Hey,

So I recently bought Skyrim AE and started my first playthrough. I just wanted to add some mods for cosmetic improvements, and tried selecting mods that were as light as possible (no large-file retextures or ENB), and safe to uninstall. My current modlist looks like this:

Achievements Enabler
Static Mesh Improvement
Hair Remake
NPC Hair
Omnibus Parallax Terrain
Real Mountains Rebuilt 1k
Happy Little Trees
Cathedral Pine Grass (RQ)
Folkvangr Grass (RQ)
Forest Grass (RQ)
QW's Grass Patch
Cathedral Water
Parallax Caves 2k (RQ)
Parallax Caves 1k
Blended Roads (RQ)
Better Roads
Bridges Snow (RQ)
Parallax Bridges 2k
Parallax Shores
Azurite Weathers
Better Weapons Meshes
Mandragora's Characters

Note: I abbreviated some of the mods' names and added '(RQ)' to mods that are prerequisites for the mod below.

In any case, it took me a while to establish what worked for me and what didn't. The one mod I am not so happy with right now, is Mandragora's character overhaul. I picked it because it seemed like the most natural face mod (no Korean plastic surgery), and because it was stated that:

"Mod is safe to uninstall in mid game. Only parameter that will be stored in your save file is feminine walking animation for some female NPCs (that's not bad thing I guess)"

Regrettably, this turns out to be absolutely untrue. Character faces look rather natural, but as others have pointed out, every female looks like Kristen Steward. I tried uninstalling it, or overwriting it with Bijin's (still better to have Korean surgery, than Steward's RBF). However, I then get a message that my save is heavily dependent on Mandragora's overhaul. Females turn up blackfaced, and even worse, my own male character becomes bald!

Since I'm only at Whiterun, I guess I'm not yet at the point of no return, and should just start a new game. I don't want to make the same mistake though, and end up with another character with baked-in mods. Can anyone recommend any not baking-in facemods? Does anyone have any experience with uninstalling Bijin's mid game?

It's basically how it works, some information related to NPCs are always stored in your savegame, so removing the mods messed up their faces.

To prevent this from happening, you will want to avoid any mods that edit NPCs directly.

Such as "Bijin Skin": it only changes the body and face body textures, without directly editing any NPC, so it is safe to install and remove at any time, as many times as you want.

ps: "Achievements Enabler" was succeeded by "SSE Engine Fixes".