My journey into modding

wilburense · November 11, 2016

Vanilla is a thing of the past :)

rkatt · November 12, 2016

In response to post #44366100.

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And now S.E.P.T.I.M.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/2846

walterhempe · November 12, 2016

In response to post #44340590.

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Same to me, I played 2500 hours with about 150 mods activated and never have seen the end of the game. Skyrim SE looks very nice but the UI is boring. I think nobody can like the game with the vanilla UI.

Aireal2 · November 12, 2016

Thank you for that wonderful article!! I really enjoyed reading it.

I picked up my 1st copy of Skyrim 11/11 for the 360...and played well over 6K hrs, then in May of last year I finally got a PC that would run Skyrim.. and I've never looked back. I had a list of mod's I wanted, before I actually had my PC... A completely different approach, as I knew what I did not like and I had "tracked" the mods that would fix those things.

WyoMike48 · November 12, 2016

In response to post #44351035. #44363725, #44368065 are all replies on the same post.

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You say there is a version that works, is it the latest version posted in the Skyrim Nexus site or a special download? I miss it a lot, but don't want to go back to Skyrim and not play SSE.

WyoMike48 · November 12, 2016

In response to post #44351035. #44363725, #44368065, #44410655 are all replies on the same post.

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I checked out your link above and see the version I need to download. Thanks, and sorry for being a "pest" ... :)

WaltC · November 12, 2016

In response to post #44315415.

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Quote
BlindJudge wrote:

As hard as it may be to fathom, before I began working for Nexus Mods, I had never really tried to "mod" anything. I mean, the only form of "modding" I had ever done in my life was add a spoiler to my first car back in 1996; put a window into the side of my first, self-built computer; and maybe change a console game with one of the cheat cartridges that were available at the time. Modding just seemed irrelevant to me, like an unnecessary hassle; I already liked the game so why on earth would I go tinkering with it? I mean, I’d probably make it unstable, or surely it would BSOD, right? It was the equivalent to me of taking a Ferrari and sticking a massive turbocharger inside it: it may be fun, but was it needed? No, of course not. I was also worried: Was I going to be VAC banned for changing textures? Would people think I am cheating if I added a mod to allow me to carry more in my inventory? Would it detract from the game if I added a map with all the roads? The list of concerns I had seemed endless.

So what has changed?

To put it simply, I tried it... Robin told me to take a week or so to have a play around and see what happens. So I started with Skyrim, the most popular game on the Nexus Mods website with over 1 billion downloads and counting. It seemed like a relatively good place to start; mods were readily available and highly tested by our community, so I loaded it up. I played the vanilla game for some hours, taking in the standard game vistas, the armours, weapons, NPCs, weather, and the like. Skyrim is an incredible game, one you can get lost in as the hours pass by like they're minutes. One moment it's 5 p.m.; the next thing you realise, you've hit 1 in the morning! Your character has many active quests, each like an episode of 'The Walking Dead', and you just need to see it through to the end before you can tear yourself away.

I was enjoying the game... That's a given! However, I had to take the plunge; my job was now on a modding website, the biggest on the internet no less, so the pressure was mounting.

To begin with, I went through the list of mods, which is a daunting task in itself as we're currently closing fast on 50,000 mod files. I explored the list of most downloaded mods and had a look to find those that were immediately going to give me something different, something I would notice, and something I would like.

In fact, the first mod that I ever downloaded was SkyUI, which is by far the most popular mod file we have on Nexus Mods. This mod has been downloaded over 13 million times, that’s more than the entire population of Greece! That is a crazy figure that indicates how good the mod truly is. SkyUI is designed to change the UI (User Interface) of Skyrim in a huge way; it replaces every menu within the game with a far more productive and informative version. Need to know how much damage your mace swings for? Just open the menu. It brings in so many useful tweaks; it makes you wonder why the developers did not create it this way in the first place.

Now, here is where I had my first RTFM (Read The f*#@ing Manual) moment! I installed SkyUI using Nexus Mod Manager (NMM). It seemed easy enough; you just click 'Download (NMM),' and the next moment, NMM opens, and the mod file is automatically added to your list of available mods. Then, you activate it directly from within the application. Easy!

