Opinion: Skyrim NSFW Modding is Hard and Disappointing for Newbies (very long, includes Licentia Black Nefaram, Happy Fun Times)

[TTriggerhappy]

Hey all!

 

For the past month or so I’ve been trying to play Skyrim with various adult mod packs and wanted to give an account of my experiences as somebody new to modding Skyrim, maybe to provide some insights to other newbies. If you want to skip the rant and go directly to the advice, just jump to the bottom of this post, straight to “Conclusion and General Observations”.

 

I hope this is the correct place for this kind of posting. I was unsure if “General Discussion” or “Adult Mods” was better suited. Feel free to move it or delete it altogether. I’m not looking to start a big discussion. I’m also not trying to bash certain mods or packs, although a lot of my feedback will intentionally be negative. If you are an experienced Skyrim modder, then you will probably not find anything useful here, as long as this rant may be.

 

Starting Position and Goals

 

Sometime ago I stumbled upon some funny comic called “Average day in a NPC’s life”, which I traced back to Newgrounds. I hope it’s okay to post an external link: https://www.newgrounds.com/art/view/ratopombo/average-day-in-a-npc-s-life 

 

Not only did this make me laugh out loud, it also made me want to play Skyrim again. Maybe not with “Rabid R*pist Werewolves” but definitely with adult mods. Of course I had heard of mods like these but I had never actually tried them. In fact, I never tried modding Skyrim at all. I had played the game when it originally came out and then again a few years later, trying to complete every quest in the game (sadly, an unreachable goal) but as far as I remember, both adventures were completely “vanilla”, or with SkyUI at the most. So my goal was: Complete Skyrim for a third time, ideally experiencing some better graphics, more comfortable controls, new quests and maybe some additional or reworked gameplay.

 

Now, I’ve been playing games since the 8 bit era and I do have some experience with modding but not with Skyrim. But, how hard could it be? Or so I thought. Whelp. It’s definitely not easy. In fact, the whole operation turned out to be a total failure. But back to the beginning.

 

Initial Thoughts

 

After some initial research, I decided I would not try to create my own mod list. Not only would that include hours of looking into hundreds and thousands of mods, I would also have to learn a lot about modding Skyrim in general and using ModOrganizer in particular. While there are many guides out there, most of the ones I found were outdated or incomplete. A lot of the documentation seems to be written for users with at least a decent amount of experience and knowledge about the subject. As a newbie, even trying to find out the meaning of commonly used abbreviations can be quite a challenge.

 

When I started this short journey, there were five adult mod packs available on Wabbajack, which seems to be the tool recommended the most to newbies. It is also really well made, kudos to the developers! Although, setting everything up correctly and using Wabbajack already involves a bit of reading and tinkering (for example: you will probably have to change your Steam installation directory, which may break other games). Wabbajack also throws you a bit of a curveball when it asks you to manually download certain mods on LoversLab, I think. Because for some mods, there are multiple versions and files available. While Wabbajack does tell you exactly which file it needs, it does so in a way that is really less than obvious, and happily proceeds, even if you select the wrong file. Also, you will need to spend a bit of money on a Nexusmods account. Yes, in theory, it is possible to use Wabbajack with a free account but it’s not really practical.

 

(Digression: Supporting Lovers Lab)

 

By the way, I find it absolutely amazing that, in contrast to the Nexus, LoversLab does not charge its users. In fact, before writing this post, I tried to find out if there was any money involved at all, since I also found no advertising on this site (or next to none). Well, if you look really closely, you will find a link to a SubscribeStar account on the bottom of each page, where the LoversLab team will indeed accept donations. Guys and gals, this is almost ridiculously modest! If I hadn’t actively been looking for this, I probably wouldn’t even have found it. Now that I did, I guess I may throw a couple of dollars your way, since I greatly appreciate the service you provide*. But really: There is no shame in asking for money!

 

*I just tried signing up but apparently, SubscribeStar only accepts credit cards. I do not have one. If there is an option to support you through PayPal, please point me in the right direction. Thanks!

 

Mods Available

 

When I ran Wabbajack for the first time, there were five adult mod packs available (once you activate the NSFW filter on the top right of the user interface):

 

- Degenerate Dungeons

- Masterstroke

- Licentia Black

- Nefaram

- Happy Fun Times

 

Degenerate Dungeons and Masterstroke are not really available, which will you find out pretty quickly once you try to install them. I’m not sure why these are still listed. On Wabbajack’s website, Degenerate Dungeons has disappeared completely and Masterstroke is marked as “in maintenance” but the actual app still displays both mod lists in its NSFW category (yes, I deselected unofficial/unsupported).

