The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Mod Thread

chooka1 wrote:

Also, I noticed that Enderal is “not compatible with Skyrim Special Edition” but it’s a stand-alone mod. I don’t even think I need to have Skyrim on my hard drive to play Enderal?
Maybe Enderal initially used the Skyrim classic files during installation to create Enderal? Just curious.

Yeah, you can play Enderal without Skyrim installed now, but it used to be that it need to be installed over your Skyrim Classic installation to work. When the Special Edition came out, it needed to be made clear that you couldn't install Enderal over that version.

When I tried a couple months ago and found NMM was no longer working, I just uninstalled NMM and installed Mod Organizer 2 then pointed it to my mod folder and it took over. I think I had to delete a couple mods that weren't updating or something but everything else seemed to work fine.

On the other hand, I may just delete all mods and start fresh. I saw some really beautiful fantasy type screenshots that made the elves a lot more fine featured and beautiful and added a lot more light and colors. I liked the original rough and dark look but a fresh coat of paint never hurts.

Anyone got any recommendations for a mod overhaul tutorial geared towards that? Maybe some more adult type themes for bars, etc?

Thanks for the suggesiton. I'll try that.

I cannot seem to find a no weight or reduced weight mod under the mods in-game for Skyrim Special Edition. I've tried searching a variety of terms.
Any in-game mods anyone can recommend to improve carry weight?

Thanks,
Chad

If you don't care about being lore-friendly or whatever, you can just use console commands.

There's a Carry Weight Modifier mod, but I haven't used it so I can't vouch for it.

If you want a lore-friendly thing, Campfire has backpacks.

I am sworn to carry your burdens.

Quintin_Stone wrote:

I am sworn to carry your burdens.

Ha

A quick plea from someone who's just reloaded this after about 12 months and found that NMM is gone. I've downloaded Mod Organizer 2 and installed it, but which folder should I be pointing it at ? The NMM folder that had those mods in, or wherever the Steam Workshop downloads mods to ?

You can't just use MO2 with other organizers. MO2 uses virtual installs but NMM installed to the skyrim folder. So you are going to have to start over. I believe Gamer Poet has step by step guide on youtube for MO2.

Didn't both Mod Organizer and Nexus Mod Manager get superseded when Nexus got the MO dev to make a replacement for NMM?

That's Vortex. It's what I've been using for Fallout 4. It works fairly well, but supposedly doesn't quite give you the same level of control that MO 2 gives you. I haven't found anything that I wanted it to do that it wouldn't let me do though, so I'm not sure how true that is. The biggest complaint I had was that when I was initially setting up my mods it would sort the load order (LOOT is built-in) after installing and enabling each mod instead of waiting for me to manually do it when I was done, but I'm almost certain there's a setting for that and I just never bothered to turn off because it only took it like 5-10 seconds.

I like Vortex. It had some mass import from NMM function as well which made life easier. Every mod list is different i know but for me ever since i moved to Vortex I have had a lot less (almost none!) unexplained random CTDs

The ultimate modding guide was just updated today.
Guide

Is that the 'new' S.T.E.P, Skyrim Modding Meta?

omni wrote:

Is that the 'new' S.T.E.P, Skyrim Modding Meta?

Hmmm, its a guide done by a guy I follow on youtube. It isn't a official or unofficial step guide. However, I believe it is the most current guide as of this moment.

I bought Skyrim SE on a whim during the Quakecon sale. I am blown away by the integrated mod support. WOW. It's a new game. I am playing alternate beginning (shipwreck start) and was directed to the cat creature mod dlc adventure. At level three I was killed with one hit from bandits. I added the cheat room mod and created the ultimate leveling potion. I'm now level 81 and the enemy spiders are basically a near death encounter wherein I have to conjure a creature to distract the spiders, constantly use fast heal and chip away at the spiders. I'm not sure if I am underpowered or the enemies scale so that encounters are this difficult?
I picked a few weapons from the cheat room and they do about 36 damage.

I'm just trying to get my bearings and make sure I did not unintentionally do something to break the game by making combat too difficult. If this is how it is supposed to be then I am OK with that. An appropriate challenges is fine.

Switching subjects, I was disappointing by the 5 gig mod download cap. Any workarounds?
It's a bit "offensive" when COD requires a seemingly weekly 66 gig download. Thanks!

