I’m genuinely this desperate. I’m a working dad going to college, I just started double classes, and I’ve just spent all of my free time for the last 4 days trying to figure out how to get modded Skyrim to run on my computer. I’m not good at this, nothing I do works, and all I want is to relax and do something fun for myself.
I’ll PayPal the money, it’s not much but it’s literally twice what I paid for Skyrim itself. I’m just so desperate to have something comfortable and newish.
I stumbled upon this and saw in a comment that you updated the post, and I do see that you edited it, but it doesn’t contain a guide or anything.
What did you end up using? Does it work well enough?I’m thoroughly pissed that my update disappeared, I put work into that.
So what ended up being the most reliable way was using Steam Tinker Launch. You install it as directed and it replaces the Proton version you’re using to launch the game. From there, I did get nexus premium to get the collection list I wanted, but only out of exasperation, normally I just open each mod in the collection and manually install.
There are a few hiccups, you can’t use the drop down menus in vortex, but you can scroll through them with arrow keys. Sometimes it refuses to let you drag and drop files so you have to close and restart it. I couldn’t get my system to hand off nexus links to vortex, so I had to download them and then move them into it, or copy the nexus link and paste it in, but either way let it work as intended. The biggest pain is I can’t get the STL windows to do darkmode so they’re blinding in contrast to my other windows. That’s fine if I minimize them though.
It’s reliable enough that I’m still playing the same character I made after this post, my LotDB museum is coming along nicely. The game is no less stable than normal Skyrim and when it does crash, STL pops up to help me get it running again.
I used to know how to install Skyrim mods on Linux. Then I took an arrow in the knee …
Can’t believe how far I had to scroll to find this.
idk about 7 hours ago, but it’s the top comment
so
skill issue
What distribution are you on? What mod manager have you tried using? And what mods are you trying to install?
Also have you tried Skyrim Anniversary edition? It has some basic built in modding capabilities.
Bazzite I’ve tried vortex, MO2, and Limo
Mods are the top 25 most downloaded quality of life, graphics, and patch mods as well as everything for Legacy of the dragonborn. I played it once a few years ago and I just want to enjoy that gain.
Mods are the top 25 most downloaded
Some of those mods are old and outdated. Not sure which off the top of my head though.
Did you install all the dependencies for these mods? Nexus should have a grey tab labelled ‘Requirements’ to link to the necessary pages. Also, some of the mods requure SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender) which is on a different site and uses a different install process.
Also, did you boot the game up before trying to start modding it? At least on Windows you need to do that first because the game generates some .dll files you need for it to work.
I’m not entirely new to modding and I’ve done all the basics. The the big problem is that the best options for mod managers don’t run on Linux and the only options I can find on Linux either don’t work or don’t offer any explanations for why the game doesn’t work.
MO2 runs just fine for me. I don’t actually use it for Skyrim — I do that all manually — but it worked for e.g. Fallout 4 without me doing anything special. I just ran its installer the same way I’d run skse64_loader.exe using the same prefix as the game.
I had a little luck with that for fallout 4 but for some reason the text in mo2 was all so small I had to use screenshots and guesswork to navigate it and even then only half the mods worked.
You can adjust the dpi setting in winecfg to fix the font size, but in recent beta versions of proton I find it necessary to set it back to the default (and restart wine) to actually play the game.
There was one fairly popular fo4 mod that didn’t work for me, but the only skyrim one I found that seemed to have a problem with linux was nemesis, and that has now been replaced with pandora. All the other thousand or so mods I tried (currently using 600 or so) seem to work about as well as they do for anyone else.
Jesus people they didn’t ask for 20 questions, they asked you to do a thing for them. You want the $20 or not?
Honestly I’m starting to wonder if the modding community is just a hoax I’ve fallen for because every mention of it turns into this same thread. Plenty of “it works for me” and absolutely nothing substantial.
Buddy, if I knew how I’d do it for free, I feel your pain.
You can skip the hassle and use this https://www.wabbajack.org/
wabbajackwabbajackwabbajack
Quite a bit of hassle involved in getting a modlist installed on linux even with wabbajack unfortunately. I have spent some time in their discord helping folks do it. Most modlists will require installing the modlist on windows and copying the entire install over. This is because wabbajack does not run on linux and licenses prevent anyone from distributing something resembling the installed collection of mods
Ahh that’s on me, I didn’t notice the community this was posted to, my bad!
