I know there was some talk on here a while back about creating a mod-specific category on the PC Gamer forums, but since that doesn't yet exist, and we've had Skyrim Anniversary Edition for about a year now, I felt it was a fair time to ask this, which is: Has anyone found a good, reliable list of AE-friendly Skyrim mods?
As some are probably painfully aware, we were all involuntarily upgraded to the AE version (minus most of the paid AE content), rendering a lot of Special Edition mods unusable. The mod community has been rallying in the wake of this, and a lot of popular mods are now fully (or at least mostly) AE-compatible.
That being said, my wife and I have been having a heck of a time trying to put together a mod list that works reliably and consistently since then. We've turned off auto-updates and play it offline in order to avoid further updates (so it's stopped at around 1.63 or thereabouts), which is an issue on its own since some mods continue updating to the very latest iterations of the game without maintaining their older versions.
I found one guide (at scinitar [dot] com, I believe it was called) that turned out to be... not so much a step-by-step guide as it was some guidelines and then a kitchen sink load of mods that are not necessarily compatible with each other and are in many cases redundant, i.e., pick the one you like best. It then goes on to talk about Wrye Bash patching and converting Lite mod files to regular (apparently the ESL variety doesn't play nice with Wrye Bash), and I just would rather not mess with that if possible. I'm content to simply keep things within the <255 limit, with ESL files making up the difference since they don't count against that limit.
Nexus Mods has their Mod Collections, but I'm not sure how well curated they are, let alone whether they're in any sort of reliable/stable order. Which is the other part of my question, one that has perhaps been answered for the SE/LE versions in the past, but my Google Fu has never found any definitive result to my satisfaction, which is, Is there an ideal, reliable/stable order in which to install mods? I know the basic rule of how one mod will overwrite aspects of a similar mod that came before it, but on a larger scale I've yet to see if there's a hard and fast rule like "NPC follower mods should come before quest mods," or vice-versa. I assume size is also a factor as well.
This post is admittedly all over the place, and for that I apologize. I just miss having a stable, robust set of mods, which I had somewhat managed in SE and LE before it (and I know I could technically go back to modding LE but I'd rather not go that route if I can help it). I'm also not (yet) interested in trying to dial back my game to the last stable pre-AE version, though I understand that's also possible (albeit cumbersome and possibly a gray area where Steam rules are concerned.) I saw the GoG version, but from the sound of things it has even more issues as it's technically a unique build apart from Steam.
Any advice/suggestions (other than "stop messing around with Skyrim mods*") is welcome and appreciated. I would even welcome arguments in favor of the whole "convert the lite mods to regular and then merge/bash them" route, if applicable.
(* - Because that's just not gonna happen, at least not before Starfield comes out.)
As some are probably painfully aware, we were all involuntarily upgraded to the AE version (minus most of the paid AE content), rendering a lot of Special Edition mods unusable. The mod community has been rallying in the wake of this, and a lot of popular mods are now fully (or at least mostly) AE-compatible.
That being said, my wife and I have been having a heck of a time trying to put together a mod list that works reliably and consistently since then. We've turned off auto-updates and play it offline in order to avoid further updates (so it's stopped at around 1.63 or thereabouts), which is an issue on its own since some mods continue updating to the very latest iterations of the game without maintaining their older versions.
I found one guide (at scinitar [dot] com, I believe it was called) that turned out to be... not so much a step-by-step guide as it was some guidelines and then a kitchen sink load of mods that are not necessarily compatible with each other and are in many cases redundant, i.e., pick the one you like best. It then goes on to talk about Wrye Bash patching and converting Lite mod files to regular (apparently the ESL variety doesn't play nice with Wrye Bash), and I just would rather not mess with that if possible. I'm content to simply keep things within the <255 limit, with ESL files making up the difference since they don't count against that limit.
Nexus Mods has their Mod Collections, but I'm not sure how well curated they are, let alone whether they're in any sort of reliable/stable order. Which is the other part of my question, one that has perhaps been answered for the SE/LE versions in the past, but my Google Fu has never found any definitive result to my satisfaction, which is, Is there an ideal, reliable/stable order in which to install mods? I know the basic rule of how one mod will overwrite aspects of a similar mod that came before it, but on a larger scale I've yet to see if there's a hard and fast rule like "NPC follower mods should come before quest mods," or vice-versa. I assume size is also a factor as well.
This post is admittedly all over the place, and for that I apologize. I just miss having a stable, robust set of mods, which I had somewhat managed in SE and LE before it (and I know I could technically go back to modding LE but I'd rather not go that route if I can help it). I'm also not (yet) interested in trying to dial back my game to the last stable pre-AE version, though I understand that's also possible (albeit cumbersome and possibly a gray area where Steam rules are concerned.) I saw the GoG version, but from the sound of things it has even more issues as it's technically a unique build apart from Steam.
Any advice/suggestions (other than "stop messing around with Skyrim mods*") is welcome and appreciated. I would even welcome arguments in favor of the whole "convert the lite mods to regular and then merge/bash them" route, if applicable.
(* - Because that's just not gonna happen, at least not before Starfield comes out.)