Chad

P.S. How is the Fallout 4 mod community on Xbox? I played through that game on PC with mods. Maybe for #$9 I'll pick it up during the current sale

Has anybody used Wabbajack before? I dont mean the crazy in-game item, I mean the 'Modlist Installer' application?

I have been pondering another modded Skyrim playthrough recently - This ususally means I wipe everything to do with the game, fresh install, and then go through the latest iteration of S.T.E.P. This is a long, tedious process to get nailed and, while once upon a time the very act of modding and tweaking was part of the fun, for me, I have neither the time nor inclination to do so these days.

Then I discovered Wabbajack. While this doesn't directly relate to S.T.E.P, it has been astoundingly successful in my initial testing.

Essentially, it's an app that links to 'official' Wabbajack mod lists (you can import your own unofficial ones apparently), most of which are based on Modding Guides that aren't related to Wabbajack at all (e.g. Living Skyrim, The Phoenix Flavour, etc).

So I downloaded Wabbajack, selected the modlist I wanted to give a try (The Phoenix Flavour, ~600 mods), put in my Nexus account details, install directory, and clicked go. It took a long while to download all the mods on my 50Mbit connection, but it just did its thing. Once it was finished, I clicked go, and....

.... it just worked. Seemingly all of it (I only ran a quickish test run of the first few levels). Including the modlist author's preferred ENB. All 600+ mods, curated and tested by someone else (i.e the hard bit), and it's all just... working... first time?

Let's turn it up a notch. Next up, I tried Living Skyrim 2, just to go for something beefier. >810 mods. 172GB on-disk size. Recommended to have a minimum of an RTX 2080 Super for this one, Let's do this.

Same deal. click, click, *wait lots*, Click Play.... It. Just. Works.

Woa.

It's worth noting that each install comes with it's own ModOrganizer custom install, which is used to edit or launch that modded version. Also worth nothing that I paid for a month of Nexus premium (about $3 or something) for two reasons - One - it doesn't limit download speeds to 2MB/s, or the number of concurrent downloads, Two - it makes the Wabbajack program fully automated. Using the free version of Nexus, Wabbajack will be in 'interactive' mode. it will show you to the download button for each mod, but you have to click download manually. Essentially they are trying to help the Nexus for the work they've been doing for the past couple of decades.

Another benefit is that, this isn't just bundling together all the mods into a giant download, which has been attempted in the past, and usually without the mod author's permission - This is just a list of mods, and a script to install them for you, and putting the things in the right places, automagically. Each modlist has a few small steps they recommend you do once inside the game (via the in-game MCM mod configuratior menus), but that's just to make things work to the liking of the modlist curator, rather than the defaults the mod creator wanted.

Anyway, you may all be aware of this wonderful tool, but it's news to me since I last visited Skyrim modding on a large scale. I'm very, very impressed with the ease of getting complex heavily modded Skyrim actually to the palying stage, and also, someone else did the leg work with making sure they all paly well together (one of the main benefits of S.T.E.P).

Once I finish up this run of Divinity 2, I'll be jumping right on this to tide me over until CP2077 release. Here I go again.

IMAGE(https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/691813472958152796/723287238233817118/ScreenShot253.png)

Yeah, Wabbajack has been revolutionizing the Skyrim modding scene. The one downside, I think, is that it makes it slightly harder to tweak the results of the modlist, since you have to take some time to understand what all of the parts are doing. But I was able to use a Pheonix Flavor Wabbajack modlist as the basis of my current modded setup. (But I already knew how to use xEdit, etc. and made some manual patches.)

Dont get me wrong, the vast majority of hard work is still dont by the modders themselves, but, I'm currently not in a position to send days/weeks messing and tweaking a huge modlist - too much adulting and two young kids, so I'll take all the assistance I can get.

I've managed to add a couple of small mods to the end of the mod list, seemingly without breaking anything, but they didn't add a huge amount.

Now if I could just find a racemenu preset that was sensible, and not either Generic Rugged Manly Man #23475 or anime-like softcore porn... that'd mean I dont have to spend days doing that either, and can just get on with actually playing the game, for a change

That sounds pretty nifty. Last playthough I used a lot of mods that needed zedit patches after installing - does anyone know the difference between xedit and zedit? How does WabbJk handle those kind of post install patches? What about mods that come with a fomod installers?

I have been waiting for Requiem to come out on SSE before jumping back in, so I can just install that then some eye candy textures/weather and im good to go.

