(Yes I know everything here can be looked up but a bit of discussion churn is nice)

I’m just about wrapping my head around the different versions now. The Anniversary Edition doesn’t appeal to me at all and I don’t really want to buy it, but I’m surprised that some mods seemingly require it as a dependency. Do I need that? Robbery.

The game has a built in Survival Mode now too which is weird.

The mechanics of modding seem to be familiar (MO2, patches, LOOT) but I haven’t gotten in too deep yet. When I was modding at the peak. I was using MO, LOOT, Wrye Bash, and Tes5Edit, which I understand might have been merged or changed since. Probably one or two other things I can’t recall. I’m pretty sure animation frameworks have also evolved since the days of FNIS but again I haven’t looked into it yet. What am I missing?

And the elephant in the room: last time I looked into returning to Skyrim, I wasn’t totally able to understand how to port original Skyrim mods to Special Edition, and that turned me away. It was just around when it was changed. And last time I thought of the game I was “waiting for Inigo V3” to get back in. God I still sound like such a Redditor. But really.

I just launched SSE, got disappointed in the frame limit now that I have a better computer than I did one decade ago, fought out of Helen on Master, and closed the game. I miss this world!

Some of the mods I remember most fondly are:
Hearthfire Extended
Inigo
Helgen Reborn
Follower and Horse system overhauls
Terrain upgrades like windmills, waterfalls, signposts, street lamps (and the map!)
SkyUI if that bears mentioning at all
Perk overhaul mods I don’t remember
Wet and Cold / Frostfall (how does that even work with Survival?)
Tons and tons of texture and model mods that kept the original artistic design

Bizarrely I’m struggling to remember more. And that might be a good thing! The vanilla game even after a decade felt very plain for the forty odd minutes I just played. But I was definitely less of a hardcore player and just wanted more stuff verging on Sims-adjacent features.

I even have a script mod I’d like to make, that I thought of all those years ago before I knew how to write code. Might be worth doing.

(Also I accidentally opened the console and it warned me that I might disable achievements. Surely that can be fixed? I only ever cheat to get out of buggy soft locks lol)

I remember STEP and Lexy’s LOTD as starting points, might do that if those still exist.

  • who@feddit.orgEnglish
    2·
    16 minutes ago

    I recently went back to Skyrim, and I’m having fun with Gate to Sovngarde. It’s a collection of roughly 2000 mods, chosen and integrated by a mod author. I think he knows what he’s doing, because even with all those mods, Skyrim’s original style is preserved and crashes are rare.

    There are lots of enhancements in here. Followers (including Inigo), perk and mechanic overhauls, textures and shaders that look good but don’t kill performance, animations (via Open Animation Replacer), uncapped frame rate, expanded dungeons, expanded cities, new areas, more player homes, a reasonably balanced climbing ability, alternate starts, character traits/quirks, seasons, and probably lots of things I haven’t discovered yet. A modified survival mode is included, and I think it adds to immersion without being intrusive. (I’m more vulnerable if I don’t take care of sleep/food/warmth, but I’m unlikely to drop dead from neglecting those needs for a while.) You can also disable it, just as you can disable many other features.

    The game is made significantly harder, in a way that I find fun. I have to think and prepare if I want to win boss fights, and there are some fights that I just won’t win until I’ve improved my skills and equipment. A (relatively) easy mode is available, but I haven’t tried it.

    To give you an idea of quality, it has become the second most endorsed collection on Nexus. The one in first place is a porn mod.

    I haven’t needed to use Wrye Bash or TES5Edit. I did need to do a LOOT sort, but I didn’t need to install LOOT because it’s built into Amethyst Mod Manager. I had to downgrade Skyrim.exe, but the collection includes a tool to automate that for Steam players. The Anniversary Upgrade (Creation Club content) is supported, but not required.

    General information is available on the wiki: https://gatetosovngarde.wiki.gg/

    Edit: The Gate to Sovngarde maintainer is planning to release a new version within a few weeks, which will not be save-compatible with the current v118. You might want to wait until that new version becomes available, or test drive v118 now and plan to start over when v119 arrives.

  • SmashEnglish
    3·
    2 hours ago

    Lately there have been new must-have mods every day (mostly due to accelerated development by LLMs), I will have to link them when I’m back at my PC, easily 200+ most have mods by now.

