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?

[ghastley]

I've heard that save files in Skyrim can actually get smaller as the game discards obsolete data, for example the state of a dungeon that has reset. So you'll probably reach a steady state where new stuff is added at the same rate as old things fall out. You can only travel around so fast, and can't go back to everywhere you've been very frequently.

Mods may not add much to the save game, if all they're doing is adding static content that doesn't require a remembered state. New outfits, weapons etc. won't add to your save size, unless they're ultra-light stuff that lets you hold more items in your inventory

My problem is more with the number of characters and save files I have. They may be small, but there's a lot of them!