VulcanTourist

To add some detail to this, you can specify the locations of the staging and download folders in Settings | Mods and Settings | Download. As I said at Reddit and @rmm200 concurs, hardlinks require that the staging folder be on the same drive/volume as the game itself; that is a limitation of hardlinks, which are a filesystem feature, not implemented by Vortex. Vortex merely uses them to good advantage. I don't know if it will help or confuse, but hardlinks are essentially extra pointers to the same file content that has already been created and stored in the Vortex staging folder. A hardlink is merely an extra pointer to the same data without copying it. When Vortex "Deploys", it's creating these hardlink pointers to the same data of the same files already stored in the Vortex staging folder. Technically the very first copy of a file is also a hardlink: the pointer and the data it points to are kept separate, which is why you can have endless pointers to the same file data. You can delete hardlinks without deleting the file data: the file data is never deleted as long as at least one pointer to it remains. Once that last hardlink is deleted, so is the data that it points to. The hardlinks occupy no file space themselves. TMI? From what you described earlier, I suspect you did move the game before you purged, which as @rmm200 said forces Windows to actually MAKE A COPY of the hardlinked files during the transfer, which then disconnects Vortex from all of them because they're NEW FILES and no longer the hardlinks that Vortex created in the first place. You could probably try to perform surgery to remove all the duplicated clutter, but it would require experience you probably don't yet have and we can't guide you through it. The only reasonable course, if that is what happened, is to uninstall the game, DELETE the remaining game folder, and then reinstall. That is the most practical way of restoring the game to its default state. After that, when the game is restored to baseline and you've made sure the Vortex downloads and staging folders are correctly specified for the new situation, then using Deploy again will recreate those hardlinks that got transformed into copies, and then you should hopefully be back to where you started. Also, as I said a while ago tonight, don't use a separate install of LOOT outside of Vortex! It's a conflict of effort, since Vortex already includes LOOT internally. It's what the Plugins tab is all about: that is LOOT under the hood.

The DLC is embedded with SSE, you can't actually start the game with any of it absent... unless you've been Very Bad and deleted the Master plugins and/or BSA files for all of them. Do you also own original Skyrim or Legendary? Is it possible that you're not using SKSE64 but instead SKSE(32) and actually launching SLE rather than SSE? Share some details about your SKSE(64?) launch button in the Dashboard and the details of what SKSE(64?) version you have installed. (Personal gripe: I wish everyone would stop being lazy and describing BOTH versions as "SKSE", because that accurately describes only one of the two and is misleading if the other is what was meant! It would save a lot of headache and confusion when people screw up which one to use, and they sometimes do.)

SETTIINGS-------->WORKAROUNDS------>RESTORE/CREATE BACKUP No, you misunderstand: he described being "forced" to do it by a dialog that appeared when he started Vortex. He was not attempting to do it by choice.

If you set every "downloaded" archive to Disabled and thus force Vortex to stage their files, I suspect that might be sufficient to do what you want. It might require actually installing them once to motivate this, but I'm not certain. There should be a lower bar set for this process, though. I've struggled at times with one or two imported mods to get Vortex to populate all of its metadata, even version number.

https://modwat.ch/ and its app are always an option now. If there's anything exploitive about that site or app I'm not aware of it.

What sequence of events can trigger the "backup and restore" dialog that the person mentioned? He was reticent with details, and I've never even heard of it.

Ohhh... I'm shunning you now for sure!

You do not want to clean the vanilla DLC plugins. At least one of them will be flagged as dirty, but if you clean it then it has the potential to break things in a very hard-to-diagnose fashion. I did it with Dawnguard or Dragonborn, and wound up regretting it have having to revert it. I don't know that you can blindly trust the LOOT messages about dirtiness and the need to clean. It's best to check mod forums for discussion about it on a case by case basis. Applying a broad brush to the process would be unwise.

I can't jump into the game, but that's the northwest perimeter of the lake, correct? Where exactly is the castle? The mod's page didn't have a screenshot showing its location on the map, but "southwest of Riverwood in the mountains" could place it near a favorite worldspace location for other mods: Bluecreek Estate, Helgen Reborn (Staadomaar), Tel Nalta, and at least several others. Is the castle east of Illinalta's Deep? Well, no matter if the crash is happening west of there. Is the crash occurring only at a very specific location like the entrance to the Pass, or does it occur more generally over a wider area around the lake? I'm hopeful you will find something useful when you probe for conflicts in SSEEdit. If you've used it to compact FormIDs - I haven't dared try that yet myself - and flag ESPs as Light then I think you can manage the right-click to filter for conflicts. I might try to filter for just conflicts in Worldspace records first as a guess, and then broaden it generally if that reveals nothing. AFAIK there's no way to search for arbitrary text strings like "Brittleshin", which would have been helpful more than once, so you might have to rummage and expand a bunch of plugins to find suspicious things relevant to the crash. You could start with the skyrim.esm Worldspace records, since that is the vanilla common ground, but the crash conflict will likely be between two mods trying to tweak the same vanilla thing.

