Finally got that Skyrim mod manager working — who else is still playing with these?

Took me three days because of a dependency loop, but now I have over 50 mods running smoothly and it feels like a completely different game. Anyone have recommendations for essential texture packs or retexture mods that don't tank performance?

I'm still running a 150+ mod setup on SSEBE and honestly it's ridiculous how much work this takes every time Skyrim updates because Wabbajack is great but if one plugin breaks you basically have to rebuild the whole load order from scratch which feels like wasting hours of my life that I could spend doing literally anything else but here we are still playing a game from 2011 and it's funny how this ties back to when I started modding Fallout New Vegas in high school because my brother would keep deleting my save files as a prank and I ended up building an entire discord server of other modders just to find out who was doing it which turned into this obsessive hobby that basically defined my teenage years — you know those moments where something supposed to be fun becomes this massive project and you can't stop because the problem-solving loop is addictive? That's exactly what Skyrim modding is, it's not even about the game anymore at some point, it's about solving the puzzle of why your script extender isn't loading properly which somehow feels more satisfying than actually playing. Anyway sorry for rambling I know this was a technical thread but that context matters because if you don't understand the compulsion behind maintaining 150 mods you won't understand how we keep doing this decade later.

The Wabbajack/MO2 setup was a nightmare in 2019 and I swear I almost just gave up, but if you get MO2 working with SKSEx right it's basically a one-click installer from there on out. The big thing — make sure your Skyrim.exe is the vanilla version (v1.6.1170 or whatever your current stable build is), because if you have any DLC updates that don't match what MO2 expects, SKSE will silently fail and load zero mods without throwing an error message. That was my problem for like three weeks before I realized my launcher had auto-updated to a beta version.

As for still playing — yeah. Every few

Omg yes i'm still obsessed lol. I reinstalled my load order like four times before it stopped crashing, but now everything works and i can actually get through a full playthrough without a CTD every 10 minutes. The Skyrim modding scene is literally insane — how do people make these games run with 300+ mods?!

same here lol. I keep finding myself downloading more mods even though my load order already has like 300 things in it. The Skyrim modding scene is basically its own ecosystem at this point — there are people making high-quality content for a game that's over a decade old which is wild but also kind of awesome to watch.

Still on SKSE every night, it never gets old.

still playing it and what isn't fun about a game with literally infinite content if you have modding tools at your disposal, I spent like three weeks on my Skyrim build alone just getting all the right lighting and weather mods to not crash each other which is an ordeal in itself because every time one of them updates everything breaks again. The good thing about the community though is that people are always finding fixes for whatever specific mod order problem you're facing, I remember a guy on reddit who helped me with my load order back in 2019 and it was genuinely kind — which reminds me of this time when my neighbor was trying to set up his home theater system and he called me over at like ten pm because he couldn't get the HDMI switcher working correctly, so I spent about two hours troubleshooting cables behind his TV while eating a bag of chips he bought for me. That's the thing about tech stuff it always brings people together in this weird way where everyone wants to figure out why something isn't working even if they have nothing to do with each other personally. Anyway, Skyrim is still worth playing because there are new mods coming out every week and I've never seen a game stay relevant for over a decade like that before.

Still going 20 years later lol. Mods are basically mandatory now