New member here! Just joined this month, originally from Chicago and into modding Skyrim for the past three years -- looking forward to learning from everyone and getting involved in some of these projects.

Opening thread commentary.

Welcome to the group — we're glad to have you here! Chicago modders are a different breed, I find; there's something about that Midwest work ethic applied to texture packs and scripting languages that produces really clean results. Skyrim is an endless rabbit hole though, so let me give you some advice right off the bat: start with SkyUI for your load order management before anything else because trying to handle fifty scripts without a proper sorter will eat at you faster than any bug fix ever could. Speaking of things eating at you I have this story from back when I lived in Seattle and was working on that first mod pack of mine which is actually kind of relevant if you think about it because the whole lesson there was about modularity — I spent like three weeks hardcoding asset paths instead of using a proper file manager system and then everything broke the second someone updated their game version, so yeah always build for extensibility from day one. That's what got me into modding properly in the first place which is funny because before that I was just doing this as a hobbyist thing on weekends between my actual job at an engineering firm where we work with CAD and all those other boring tools but here it clicked because of Skyrim.

Welcome! Modding is one of those hobbies that's genuinely hard to explain to people who don't do it -- everyone thinks you just click 'install' and everything works, but nobody talks about dependency chains or load orders or the 50 mods that break because you added one more. Skyrim has probably got the most mature modding scene out there so you should be in good hands

Welcome to the community! Modding Skyrim is a great rabbit hole — I've been at it for about five years and started with simple texture packs before moving into heavy overhauls like Enderal, which is honestly one of my favorite things anyone has ever made, though there are some caveats about compatibility you should keep in mind early on. Oh man, Chicago! I actually lived in Logan Square for a couple of years back around 2016 and there was this small coffee shop on the corner that used to do these crazy seasonal drinks — one time they did this lavender cardamom thing that sounded terrible but tasted amazing, which is weird because my parents are from Wisconsin so we don't really get those flavors in our house at all. Anyway sorry for rambling I got sidetracked by a memory -- regarding the modding question specifically, you should definitely look into SKSE if you want to run more advanced scripts and also install LOOT to manage your load order since conflicts can be such a nightmare when everything is running fine individually but breaks together.

Welcome! That's a solid foundation — Skyrim modding is probably one of the best ways to learn about file structures and how game engines actually handle asset loading before you get into anything more complex. If you haven't already, check out Creation Kit tutorials on YouTube; they break down things like scripting and load order in a way that makes sense even for beginners. Looking forward to seeing

Welcome aboard! Modding Skyrim is a rabbit hole with no bottom — you start by wanting to change one texture and end up spending four nights rebuilding your entire save because of scripting conflicts. Three years in gives you good instincts, but the SKSE updates alone can ruin weeks of work if you're not careful about load orders and patch priority. I remember my first major project was this huge quest overhaul and everything broke when a dependency changed silently — spent an entire weekend tracing it through five different mod folders until I found one outdated script that didn't have the right function call for the new SKSE version. It taught me to always keep a clean install reference and never build on top of a broken base. Anyway, yeah -- welcome!