 

Mods Played

 

I tried the other three mod packs listed above, first Licentia Black, then Nefaram, then Happy Fun times. I also tried two other modpacks from the SFW category, Living Skyrim and The Phoenix Flavour. I do not want to go too deep into each of these but I would like to share a few observations, that other newbies might find useful.

 

Licentia Black

This was the first mod pack that I tried. This means that some of the problems I found with it were probably more rooted in my inexperience than in the mod pack itself. Still, I wasn’t too thrilled with it. The main problem I had was its greatly increased difficulty compared with vanilla Skyrim. Well, I say difficulty, but that is not really the best way to describe it. I will go into a bit more detail in my conclusion below. Anyway, apart from the frustrating fights I also wasn’t too thrilled with the adult portion of the mod pack. I think these mods were just not integrated into the game very well. More like “bolted on”. You can ask random characters to have sex with you or make them do it with some form of “evil, depraved magick” but for the few hours I played it, none or at least very few of the quests seemed to make use of the new possibilities. Pretty soon, I also ran into broken quests, which made me switch to …

 

Nefaram

Nefaram is massive. This mod pack eats about 450 gigabytes of disc space. You can free up a good portion of that after the installation by deleting the downloaded ZIP, RAR and 7Z archives but still: Setting it up takes quite a while. Which made it even more frustrating to see that so many things were broken when I fired it up for the first time. Now, I did chose to play a male hero. Nefaram is very much made for female characters. A lot of its mods are specifically designed to be experienced by female dragonborns (or rather: a bastardized, humiliated and abused version of this figure). There is an option to switch roles after creating your character (or turn of the worst of Nefaram’s extensive misogynist content, if you still want to play as a woman) but for some reason that didn’t work for me (yes, I followed the instructions). NPCs would still address and treat my character as a girl, even after fiddling around with a few settings and trying an in-game sex change. I also ran into a load of other glitches, like missing textures or models. And I absolutely hated all the chores and annoyances this mod pack puts into the game, like camping, nutrition, weapon maintenance and body temperature. On the plus side, the fights were a bit less frustrating than in Licentia Black. Still, I switched mod packs again pretty soon.

 

Happy Fun Times

This was the third mod collection I tried and it’s the one that I probably played the least because the “difficulty” was so completely over the top that it simply made me rage quit. Happy Fun Times offers several starting locations, and in the one I chose, the very first enemy I encountered (who you can simply not avoid) would simply one-shot my character (well, almost, I think it was two hits) again and again until I gave myself a bow and arrows through a console command and whittled him down by abusing Skyrim’s terrible pathfinding. It didn’t get any less frustrating after that. I couldn’t win a fair fight against even the lowliest Skeever, I constantly had to abuse the game’s mechanics to actually stand a chance. Now, some of Happy Fun Times’ starting conditions are random, if I recall correctly, so maybe I just had an unlucky start. But I didn’t stick around to find out. I simply quit.

 

At that point, I had already invested quite a lot of time into this endeavor, and very little to show for it. So I thought, well, maybe it’s the NSFW mod packs that are the problem. Maybe I don’t need sex in Skyrim, if that means getting a more stable and playable experience. So I looked into SFW mods.

 

Living Skyrim

Living Skyrim is described as a flagship modlist and is reviewed quite favorably. So this is where I went next, lured in by the promise of tons of new content. It is true: I did find loads and loads of new things in Living Skyrim. The problem is, the quality varied quite a bit (not unlike the content of the original game, to be fair). Some things were really good, some things weren’t. My main problem is, there was too much of everything. Living Skyrim is literally overflowing with content. There were places I could barely move because they were so incredibly crowded with NPCs and filled with all kinds of fluff. Try reaching Saadia’s chamber from the main room of The Bannered Mare, you will have to squeeze by a dozen NPCs taking up every square inch of floor space. Still, I did have some fun with Living Skyrim and played it until hitting level 10 or so … which is when things started breaking yet again and I ran into missing persons (or rather: did not run into them) and broken quests. Sigh.

 

The Phoenix Flavour

So, my next thought was this: I guess all of these mod packs simply want too much. They simply try to incorporate too many mods at the same time. There are too many interdependencies, to many unforeseen consequences. Let’s take a step back, take a very basic, simple mod list, and try to expand it with a few manually installed add-ons. To cut a long story short, this also didn’t work. I simply couldn’t get it to run. That is not The Phoenix Flavour’s fault. I ran it for an hour or so, just to confirm that it was working. But once I had downloaded and installed about 30 mods from Nexusmods and LoversLab, that I chose mainly from the lists I tried earlier, the game wouldn’t even start. I eventually got it to launch but it simply crashed during the first loading screen. And no I did not simply throw a bunch of files into ModOrganizer and called it good. I made sure that I followed all the links, installed all the dependencies, optimized the load order and twiddled a few settings but still: it didn’t work. And there isn’t much feedback by ModOrganizer or Skyrim itself to try and analyze what the problem might be. Now, I may have gotten it working eventually after a ton of additional research and probably a lot of asking around but at this point I had already burned four weekends and quite a few evenings on this “project”, and I really just wanted to finally play.