I feel you… Sorry i cant help but i feel you… It gets better they say
Bro buy a premium nexus mods account and then install vortex from Nexus mods and simply go to https://www.nexusmods.com/games/skyrimspecialedition/collections and basically one click install a thousand mods. Choose a collection that has the highest success rate install and just follow the very few directions you’ll need to do (like launch Skyrim once or something after new install)
Does that work in Linux now? Last I heard they were working on a Linux version but it was a limited roll out.
Unfortunately, vortex runs on Linux about as well as unpatched Skyrim runs on on Linux. I’ve tried using the api link from nexus to install mods both with limo and with umo for OpenMW and as far as I can figure, the sandboxing on bazzite stops them from being able to recieve the links.
I’m on bazzite and use limo to mod x4. It handles the uri from nexus no problem. Have you looked at the limo wiki? It specifically covers skyrim.
Ive only ever used Vortex and it works great for me, even on the steam deck.
I used ProtonUpQT (its on the flatpak store) to install SteamTinkerLaunch.
For the game you want to run, you set the compatibility tool to SteamTinkerLaunch (same menu you would use to select the proton version).
Then in your steam library you create a category called Vortex and add whatever games you want running vortex to it.
Then when you launch the game you get a SteamTinkerLaunch menu where you can change loads of settings and access Vortex Mod Manager.
Ive played Fallout 4 (should be similar situation to Skyrim) like this since the Steam Deck came out and the only issue i came across is when i had a game on the SD card Vortex couldnt find the game location so i had to create some symlinks.
This method also worked for me when playing Starfield.
You can install mods by copying the Nexus mods link into Vortex and they also auto update.
Wow. I’m doing the same thing right now. I bought and installed Skyrim for the first time a few days ago. Then I thought, if I’m going to play it, it should be with all the graphics mods. Which I haven’t figured out so I haven’t played.
Honestly, just play the game. You don’t need mods. If you really like the game, you can revisit mods later.
I don’t want mods to change the game. I only want mods to update the graphics.
It’s not like I’ll play it through again even if it’s great. I’m 15 years behind on games.
That’s usually what I do. First play through on a game I’ll do without/minimal mods. After that though… game on! My Skyrim has 141 mods now and is hardly the same game anymore.
Any chance you’d be willing to zip up your intall and send it my way?
I’m running most of the mods through Mod Organizer 2 on Skyrim Anniversary Edition on an old assed pc, so I don’t think it would work for you without a lot of effort and tinkering. it took me a lot of swearing and hair pulling to get it to work right on mine lol!
It’s worth plying without mods if you wanna save the headache, but I’ve been playing it for 9 years now so something new would be nice.
I tried to play the official Skyrim VR and couldn’t even make it through the intro because the horse cart would bug out before it completed the path. I haven’t even started the modding process yet but it’s funny that I’ll likely have to do that to even play at all 🙃
That’s when you use an Alternate Start mod. I highly recommend Realm of Lorkhan or Alternate Perspective. There’s even a mod for those two to combine. With the Wabbajack stuff above, I would even recommend starting with something like the FUS / FUS Heavy modlists, or you can go all out with the Mad God’s Overhaul 3.7.
I can’t vouch how any of this runs on Linux tho. Maybe I’ll flip eventually.
Thanks for the advice. My experience was on Windows, using a Quest 2. I’m killing my PC this month and installing Debian, so I’m sure I’ll have a whole new set of challenges on the there
If I don’t get to hear “Hey you, you’re finally awake” to start my day, I don’t feel like I’m even playing Skyrim.
I can’t wait to reverse my current experience of this, which is hearing the quote and then the cart bumps a rock and we go 🙂🙃🙂🙃🙂🙃 until the cart wedges behind a rock or tree and the horse gets spaghettified
I think the cart doing weird things has something to do with the framerate. It’s been years since I tried playing skyrim, but I vaguely remember that the physics was somehow tied to the framerate.
And this post on the steam forum seems to confirm it https://steamcommunity.com/app/72850/discussions/0/3195866872030068939/
I found this github for a lutris setup with vortex: https://github.com/monyarm/lutris-skyrimse-installers … if anyone wants to figure this out for op.
