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.
before spending money: check out the software called wabbajack, which has pre-configured mod-packages you can install :)
otherwise hmu, you can hop on my discord and me or my nerdy friends will help you for free :)
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.
deleted by creator
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.
Oh nice! I’ll give STL a shot, thanks!
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.
