Where does Vortex store its mods?

[Souperintendent]

So my OS is installed to a 64 GB SSD, which means I only have like 10 or less GB free at any given time. As such, I have Nexus Mod Manager and my mods installed on other, much larger drives. But because apparently Vortex doesn't auto update if it's not installed to the C drive (WTF?), I installed it to that, and planned to have the mods installed to a different drive still.

 

But when I imported the mods from NMM, it started filling up my C drive, and now it's almost full. I uninstalled Vortex, but that didn't uninstall the mods. Now I have no idea where all this crap is taking up space.

 

Anyone know where to look?

[Tannin42]

Settings->Mods

 

You can also move your mods from there.

[BathSaltKnight]

Settings->Mods

 

You can also move your mods from there.

I uninstalled Skyrim and forgot to uninstall the mods first. It says "Please select a game to manage first". I now have 20 gb of wasted space and i have no idea where it is.

[Tannin42]

Well, the directory where mods are stored can be customised - if you did that we can obviously not tell you what you put there.

The default though is %APPDATA%\Vortex\skyrim, the downloads (mods in their packed format like .7z) are in %APPDATA%\vortex\downloads\skyrim

%APPDATA% is something you can put into the navigation line of explorer, it will automatically be replaced with "c:\users\<your username>\appdata\roaming"

[BathSaltKnight]

Hey, thank you very much. Very Grateful :)

[Auxitism]

Me aswell . 300 gigs

[XavecTelvanni]

Why does it go through so much trouble to hide them deep in a hidden system folder and also why is it so hard to change the directory without simply copying all the mods hence taking up more space? I try getting rid of old files and Vortex starts spamming errors then I have to uninstall all my mods and start over. I long for simpler times.

[showler]

How to move mods in Vortex:

 

To move where the downloaded mod archives are stored: Change the directory in the settings. Vortex will move your downloads to the new place.

 

To move where your mods are deployed: Purge mods (simple button press), change directory in the settings (has to be another valid location). Vortex will move your files to the new place. Deploy mods.

 

No copying mods on your own. No taking up more space.

 

If Vortex is spamming errors, then you are trying to move things in Windows instead of letting Vortex do the moving.

[Tannin42]

Why does it go through so much trouble to hide them deep in a hidden system folder and also why is it so hard to change the directory without simply copying all the mods hence taking up more space? I try getting rid of old files and Vortex starts spamming errors then I have to uninstall all my mods and start over. I long for simpler times.

 

Vortex uses that directory because that's what it's there for. It's literally for "application data", the data of applications. It has a predictable directory hierarchy and file permissions so we can be sure that all users have that directory and can write to it. The alternative would have been either an automatism that would fail for a percentage of the userbase or forcing users to select something where they currently have an option to do so.

 

When I originally built this my intention was for the startup screen (dashboard on the first start) to have a section going "Hey, here's a bunch of default settings we made, please go here (->link) to change them.". That was then gradually replaced with icons and then removed by UI designers to make the UI simpler.