Manually reverting AE update

[Bellegar2020]

I've seen quite a few of those mods / tools to roll back to your Skyrim setup before AE and it's awesome to see people making things like that, but since AE is still quite new the tools are being updated and maybe everyone can't get them to work for their setup. so this an alternative way of reverting back to pre-AE Skyrim in-case you have a backup of the files listed below.

 

About four or five days ago I launched SKSE through a shortcut and wouldn't you know it, I got a message saying "You're playing a version of Skyrim that isn't supported by your SKSE." Well, words to that affect. I panicked and couldn't understand how on nirn my Skyrim got updated, since I have the setting turned on to only update Skyrim when I launch it, and I only launch it through SKSE, which shouldn't prompt the update, I think.

 

Then I remembered reading about backing up your game files due to the then upcoming AE update. It's really good to have a backup, especially on heavily modded setups and if you do any manual installations or edit meshes, textures or other stuff to your liking.

 

In order to revert the AE update, I went to Skyrim root folder, where SkyrimSE.exe is, and sorted the folder by "Date modified".

There were four items in the root folder that had been modified when the game updated:

 

1. SkyrimSE.exe

2. Skyrim.ccc

3. bink2w64.dll

4. Data folder

 

Inside the Data folder, there were 29 files all with the same modified date, being part of the AE update:

 

- ccBGSSSE001-Fish (BSA)

- ccBGSSSE001-Fish (ESM)

- ccBGSSSE025-AdvDSGS (BSA)

- ccBGSSSE025-AdvDSGS (ESM)

- ccBGSSSE037-Curios (BSA)

- ccBGSSSE037-Curios (ESL)

- ccQDRSSE001-SurvivalMode (BSA)

- ccQDRSSE001-SurvivalMode (ESL)

- Dawnguard (ESM)

- Dragonborn (ESM)

- HearthFires (ESM)

- Skyrim - Animations (BSA)

- Skyrim - Interface (BSA)

- Skyrim - Meshes0 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Meshes1 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Misc (BSA)

- Skyrim - Shaders (BSA)

- Skyrim - Sounds (BSA)

- Skyrim - Textures0 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Textures1 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Textures2 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Textures3 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Textures4 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Textures5 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Textures6 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Textures7 (BSA)

- Skyrim - Textures8 (BSA)

- Skyrim (ESM)

- Update (ESM)

 

As far as I know, those were the only things that changed with the update. No loose files were added in the data folder with AE update, to my knowledge. I could be wrong, but it would make sense for all of the files to be in archived format. I moved all of these 32 files into a new backup folder specifically for the AE update. Then I iadded the files from my pre-AE backup to Skyrim root and data folders, all the ones that had been replaced by the update. Now it's been almost a week with no issues whatsoever.

 

I don't know what I'm doing half the time, when it comes to modding. Just now starting to get more familiar with SSEEdit. Meshes and textures I can handle, but this talk of scripts..

 

All of this might be super obvious and useless stuff for many but hope it helps someone even if just to prepare for situations like this, or to prevent f***upery when you edit 500 meshes, overwrite your old ones with them and later realize you just messed up your game and you have to edit all of them one by one, again, and you slowly sink into madness and desperation thinking will this never end, am I doomed to repeat th.. but I, I never had that happen, fortunately.

 

Anyway it'll be 2031 when Bethesda is about to release the 20th Anniversary Edition, so plenty of time to practice breaking and fixing Skyrim. "The man who is prepared, has his battle half fought", good old Miguel always used to say.