Mods affecting save data

[bafitsoul]

Hello, I'm new to modding, so apologies for my ignorance here. After my first round of modding Skyrim VR, I found a bunch of other mods to add, but after doing so, my game seemed to reset to lvl 1 and all my save data was MIA. Wondering if this is always the case. I would like to add the voice mod to my game (lvl 22) but obviously don't want to start the entire game over just to add that mod. Currently, I have about 40 mods added. Any info on how mods affect save data is much appreciated.

[bZuYSu90]

I have never experienced a loss of my save games when adding or removing mods. Did you change mod managers, or change the configuration of the one you used to start/stop using local saves.

 

I know with Mod Organizer 2 (MO2), if I want to change my local save setting, I have to manually move the saves between the default location and the profile location. I don't have as much experience with Vortex, but recall it has a similar setting for save games local to a profile. Likely the save files are all still there, just not in right place.

 

The default location is %USERPROFILE%\Documents\My Games\Skyrim Special Edition\Saves

The save files have a .ess extension for SSE and VR (you will also have a sister file with an .skse extension if you are using SKSE)

Since I use MO2 and have saves organized by profile, the saves are in %APPDATA%\Local\ModOrganizer\{MO Instance name}\profiles\{Profile name}\saves where MO Instance Name and Profile names are things the user sets when starting MO2. If used as stand alone, that is instead all in the MO2 install directory.

 

At worst, you can search your disks for files of the form "*.ess" and find where your old save games are or determine something really did happen to delete them (again, I doubt this is what happened, but you never know) Good Luck.