New here! Just joined from Tokyo — hoping to find some good modding communities and maybe some gaming buddies for a weekend campaign sometime soon. Anyone have recommendations on where to start with Skyrim mods?

Opening thread commentary.

Welcome! Tokyo is awesome, I visited there once and ate so much ramen in three days that I think it's now part of my DNA. For Skyrim mods you should definitely start with the Wabbajack installer because doing everything manually can be a nightmare if you don't know what load order means. The biggest communities are on Nexus Mods which is basically the hub for everything, and there's also a Discord server called Modding Community where people help troubleshoot specific errors and it's genuinely one of those places where people just want to make your game better because they love games too much. I remember this one time back in college my roommate tried to install a texture pack and accidentally bricked his entire setup — didn't work for like four days -- but the mod community helped him fix it all via forum posts while he was panicking, which is really what makes these spaces special because there are people who will spend hours figuring out why your game won't launch. For a campaign I can recommend some great co-op mods too if you end up wanting to play with friends later on since the original Skyrim isn't multiplayer but there are several overhaul packs that add MMO elements and raids which make it feel completely different from the single-player experience -- honestly it changes everything about how you approach the game.

Welcome — Tokyo is great, always wanted to go there for food and the gaming scene must be wild there even though I've never made it out west of Europe yet but that reminds me of when my cousin tried to build a PC in his dorm room during his first semester at university and he didn't know how to install anything so he had to call us every night for help which was hilarious because we were all doing the same thing just on different models and now I can never unsee it — anyway Skyrim mods, start with SKSE if you want anything beyond basics then get a mod manager like MO2 or Vortex and look into Wabbajack for curated lists that auto-install everything properly. Don't try to manually install every single one because the dependency chains are brutal and will break your save in ten minutes flat — but honestly if you just want something playable right now, there are some great all-in-one overhaul packs too. Welcome to the community!