 

Nefaram (again)

So I gave Nefaram a second chance. I figured, if I simply reinstalled it, it might work this time. There was a chance that I had overlooked something in the instructions or that something simply broke during the setup process. Luckily, I had backed up the installation archives, so after a “bit” of file management (even with two PCIe SSDs, copying hundreds of gigabytes of data does take a while), I started up the game again … and it finally worked! At least for a while. I managed to play until my character hit level 22. A lot of things went better than in the first attempt. I didn’t encounter any obvious missing models. And most times, my character was now gendered and addressed correctly. I chose to play a hermaphrodite this time (I hope that is the respectful term, I think they are called futa in the game), as a compromise. It mostly worked, although some of the animations didn’t quite fit the character. And although I tried to disable most of the mods I didn’t like (in the game – I did try it through ModManager at first, but that simply broke the mod list), some content still remained that didn’t fit in or that was simply atrociously bad. I did make the most of it by incorporating it into my role playing and simply murdering as many of the offensive assholes as I could. Oh, you want to enslave me and put me to work on your shitty farm? Watch me unravel your entrails and then pass by your unpickable locks by simply jumping over your shitty fence. Bye! However, the longer I played, the more things started to go wrong. There were quests I couldn’t complete, enemies I couldn’t kill, stuff I couldn’t find, areas that failed to load, broken savegames, outright crashes and so, so many other bugs. I did have to resort to console commands once or twice, which helped in the short term but might cause more problems in the long term. In the end, enemies would just completely ignore my presence, which makes the game almost unplayable, and at the very least unenjoyable. I do know that this is caused by some mod or scripting problem and I might manage to avoid this by loading an earlier save game but I’m absolutely sure this would only be a temporary solution. Which brings me to the conclusion.

 

Conclusion and General Observations <- This might be the helpful part for other newbies

While tools like Wabbajack certainly make modding Skyrim easier and more convenient, I think that newbies like me will still have to invest a considerable amount of work and time and must be prepared for some frustrations.

 

While all of the mod packs that I’ve tried had features that I liked, overall I cannot really recommend any one of those. I spent the last couple of weekends and evenings more working than actually playing, and when I did play, the experience was often less than enjoyable (at least it was rather lewd sometimes).

 

A lot of Youtube videos and other media make it seem like Skyrim mods are “just one click away” and really accessible but that wasn’t my experience at all. In fact, it really makes me wonder how much time many of these content creators and editors actually spend with the mods they recommend because many of the problems only seem to pop up after many hours of playing.

 

If you just want to try out an NSFW mod pack to spank Lydia’s bum or admire your dragonborn’s little dragon dangling in the breeze, that is certainly possible. I think you can also have some fun if you concentrate on some of the new quest lines and gameplay elements that packs like Nefaram introduce, provided you know how to use console commands and it’s your thing to roleplay as a human milk cow, just to give one of many bizarre examples. But if you actually want to, you know, experience Skyrim, bigger and better, with some added erotica, then you’re out of luck.

 

In general, I think the mod packs I tried all shared the same problems.

 

1. They simply incorporate way too much stuff. Do I really want to browse through 1.000 hair styles during character creation? Do I really want to scroll through 500 blacksmith plans? Do I really need a mod for a single tree in a single spot on the map, that I might never visit? Bigger is not always better, it’s often just more complicated and less convenient.

 

2. A lot of this stuff doesn’t fit together making for an inconsistent experience. It’s hard to role-play when one person kisses your feet as the heroine of Riften and the next guy tries to make you lick his while calling you slurs. And don’t even get me started on the massive difference in quality in some of these mods. On the one hand, you have a mod like Morgaine, a wonderful new NPC and follower, with well-written, fully voiced dialogue, her own quest line, configurable spells and behavior, and much more. On the other hand, you have the “slave sluts of skyrim” with memorable lines like these:

“You have big tits.”

“Yes, I have big tits.”

I don’t actually know which of these slavery mods was responsible for the “named” slaves and their dialogues and I do not want to shame anyone for using these but come on! That is simply terrible!

