Who else has been messing with mods and the Special Edition of Skyrim? I had used Nexus Mod Manager with the original version, and the newest version of NMM works with SE. I uninstalled all of my mods for ‘old’ Skyrim and put them in a separate folder. Then uninstalled NMM and LOOT. Then I did a fresh install of NMM to a new directory for Skyrim SE and a new install of LOOT (there had been several updates I missed apparently). Then I just went through the most upvoted mods on Nexus and went from there. Just make sure NMM and LOOT are pointed at the directories for Special Edition and NOT the original. I haven’t tried running mods with both the original and SE, so I can’t say how well that will play together. There aren’t many old mods that still work with the new Skryim from what I can tell. SkyUI, the most important IMO, relies on SKSE and that isn’t available for the SE yet. I tried several other older mods and SE wouldn’t load. For now, I’m just sticking with the ones updated and rewritten for SE.
Right now I have 71 mods, this is the installation order I went in. A few things I had overwrite and a few I didn’t, it depended on the mod and which textures I preferred. I can eventually post all of the Nexus links to the mods, but if you go through the top ranked mods for SE, you’ll find them rather easily. Load order was sorted by LOOT automatically and I haven’t had any crashes or issues so far; but I just started playing this character and I haven’t ventured much outside of Whiterun.
right-click → open image in new tab to see images in full resolution. The links were taking forever to work right…
I only played a little bit of SE vanilla, but coming from 100+ mods/ENB (RealVision ENB and almost all of the recommended mods) with the original Skyrim, this was far smoother of a process (as far as no CTD’s, install order importance, etc) and runs much better at higher settings than my old Skyrim. I have a few screenshots of old Skyrim and all of the mods I had. I’m not a professional screen-capper or anything like that, just some random times I hit the screenshot button while playing. This is 1920x1080, med-high settings, outdoors ~45fps, indoors ~60fps. (5930K @ 4.4v, GTX780 3GB, 32GB RAM, running off a Crucial SSD)
I know these aren’t in the same locations, but still, it’ll give you some idea. These are a few I took after getting SE modded. Still 1920x1080, but ultra (everything maxed) settings, most areas have been 60fps, though I’ve been seeing random dips to ~45fps.
So yeah, I reallly like how it looks so far and the amount of work of getting it to run was minimal. LOOT did all the work, I just had to make sure a couple patches were down near the bottom; as LOOT doesn’t always do that for some reason. I still have some tweaking to do, and really want SkyUI to make it over, but so far it’s been quite easy and enjoyable to mod. How is everyone else doing with it?