It’s been so long that I forgot I’ve tried this method. My experience with lutris is actually what turned me on to bazzite. It’s fantastic for gaming so long as you don’t mind running everything in steam.
For the Linux side, I’ve used Mod Organizer 2 on Linux via https://github.com/Furglitch/modorganizer2-linux-installer
The problem is that the Linux compatibility stuff is the first step, and as the Skyrim modding forums will tell you, getting Skyrim modded is basically a game in-and-of itself. There are various incompatibilities between different mods, load orders matter, and so forth. It’s not a low-effort path.
Like, the real answer is that I don’t think that there is really a great low-effort way to get just “modernized Skyrim” up and running. That’s not that I don’t sympathize — I think that there is real demand for someone who just wants a vanilla-with-a-lot-of-community-updates Skyrim with minimal effort and troubleshooting. I’ve done it, and it takes time to debug issues.
Also, there isn’t just one “modded Skyrim”. There are people who want to play a vanilla game, just with higher-res textures and higher-polygon models. There are people who want more changes, like cities that smoothly transition into the open world. Some people want a seriously modified game, like a survival game. There are people on LoversLab and similar who want an erotic open-world game. And those just aren’t really compatible with each other.
I have never used Wabbajack on Linux successfully — haven’t tried recently, either — but it downloads entire collections of pre-set-up mods. The idea is that it has some “pre-modded” configurations to start from that someone’s tested. You don’t get to configure everything, but in theory, it should “just work” on the Skyrim side of things, and it’s the closest to that that I’m aware of.
EDIT: It looks like Wabbajack has “unofficial Linux guides” up off their main page, so some people are clearly using it on Linux these days.
Blows my mind that there aren’t common modpacks for Skyrim. Last time I tried getting into it I spent probably a week getting everything together… then launched the game, played a couple of hours, then got distracted by life.
Never went back to it because I didn’t want to go through the exercise of maintaining it.
Honestly, I think that one thing that people don’t appreciate about Linux is how much work has been done on a common license front (BSD/LGPL/GPL/MIT) to help unify work, and how much work has been done by packaging and testing people, the distro guys. Like, if people had to spin their own Linux setup out of open-source repos — some on GitHub, some one SourceForge, etc — it’d be a lot harder. That’s kinda what the Skyrim modding world is like.
The Skyrim modding crowd has several sources of fragmentation, I think:
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Bethesda doesn’t actually make money off mods at all, unless it’s from the Creation Club and paid, of which there is not much. Skyrim is closed source, so they’re the only people who can work on that. My guess is that some stuff, like Skyrim Script Extender, really should have been folded into the base game…but there’s just not money in it for Bethesda, and they aren’t a volunteer project. If you look at a favorite open source game of mine, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, there are surprisingly few mods…because over the years, things that would have been “mods” for a lot of commercial games were just added to the base game.
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Bethesda has been comparatively-restrictive on what content they’ll host, so “just put a mod on Bethesda’s site” isn’t going to be a universal solution.
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NexusMods, probably the largest mod distribution site, is a company, and has no incentive to help facilitate other sources of mod distribution. So their mod managers only support automatic download of mods from NexusMods.
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Some mods are going to cause moral outrage or are even outright illegal in some places.
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Because many mods don’t allow redistribution, they can’t be moved to another site. That also limits the clients that can automatically handle them.
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Because mods generally are not under licenses that permit forking, people can’t just go out and fix some of these compatibility problems and release a fork that works.
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Sometimes people take down mods. Maybe they don’t want people to know that they were producing an erotic mod. Maybe they just get angry or frustrated and want to stop. Maybe they get in a fight with someone else. Maybe they’re doing a political protest (I remember some users doing this when Russia invaded Ukraine). With FOSS software, that’s not much of a problem, because the rest of the world can fork and continue development. That’s often not the case with Skyrim mods.
And a lot of these problems affect modding of games other than Skyrim. It’s just a particularly big problem because Skyrim is an extremely-heavily-modded game.
