(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.
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 porn and has been around for longer.
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.
The mod site is login only now!?
No, but the Gate to Sovngarde collection page on Nexusmods is marked as adult content. I don’t know why.
Unfortunately, Nexus downloads require logging in now.