Getting Started

[Eragon615]

Hello all, I'm trying my hand at modding for the first time, but having no luck. I'll put everything I've done here, but it's probably gonna be a bit winded, so I'll include a tl;dr at the end.

 

So starting off, I watch a few mod reviews on YouTube, decide it's time to finally give modding a try. I've modded minecraft for a while now, how hard can it be right?

I remember when I looked at it back in the days of the original Skyrim (which I see is often called Oldrim) that there was Nexus Mod Manager. I mean, seems obvious, the site is called Nexus after all. So I go and grab it. First thing I notice, is that even though I'm logged in and linked to the Nexus site, it's not able to download mods from the site. Says that skyrimspecialedition can't be found. I'm not sure why, I pointed it directly to the install folder and it found the executable. But no matter, I download a bunch of zipped up mods (.7z I'm pretty sure) and add them manually. I just want some basics, not some 100+ mods I tell myself. SkyUI, SPERG, ooh look, more weapons... I end up with about 20 mods. But about 4 of them won't activate. NMM tries, gets to about the 50% mark, then just nopes out and says something like "The error is: ". Real helpful. I google for a while but it's not working. Finally I try to just install those 3 manually. How hard can it be. Well, apparently hard enough. Now Skyrim launches but I never get a game window. No audio, just Steam saying that it's running and task manager telling me it's using a little CPU. So I kill it, try a few more times. Same result. Some Googling later and I find LOOT. I try it, but it doesn't seem to really help.

 

So I Google and YouTube, and discover that NMM is kinda outta style. Seems all the cool kids are using Mod Organizer 2 now. Okay. I'll give it a shot.

 

So I reinstall Skyrim SE to clean up my mess from my first attempt, and start learning how MO works. I get my mods imported, and hot diggity, it can download from the site. Looking good! But I've got 2 errors in the little notification. One, that it can't find Dawnguard, Dragonborn, Hearthfire, Updates, or even Skyrim, and Two, that a couple of my mods are type 43, so they're for Oldrim. That's odd, they say SE in the name and definitely came from the SE part of the site. Maybe just some red herrings. So I tell it to launch using SKSE, and look at that! It launched! I open the console and do getskseversion and I get output! It's working! So I start up my game and... Where are all the mods? Not even SkyUI is working, the only mod that didn't have a warning in my list isn't active. I close the game, back to MO, and start trying everything.

I see the sort option in the Plugins tab and try it. LOOT loads, and tells me that none of the Vanilla files are valid plugins, and that none of my mods are in my game's directory. I thought that was the point of MO, that it does this virtually or something? Someone didn't give LOOT the memo...

 

I fought with it for quite some time last night. Finally, decided to give it up and sleep on it. I can tell it's bugging me though, I actually had a stupid dream about it last night, getting it to work.

Some final notes:

My install is on an SMB mounted network drive. I have a NAS connected over 40GbE so it's faster than an SSD, and I don't have an NVMe anyway...

I'm pretty sure I've got SKSE working, since I can run the command for it.

The folder I've put MO in is at the root of my network drive for Steam.

I did try cleaning the DLCs with SSEEdit. I read somewhere that was something I should do. Didn't seem to change anything.

 

tl:dr: MO isn't loading mods, and is telling me that the base game's plugins are not present. Skyrim SE finds the DLC plugins just fine on launch, but isn't modded. Help!

 

Edit: So some things happened... I discovered Vortex, which was equally broken... It would load a mod, then the next mod would tell me that all of the files of the previous mod were added outside of Vortex, and no matter what I did, it would fail to deploy them and then promptly delete all the files.

 

After fiddling with it for a while, I gave up and moved Skyrim to my C drive and just ran Vortex there. I'm guessing that my ZFS NAS is constantly making small changes to the files or something in some way that is freaking the mod managers out. So let this serve as a lesson to anyone that runs into my issue. Just run it locally, don't use a network drive.