 

3. For some mods, there is little to no documentation or there are little to no options to tune them to your liking. One SFW example: I think all of the mod packs or at least most of them used ENBSeries to change the in-game lighting. Which made Skyrim pretty much unplayable in bad weather, at night or in some dark places. As in: You couldn’t see objects or enemies directly in front of you, literally in hitting distance, not even with some of the in-game spells or lighting equipment. (But of course, they can see you just fine!) To find out what the problem is, and how to fix it, takes quite a bit of googling. ENBSeries’ documentation is pretty much no help at all. And some of the fixes you find in forums and other places simply do not work. Or the work only in some mods/configurations but not in others. In Happy Fun Times and Living Skyrim, elevating the ambient lighting levels made the game much more playable but didn’t help at all in Nefaram, where I had to manually turn up the overall brightness, which led to snowy areas being completely washed out.

 

4. Some of the mods try to turn Skyrim into something it simply cannot be. For example, all of the mods I played tried to overhaul combat in some way. All of them tried to make it more challenging, and more difficult. And all of them completely failed at that. That is unless you think “difficult” is another word for “long-winded” or “frustrating”.

 

Just to give you an example: We all know how overpowered the infamous stealth archer/assassin builds in the original Skyrim were. Well, they still are. In fact, they are even more powerful now. Because facing enemies in open combat that have their health points tripled or quadrupled, never run our of mana and can two-shot your character or your followers is simply suicidal. So the mods force you to either invest a ton of resources and time into micro management to improve your character with every advantage you get – or to simply abuse the game mechanics so you can hit your enemies without being hit back. There are still a ton of possibilities to do exactly that, the stealth archer being one of those.

 

It doesn’t matter that the enemies now search for longer – they are still not clever enough to find you. You didn’t make combat harder, you made it longer! It took me something like 15 minutes to take down my first dragon! But didn’t that feel epic? No, it felt like work! My hands hurt. The games mechanics simply do not allow for Elden-Ring-style skill-based-fights, none of the combat mods I tried changed that. I really don’t know why they even try. (Note: I exclusively play Skyrim in first-person, I think some of the combat mods actually require you to play in third-person to be effective.)

 

Another example: One of the mods, I think it might have been Happy Fun Times, stressed how important it was to hire multiple followers: a tank, a healer, DPS, all working together. Excuse me, what do you mean, multiple followers working together? Have you ever actually played Skyrim? The AI is terrible! Fights with more than two or three participants regularly deteriorate into utter chaos! Allies hitting allies, NPCs killing themselves, models clipping through objects. Why would I want that? My followers are more of a hindrance than an asset. That’s why I park them at the dungeon entrance and go adventuring alone. If only they actually stayed…

 

I could go on but this post is already more than long enough, and you didn’t even get to see a naughty picture. Well, I can at least give you that: Two of my followers enjoying each other. Some of the lesbian animations especially are really cute.

 

 

As for my plans, I might give Licentia Black another chance at some future time, since I might have treated it a bit unfairly due to my inexperience with Skyrim mods in general but for the moment, I’m done. I will take a break from Skyrim for now and continue with Baldur’s Gate 3, which does also feature nudity but so far no sex.

 

If you’ve made it this far, thank you for reading. If you are new to Skyrim (NSFW) modding and found this helpful, then my time was not wasted. If not … well, I wish you better luck than I had.

 

PS: If you are the author of any of these mods or mod packs and found my critique too harsh or unfair, please keep in mind that this text only reflects my personal opinion and I absolutely know that some of the problems I described may simply be caused by my own experience. I am grateful for all the work modders put in to expand and improve the games we love. As I said, there were some things that I liked, for example the varied animations that were outright fantastic. But I wanted to focus on the negative and problematic aspects of Skyrim modding, not on the positive side.

[NymphoElf]

Not trying to be mean or anything, but you really should learn how to use a Mod Manager properly if you want to mod Skyrim AT ALL. You also need to understand what a mod is changing about your game before installing it, that way you have a better idea of what is supposed to happen and what is not. Just downloading a random mod list makes that nearly impossible.

 

You don't HAVE to use Mod Organizer, but you need either that or Vortex. Despite what people say about Vortex, it's perfectly fine for most people.

 

Also, please remember that Skyrim is a nearly 12 year old game. Old information is not always bad information. Plus, from my experience most people are friendly here, so if you have a genuine question - no matter how newbie or "obvious" it seems to someone else - please don't be afraid to ask.

 

As far as finding a "Mod List" - I would recommend slowly building your own piece by piece. You don't need to jump straight into a 600 plugin load order. That's just asking for problems if you have no idea what you're doing. Modding in general is not something you should do with a faint heart. It takes time to get "good" at modding. I've been modding for 9 years now and have plenty to learn. It's just 'part of the game'.

