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Switching to Pikdum scripts for modding my Steam Deck
This post overrides all previous posts I’ve done on the topic of how I’m modding on my Steam Deck. The TL;DR version is, I got frustrated with Vortex not being supported well with steamtinkerlaunch, which was causing me problems with being able to update Vortex to new versions.
I have now ditched steamtinkerlaunch from my setup entirely, in favor of setup scripts created by and posted to Github by a user called pikdum.
Deets behind the fold.
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Mods review for Harrowhark’s run
Since I’m canceling Harrowhark’s playthrough, I’m taking the time in this post to review her final list of mods, and decide which of them I want to keep and which ones I will not be revisiting for future modded runs.
As of her last sessions, I had 91 total mods being run, with a handful of others being ones I’d tried to ditch mid-playthrough. As I’ve written about before, compared to a lot of Skyrim players out there, this honestly is kind of amateur hour. And since this was my first fully modded run, I’m also honestly not surprised I eventually ran into trouble. Like I said in my post about canceling her run, I’ve learned the hard lesson that fucking around with your mods in the middle of a playthrough is really not a good idea.
So this post is for thoughts about which mods I will ditch and which ones I want to keep for future reference. Since this is going to be long, let’s put this behind a fold, shall we?
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In Which Gyllerah Has Another Reset
Followup on my earlier post lamenting breaking my Default build for my ESO character–because, as I expect any ESO player with an Armory Station can sympathize with, it happened again. This time to my Healer build.
Which was incredibly fucking frustrating, because I’d been getting such great help from my Guild about recommendations for how to set up to be as helpful a healer as possible for running trials.
So, I had to go to the trouble to fix everything again. This time, though, I took some steps to recover from this for the inevitable next time I screw up which build I’m pointing at in the Armory Station.
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A few more thoughts about Inigo and dragon souls
I got up this morning realizing I’d identified another core reason why Inigo harshing on the Dragonborn for absorbing dragon souls bugs me.
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Spoiler-free short review of the Forgotten City mod
When I put out a call for what mods were recommended for a modded Skyrim run, one of the strongest recs I got was for one called The Forgotten City. This thing got a Writer’s Guild award for the strength of its plot, and the team that created it went pro and turned the overall plot structure into a standalone game, even.
I can now say that I’ve run this mod in Harrow’s run, and I enjoyed it immensely. I had a couple of small quibbles with it, but these were minor quibbles indeed. So if you’re in a position to run mods on Skyrim, I do highly recommend you consider checking this out.
I’ll be going into depth about my experiences with the mod in Harrow’s next full post. But by definition, that post will be chock full of spoilers. If you think you might want to run this mod at all, you might want to skip that post until you do.
In this post, I will limit myself to spoiler-free commentary, just enough to offer up a few tidbits and let you decide if you think the mod sounds like fun to you.
Deets (again, spoiler-free) behind the fold.
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Notes on future mods I’ll want for Survival Mode
What I’ve learned from my experience with Survival Mode in Kendis’ run, and my decision yesterday to bail on it, is that:
- I really still like the overall idea of Survival Mode, but,
- As implemented in Skyrim’s Creation Club/Anniversary Edition content, it just makes things too damned difficult for my personal ability to enjoy.
I will probably take another crack at Survival Mode in a future playthrough. But this will depend entirely upon doing a modded playthrough specifically set up for it, a thing which, as I’ve said before on this blog many times, I can’t do on the Switch. So this will have to be a thing I do on the Deck and/or the Win11 VM on my Mac.
And I’m not going to try to bodge Survival Mode into Harrowhark’s current run–she’s already fairly well in on a playthrough, and she’s got challenges as it is since I’m playing her as a vampire.
But here are some notes about what mods Future Me is probably going to want to have for a modded Survival Mode playthrough.
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Mods for Harrowhark’s Playthrough
My latest Skyrim playthrough, launched on my Win11 VM and which is also running on the Steam Deck as my whim dictates, stars Harrowhark the Imperial. She is named after Harrowhark Nonagesimus in Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, and it is very likely she will also wind up being my vampire/necromancer playthrough. I expect she and Serana are going to get along very well indeed.
This, however, is not her first official playthrough post. This is the post in which I’ll document, for the curious, what mods I am running. Because this is also my first official modded Skyrim playthrough!
I have quite a few mods installed on the VM for this–nearly 80 in all. I’m not going to list them here in the actual load order, because the load order is a thing dictated by my mod manager of choice, Vortex. I took pretty much the load order Vortex set up for these mods as I installed them.
Instead, I’ll break them out into categories here. And this post is long, so the full list is behind the fold!
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Screenshots of mod testing in Skyrim
The in-depth exploration of mods in Skyrim has begun!
I’ve been using my PC as a sandbox first, trying out mods in sequence to see whether or not I like them well enough to deploy them onto the Deck for use in official play. So right now I’m doing that with a separate character from the ones I’m actually seriously playing–which may or may not turn into an actual legit playthrough later, we’ll see. For now she’s just a test character to give me opportunity to play with mods.
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Problems with steamtinkerlaunch on Steam Deck
Editing to add 11/5/2022: This post gets a bit of traffic so if you’re looking for help on setting up steamtinkerlaunch on your Steam Deck, you should go check my more recent post about this, where I do a walkthrough of my current setup.
I’ve begun my explorations with how to get Skyrim into a moddable state on the Steam Deck! But I’ve run into some challenges, and this post is a writeup of this, in the name of being able to share a single link of information in case I need to yell for help on Discord or Twitter, or wherever.
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My plan for modding Skyrim on the Steam Deck
This is a post to compile my overall plans for how I’m going to mod Skyrim on my Steam Deck! This will include a compilation of the various recommendations for mods I’ve already gotten, as well as some stuff I’d like to see if I can find mods for.
This will be a long post, so here’s a More tag!