Edited September 17, 2020 by Eragon615

[anjenthedog]

My single bit of advise? Dump MO2 and install Vortex in its place. There will still be a few things to learn, ex: resolving load order issue in the few cases when Vortex doesn't just handle it seamlessly on its own, something I've had to deal with less than a dozen times in over 350 mod installations, but IMO, it really makes installing mods pretty easy. I've had very very few issues with it... and I'm not a gamer by any means. The last game I installed prior to this was Final Fantasy XI, and I uninstalled that game in early 2008.

 

PS> kewl kids are overrated.

 

PPS> I've been out of work for a while, (serious bout with sciatica, combined with the covid BS and being "older" which makes getting a job a bit more difficult what with the age discrimination so prevalent today), and one of the things I do is read these (and other) forums with a passion.

 

A paper napkin estimation of "catastrophic" problems that I've read, both here and elsewhere, as "measured" by mod manager, is about 3/4 coming from MO2 users.

[saurusmaximus]

I've never heard of anyone trying to run a modded skyrim from a network drive before; so you've answered a question I never thought to ask; "Can you do that?"

 

Apparently the answer is ''No" :laugh:

[Eragon615]

I don't know if the network drive was the issue or not. I would be more likely to blame the fact it's running on a ZFS file systerm, on a linux server than to think it's just because it's a network drive. If I had a standard SMB share on an NTFS drive, I'd try it. I'm also considering copying my Skyrim folder back onto the network drive as it seems like installing them was the issue, not running them. But it has been a learning experience for sure.

[anjenthedog]

I don't know if the network drive was the issue or not. I would be more likely to blame the fact it's running on a ZFS file systerm, on a linux server than to think it's just because it's a network drive. If I had a standard SMB share on an NTFS drive, I'd try it. I'm also considering copying my Skyrim folder back onto the network drive as it seems like installing them was the issue, not running them. But it has been a learning experience for sure.

does you hardware support using a solid-state drive directly or have a free port for a "traditonal" harddrive? If so...they're really not that expensive. I bought a 5tb harddrive (for augmenting my local archiving) a couple months ago for around $100, so even a 1 or 2TB is well under a hundred... And a 500G solid state is also around $100

 

if possible, I'd recommend running form the primary drive. It makes life far easier. My machine has a 500G SSD as the primary and although I move archive materials to another drive, I've always found that running programs from the root drive (not to be confused with Linux terminology) is much snappier.

[Eragon615]

My PC has 5 drive bays, I've got 2 500 GB SSD's, one for my Windows install, the other for Linux. I originally had a 10 TB drive in another bay, but it was full and slow, spinning rust and all. So I ditched it and built my NAS. 40 TB of space and fast. Now I use the other three bays in my PC with 2 TB HDDs, in an LVM for Linux. I play most of my games on Linux, but didn't want to try to play Skyrim under proton with mods on top. I do play Morrowind there though using OpenMW. Might try modding it next.

[anjenthedog]

Ah...I play under windows 10. Hain't an idea how one plays the game in linux although I am aware some do. I also have 4tb and 5tb older style harddrives for archiving (I also have a dual boot for Linux and windows 10. Linx on my system is reserved for programming, but it's been idle for months)

 

Skyrim (and all its resources) is loaded to the windows 10 drive on the C drive (one of my 500GB SSDs). Best of luck.

[Baz1963]

Hello Eragon615,

 

I have only been modding (if you discount the Steam Workshop) since the beginning of September 2020, I started with MO2 and ditched it after two or three days and moved on to Vortex which I find more intuitive.

 

anjenthedog is quite correct - run Skyrim under Win 10, I would suggest a secondary drive that doesn't contain your OS - that should halve your problems for a start. Then watch 'Gophers' Vortex tutorials on You Tube before you even load Vortex, they make so much sense.

 

I now have around 40 mod's installed, although it has been a labour of love and certainly not trouble free. I still have 10 or so in my list that are disabled or uninstalled as I haven't managed to resolve load order issues (mostly) with them. But thanks to Gophers series I have so far managed to sort most of the issues that have arisen myself.

 

'Go Gopher' buddy - I cannot recommend him enough.

 

Good luck.