How I Installed Mods in Skyrim (2024)
This is a very basic overview of what I did in early 2024 to add mods to my game as a first-time modder. I strongly recommend doing your own research on how to install mods and follow one of the many guides that are already available.
I had no prior experience installing mods for Skyrim, or any game for that matter. I did what most people would do and searched the Internet for installation guides. It was not long before I ran into information overload. There are so many tutorials out there, and since the game has been updated numerous times over the years, I was not really sure where to begin.
After much time struggling, I reached out to some community members in Discord to ask for recommendations of where to start. This led me to two places:
Ultimately, I decided to try out Wabbajack, since it has the ability to automatically install mod lists. I went through their gallery of available lists and found Skyrim Modding Essentials to be ideal in what I wanted. SME has all the mods I wanted, yet it is set up in a way that I can add more and have some ability to customize.
I followed the perquisites and installation guide found on their website. Everything went fairly smoothly. SME includes Mod Organizer 2 as part of the list, so I did not need to install that separately as I thought. After installing Wabbajack, I began to download and run SME but I ran into an 'installation failed' error partway through. I was able to check the logs to see what the error was. After I quick online/Discord search, I confirmed that the solution was to delete 2 Rare Curios files from the game files and reinstall them by launching Skyrim through Steam. After doing those steps, I restarted Wabbajack and continued the installation. There are a few manual steps that are outlined in the SME guide. I followed those directions and proceeded to open Mod Organizer 2. MO2 seemed like it took a while to open, but I suppose that is to be expected as it was the first time loading.
I checked the load order and ran the game through SKSE in MO2. After going through the game intro, it was very exciting to see the mods working!
Using SkyUI instead of the regular inventory interface