Vanilla Script (micro)Optimizations

What this is not:

It's not aimed at adding new features or fixing bugs (with one notable exception)*.  Mods are for the former, USSEP and related are for the latter.

Edit 21 Aug 2020:

I've been getting a lot of questions about this, on the forum and in chat.

It's not anything "new" or "revolutionary."  It's not voodoo, no virgins were sacrificed to Elder Gods.  Not even one single goat was harmed in making this.

It's taking principles that the modding community- mainly people who came before me- established as "good coding practices" and applying them to an area that had been previously overlooked: the scripts that ship with the base game!  It's also taking what are basic foundations of good coding practices (not specific to Skyrim) and applying those as well, namely the principle of "fail fast, fail early."

Mod Authors devote countless hours finding ways to make their scripts as efficient as possible, in the hopes that their mod will run better and that the players can have a better experience.   Or in the hopes that players can run more mods before they run into problems.

But, most of that effort is for naught if the basic game scripts are inefficient and hogging up a lot of Papyrus' resources.

There's a lot... A LOT! of posted articles, how-to guides and questions that have been answered in the last decade where mod authors share their knowledge about what works and what doesn't in Skyrim.  THOSE PEOPLE, who publicly shared their hard-earned wisdom, are the main contributors to this.

Even Reddit is sometimes useful:

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/4omjly/a_few_script_execution_speed_psas/

https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/i57siz/profiling_your_papyrus_scripts/

AFKMods has a lot of info on it.  So does Arcane University.  Lots of useful posts on the Nexus forums as well.

Fail Fast Fail Early

In layman's term's, it means "check things that are fast to check first, then check the slow ones"

If I say to you:  "Go see if the store has eggs for sale, and if you have enough change in your pockets buy me some eggs."

There's two conditions there:  'If the store has eggs for sale',  and 'if you have enough change in your pocket'

One is slow (store has eggs) and one is a fast check (if you have change).  It makes no sense to check them in that order.   It makes sense to check the quick thing first, so if it fails you don't waste time checking the slow condition: fail fast, fail early

But computers are literal.  If you tell them to check the slow thing first, they will.  They'll waste that time, every time they run that code.

end edit

It is aimed at increasing the overall efficiency of vanilla scripts: faster execution and reduced memory usage.  The hope is that by decreasing the amount of resources Papyrus has