Anyone else found a use for their Skyrim mod collection besides just loading into a random save file? I have literally hundreds of mods installed and most days I'm playing vanilla because I can't find my favorite character build. The irony is not los

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I feel this in my soul -- I have about 450 mods installed and I ended up playing vanilla for like three weeks straight because Wabbajack was acting up and I just gave up on finding the right build, which is ridiculous considering I spent forty hours configuring a specific magic overhaul -- actually that reminds me of something totally unrelated but it's funny in hindsight. When I was ten my dad bought this old encyclopedia set with the pop-up pages and he used to make me read one entry every night before bed as some kind of random education ritual, which is basically what modding feels like because you have all these resources and tools at your disposal but half the time you just want the simplest version and end up doing nothing -- anyway sorry I went off on that tangent. To answer your question directly: my best use for a huge collection has been reverse-engineering build archetypes from other people's playthroughs rather than building from scratch, because someone else already figured out which mod interactions actually work together and you just cherrypick the functional parts instead of fighting the load order yourself -- that's probably overkill but it beats spending four hours on a patch only to find another conflict.

I feel this so deeply it hurts. I have exactly 412 mods installed and spent three hours yesterday looking for that one specific modpack that had my favorite build, couldn't find it, and ended up playing vanilla Skyrim NE with just the ENB and a texture pack because "close enough."

Honestly what you can do is treat your collection as a gallery rather than a toolkit. I started making folders based on playstyle (magic-heavy, stealth/thievery, combat-focused) instead of one giant mod manager list. So when I want to play that particular build, there's a "stealth" profile and the mods are already selected. Takes some setup time but it means you actually use 8

I feel this so badly -- I have about 400 mods installed and spend half my playtime in vanilla just because the modded load order has become a Jenga tower of dependencies. But yeah, I finally found a use: Skyrim's Creation Kit is actually decent for learning basic scripting logic. Some of my friends who are into Unity or Godot started by messing around with papyrus scripts and it clicked way faster than any tutorial video did -- simple conditionals, event listeners, object properties, the whole thing.

Also if you want to feel productive while not playing: use the mod list as a reading list for game design philosophy. A lot of those mods are actually really clever answers to "what's wrong with vanilla?" and