 

I'm not going to tell you what to do or not do with your game, but if you're not willing to learn the basics of modding then I would not recommend complaining when you have issues. It doesn't look good, and makes people less willing to help.

Edited August 9, 2023 by NymphoElf

[ponzipyramid]

That's understandable. There are almost certainly going to be people in this thread saying something to the effect of, "that's why you make your own mod list". But I'm empathetic towards newcomers who just don't have the time or patience to sit down and sift through the literal thousands of mods out there, resolve the inevitable conflicts, and in some cases use "advanced tools" like xEdit and Dyndolod. I like tinkering but sometimes I just wanna hit download, wait a couple hours, then hit play.

 

I'm curious to see if splitting monolithic mod lists into "submodules" might provide a nicer middle ground between forming your own list from scratch and going with someone else's vision. Nefaram could probably be split into a bunch of categories: graphics enhancements, Music & SFX, consensual NSFW, non-consensual NSFW, survival, bug fixes, quests.

 

You could package these separately and describe the kind of player that should install them. If you're playing on a potato, skip the visual overhaul, if you're not into survival, skip that part. Give players some choice but do the heavy lifting of picking the cream of the crop for them. And it would probably make it easier for newcomers to understand their list and make tweaks.

Edited August 9, 2023 by ponzipyramid

[Grey Cloud]

Well you have learned two lessons at least.

1. Modpacks get you someone else's idea of a great Skyrim.

2. All the time and effort you put into reading up and wrestling with wabbajack stuff would have been better spent learning how to mod Skyrim.

 

Modding Skyrim is like much else in life - the more time and effort you put in at the start the less arsing about you do later.

 

There are at least two guides here on LL (1 x LE and 1 X SE/AE) that will get you from nought to a fully functional and stable adult Skyrim and will do it in a way that leaves you better placed to tinker and fine-tune your game to exactly how you want it.

 

No one on here got their Skyrim overnight.

 

I've just started BG3 and have spent a fair amount of time reading and a much smaller amount of time installing mods. Maybe 10 mods so far.

Edited August 10, 2023 by Grey Cloud

[bnub345]

You can't have all of your modding done by other people and also have that modding fit your personal preferences. I don't see how you could have ever expected otherwise.

[zalduras]

The following guide helped me a lot to understand the whole thing better. I just followed this step by step guide and integrated more mods afterwards.

 

https://stepmodifications.org/wiki/SkyrimSE:2.2.0

[Miauzi]

Vor 2 Stunden sagte TTriggerhappy:

Ein weiteres Beispiel: Einer der Mods, ich glaube, es könnte Happy Fun Times gewesen sein, betonte, wie wichtig es sei, mehrere Anhänger einzustellen: einen Tank, einen Heiler, DPS, alle zusammenarbeiten. Entschuldigung, was meinst du damit, dass mehrere Follower zusammenarbeiten? Hast du jemals tatsächlich Skyrim gespielt? Die KI ist schrecklich! Kämpfe mit mehr als zwei oder drei Teilnehmern enden regelmäßig im völligen Chaos! Verbündete schlagen Verbündete, NPCs töten sich selbst, Modelle schneiden sich durch Objekte. Warum sollte ich das wollen? Meine Follower sind eher ein Hindernis als eine Bereicherung. Deshalb parke ich sie am Kerkereingang und gehe alleine auf Abenteuerreise. Wenn sie nur tatsächlich bleiben würden ...

 

 

 

Such a text allows only one conclusion -> half-knowledge about a game

among others definitely the wrong companion mods

 

 

[Tlam99]

Skyrim is exclusive.

Even if I would give you a modded skyrim, you will not be able to play it.

Because you don't understand it.

Understanding the mods is as important as putting the mods together.

They must play together in a synergethic way. 

The major problem of modlist, packs, whatever. They give you the illusion of a polished setup.

They give you a plane, a racing car and a key. After starting the engine you will realize, you need to learn,

spend time and effort into modding, understanding, using. 

Skyrim is exclusive to people which are willing to do so.

[fred200]

The best way to get discouraged with modding is to use someone else's list, collection, whatever.

 

Keep it simple. Make a default set of just the basics. SKSE, Unofficial Patch, etc..

 

After you get that working, find a single game changing mod you want to try. Make a new profile including that mod and any additional prerequisites, and your defaults.

Don't do anything else until that works.

 

Do this again for each new game changing mod you want to try.

 

If you want to enjoy the game, and keep playing, don't throw 100 mods at it. You will not be happy. Grow slowly.

