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 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.
No need for money. Many people will glady help you 😁. Anyway I have not modded skyrim yet. But a easy way to mod on Linux I found is copy the installed game including mods over from windows where you did mod the game. Works for quite a few games. If you can’t get it working directly from Linux that is.
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.
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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)
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.
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.
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.
Does that work in Linux now? Last I heard they were working on a Linux version but it was a limited roll out.
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.
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.
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.
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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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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!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
Buddy, if I knew how I’d do it for free, I feel your pain.
I feel you… Sorry i cant help but i feel you… It gets better they say
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.
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.
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.
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 briefly tested Jackify, and it seems to be a great tool. I’m not able to fully test it because I don’t have Nexus Mods subscription. But, I was able to test it with my old Nordic Souls files.
Guide to modding Skyrim on Linux by using a modlist:
- You need Nexus Mods subscription to download modlists.
- You most likely want to have Anniversary Edition of Skyrim, otherwise modding will be challenging because many mods requires it.
- Launch Skyrim normally, and if you have Anniversary Edition, let it download all Creation Club Content (CC Content). Do not Alt-Tab out of Skyrim, or it will interrupt the download. The game will claim it downloaded everything, but you’ll miss some of the CC Content. If you get any errors about files that have the letters “CC” in them, this is your problem.
- Once the CC Content is downloaded, close Skyrim.
- Head over to Jackify Releases. Download the latest Jackify.AppImage.
- You might need to give it executable permission. You can typically do this by pressing the second mouse button over the icon, go to Properties -> Permissions and look for the option that says executable. Or use
chmod +x /path/to/Jackify.AppImage. - Place Jackify.AppImage where ever you want to and launch it.
- Go to Modlist Tasks -> Install a Modlist.
- Select Skyrim as the game, and pick one of the Modlists. If you are out of ideas, and you have a decent computer, try Nordic Souls. Note, that you cannot combine modlists, but you can install more mods if you want to.
- Change install and download directories, so that they have the name of the modlist in them (create new folders, for example).
- Under the Nexus API field, there is a link. Click it, scroll to the bottom to Personal API Key section, hit the Request API Key button and copy-paste it to the API Key field. You might want to read the warning on the Nexus site, and decide yourself if you want to trust Jackify. Jackify team is planning to implement a better way to do this, but it is what it is for now.
- Click Start Installation button, go brew some coffee, make a dinner, wash your clothes and come back to see if the installation is finished.
Once the installation is complete, Jackify adds the modlist to your Steam Library and configures the proton prefix. Make sure you are using Jackify 1.6.2 or newer, or the prefix configuration will likely fail. When you start the modlist, it will launch ModOrganizer2. Hit the big Play button to launch the game.
Nordic Souls defaults to ENB for its graphic improvements. On my old Nordic Souls, it doesn’t seem to start, or it takes a very long time. Nordic Souls also comes with Community Shaders, which does the same thing. In the latest Nordic Souls version, there is a separate profile for ENB and CS. Change it from top left corner of MO2.
If you get “too many open files” error during modlist installation, you need to edit
/etc/security/limits.confand add this line to it:your_username hard nofile 524288and then relogin, or restart.Once you start a new save file, avoid changing the mod and plugin load orders (left and right side lists) in MO2. Doing so might break your save file, and fixing it will be difficult, because you probably won’t remember the old order. Also, never uninstall or upgrade a mod, unless you are sure doing so is safe. This too can break your save file. Re-installing a mod once something has broken might not fix it.
You can install more mods using MO2. Always read the instructions given by the mod author, and follow them to a T. Pay attention to things like dependencies, incompatible mods, load orders. If the mod author doesn’t mention which of the two load orders they mean, it’s most likely the mod load order (left side).
If a mod comes with different versions for AE and SE (Anniversary Edition, Special Edition), you most likely need AE version of it, if you are using AE. Otherwise, SE and AE are the same, and both should work for AE.
Some modlists, such as Nordic Souls, will downgrade the Skyrim version to something like v.1.5.97. If a mod has versions for different versions of Skyrim, pay attention to this. Check the Skyrim version from the main menu of Skyrim.
This may not entirely help you if you don’t have a Windows drive (I dual boot when needed, especially for modding my games easily on Windows and then moving the files over to Linux after testing it works in Windows) but:
- Log into Windoze
- Install your game if it isn’t (Quick Tip: If you do have Windows and Linux on separate drives, you don’t have to download the entire game again. Drag the game over to the correct folders you would have on Windows, then go to download the game. It will see the files and fetch anything you still need)
- Run the game at least once to make sure your files are created and whatnot (SkyrimPrefs.ini or whatever it is called)
- once at the main menu, download any of the anniversary edition stuff if you have them
- Use Nexus Mods modding tool Vortex and use a Collection (NOTE: If you do not have a Premium account, you can use any other program like Mod Organizer 2 or whatever if you want, I have only ever used Vortex, sorry. :/ )
- Let the mod managers do their thing
- Once all the mods from the Collection/s are installed, start the game on Windows and make sure you can get in game at least (Not all mods/Collections are created equally!)
- Log back into Linux and use your preferred File Manager program to go into your Windows drive (Mine is called basic something, I’m away from my computer right now) and move the whole game folder over to your proper Linux folder for your Steam games
- Test
- Hopefully profit?
This might not be exactly what you are after but Enderal: Forgotten Stories, an incredible total conversion for Skyrim that in my opinion easily surpasses Skyrim in quality, is available on Steam and works out of the box.
