Loving Vortex

[Dargone]

I've decided to mod and play all of the Elder Scrolls games (except the first two) and I am absolutely loving Vortex. I have spent the past two to three weeks setting up my mods primarily for Skyrim SE (maximum plugins reached) and have found the program elegant and easy to use. I have also used it to mod Oblivion and Morrowind to a much lesser degree and have found the program great for these two as well.

 

I've taken the time to learn the program and have it set to launch all of my other modding tools such as Loot, Wyre Bash, Fnis, etc. Out of all the modding tools that I am using Vortex is by far my favorite and easiest to use in my opinion.

 

Kudos to the development team. Happy to be a lifetime premium member with this tool available for all of my modding needs. Keep up the excellent work!

 

 

 

[HadToRegister]

 

 

I've taken the time to learn the program

 

^

No truer words have been spoken

 

 

Glad you're liking Vortex, once you spend the time, and get over the initial learning curve, everything becomes super easy and fast.

[Seraffian]

Totally agree with Dargone. I'm constantly amazed at how easy and quick it is to use. I'm a noob when it comes to modding and I've currently set up Fallout 4 with two profiles, one for settlement building and one for a survival playthrough. I constantly expect my ruthless way of installing mods - which is basically to just throw a bunch of them in there and hope it all works together - to crash the game or completely ruin it, and every time I'm amazed that it just works.

 

Sure, I get mod conflicts and error messages, but instead of having to spend hours trying to figure out what I did wrong with a game that keeps crashing, Vortex tells me exactly what's wrong and how to fix it. It even recommends which mod to load before/after the other in case of a mod conflict which is brilliant for someone like me who don't often know the right load order.

 

I've spent some time learning Vortex - even asking questions here and gotten some really helpful advice from kind people - and for a noob like me the manuals could be a little easier to understand, but once I learned how Vortex behaves and what it does, it's been smooth sailing ever since.

 

Vortex is the best mod manager I've ever used by far and I spend almost all of my time IN-GAME now, which is where I'd prefer to spend my time, rather than in the mod manager. :)

 

Keep up the great work!

[NeuroticPixels]

I decided I'd leave my two cents here. Since I'd consider myself to be part of the group of users that love Vortex. Thank you to everyone that has had their hand in developing it and improving it.

I recently left these comments on another mod, finally wanting to speak my mind about Vortex because I see so much disdain for it that I don't understand. Honestly, I think people are just biased and/or just plain don't like change. And I mean that in the most respectful way possible. I can relate! So here we go:

 

Vortex is much, much different than NMM. And I think that's why a lot of people are prone to hate it. It's massively different. But... once you learn how to use it, it's so much better than NMM in so many ways. I hope that the Mods page in the program will get cleaned up and organized a bit more in the future, but besides that, I'd never go back to NMM as long as Vortex is around. And unlike NMM, Vortex is still regularly updated. I find comfort in that; knowing bugs will get worked out and improvements will be made.

A lot of people say it's bad because it uses LOOT to organize your mods and that can cause problems (if you don't use the other features that Vortex has implemented). Well, LOOT is a great starting point. What's great with Vortex is that that's all it is... it's using LOOT as a SUGGESTION of how we should organize our plugin load order.

You can modify and change everything as you wish. And that's why people get annoyed. They don't take the time to learn this and experiment with it.

With NMM, if something happened to your load order and you didn't have a backup of your plugin list, you'd have to go off of memory to place your plugins back into the order that you put them in.

With Vortex, it remembers it all for you. Not only can you create your own "groups" for it to follow (seen here: https://i.imgur.com/w7Vx6JF.png ), but you can also manage "rules" (seen here: https://i.imgur.com/WraKHEl.png ).

You can make an infinite list of what mods should load before other mods, which mods require other mods to be enabled, and which are incompatible with each other. It's awesome.

Also, another feature I LOVE, is managing loose file conflicts. Instead of just popping up with a window like NMM does, you have a screen you can look at and change any time you want. (Seen here: https://i.imgur.com/Bu86Aiu.png ). It definitely helps you better understand and remember which mods are overwriting others, and makes it extremely easy to make changes if you decide you'd like to try something else. I'd hate to mod without it now.

There are tutorials on the Nexus that I had to look at a few times once I got started with Vortex, but a lot of what Vortex can do I learned on my own as I used the program. It gets pretty intuitive.

Here are some links if you're interested in checking it out and/or converting from another mod manager to Vortex.

https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Frequently_Asked_Questions

https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Category:Vortex

https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php/Migrating_to_Vortex_from_another_Mod_Manager

https://wiki.nexusmods.com/index.php?title=User-Interface-Overview

https://www.nexusmods.com/about/vortex/

Good luck. :)

[HadToRegister]

 

Also, another feature I LOVE, is managing loose file conflicts. Instead of just popping up with a window like NMM does, you have a screen you can look at and change any time you want. (Seen here: https://i.imgur.com/Bu86Aiu.png ). It definitely helps you better understand and remember which mods are overwriting others, and makes it extremely easy to make changes if you decide you'd like to try something else. I'd hate to mod without it now.

 

 

 

100% fully agree with this

 

When I was overwriting loose files with NMM I wasn't really understanding WHY I was overwriting them, and at the time, didn't even understand why I was supposed to install MOD B after MOD A etc, so any conflicts I had with NMM were just random, and so I'd end up fiddling with my Plugin load order for hours, not realizing that no matter how much a re-ordered my plugins, it wasn't going to fix all of the textures and meshes I let NMM overwrite.

 

Now Vortex allows me to see ALL the files that are conflicting, and it let's me see with what other mods they are conflicting with, and it lets me understand WHY they're conflicting.

Best of all, if I pick the wrong thing "LOAD BEFORE or LOAD AFTER" and mess up my textures and meshes, I can just change the rule as you said.

 

You can even drill down farther and overwrite SINGLE files

 

 

[sopmac45]

Modding my games has never been so easy and because I do not use too many mods in my game, perhaps I only resolve 2-3 mod conflicts at the most and be ready to play without worrying about ordering my plugins.

 

Back with NMM it was tedious and very complex. One mistake, and I had to re-do the whole thing again. Vortex is like driving an automatic car, turn the engine on, shift to D and start driving.