What went wrong with Vortex Update?

[JimmyChoice]

So, I had a bit of an "oh shiaaat" moment today. I managed to scramble together a perfectly working 281 mods strong Skyrim SE installation over the course of last fall/this winter. But early March I kinda needed a Skyrim break and went on to play other things. When I wanted to play some Fallout 4 today, I noticed a Vortex update and thought "sure why not can't hurt to have the latest version, right?" but I was wrong. Somehow Vortex had forgotten about Skyrim after the update. Everything gone.

 

Naturally, I paniced and selected Skyrim SE from the list within Vortex, which asked me to specify the installation folder as it could not find the game. I put in the folder path and boom goes the dynamite! All the additional settings for FNIS, Dyndolod and whatever creates own files within the folder disappeared. Now the good news: I actually was able to fix my game back together. Because I had Steam overwrite with AE before I keep a backup of the entire folder on my PC. Deleted the real one, copied the contents of the backup over. Next I had to spend several hours manually enabling 281 mods and running FNIS who knows how often... I know normally this can be done in one step, but this time it somehow refused to work so I had to do it little by little. Thankfully, I only had to deploy and not reinstall everything (would not have remembered the correct file conflict load orders anymore).

 

Anyway, thanks for bearing with me and here is my question:

I'd like to avoid this problem in the future. Could it be that Vortex, upon updating to another version, tried to scan my Steam libary and failed to find Skyrim, which resulted in losing all the deployments as well as integrated tools? The reason why I ask this is because I'm kinda cheesing Steam. You know how it keeps trying to update SE to AE no matter what your download settings are? Well, earlier this year I solved that problem by uninstalling Skyrim from Steam, then dump my backup into the game folder, then have Vortex confirm the mods and run FNIS, and finally only start the game through skse.exe - this makes Steam forget Skyrim is installed every time I close the Steam app. Don't ask me how - it just does.

 

Anyone know if these two things are related? Is Vortex attempting to find the game anew after an update? Should I never update my Vortex again to be safe?

[showler]

There's a Vortex support forum where the lead developer will answer questions.