    Probably all guided you will find are probably outdated by now, most have shifted to just providing Wabbajack deployments

  • Maiq@piefed.zipEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    Better vampires, Seranaholic, Serana Dialog Edit, LOTD (Legend Of The Dragonborn), Opulent Theves Guild, Expressive Facegen Morphs, Cloak, cloaks of skyrim, Better Dynamic Snow, True Storms, A Midian Book Of Scilance, Apocalypse Magic of skyrim, PTOTEUS, SSE-Engine Fixes, ENB, ENB helper, and things like Address Library, power of three (tweaks, papyrus extender, functions), SkyUI, Song Of The Green(awesome Auri Follower), NFF (nethers follower framework), dragonborn voice over and of course Moonpath to Elsweyr.

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    2 hours ago

    I remember STEP and Lexy’s LOTD as starting points, might do that if those still exist.

    We are in a similar boat! I did a full LOTD install in the past, and IIRC that was built around a treasure collecting system + a castle on Raven Rock.

    I too am vaguely interested.

    Forgive my potential ignorance, but from what I have gathered:

    • Old Skyrim editions are basically obsolete. Last time I played LOTD, SSE was already the standard, and the old version of Skyrim was not recommended.

    • AFAIK all versions of Skyrim had an absolute framerate limit, excepting mods to hack it out. So this shouldn’t be a reason to shy away from SSE.

    • It appears automated installation procedures (Wabbajack) have replaced LOTD-style manual installs for most. This… makes sense to me, as a lot of the installation is just busywork, not actual modding choices to make or system work to be cognisant of.

    • More “major questline” overhauls seem to be done now, though apparently not Skyblivion or Skywind just yet. Skyblivion seems closer.

    • Engine patching is now deeper (so SSE should look/run better).

    I know this may be controversial, but working HDR mods, Skyblivion being almost done, and the LLM-driven follower/NPC mods are what drew my interest back in. I can just point those LLM mods to my local inference server/router, and “good enough for a janky mod” dynamic conversation/scripting seems like a perfect application for text models, something that would really add to the experience of Skyrim for me.

    • ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.comOPEnglish
      1·
      2 hours ago

      Old Skyrim editions are basically obsolete.

      Yeah, I wasn’t planning on playing Oldrim. I understand why the modding ecosystem moved to SE, but the relationship between SE and AE in the modding world is not quite clear to me. I know the overwhelming majority of people hate and don’t use paid mods, so

      frame limit

      I remember that the physics engine is tied to framerate I think, but I wasn’t complaining about a limit that wasn’t there before. My hardware is much better now than in 2015, and I have a display over 60Hz. So I was hoping I’d get more frames. I’ll definitely look into it, I know modding more frames into games that don’t support it can have other issues.

      I know this may be controversial, […] the LLM-driven follower/NPC mods are what drew my interest back in. I can just point those LLM mods to my local inference server/router, and “good enough for a janky mod” dynamic conversation/scripting seems like a perfect application for text models, something that would really add to the experience of Skyrim for me.

      radioactive white-hot take

      So normally I am absolutely repulsed by all forms of slop. I hate LLM output. I hate modern TTS. I hate diffusion output. If it comes out of a tensor core and it isn’t a vector that feeds into something actually useful instead of pseudo art/thought then I abhor it with practically every fiber of my being at this point in the slopocalypse. I find the thought of people ripping others’ voices, others’ words, others’ art, genuinely, deeply, palpably - just constitutionally abhorrent. I can pick out five consecutive words of slop in an otherwise handwritten paragraph and I hate it.

      And yet.

      And yet.

      This is Skyrim. Skyrim is a playground of code, of people doing things in games just because. It’s a sandbox game in the most meta sense possible in that people take the core and just take it into so many different directions. I think, for me, I would be willing to have a playthrough even with an LLM-powered follower, or worse, mods with original/LLM dialogue that (ab)use the original VA’s voices. But only Skyrim, because of what Skyrim is, not because of what slop is. I know both tensor perverts and my fellow haters of ““Gen””““AI”” would scoff at my thought, but I genuinely think that this tech is something I can only interface with without retching in the context of a tech demo in Skyrim The Everything Game™.

      /take