I’d like to see a cross-platform game-agnostic mod manager. Something that’d have enough scale that it could be maintained on an ongoing basis, past a single game’s lifetime. Support non-interactive operation, conflict resolution (automatically disabling various sets of mods, restarting game, asking user if problem is gone), downloading from a variety of sites automatically. Downloading deltas efficiently, rather than whole archives, if a user has a recent version already. Then, if any game-specific support is required, just have a small extension to add that. That won’t solve all the problems — the license problem on Skyrim mods is, I think, a big root cause — but at least it’d be a starting point.
I’d like to see a cross-platform game-agnostic mod manager
Tbf, Mod Organizer is mostly that
Like, if people had to spin their own Linux setup out of open-source repos — some on GitHub, some one SourceForge, etc — it’d be a lot harder.
There’s a name for that: it’s called “Linux From Scratch.”
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There ARE common mod packs that’s the entire point of wabbajack it even has Linux support.
There is zero fucking effort in modding Skyrim nowadays.
Never went back to it because I didn’t want to go through the exercise of maintaining it.
You shouldn’t be actively trying to maintain it. Some mods and patchers like DynDoLOD will break if you change your load order during a playthrough.
Best practice is to get it set up and stick with it until you’re ready to start a new game
This entirely. Skyrim/Fallout with mods is a fickle mistress. Once you have her going, don’t even think about touching her again unless you want to further frustrate yourself!
What you’re looking for is called “Wabbajack”. It’s a pretty impressive system, because it actually pulls all the mods from their official nexus mods source, rather than requiring you get permission from every mod you want to include to be compiled into some new package that then has to be maintained and updated whenever anything updates.
It’s like setting up a full-blown, fully tweaked modlist in a single click. Really impressive solution to navigating a lot of the thorniness that would come from redistributing other people’s work in a “traditional” modpack.
Does the Nexusmods method just not work on Linux?
Vortex mod manager doesn’t, but you can still use the api key to attach another mod manager. In theory, the only one I’ve found that allows it won’t actually download anything and doesn’t explain why.
Just spitballing, but most of modding skyrim is just loading .esm and .esp files in the right order.
You may be able to get the modlist downloaded, load order sorted (and any merged patches made if those are still a thing) in a Windows VM, then shift the files and load order list over to Linux so you’re just struggling with Linux compatibility to run instead of also with the setup of the mods.
As far as I know, that’s the reccomended way to handle modding for a lot of games running on linux through compat layer stuff.
As far as mods themselves, I’d pick one of the more popular packs on nexus or wabbajack that appeals to you and doesn’t seem to have a lot of complaints about bugs in the comments.
Modding has multiple hurdles. Getting the tools set up, getting the game set up, selecting and installing the mods, working out compatibility issues, and making sure everything runs at the end. By sticking with a popular modpack, you cut out selecting the mods and having to figure out getting them working together yourself. By using a Windows VM for initial setup, you cut out most of the struggles of getting the tools working on Linux. Hopefully that would cut the challenges down to a managable level.
Yeah… Mostly…
But if you wanna install new models it gets weird. Every time I have installed a new model or replaced models, I run into major headaches with crashes and dependency issues that take a while to figure out. They never “just work.”
And that’s using the Nexus Mod Manager on Windows! Don’t get me started on how fucked shit is if you wanna do it manually or on an OS other than Windows.
Sounds like you need to switch to Mod Organizer. Once you know how to use it, you have all the tools you need to diagnose issues
I have looked into this, unfortunately I was just as lost trying to learn how to set up and run a VM that it just felt like a detour on a road to nowhere. I genuinely can’t stress how desperate I am to be offering the whole of my fun money for the month and the entire safety of my computer to maybe get a chance to play a game.
What’s the timeline on this? I have played a bunch of modded Skyrim but just switched to Linux. That said I was about to build a mod list for myself, probably a lightish simonrim (basically vanilla +) setup with the good quest/new land mods if compatible. If that sounds like something you would also like I will just give you my mod list and load order when done.
Timeline is basically forever, unless someone comes through on this I’m just sol on the whole idea. I’m trying another poster’s suggestion for steam tinker launcher right now but my first attempt crashed so hard it forced a system reboot. Scond attempt is 7% through installing a modlist, so if it doesn’t detonate my computer I’ll tell you what I did to save you the headache.
Once I get mine done I’ll let you know!
If you shoot me a message, I would be happy to help you out if I can, free of charge. I used to mod skyrim a lot and havnt done it on Linux yet, but I’d be willing to give it a go.
