waahooo

Sorry, I did not understand what you meant by "wiping the Data directory" in your first post but I'm following now. Thanks for your advice.

Thanks for your perspective. I think I'll go with the safe side and wipe all old mods first. Two more questions: Is there an easy way to wipe the data directory of old mods? Do I also need to uninstall script extenders? Looking through the Vortex FAQs, it looks like script extenders can be installed manually without issue so it seems like those should be okay to leave alone? But as an inexperienced modder, if you think it's still safer to uninstall those as well and install them through Vortex, I'll do that.

Okay thanks. So the pre-existing mods should run okay in addition to the new mods managed via Vortex. I don't have any other mod manager, Vortex is my first. I haven't had the need, actively trying to keep my mods slim and only have about a dozen quality-of-life improvement mods. I've been "managing" my mods through Skyrim's built in splash screen UI. Which actually leads me to a follow up question, is it safe to toggle the old pre-existing mods on/off (though I don't really toggle them off) through the Skyrim interface with Vortex now installed? It sounds like from your answer, Vortex doesn't interact with any pre-existing mods and scripts so it seems like the answer would be yes, it should be safe.

I have a few mods that I manually installed for Skyrim, but now I just installed Vortex to install a more complicated mod that requires a mod manager. Vortex does not seem to detect the old mods through the user interface. I haven't loaded up Skyrim yet nor have I installed the new mod. My question is, can I install the new mod through Vortex and play the game normally? Will it detect and load my old mods that I installed manually? Or does this require me to manually uninstall my old mods and reinstall them through Vortex? I tried looking through the Vortex knowledge base page but couldn't find an answer. Thanks