I could find no mod that alters the weight of lockpicks, even with an advanced search, which suggests to me that it's probably not feasible due to a hard-coded limitation of the game engine. I did find this, though: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/27224 It allows you to set a limit on how many can be carried and adjust their value.

I would leave the archives untouched unless you encounter a true storage apocalypse that demands housecleaning: the archives don't affect responsiveness of anything save perhaps the Downloads tab and UI;if you ever found any value in a mod then you might later find it again;mods can be removed from NexusMods at the author's arbitrary whim or due to site policies;you might later want to learn from or cannibalize part of a mod for some effort, and having the archive means that you can access the bits you find interesting, regardless whether the mod still exists publicly or not.I can only think of that one argument in favor of removing them, and it doesn't seem that you're facing the apocalypse.

Okay, I'll take it. Where do I pick up my badge?

Say, I presume these are site-wide statistics across access to all games' mods, yes? Can you also summarize the same statistics for just Special Edition mods?

Quotation gold!

The question was hypothetical and not motivated by a personal disaster. Someone at Reddit shared a rather disastrous series of missteps he made with Vortex, beginning with some "backup and restore" dialog that I've never encountered, made progressively worse with each choice he made. I'm not confident that anything is recoverable now, but if I can't quickly assess the current state of things I'll be trying to drag him over to Vortex Support. Why people think r/Skyrimmods is a better resource for troubleshooting their mistakes with Vortex....

Would you want or mind that from-the-horse's-mouth information being shared in debates about the two, where relevant? I know you might not have prepared it as though it was a press release, but I'd like to have more information with which to be persuasive. Also, regarding the "run as admin" issue: does this relate to merely using a user account with Administrator rights, or explicitly starting Vortex with Run As Administrator? (I would expect you meant the latter, but just confirming.) What issues arise from that?

If a section/block doesn't already exist in an INI file that would otherwise contain properties you want to change, that simply means the game will resort to defaults; there are far more possible properties than are ever listed in one of the INI files. Simply create the missing block with [blockName] and add the properties that you need, and they will override the defaults. Don't misspell the bracketed name, of course, or the properties within will be ignored.

The Possible relevant objects certainly confirms your suspicions. Did you already have the crash log and that is how you narrowed the suspects to those three, or are there other insights from when you disabled various combinations? I take it that the crash occurs when trying to enter the castle? Is it the PC causing the crash whether accompanied or not, or is it the presence of a follower that triggers the crash? Most crashes I've suffered have been conflicts between two mods trying to alter the same vanilla worldspace, but if you've conclusively narrowed it to these three then it might be something else. Have you tried loading your entire plugin list into SSEEdit and then filtering for conflicts, and then looking at the Castle Riverwood plugin to see what might be conflicting with it, either in worldspace or anything else? If it's specific to that locale, I would focus on at least the one mod that is known to alter it. If there's another hidden culprit, that process should expose it. Have you worked with SSEEdit? It takes some time and experimentation (or tutorials) to become accustomed to it. It has no toolbars or GUI menus, it's all context-driven (right-click) menus.

It's globally original.

What happens if a power failure occurs while Vortex is in the midst of deployment, and has created some but not all of the necessary hardlinks? If another deployment is later started, how does Vortex deal with those existing hardlinks? Does it recognize them as its own creation and simply leave the ones still relevant? Is there a possibility that some could become orphaned and create problems?

I "hang out" there with the express purpose of trying to dispel some of this stupidity and otherwise help a few people. r/skyrimmods is just about the only subreddit that I spend any time reading. I've had a dormant Reddit account for 4 years, but since becoming active in that subreddit a month ago I've gone from essentially 0 "karma" to over 1000. I hope I've done some good. I'm building up an archive of canned replies regarding Vortex and a few other issues.

It seems to be developed primarily in TypeScript, according to Github: https://github.com/Nexus-Mods/Vortex. I look forward to being able to use it in any fashion.

That sounds very promising. Since Vortex has also implemented the easy form, what would you think of submitting the core of your work as an upgrade to the existing Make Light feature? Sure, I can add your tool to the Dashboard, but being able to visually select multiple plugins right inside Vortex and then apply the feature to all of them as a group, as I can now, would be fully awesome.

Dirty Harry: "A man's got to know his limitations." You listened! I haven't used Wabbajack, but I've read good things and was impressed by the careful process used to curate the published lists.

What irks me about this behavior is that they mislead others into believing the same, when it's repeated often enough (and it is). There are people who never even consider Vortex as an alternative because of this ad hoc misinformation campaign.