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Keeping two separate instances of Skyrim installed


GRFenrir

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I've been thinking lately that it would be wonderful to have two separate installs of Skyrim, given the increasing number of mods I would not want to use in conjunction with others(Tropical Skyrim started it all). For instance, I would have different armor mods installed, different ENB setting and I would have to disable a host of other mods that completely break the immersion with a Tropical Skyrim. If I just copied the entire Skyrim directory, with all my mods, SKSE, ENB, the whole thing, and pasted it in another location...

 

1) Would the copied version even work?

2) Would NexusModManager manage to properly keep track of installed mods of that particular Skyrim install?

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Um, you can most definitely do this with no trouble at all, and you DEFINITELY do not need multiple hard drives. o.O I currently have 6 separate skyrim installs.

 

Use this tool! Simple, one-two click swapping between profiles, label them, and even make a 'vanilla' profile with extreme ease from any install of skyrim, no matter how many mods are installed!

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/19034

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I have a SSD drive installed just for this in my desktop machine. Main disk Skyrim try out all the mods, texture swaps and play Barbie with armor and face mods. Boot to extra drive for (pretty basic) Skyrim actual play.

 

Full Win7, Skyrim, CK, NMM, 40 or so mods, lots of save games used around 70GB. Boots and runs faster off the SSD than desktop hard drive.

 

Near as I can tell, the NMMs don't talk to each other. Steam doesn't seem to care, same account number number on both installs, but they are never both active at the same time.

 

Downside: Have to wait while Steam and Windows downloads and install updates again.

Upside: I have nice clean saves etc. just by copying and pasting between drives.

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Tried changing NMM's install directory to the copied directory, and installed a couple of mods. Works like a charm... Except when I switch back to the original directory NMM thinks the mods i installed at the copied directory is installed in the original directory. Is there a way to manually mark the mods as not assigned? I noticed there's an option for mark ALL mods as unassigned, but that's not what I want.

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  • 1 year later...

Glad to see this here. I just installed another Skyrim directory and it is reading both games as identical. Same save games, same .ini.

 

The goal is to be able to run two different instances with two different sets of mods. I will be checking the suggestion by Demonic Pink right now.*

 

Anyone feel like sharing their experience and success? Maybe a simple step by step for everyone would be great?

 

*This mod requires steam. I do not personally use steam so still looking for an alternative.

Edited by anotherderelict
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Glad to see this here. I just installed another Skyrim directory and it is reading both games as identical. Same save games, same .ini.

 

The goal is to be able to run two different instances with two different sets of mods. I will be checking the suggestion by Demonic Pink right now.*

 

Anyone feel like sharing their experience and success? Maybe a simple step by step for everyone would be great?

 

*This mod requires steam. I do not personally use steam so still looking for an alternative.

I personally run about 5 different installs using that program, I also use Wrye Bash with it, so I can confirm that works really well!

 

also, is it possible to get a non steam skyrim legitly? o.o I bought the hard disc copy of mine from game stop and still had to install steam to install it from the disc... >.>

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You don't actually need that program, it just saves harddrive space from what I can see. Just create another steam install, so long as only one account is active at any one time Steam doesn't have a problem with it. I've got a second install on a separate harddrive as a backup, sometimes the main install gets messed up for some reason so I just delete the folder and copy the contents back over and everything works again.

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  • 4 years later...

waiting for the mod files to deactivate and reactivate. plus a deactivation doesnt delete every last file the mod installs. thus bogging down ur skyrim game cuz it still picks up things like textures and overwrites that technically shouldnt exist. im actually looking to make a new install myself. i have two instances of NMM successfully installing in proper locations to their respective skyrim game directories. but i cant seem to get the skyrim i deleted the mods off of to work. i even went as far as to change the main directory names of the modded on so steam wud pinpoint the regularly named skyrim. but ive had no luck with this. i also wanna know how to redirect save file directory locations so i can have separate save locations for the two skyrims.

Edited by dswagg92
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