I'm scared of using Steam Workshop

[J_R]

I tried to find info on this, and considering there wasn't much, I'm assuming I'm worrying for nothing but.. are there any compatibility issues between running mods through NMM and downloading on steam workshop? What about using BOSS? Thanks.

[Staind716]

Not 100 percent sure about the compatibility issues. I personally prefer the Nexus because the Workshop is so new and I really don't like blindly trusting their mods to be installed and uninstalled correctly. My advice would be to get as many of the mods you want as possible from Nexus and only using the Workshop for the mods that are exclusive to them. I like to install my mods manually so if there are any issues I know exactly where they are and what files need to be removed. If you want automatic downloads though I would use NMM over Workshop.

[David Brasher]

Steam Workshop generally does not work. Most mods cannot be uploaded there because the system is designed wrong and/or is broken. TESNexus has about 13,000 mods and Steam Workshop only has about 400 mods because it is an ill-executed hunk of junk. Very disappointing. (And they held back the CK for three months just so they could make this?)

[Rennn]

The mods that are there should work, however. I have NMM, many Nexus mods, and probably ten or fifteen Workshop mods, and they all work together. Workshop mods are at least obscenely easy to uninstall if they don't work, so it'd be a tiny risk.

[J_R]

Thanks you guys for the responses. I'm pretty much already on board - I've been Nexus-exclusive thus far, but am now supplementing with ones that are only on the Steam Workshop.

 

Buuut... funny enough (ok not very funny at all), I encountered some issues recently, and I traced both issues back to mods downloaded on Steam Workshop... both were housing mods and they were causing CTD's and one was even making interactive objects (pillar puzzles in a quest) not function at all.

 

It really reinforced my wariness about using Steam Workshop and now I'm even more paranoid than ever!

[kromey]

Buuut... funny enough (ok not very funny at all), I encountered some issues recently, and I traced both issues back to mods downloaded on Steam Workshop... both were housing mods and they were causing CTD's and one was even making interactive objects (pillar puzzles in a quest) not function at all.

 

It really reinforced my wariness about using Steam Workshop and now I'm even more paranoid than ever!

That's a mod issue, not a SW issue -- you could have had the exact same problem had you downloaded the troublesome mods in question from Nexus, NMM doesn't do any kind of magic to fix things like that (nor does SW do any kind of magic to cause things like that).

 

I'm not arguing that you should use SW -- it's wholly up to you where you want to get your mods from -- I'm just pointing out that this incident is no reason to be wary of SW anymore than you should be of mods in general, regardless of source.

[David Brasher]

Some people blithely archive their mods with the CK and upload them exclusively to Steam Workshop. They may not realize that the packaging process broke their mods by leaving out important files. So unfortunately, there are mods uploaded to Steam Workshop that do not work. Most of the mods there probably do work, but don't be too disappointed if you subscribe to a mod which does not work.

[kromey]

There are people who upload mods that don't work to Nexus, too, often because they neglected to include necessary files. Again, that's not a function of the distribution network, but rather of modding itself -- people can make mistakes when packaging their mods regardless of how they are distributing them.

 

Case in point: I uploaded 3 different versions of my mod Dovahheim to Nexus before I realized I'd neglected to include the placeholder audio and lip files for my NPC's dialog. Not a mod-breaking issue, true, but it did make it nigh impossible to know what she was saying, and could have happened whether I'd been uploading to SW or Nexus.

[David Brasher]

Steam Workshop only allows CK auto-packaged mods to be uploaded. If the CK packages the mod wrong, then there is no way to manually package the mod and upload it right.

 

Mods you often can't upload because of the broken CK archiving system:

 

(1) Mods with sounds.

(2) Mods with scripts. (Especially vanilla Skyrim scripts that have been edited as opposed to mods with new scripts.)

(3) Mods that edit some buggy areas of Skyrim.esm and the auto-archive system tries to pull in the buggy content for packaging.

 

Steam workshop has some severe limitations which prevent certain other classes of mods from being uploaded. Mods you can't really upload:

 

(1) Large multi-part files. (You could upload pieces of your file in different spots with different names, and rely on the gamer to reassemble everything, but that is not optimal.)

(2) Files with multiple .esps for different options. (Like an overhaul mod with different pieces or different versions to help you tailor your game to be the way you want it.)

(3) Files with multiple documents.

(4) Mods with enclosed image files.

 

I don't know about you guys, but this just seems really really lame to me. TES Nexus would shut down in short order if it was set up this way.

 

When I think about how they built Steam Workshop, I think about an error message that an old computer I used to use would sometimes give me:

 

REDO FROM START

Edited March 8, 2012 by David Brasher

[kromey]

Not all of this is true.

 

You can add files to your archives even if the CK didn't automatically pick them up for you, and still upload those to the SW. If you couldn't, no texture replacement mods would be found on the SW -- and yet there's plenty of those! All you have to do is, when you select "Upload Archive" and it shows you what it wants to put in the .bsa, drag the extra files into that window. Heck, without this ability, you wouldn't be able to upload archive-only mods, and yet there's a section on the wiki dedicated to doing exactly this!

 

And when you go to upload an archive and already have a .bsa file made, it asks you if you want to use that one or replace it; while I haven't tested this yet, this seems like you could use external tools to create your mod's .bsa and upload that to the SW. In fact, checking the CK wiki, it says that this is indeed possible for mods uploaded to the SW!

 

That's not to say that there aren't faults with the SW. You hit on my biggest gripe (and the reason my Advanced Glass mod likely will never be on SW, at least until they fix this) -- no options. That is, you can't supply two or three .esp files for a single mod with different settings, meaning that you can only make all-or-nothing mods for SW, or else clutter up the terrible SW browser with multiple versions of the same mod. Another big fault is the complete lack of any support at all for mod dependencies. And did I mention the terrible SW browser?

 

As far as I'm concerned, liking or disliking the SW is a matter of personal opinion. I find it tolerable, personally, but Nexus remains far superior in nearly every way (I like that subscribing to a mod on SW means the latest version will be automatically downloaded!). I won't argue with you if you dislike it, though, but at least do so for legitimate reasons please, instead of out of ignorance of how to use the tools.