(That is of course until Skyrim Special Edition gets released and we get a huge influx of people, so we have to turn off NMM so the sites don’t go down ;))

After activating the mod, I opened Skyrim and went about my merry way; but where was this amazing new UI that I was expecting? Everything still looked identical! I opened up a browser and navigated rather solemnly to the mod page and read through the description. It seems I had missed one ever so minor part that was necessary to get SkyUI working correctly: I had not installed SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender). SKSE is a mod that isn't available directly on Nexus Mods, so I had to download it manually from their website. To put it shortly, SKSE does exactly what it says on the tin, it expands the scripting language for Skyrim to allow for bigger and more robust mods. The memory allocation patch that it includes also allows you to add more mods to the game without it crashing to desktop, I however, just wanted to use SkyUI.

This time, I ran the game and pressed Tab – you could say that I was pleased when I was immediately presented with the updated menu system that I had been expecting the first time. I continued my game for another hour or two before stopping to think about what had just happened. Now I don't know about you, but have you ever thought about how much time that singular mod has saved you while you have played the game? Before, I would have to open up my inventory and then click to select Armour, Magic, Books, etc., and then run my cursor down the list to find their information. Now, all I had to do was open the menu, look straight at a table of items, and all the stats were immediately available. I could even sort by any of their values if I wanted. It was just a pleasure to use.

SkyUI single-handedly changed my view of modding. Now, that may come across as a bold statement, but I'm pretty sure that most of the people who have read this far, and have Skyrim themselves (the original, not the Special Edition), will have SkyUI installed.

Now, I digress, but the impact of the mod was made clear to me the other day when the Skyrim Special Edition was launched. I was looking forward to checking out the new visuals and improvements that Bethesda had made to the already excellent game. After pre-loading and waiting for the game to unlock, I sat looking at the screen wondering what mods I was going to install first. Working for the site, I knew that the interest was high, and we would soon get an influx of mods that I could choose from. Then it opened, and I quickly began the game and sat through that same cart journey toward Helgen, after which I had to configure my character (something I take my time over) and go into the actual gameplay. The dragon descended and away I went. I decided to follow Ralof and made my way through Helgen, collecting junk, choosing the sword over magic and following the path, only to emerge on the other side a little bit sad. Yes, the game was still fun; yes, it still drew me in, but the standard UI on the menu system was just terrible, and I was already missing the look and feel of SkyUI.

So if this was just one mod, what could I do if I began to find ones that were going to prove helpful and stack them together?

I must have spent a good few hours looking through the mods for Skyrim on Nexus Mods; I admit that I did it the 'easy' way and sorted through a list of 'Most downloaded' before going through each one to discover what it was offering. I believe that in the first few days of modding, I had downloaded, installed and activated around 50 mods. It was exhilarating to add new features to the game, jump into my character, and see what new items, tasks, quests, abodes and spells were available to me. The mini-games that I found tedious and (in my eyes) took away from the main game I no longer had to worry about. Lockpicking no longer deducted from my gaming experience as I installed 'KenMOD - Lockpick Pro - Cheat'. Concentrating on the quests now became the priority and it became clear that these mods had enhanced the game considerably based on my own personal tastes.

With a choice of 50,000 files on Nexus Mods for Skyrim alone, I needed to think about how I wanted my game to 'feel', so I began plotting. I wanted to find mods that were going to enhance the sound and the visuals. I wanted a few more abodes in which my character could relax. Also, as the standard map in the game is 'adequate' but not great, I thought that maybe I should go for a different map.

The list began to grow, and so did my frustration with the website. Nexus Mods is a vast repository; it hosts over 400,000 mod files and even more image files, but can you find anything on it? Yes, but barely. The search was only just functional and didn't allow many filters or arguments at all. Something was definitely going to have to be done to rectify that in the redesign!

Over the period of around a week, I must have installed around 75 mods into Skyrim. It most certainly wasn't smooth sailing, I had numerous crashes to desktop, problems getting mods installed, trouble removing ones I no longer wanted and much, much more. But through tools such as LOOT (Load Order Optimisation Tool), sites such as http://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/wiki/beginners_guide and the Nexus Mods Wiki, combined with lots of perseverance, I have now ended up with a build that suits me down to the ground. Now, following the release of Skyrim Special Edition I have to go through the entire process again. But you know what? That's part of the fun!

