Making mods with loose files

[BrotherShamus]

I'm looking to extract the night sky textures from Skyrim HD SE to use without using the other textures (the other textures are great but I've fallen in love with parallax ). I've tried searching this but can only find how to make mods using custom textures.

[thumbincubation]

For manual install, If you just want to only use those textures, download the mod and put the archive into a safe and separate folder. Unpack the archive (with winrar, it's right click > extract here) into the safe location and find the images you want to use. They would be under textures > sky and probably skystars, etc. Use BSA Browser or something similar to open up Skyrim - Textures5.bsa, and make sure you see the identical file names and file path. As long as they're the same, move the new mod textures into your data folder with the same file path, creating any folders you may not already have. Start in your textures folder, look for Sky, create if not there, then cut and paste your mod textures in, while the others remain safely in the separate folder, while you test and make sure you haven't missed anything. When you've got what you want, go back to that folder, highlight and delete everything but the archive and then you've got a backup archive if you ever need it. Once the night sky textures you want are in their proper file path (when in doubt, look in BSA Browser as the archives will show you the file path) then they will overwrite anything in the archives themselves, as loose files win.

 

For mod managers, I'm afraid I'm of no help.

[BrotherShamus]

Awesome! Thanks! I do use Vortex though... I'm wondering if I could re-pack the textures I want with Cathedral Assets Optimizer to make a new mod and just install it that way. (I know you said you can't help with mod managers... just kinda thinking out loud here)

[IsharaMeradin]

With mod managers the process would be the same really. Only difference would be if you wanted to create a mod archive to then install and be managed by the mod manager. In that case, instead of copying the files from the mod folder into the game's data folder, you would copy them over into another clean folder outside of the game where you would mimic the data folder structure. Then when all is done, pack it up into a 7z, zip or rar file and import it into your mod manager.

[BrotherShamus]

Sweet! Looking forward to some brilliant night skies!