I’m genuinely this desperate. I’m a working dad going to college, I just started double classes, and I’ve just spent all of my free time for the last 4 days trying to figure out how to get modded Skyrim to run on my computer. I’m not good at this, nothing I do works, and all I want is to relax and do something fun for myself.
I’ll PayPal the money, it’s not much but it’s literally twice what I paid for Skyrim itself. I’m just so desperate to have something comfortable and newish.
What distribution are you on? What mod manager have you tried using? And what mods are you trying to install?
Also have you tried Skyrim Anniversary edition? It has some basic built in modding capabilities.
Bazzite I’ve tried vortex, MO2, and Limo
Mods are the top 25 most downloaded quality of life, graphics, and patch mods as well as everything for Legacy of the dragonborn. I played it once a few years ago and I just want to enjoy that gain.
Edit: You can now add wabbajack to that list. I got it to run but it freezes if I click literally anything and I have to kill it to see my screen.
Some of those mods are old and outdated. Not sure which off the top of my head though.
Did you install all the dependencies for these mods? Nexus should have a grey tab labelled ‘Requirements’ to link to the necessary pages. Also, some of the mods requure SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender) which is on a different site and uses a different install process.
Also, did you boot the game up before trying to start modding it? At least on Windows you need to do that first because the game generates some .dll files you need for it to work.
One more thing: which version of Skyrim did you get from Steam/GOG?
“Skyrim”, also known as “Skyrim Legendary Edition” or “LE” for short, is a 32-bit game and is listed as just “Skyrim” on Nexus Mods.
“Skyrim Special Edition”, also known as “SSE”, and “Skyrim Anniversary Edition”, also known as “AE”, are the 64-bit versions, and mods for them are listed under “Skyrim Special Edition” on Nexus Mods.
Also, SSE and AE are the same thing, assuming SSE is updated to the newest version. The only difference is that SSE comes with 4 free Creation Club mods, while AE gives you access to “all” Creation Club content.
Long story short, if you bought the 64-bit version and are trying to install mods from the 32-bit version (or vice versa), a lot of mods won’t work
I’m not entirely new to modding and I’ve done all the basics. The the big problem is that the best options for mod managers don’t run on Linux and the only options I can find on Linux either don’t work or don’t offer any explanations for why the game doesn’t work.
MO2 runs just fine for me. I don’t actually use it for Skyrim — I do that all manually — but it worked for e.g. Fallout 4 without me doing anything special. I just ran its installer the same way I’d run skse64_loader.exe using the same prefix as the game.
I had a little luck with that for fallout 4 but for some reason the text in mo2 was all so small I had to use screenshots and guesswork to navigate it and even then only half the mods worked.
You can adjust the dpi setting in winecfg to fix the font size, but in recent beta versions of proton I find it necessary to set it back to the default (and restart wine) to actually play the game.
There was one fairly popular fo4 mod that didn’t work for me, but the only skyrim one I found that seemed to have a problem with linux was nemesis, and that has now been replaced with pandora. All the other thousand or so mods I tried (currently using 600 or so) seem to work about as well as they do for anyone else.