 

[FutaNemesislol]

As someone who has had there game crash hundreds of times, i would be lying if i said modding skyrim was easy. But each time i crashed i got better. As the other peeps said, i would never use someone else mod list because that's like cheating and you aren't really learning anything from your experience.

 

I also recommend joining discord servers such as NSFW SKYRIM, that server is what made me look at other people screenshots which made me ask questions of how in the hell you do that lol. I would ask what enb do you use? I only have a gtx 1650 amd ryzen 7 laptop and it has held up pretty well for what i'm able to make compared to what i did before. I never looked at a guide because well it takes to long lol. I have installed each and every single one of my mods manually without any mod packs because i only wanted the things i want.

 

Anyway here is what one of my screens looked like from 2 years ago, it contains futa which i know not everyone likes but the improvement is really crazy in the second spoiler

Spoiler

 

Now my screens looks like this because of constant crashes and experiences, hell i even make sex videos now( these are regular female images and vids) 5 pics and 1 vid( the vid has sound and its a little loud sorry about that)

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

 

 

Anyway point is that you should ask people for help such as what skin do you use? body preset? sex animations and other stuff that you find interest. It's what i did and my game crashed and crashed again but eventually i started to get the hang of modding such as what mod loads before and after. The mod manager i use is vortex sense i found it to be the easiest to work on...for me anyway

Edited August 10, 2023 by FutaNemesislol

[travelmedic]

First and foremost, I agree 99.9% with your initial thesis - modding Skyrim can a frustrating experience, and there is definitely a learning curve.  No one learns to do it overnight, and I think I can speak for everyone on this site when I say that we all had failures when learning to do it.  My first attempts at modding were disasters, but I kept reading and learning and stuck with it and now I feel very confident when setting up a game.  In fact for me, browsing the hundreds or thousands of mods and setting up a new load order to try new stuff is just as rewarding, if not more so, than actually playing the game itself.

 

Obviously you spent a lot of time downloading and trying to adjust mod packs.  For the same time investment the next new person who reads this thread could learn the basics of using some of the tools and learn to do things on their own.  Once you know the basics, you can also apply the principles to other Bethesda games like the Fallout series and other Elder Scrolls games too.

 

Really, too, the most essential tools are not that difficult to use, or at least not as difficult as many people think.  I remember the first time I used Dyndolod, I was scared to death because I had it in my head that it was an advanced tool that I was somehow going to ruin my game with, but I took my time and used some good tutorials.  Once I was done all I could think was "fuck, that was easy!  Why the hell was I scared of that?"

 

Your post is a good cautionary tale for other new-to-modding people about the perils of using modpacks - you have to play someone else's idea of what is fun, and you have to assume that the person who put it together actually knows what they're doing (not all of them do).  Thank you for posting it.

[Just Don't]

Gonna be honest chief. I'm not reading all of that.

I'd still be disappointed if I invest a bit of time into getting someone's else idea of a modded game and I have no idea about how to tweak it or create my own vision because all the efforts went into getting an automated version of the process.

In the time you thought and wrote this thread you could at the very least download a mod manager and watch a quick video tutorial about the basics. From there it's just going slowly and understanding what you're doing. Skipping that and sooner or later you'll find out you're screwed.

[krzp]

NSFW modding, in general, is quite interesting because I've always sensed that the authors oddly balance between "Let's create a quality mod for the game, so it is fun to play" and "I'm fulfilling my personal fantasies, quality be damned." Let's be fair; a significant portion of NSFW mods tend to lean towards the latter approach.

 

Thinking philosophically, what is the true purpose of many NSFW mods? Sex scenes primarily serve as brief cutscene interjections; even in the realm of professional game creators, good writing is hard to come by - it's unlikely that a horny teenager would produce content on par with industry standards; most mechanic overhauls are poorly programmed or badly designed, often both. So finding well-crafted mods that actually make sense from a gaming perspective is a challenging endeavour within the NSFW realm.

 

I personally believe that many mod lists miss the fundamental idea that makes modding enjoyable – identifying what's lacking or can be enhanced in your game based on how you personally want to experience it, and then trying to incorporate those elements. Nonetheless, there's nothing inherently wrong with playing someone else's version of fun, just... don't expect much if you didn't build it yourself from the inside out. ?

 

I think the best approach would be to grab a good mod list that does stability/visual overhauls for you, and then gradually add game play elements to your liking, be it combat overhauls, quests, sexing mods, or anything else that Skyrim's scene has to offer.

[27X]

You can have exactly what you want

OR

you can have easy

 

 

that's it, the end.

[Lyman the Lunatic]

Congratulations, this will be the 1st time I use a meme to reply a post.

