find everything you need along with tips on how to get everything working properly. My game at the moment is at a point now where I'm happy but it's been a rocky road up to this point with a lot of frustration and taxing the grey matter. End result is well worth it though.

Good luck and PM me if you need any one on one help, I'd be happy to give you some pointers but there are far more knowledgeable people here. Everybody has a different idea of what the perfect SH3 should be, which is good because without that, we'd not have such a wide choice of mods.