SE Support

[darkevilhum]

Hey Guys, I'm thinking of giving heavily modded skyrim another go after not having done so in a good few years now. Last time I enjoyed skyrim was just around when the creation club drama was starting. I wanted to see how the support for SE is vs LE. I have both but I never bothered with SE back then because barely any mods supported it. Are there any major losses mod wise for SE? Or is it the go to now?

 

My typical mod setup is usually SexLab heavy, tons of animation packs, SMP, lots of clothing mods and then some extra mods here and there for spice like Thief/DD/Event type mods etc.

Oh one thing I'm curious about is, can I take simple clothing/armor adding mods from LE and slap them into SE? I had so many clothing/armor mods that I used some tool to combine them into a single ESP which I still have, along with all the mesh/texture/bsa data which Im hoping to just copy over (once I update/rebuild the relevant bodies).

Edited April 5 by darkevilhum

[TheVolcanoGodess]

At this point in time, SE has mostly caught up to LE. I think SE is the go-to for more modders nowadays because it is said to be more stable (I think? >w< ).

I'm on AE myself, and I managed to fill it with not just a huge amount of Sexlab packs, but also nemesis moveset packs and quite a few heavy DLC-like mods. 
LE will most likely still have a few select mods that have not made it to SE, but I personally saw those losses a negligible. 

Edited April 5 by TheVolcanoGodess

[Silvain]

I think for what you want to do either would be fine. It's been a while since I've looked at LE (I'm creating an AE modlist right now) so I can't really say how much SE stuff is also available for LE. 

So far I had almost no mod that could not be ported over to SE with little to no work. And for those Script/SKSE mods that did not get a port I found a new SE mod that worked as a substitute (and often times were better). Most SL mods work for both versions. 

 

For a heavy modlist SE is a nobrainer. Compared to before it's way easier to create huge lists with 2000+ plugins thanks to .esl support. No real need to do huge and messy merges anymore. 

 

Concerning armors/meshes: this can get tricky I think. The basic stuff is fine. Just run the meshes/textures through cathedral optimizer and they are good to go (i.e. won't crash your game).  That takes like 2 clicks and maybe a minute of letting the optimizer do it's thing. Of course you still need a working body.

The plugin/esp itself should pose no problem at all. 

SMP stuff probably won't work. If I remember correctly the tech behind SE HDT (SMP) and LE HDT (PE) is different. You would need to convert it yourself. But haven't touched LE in long time so I don't know if that is still the case. 

[darkevilhum]

That's very helpful thank you. I've decided to move away from UUNP and try out BHUNP. I was wondering what the compatibility was like between armor/clothing mods between those two? The mod page for BHUNP vaguely suggests that UUNP stuff will work with BHUNP, does that mean I just can use my UUNP bodyslide files to build for a BHUNP body?

[JimUpdating]

For an easy directory of AE mods, tasairis maintains https://tasairis.github.io/compat/ in addition to the compatibility tracker thread. 

Having started with SE and moved to AE, the merging/bashing of mods isn't something I've ever had to do.

If you do go the SE/AE route, and have installed Skyrim through Steam, go to the SteamLibrary directory, then the steamapps subdirectory. There should be a file appmanifest_489830.acf and if that is set to read only then Steam can't push any updates to Skyrim. This should be much more secure than setting Steam to only update when requested.

[Silvain]

On 4/6/2024 at 1:47 PM, darkevilhum said:

That's very helpful thank you. I've decided to move away from UUNP and try out BHUNP. I was wondering what the compatibility was like between armor/clothing mods between those two? The mod page for BHUNP vaguely suggests that UUNP stuff will work with BHUNP, does that mean I just can use my UUNP bodyslide files to build for a BHUNP body?

 

Sorry can't help you with that. I'm on the other boat, my whole armor collection is CBBE so I never got into the UNP bodies. 

 

If it is anything like CBBE there may be differences in the sliders thus causing bodyslide/morph stuff to not work properly. you can test this yourself pretty easily I guess. Just open up a UUNP and a BHUNP armor in bodyslide and see how the sliders are. If the old ones are still there it should work. Though they won't use the new sliders and physics may be wonky. I'm not well versed in this so I can't really help you. 

 

To expand on what JimUpdating said in case you don't know: AE is still getting updates. Mostly for creations (paid mods) and most updates change the .exe. This causes Script extender and SKSE based mods to break more often than not. There are ways to make it less of a hassel (adress library a SKSE Framework for version independet modding) but it still is a problem. Thus disabling the automatic updates is a smart thing to do. 

 

This caused a "rift" somewhere down the line most noticeable with the original special edition at Version 1.5.97 (or so). Many modders stopped supporting the newer versions while others updated. So sometimes you find mods that are only for older versions. But most of the time there is a "NG" version somewhere on the nexus that uses the adress library thus supporting the newer versions. 

 

There is also no real consens about what is "SE" and what is "AE". Most of the time SE refers to the old pre-AE Update game version (1.5.97) and AE to anything after that. But sometimes modders call the post 1.5. game versions AE while others only call the game with creations (paid content upgrade) AE. So you need to read the read me even more than before as sometimes AE mods require the creation club content and sometimes only the game version. 

 

But even with all of that said. My Skyrim with AE was never as stable and feature rich.