Re: Extending the material palette
I don't think there are enough mods with custom materials combined to fill up all the undefined indexes...
You probably have some conflicting indexes on materials on some mods.
Or maybe you happen to have two materials that use the same color rather than index, but this is highly unlikely...
Find whatever mods crash your game and change index numbers on the material code.
These are all the indexes that are unused in the vanilla game, mods with custom material use these.
If you have two custom materials that use say, index 4 - then it's a no go. You'll need to change one, and so on.
I recommend opening "Base.rte/Materials.ini" and reading the documentation in there to get a better understanding of how that stuff works.
Good luck.