(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.

EDIT: Dug out one of my mod lists, I know there are stuff I considered must-haves that I didn’t have in this setup.

Highlights for me:
A Matter of Time (HUD)
Atlas Map Markers (cool to be pulled to map oddities after many years of playing)
Craftable Planters (again, Sims adjacent stuff)
Immersive Patrols
More Plans and Recipes (RIP balance but it’s okay)
Sounds of Skyrim
Uncle Sheo’s (basically obsolete, I used to play off a hard drive and now there’s no loading screens)