Starting Skyrim on PC Options

[Renee]

Yes, it looks like it's finally happening. It's raining and lovely outside, and is supposed to do so all through Sundas. I mean Sunday. And I am going to maybe start Skyrim on PC tomorrow.

So what I want to do here is to collect any advice the community here at Chorrol feels like contributing. For instance: I still want to install my game outside of Program Files, right? That sort of advice. I have heard that modding Skyrim is different from Oblivion.

What's the best (easiest, actually) mod manager to use? That's a good place to start. OBMM isn't as fancy as Wrye Bash, for instance, but I still use OBMM most of all because it does what I need it to do. And so I am assuming Skyrim also has several mod managers to try using, right?

I'm pretty excited about my first character. I already know a lot about him, since he is based on a character one of my friends from high school (1980s, lol) created. The only tricky thing is this character will be Asian, and I'm going to want some Asian face-tweaking mod, because I could never create this guy with vanilla tools on Xbox (yes, I tried). Anybody know a mod that adds some Asian elements to faces?

[SubRosa]

That is the Steam client itself you are looking at, not the folder on the your drive. It should have created an icon on your desktop that you can start the game from, as well as on your start menu.

But you can also start the game from the Steam client as well. Move your move over Library for a moment, and a box will drop down from it. Click on Games. It will populate a short list of all the game that you own, as well as ones that are free to play. I see things like Counter Strike and Team Fortress Classic, which I never bought, but apparently Steam is giving away. Anyway, click on Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. That will fill in the window with a Skyrim page. Just click on the blue Play button and it will start the game.

However, SKSE won't work if you start the game this way. You have to find skse_loader.exe, and make a shortcut to it. Look for that Skyrim icon that should be somewhere on your desktop or start menu. Right click on either, and click on Properties. The Target box will tell you exactly where your Skyrim folder is on your drive. It will be buried under a whole bunch of Steam folders. Usually it is something like Steam\steamapps\common\skyrim\

To change your shortcut to start using SKSE, all you really have to do is go into that target box. I think it will end with SkyrimLauncher.exe. Change that to skse_loader.exe. Voila! All done.

Now the Steam client has to be running to play Skyrim. So you have to either start it every time before you start Skyrim. Or when you start the game - even from the SKSE shortcut, it will automatically start the Steam client, and bypass SKSE and go straight to the vanilla game loader instead. You have to exit from the vanilla game loader window. Then start it again from the SKSE shortcut. That will start the game with SKSE running. You can tell because it will completely bypass that vanilla loader.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Dec 8 2014, 01:44 AM