Those packs are specifically crafted. I haven't looked at every single mod, but I wouldn't be surprised if they have made their own mod that only contains the extra files/configs needed for the specific mods in the list. This is entirely curated, rather than just a big list of mods anyone can install.

There are a few things that have to be done in MCM, and a few more things that have to be done once you're outside of the Live Another Life starting cell.

There are a couple of Official Wabbajack lists that incude Requiem.

Both xedit and zedit act as interfaces to edit the plugin databases (.esp, .esl, and .esm files) which define the internal values of the game. The Elder Scrolls engine stores all the game data as records, indexed by an internal ID. In game the ID turns into two-hex-digit plugin number + object id, so skyrim.esm objects start with 00.

As the game loads plugins, it overwrites values for each record. Mostly that's what you want, but it does create problems when there are conflicts. Usually it's smart about things, but there are some records that combine several different data types that cause conflicts: a common source of problems is that character appearance, inventory, and AI settings are all on the same record. That's the reason why an AI mod can cause issues with the face texture.

A common conflict comes from the unofficial community patch (UESSEP) which adds fixes for things in vanilla Skyrim. Mods which were created before the UESSEP don't have those fixes, and therefore can sometimes overwrite the fixes, requiring a patch mod so the correct, unified values are the last thing loaded.

The various versions of xEdit (properly, TES5Edit, SSEEdit, etc.) basically act as Creation Kit replacements. People have written scripts for xEdit that automate various tasks, making it easier to make patches and stuff that have the correct values.

The newer editor is zEdit. It can do most of the stuff that xEdit can do. The big reason to use it in addition to xEdit is the zEdit patching: it has pretty slick functionality to run scripts that auto-generate patches. Makes things much, much better. (It also has zMerge, which has some really sophisticated handling of merging plugins together that also makes scripts call the correct plugin even if its been merged.)

If you're doing serious editing, you want both xEdit and zEdit. zEdit can't run xEdit patches, and there's still some xEdit functionality that heavy modlist editing uses (like cleaning plugins and identifying plugins that can have the esl-flag added).

In my experience, Wabbajack modlists handle zEdit patches by having the modlist author create all the necessary patches and just letting you download the results. That makes it slightly harder to modify on your own (I ended up not touching the modlist author patch and just adding my own patch after it to tweak the stuff I wanted to change). So unless you want to make heavy edits its not something you need to worry about.

Fomod installers, for those who aren't aware, are mod installers that let the user select options or automatically adjust the install to match other installed mods. Wabbajack also handles fomod installers just fine, though you'll get whatever the modlist creator decided were the best choices.

That kinda reads like a lost Sermon of Vivec.

Thanks Gremlin, that's great.

Danjo Olivaw wrote:

That kinda reads like a lost Sermon of Vivec.

The ending of the modlist is the three syllable spell DYNDOLOD.

Just chiming in quickly to say I've used Wabbajack (although it was a while ago, probably a year ago now) and it was quite seamless. Recommended.

I saw Wabbajack mentioned in a PC Gamer article either this summer or spring (time has lost all meaning) and I bookmarked it to try next time I jump into Skyrim. It sounded really slick and neat.

Just wanted to really say thanks for the Wabberjack recommendations. Despite a few half-hearted efforts, I never really got into modding Skyrim, but knowing that I could make it much better also grated a bit when I was playing the vanilla version. After reading this thread, I installed Wabberjack and used it to install Living Skyrim 2, reading the instructions like I was defusing a bomb.

Holy crap it looks awesome, and there's an amazing amount of new stuff in the game, which I should probably have expected with 900+ mods. There's a bit of weird depth-of-field effect that I can't seem to quite get rid of, but I've decided that my character maybe just needs glasses. Haha!

Coldstream wrote:

Holy crap it looks awesome, and there's an amazing amount of new stuff in the game, which I should probably have expected with 900+ mods. There's a bit of weird depth-of-field effect that I can't seem to quite get rid of, but I've decided that my character maybe just needs glasses. Haha!

If you have ENB installed, Shift-Enter will usually bring up the ENB control panel, where you can turn off various graphics settings, including depth-of-field. (Some ENB presets change the hotkeys.)

Gremlin wrote:

If you have ENB installed, Shift-Enter will usually bring up the ENB control panel, where you can turn off various graphics settings, including depth-of-field. (Some ENB presets change the hotkeys.)

What a delightful person you are. That fixed it neatly. Thank you!