 

Okay, okay, I'm sorry, humour is dead on the internet & kids can't tell the difference. I read half way & got bored because you think this is a journal blog, you could trim them down more.
1st up, welcome to the Skyrim modding community
2nd of, welcome to Loverslab. If you are an absolute newbie, I recommend you to leave. Not because we hate you, LL mods just requires you to put more efforts into installing them, and that can make your skyim gaming experience too frustrating that it needs to. Get back to fiddling around with the basic mods (hair, armour, weapons) & get used to how MO2 works. Then come back here. You'll love your life more that way.

From what I gathered, you weren't ready with all the work you need to install the mods. I don't really blame you, you did said those silly youtubers lied to you. But I don't think they intend to lie, or everything they told you is a lie. Bethesda is a terrible game company & CK is an archaic engine, things breaks all the time (even when you did everything absolutely right). Which is why I recommend you to leave here for now, play around with simpler mods & comes back later. You just need to get used to how broken & unpredictable nature of Skyrim & mod managing 1st. There's a reason why some of us says "mod it till it breaks" (and sometimes, the game breaks itself).

I never trust those mod packs, so my advice is for everyone to install the mods they like, if you want to download a pack, just install them independently. Because if something breaks, it's easier to fix that way. Just like you described yourself, at 1st things looks fine, then it all starts to break, and what did you do? You removed the entire pack. Doesn't that makes you feel discouraged or depressed at all? i imagine you'll feel burn out at least.

I want you to remember something, most game companies hates mods, they don't want their customers to change things in the game. Modding those games are harder or even impossible. Skyrim is the exception to the rule. My advice? Disable those modlists, download some basic stuff like armour, weapon or hair mod, spend time making your character looks the best you possibly can. Play around in skyrim. Fool around with console commands a little. Take a break form the modlist burn out. Go enjoy life, come back here & tackle that monstrous modlist again.

 

Good? Good!

Edited August 10, 2023 by Lyman the Lunatic

[Mrs Taewa]

Honestly, all in all I'm pretty shite at modding, I'm completely Tech-No-Logic and as much as I try I just can't wrap my head around Computers, but that being said I do run stable Mod Games with NSFW content with little to no issues. I would say one of the primary reasons for my success is not biting off more than my tech-no-logic mind can chew...and for me that includes, "don't touch Mod Packs"...if you want a modded game, start small and work your way up from there, reading everything included.

People will probably give me a hard time for this, but I use the Nexus Mod Manager (NMM) as my Mod organizer, why? Because I'm comfortable with it and I can work it the way I like without hassle, I have tried Vortex and MO, both ended badly for me for their own reasons and I just want to enjoy my modded games without the headaches and I would never use a Mod Pack, it's someone elses game built for their computer and what they want, it;'s their vision, not mine.

I would say avoid Mod Packs like the plague if you're new to Modding, you are biting off more than you can chew, I would suggest enviisioning the kind of game you want and then perhaps asking people if those Mods exist, people here are very helpful, it's a good community, you will get help and suggestions. You don't have to be an expert to run a nicely modded game, but you do need to be patient, ask questions and be willing to read

[sila]

I have spent almost as much time modding skyrim as I have playing skyrim over the years. To make your own list takes time, but you can be the champion of your own world, and not someone else's if you take the path to do it yourself.

 

I agree with folks that said to start small. Don't go through hundreds of mods throwing things in willy nilly. That is a GREAT way to break the game and subsequently have no CLUE what is wrong or how to fix it. Start small, say graphics mods. Then throw in some gameplay stuff you like. Put in sexlab and maybe an addon or two. Then add a few more that look interesting.

 

Make a simple foundation and build on that. Actually test the mods as you add them, so when something does not work you know what it is and where to look for answers.

 

That would be my advice to anyone new to modding skyrim or even modding games in general. 

[venomr]

My advice for building your mod list from scratch is to play skyrim normally without mods. Then as you go through the game, add in mods that cater to the parts of the game that you enjoy personally.

 

For example, if you enjoy the company of the Hoursecarl Lydia, you can find mods that  give her a new appearance or add features specifically for her. Or if you really enjoy summoning things with conjuration, you can find mods that add new creatures for you to summon.

[DarkBlade13]

I honestly have never used any mod packs. The idea seems lame. Too restricted. I am now at the point of having 430 mods enabled all chosen one by one manually. You don't really need a mod list. What you do need is insctructions on what mods you can conbine and wich one you can't. More importantly the mods that are unstable and that I would never install again after trying. Bughunting can be long and slow. Anyway if you do like me you end up making your own mods because you have gotten that much fond of the freedom it gives. Yes thats right I now just make my own mods. Btw you shouldn't start with NSFW. Start with the basics. Get live another life working. Get FNIS working, get XP32 maximum skeleton, Get a dance animation working. Once you got the whole framework set up like, SKSE, bodyslide, BHUNP or CBBE/BBD. Working FNIS or Nemsis. Then you can come to Loverslab and install the SSL framework.

