Help for Skyrim and Skyrim SE modders!

[Deleted17641124User]

This is generalized help for a LEGAL Skyrim and Skyrim SE mod game

 

I personally have over 300 hours into modding Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout New Vegas, Tales of Two Wastelands, and Skyrim SE. So I learned a lot from how to set up mods that are maintained well and here I will be helping with my most frequent messups.

 

First before I start I want you to download an unmodded version of your game from Steam (If it already heavily modded DO NOT do this, ignore it and proceed to next bold letters.) and I want you to do this.

Go to your Steam game and right click it. Select properties and select 'local files' then select 'backup game files' then backup all the games you are going to mod, this will save you A LOT of time from having to redownload the entire game if something goes wrong. Generally speaking you shouldn't have to do this because Steam can simply validate the game however it doesn't always work and modding is a very complex thing. A single wrong script or modified data file can cause your game to crash.

 

Now that that is done (I love english.) lets proceed to the often screwups I had with Skyrim and SE.

 

Generalized Tips

 

I understand these will seem random however I find this to be the most effective form of quick and easy help and I am sure you will learn something.

 

First of all this is based on NMM because Mod Organizer is not as generally good and this is also to help promote NMM since I personally have spent around half the time on each modding manager and I found NMM to be the generally better choice however Mod Organizer is also good and should have the same features! No hard feeling MO.

 

Okay onto tips! Firstly, if you have problems with your mods make sure they all all maintained correctly. Use common sense, make sure it has a lot of endorses, but even then sometimes its a dead mod. Go to the mod you think is broken and find it on the Nexus site, then click Bug Report tab and make sure that bug reports are being fixed and maintained, if they are more than 3 months old then dont bother, (Unless the mod is conflict free and often this will be quoted on the mod.) then its likely the mod isn't being maintained anymore.

 

Another and better way to check if the mod is updated and maintained regularly is to find the 'actions' tab and click the 'logs' button, here you should see a very long list of logs, and the top one should not be more than 3 months old. If either/or is the case, then the mod is likely dead. If the list is extremely long or very recent then its very likely the mod is maintained well and the mod author is very good at their job. Look for the 'Immersive Armors' mod or 'Unofficial patch' mod for a good example of a well maintained mod. Kudos to these mod authors by the way!

 

Next, if you do a clean install of your game and uninstall all your mods make sure the first thing you do is get to the menu screen of the game before you download a single mod. Also if you do a clean install âmake sure you delete your skyrim or SE folder in the documents section of you are cleaning your saves as well. This is extremely recommended if you are going to start from scratch as well and you modded your other saves heavily because the pref in your documents could also be modded. Unlikely but possible.

 

Make sure once you do make stable mods that you create a backup of both your mods and your modded skyrim as well as your saves and documents! Preferably do this on an SSD because these generally last decades and some even a lifetime. I highly recommend that if you do mod your game successfully that you back it up on a spare SSD without an OS on it. This will prevent you having to someday delete everything if you have an OS failure. Another reason why I want you to do this is because if you add more mods and something happens, you can use this very backup to restore the state it was in ensuring that you can at least recover X time you played. Make sure to make these backups at least once a month.

 

Do not bother too much with load order with NMM or MO, I personally never really have and in my 4 years of modding I can only count 3 times load order actually screwed something up and that was fixed not much later by NMM. NMM does an excellent job creating a correct load order and I've personally never used LOOT because it screwed up my game once.

 

Mods are a very finicky thing, for instance if you uninstall Skyrim SE static mesh improvement mod, it will cause untold problems with your game. (The mod is still amazing, dont misunderstand, virtually all mods do this! Thats why mod authors almost never recommend uninstalling their mod.

 

If you do uninstall one of the many mods that dont really work well with being uninstalled, I highly recommend you uninstall all your mods, reinstall them, delete your documents for the game, and reinstall the game. If you dont want to do this, then simply uninstalling all your mods and reinstalling them should work, but only do this if you encounter problems.

 

If you want to uninstall a mod, the first thing you should do is check to see how the mod author wants you to uninstall the mod, as long as you do what they tell you to, 90 percent of the time you wont have any problems. Unless stated otherwise.

 

I suggest if you want to heavily mod your game the first thing you want to do is create a new save, a new game, a new everything. I have not encountered a single crash or problem from my heavily modded games and I have 106 mods running on my Fallout 4 game, 75 mods running on my Skyrim SE game, and I lost my mods for my Tales of Two Wastelands when my HD drives disk broke (Which is why you want an SSD.) but I had well over 60 mods for that one and for Wastelands that is quite a bit. (Tales of Two Wastelands is a mod that is quite amazing and connects both Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas and does an amazing job doing so, they have their own website for this, do not post any mod from their site to here without their permission.)

 

This is pretty much it, I will end this here, I will not go too indepth into this but if you have any questions at all dont hesitate to ask, as long as it's modding wise, I can probably help. I've probably encountered every possible problem you can find with modding but often times the answer is going to be something you wont like. Often times you are going to have to just start over from scratch, that is why I strongly recommend that if you want to heavily mod your game you either do it slowly on an old save or do it all at once on a completely new game and save. I highly recommend the latter.