Help with resetting to vanilla to start over.

[EkasBadviper]

Hello there everyone. I hope this is the right subforum to post this in. I've been trying for a few days now to completely reset skyrim to a guarunteed vanilla setup so that I can start modding from the ground up. It's been a very long time since I've played the game and I'm a little bit older and wiser, but by no means an expert. I intend to use mods that can only be managed with a mod manager so I can be sure I can add and remove things without messing up the core files from now on. However, even after deleting the My Documents Skyrim Folder, the Appdata Local Skyrim folder, and having Steam properly uninstall the steamapps common folder, I still end up redownloading some old, foolishly manually modded version of the game. I'm certain of this because it downloads with the SKSE launcher already in the newly installed folder, and has some texture and mesh files referencing a Nikki character that I don't even remember, but I'm pretty sure isn't vanilla. Even with... theoretically no mods installed via my mod manager, I still get the infamous darkface bug with vanilla npcs, so I can only assume I royally screwed up with a manual mod installation from looooong ago, and for some reason these screwed up files are also getting redownloaded every time. I'm just about at wits end and any help would just about metaphorically save my life at this point. Thanks in advance.

Edit: I should also clarify I've unsubscribed from all steam workshop mods. (Which steam didn't make easy because there's no workshop on the skyrim steam library page anymore, but I'm positive these were still installed as they were on my profile when I looked it up online.) Further Edit: Apparently Special Edition doesn't have a workshop, so what I deleted were probably Oldrim workshop mods.

[myuhinny]

@EkasBadviper

 

First uninstall skyrim then delete the whole skyrim folder as the steam uninstaller will only remove what it installed. 

 

Skyrim is installed in your programs files. So you need to go to program files/steam/steamapps/common/skyrim and delete this folder as when you reinstall the game it'll make a new folder for the game and by doing this you are making sure nothing has been left behind.

 

Also you shouldn't use manual mod installation as it's very easy to break your game by overwriting something so you should be using a mod manager for installing your mods like MO MO2 vortex or NMM.

[EkasBadviper]

Oh! I'm a dunce! xD I only uninstalled via steam. I didn't think to delete the folder itself. I just assumed Steam would remove the entire folder and everything in it when it uninstalled. I never checked back for any leftovers. But it makes sense. The stuff I put in there wasn't part of the installation so steam would just glance over it. xD Thank you very much, and thanks for being patient. Also aye. It's only Vortex MM from now on. xP