Edited August 16, 2023 by DarkBlade13

[LesboIsBesto]

wasnt disappointin for me when i was a noob, the most fun ive had in ages & of all time for pc gamin.

 

now I just gotta work up the nerve to update fallout 4 & do new vegas next

[Ronin79]

I've been modding Skyrim for almost a decade now, and there is no escaping the fact that in order to have a truly great experience, you will have to learn about modding. Educate yourself, and build your own mod list. Yes, there are some good collections on nexus, and yes... There are a few available for wabbajack, but there will always be things you'll want to change about them to suit your individual tastes, and that requires some knowledge of modding, so why not just build the mod list you really want? 

 

You can have a good-looking, and smutty skyrim with a decent combat experience, with 300 mods or less if you know what you're doing, and have the time to invest in patching everything right, merging plugins, etc. 

 

I loved living Skyrim, but I have to agree with you on the point that it was just way too damn crowded in some areas. It took me a long time to find the perfect combination of mods to populate skyrim exactly the way I wanted it, but it was well worth the effort. 

 

The best advise I can give you is to do your homework. Find mods that will give you the general experience (Gameplay, aesthetics, quest mods, npcs, etc.)  you're looking for, and learn how to make them work together. Sort of like building a house, this will be your foundation. Aside from selecting an appropriate male and female body/skin combination, Don't even start installing NSFW mods till you have a good foundation to build your mod list on.

 

Just picking the right body/skin can be a chore, because some bodies have very little custom armor available for them, and some don't even have a vanilla armor refit available. My advise... Stick to the basic UUNP, or CBBE until you've been modding for a while. BHUNP looks great, but if you don't know what you're doing, it's not going to work. Same with any of the more advanced bodies. Hell... I still use UUNP special, because it just works so well with very minimal tweaking.

 

Avoid HDT hair until you understand how it works, and how to edit meshes and head sculpts. I wish someone had told me that when I first started screwing around with it, because it would have saved me a LOT of unnecessary aggravation. None of it works right out of the box, and nine times out of ten, it won't perfectly fit your character's head.

 

While we're on the subject of unnecessary aggravation... Do yourself a favor and NEVER manually install mods. Use a mod manager, or you will end up constantly re-installing the game. Even just using Nexus Mod Manager is better than manually installing mods. 

 

Once you've got your foundation built, then you can start looking at installing an NSFW framework. The two most common are Ostim, and sexlab. I prefer sexlab, because I'm a stubborn old bastard, and I'm used to it. I've completely torn it apart, tweaked it, and rebuilt it for my specific needs. Also because Ostim feels like a game unto itself, and has very limited animations. If you want complete control over a scene though... Ostim is probably for you. 

 

Sexlab has a lot of mods designed to work with it, and it's by far the easiest framework to create new mods for (in my own personal opinion at least) so it's what I've stuck with. If you want to complete quests using sexual favors, there's a mod for that. If you want to become a succubus, there's a mod for that too. If you want to get assaulted by all manner of npcs and creatures instead of dying every time you lose a fight, there's mods for that. Unfortunately, none of this stuff just works perfectly out of the box. You will need to do some tweaking, and once you understand how mods work, you can just tear them apart and rebuild them to suit your needs like I do.

 

 

Edited August 18, 2023 by Ronin79

[hitmanh]

I feel you, having gotten into Skyrim SE earlier this year (after years of playing modded FO4). It  was something of a steep learning curve, but I got there. I'm not a fan of wabbajack, to little view of what the actual mods are, and more importantly, which version (many mods are actively maintained and pre-reqs and the like can change over time). Luckily for me, I came across @Aylis wonderful thread

Which is both actively maintained and has a bunch of users running it. I went from an unstable Skyrim to rock solid, with beatiful visuals, some nice but balanced changes to combat and it gave me a solid base to investiaget mods that look interesting.

 

The big point is get a good solid base going first, then start exploring the mods that interest you. Also, moving to MO2 really helped.

 

Be prepared to take a systematic approach to testing mods (get used to starting the game a good few times until you are stable). Then once you are happy, don't mess with it. Also don't forget that just becuase you have a mod install, doesn't mean you can't turn individual features off within it (MCM is very helfup here). Especially with the kink stuff, tuning stuff to your taste will take a while.