How's the SE/AE situation?

[AlyssaAwoo]

Hey y'all.

 

After a long break of Skyrim SE I'm thinking of getting back into it, though I'm curious how the situation is with SE vs AE. Last time I played a lot of people just backported to 1.5.97, same with me. Now I'm noticing however that a pretty decent amount of mods have AE versions. Should I just.. make the jump and embrace it? Would it be stubborn to stick with 1.5.97 even now? I haven't been around for a while, so I have no idea if it would be worth the effort / if there's a great benefit in upgrading as it stands.  

 

To be clear I mean the free update to SE, not the actual AE you have to purchase.

[excidium93]

THB, if you haven't got a mod list running in an older version, it makes no sense to not use the latest version.

[AlyssaAwoo]

For example Archeron - Death Alternative's newest version is exclusively for Anniversary Edition, so maybe I'll just have to make the switch sooner or later anyway due to things like these. 

Edited January 11, 2025 by AlyssaAwoo

[belegost]

Any mod will work on SE with BEES

 

The only thing that will not work is stuff that requires Creation Crap as masters and you do not install Creation Crap.

 

That's it.

[JimUpdating]

if starting modlist from new, 1.6.1170 has been stable for a year. Just set appmanifest_489830.acf in steamapps to read only to prevent updates.

 

usual caution if a mod uses SKSE as a base - get ready for version specific  ie Sexlab 1.66b 

 

for an interesting list of what could be loaded in AE, https://next.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/collections/qdurkx/mods has the 1600 mods, for 54.7Gb of updated stuff.

[Just Don't]

1 hour ago, belegost said:

Any mod will work on SE with BEES

That's only for esp files with the new version thing. SKSE plugins are still somewhat version specific (because even with clib it's not always possible to compile a single DLL file for all the executable versions of the game, or authors might chose to only support some to make compiling and troubleshooting errors easier for them).

 

The answer to this question will always be: totally depends on the mods you're using. If a mod you use is only available on 1.5 and there's no way you can replace or remove it, then that's it. The same goes if you want to use something that's only available on 1.6+. If you already have a 1.5.97 setup maybe keep playing that, see if you can update all your mods without moving versions. If that's not possible going to the current version is likely your best choice (unless you have a 1.5 exclusive mod that is irreplaceable in which case we go back to the start of this paragraph).