I've based this article on Skyrim; it was the logical stepping-in point for me due to it being the most prolific game on Nexus Mods. But since then, I have had the enjoyment of creating a new experience within Fallout 4 ('Lowered Weapons' and 'Full dialogue interface' are two mods I now can't live without), adding different vault suits, changing the UI and allowing someone else to accompany Dogmeat and me on our travels.

I've tweaked some of our lesser known and used games such as Dying Light, Starbound, Wolfenstein and Dark Souls to name but a few.

Each little tweak here and there adds to the experience, allowing new possibilities and fixing some of the bugs that remain in games. The hardest part, for me, has been knowing when to stop and play the game. I get engrossed in the build. It becomes like a powerful drug and I find myself saying "just one more mod, then you can give it a play-through".

The great thing I have found with modding is that it is all down to personal preference; there is no wrong or right way to mod your game. I mean, you can have your files in the incorrect load order or can put two incompatible mods together, which would need to be rectified before your game will work, but what you want to install is entirely up to you and your overall aim.

The community that we have here at Nexus Mods (I know, I drum on about it a lot) truly is an excellent source of knowledge, one which I relied on a lot when I was first trying to get things working. I often found myself scouring the forums, trying to find a solution to some problem I had come up against, and more often than not, I would find the solution. I’ve found everyone I have spoken too to be exceptionally receptive, assisting me in all manner of queries and never begrudging my seemingly benign questions. Our community is a resource, one that each of us can tap into no matter how far along the modding journey we are.

Over the coming months, Dave (SirSalami) and I will be presenting an 'Introduction to Modding' series that will concentrate on a particular game and show how we have modified it to meet our needs.

We'll most likely start with vanilla Skyrim (Standard Edition) and begin adding mods to it. As the weeks progress, we'll show you how we use tools to get everything working, how they make it easier for you to organise mods, and much more. We do hope you stick around and join us.

If you would like to submit an article to us here at Nexus Mods, please feel free to get in touch with Paul (BlindJudge) at blindjudge@nexusmods.com.

Yes, Skyrim is the penultimate poster boy for modding computer games.... It's hard to believe how much better the original Skyrim looks and plays with the 70+ mods I use that all seem to work together without a problem! I'll be delighted when modding comes together for SE, though--should be able to do much more with it...! As you discovered, SKSE is a must!

But right now? I can't believe how much more striking my original Skyrim is than the SE version--even with the few mods available for it at the moment. My original Skyrim looks so much better, in fact, that it's like another game entirely! It's easy to forget how homely the base game is...

I've been at gaming & computers (no consoles here!) beginning with the Amiga in 1986--so that makes, let's see--30 years! Gaaa... I'm old!...:D And I haven't lost my passion for computer gaming yet! (It's great in retirement! Keeps me sane!)

Seriously, you are as young as you feel, and a youthful attitude of curiosity and discovery will keep you young long after you start being able to hear your friend's arteries as they harden while you talk to them!.. Some of my friends are so old...and *stiff*, I guess is the right word! So hang in there--the world is your Oyster! Stick with it because it is worth sticking to!

I'm not sure what the "Director of Content" actually does at Nexus, but I enjoyed your article and look forward to hearing more from you!

Edited November 12, 2016 by WaltC

Deleted3624098User · November 12, 2016

We are obviously family. Thank you BlindJudge.

hippocamper86 · November 13, 2016

In response to post #44340590. #44386910 is also a reply to the same post.

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True, but i never used the ui, not really, hotkey mods!!! With pinnacle game profiler and a 360 controller made the experience seamless, it was like playing a musical instrument.

MrKit · November 13, 2016

In response to post #44340590. #44386910, #44439645 are all replies on the same post.

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To me, half the game was coming up with the load list of mods. It was about finding the perfect list of the best mods and making them play nice together whether that required learning how to make merged lists or whatever. Then, the rest of the thousands of hours I spent, I just did what I wanted. I think I only completed the main quest twice and that was years after getting the game. I played Oblivion for thousands of hours, too and only completed it a couple of times. I spent time on side quests, building certain skills for specific types of characters. I do LOVE the main quest of Skyrim. I just don't feel "married" to it like I have to rush out and get it done. I mean the Prima guide is 1119 pages long, jam-packed with information. This is a HUGE, intricate game with many complicated systems. It could be played vanilla forever without getting old if one is a true roleplayer, so of course with mods it's no wonder we play for thousands of hours and don't always do the main quest.

My journey into modding

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