I think I might have screwed up inadvertantly

[kvnchrist]

I am a truck driver and am out over the road for 3 weeks at a time. I recently bought an Alienware 17 r4 to play my games on. I downloaded all my games on there and then while out over the road I had an issue where I had to reinstall my OS and I suddenly couldn't tether wifi from my smart phone any more. It just wouldn't connect, so I bought another laptop to hold me through to when I got home and could put the alienware in the shop. I have Skyrim downloaded on the second one and finally found out what was wrong with the connection problem on the Alienware. I've been trying to download Skyrim, back on my Alienware using steam, as I've done so in the past.

If I bought every game I've ever owned, can I have them on two computers, having one for a backup and still be good with Bethesda. As I've said I tether wifi from my smartphone and the 11 gb that it takes to download it over the road comes at a very high price.

[engelbert]

I'm not sure if i understand the question right, but you can copy the game files from one steam installation to the other steam\steamapps\commmon\Skyrimspecialedition and also copy the appmanifest_489830.acf (its either in steam\steamapps\commmon\ or steam\steamapps. restart steam, press install and steam will say discovering existing files and revalidate (at worst case it will redownload the masterfiles again, if you cleaned them before).

also copy the saves and disable steam cloud, since uploading and downloading the saves takes also a lot of data, since average save file is like 12mb for a modded skyrim.

with two steam installations on different computers (same account), only one can play at a time. and also for tethering i personally would recommend usb-tethering, since the connection is more stable.

[engelbert]

edit: just saw that it does not say special edition. for normal skyrim you would need appmanifest_72850.acf

[Oubliette]

Basically you can have as many copies of Skyrim installed from steam to as many different pc's as you want. You can only play one at a time and keeping your mod lists the same isn't generally as easy as copy pasting your data folder but no one's gonna hunt you down for installing more than one legal copy.