Should I use Skyrim Legendary Edition or Skyrim Special Edition nowadays for adult modding purposes?

[SapphireCloak]

Just wondering. I've tried both. For the content that I want to install I've had the most success with LE. For some reason getting animations to work properly on SE are a major pain in the ass and I think there are some major frameworks missing or not updated for SE.

 

I know SE has newer mods and stuff for it though. What would you guys recommend?

[chaimhewast]

The thoughts of someone who was on LE for the longest time until switching to SE:
 

LE worked fine for me until I started to run into the limits of being a 32-bit process. At that point I rebuilt my modlist to be for SE. I have almost the same mods in SE as I had in LE - the only real losses for me were HDT-PE (HDT-SMP works, but not as well as PE did) and IFPV (the SE version isn't as functional as the LE version), with the addition of a bunch of retextures, remeshes, and an ENB - all of which would've taxed LE too much for me to use. Being able to compact ESPs into ESP-FEs is massively better than merging all the small mods, since it gives basically the same effect with much less effort.

 

It does mean having to roll back to 1.5.97 for a lot of the stuff I use though, since there's still mods I consider important that haven't updated to 1.6.x, some of which may never update. That's the biggest reason I can think of to use LE - not having to worry about when Bethesda will break all your mods, since their focus is on SE.

[Ruffled Pigeon]

I can't think of anything that doesn't work on SE, or any reason to run with LE over SE nowadays if you are going for a new setup. You may need to run some meshes through Cathedral Assets Optimizer yourself if you run into really niche stuff, but that's about it. Better stability, more mods and a lot of helpful SKSE plugins make SE the better platform for modding.

 

If you're going for SE, I'd currently suggest going for Version 1.5.97, that's the one before the Anniversary Edition update. Not everything works with the AE yet. To do that use the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Downgrade Patcher after downloading the current version from Steam.

[Guest]

20 hours ago, Ruffled Pigeon said:

I can't think of anything that doesn't work on SE

Some scripts won't work well with SE as far as I know, but they're pretty rare and I haven't personally ran into any issues. A few SKSE methods were either refactored or deprecated and won't compile for SE without updating a few lines.

I may be wrong but I believe the method for getting the player was drastically simplified, but even the old way is supported so everything will compile just fine.

 

I usually just run LE mods through CAO, test them extensively and update the occasional scripts whenever I get an error.