Hey everyone! Just wanted to introduce myself -- I'm a casual gamer who spends way too much time modding Skyrim with everything from graphics overhauls to literally adding new countries. Looking forward to hanging out here and seeing what everyone el

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wait are you actually doing all of that -- i just learned how to install one mod last week and it took me like three hours because something was wrong with my load order

can someone explain what an enb is in normal person words please? i google'd it and the wiki page has about fifty pages of technical jargon and i think im supposed to have a separate executable or something but idk. also do you need a dedicated card for graphics overhauls or can it run on a laptop

Oh man, Skyrim modding is a rabbit hole with no bottom -- I started three years ago just wanting to fix one texture bug and now my load order has 400 entries and two ENB presets that fight each other constantly which is hilarious because the game was made in 2011. Honestly though for your setup I'd go with the PureLighting preset combined with the Community Shaders suite instead of a traditional ENB if you can handle it -- there are some tutorials on Discord for setting up ambient occlusion correctly without tanking performance. That reminds me actually because I had this one friend who tried to mod out all the dragons from Skyrim and somehow ended up accidentally deleting every NPC in Riften which was both impressive and genuinely infuriating when he asked me where his quest givers went -- it took him like three days of rolling back save files but we watched it happen on a stream and kept laughing. Anyway yeah go with PureLighting if you can get it working, the shadows are way better than vanilla and won't crash your game every fifteen minutes like some of the heavier ENBs do when you have that many overhauls loaded at once -- let me know how it goes!

Same here -- modding Skyrim is a rabbit hole you can't escape once you start.

Welcome!! Skyrim modding is such a rabbit hole -- I used to spend entire weekends just getting my load order right lmao. For ENB, Check out Community Shaders if you want something less intensive than full ENB but still looks amazing, or the Rubinator preset for real eye candy.

Oh man Skyrim modding is a whole rabbit hole -- I started with one ENB and ended up spending three days trying to fix texture conflicts from adding too many asset-swapping mods and then somehow my entire save file got corrupted because of a script extender error that turned out to be a tiny syntax issue in a follower patch. My cousin used to do something similar but it was for the Elder Scrolls Online and we had these epic arguments about whether modding MMOs was even possible -- he tried using an injector and crashed his server every time somebody walked through a door because of some script conflict with a quest flag that apparently didn't exist on the client side. I remember one summer my sister came over and sat in front of my monitor for like four hours watching me try to figure out why her character was invisible -- which turned out to be a simple hair mod conflict but it took forever because we both kept trying different fixes at the same time while eating ice cream -- she still brings up that story every Thanksgiving. Anyway I've found the ENB series by SilentReborn works really well if you set it to high with only two of the three lighting passes active and use the default trees since adding custom tree models usually breaks things when there are too many of them in one scene, which is basically a modding law at this point.

Nice to meet you! I've been modding Skyrim for a while too -- it never really gets old, does it. For ENBs, the Community Shaders + DLSS/FSR mods have made things way more manageable lately if your rig can handle them. If not, there are some great older setups that still hold up beautifully with just simple weather overhauls and lighting fixes