Law #36 - Taxes and Penguins
January was a long year, wasn’t it?
I had my hands full, like I usually have on January, but even more so this year. That is because 2024 was the first year I worked in a B2B system and I had to do that atrocious thing called taxes at the beginning of 2025. And with the Romanian government changing rules at the last minute, things were confusing for a while.
Thankfully, I am over that bridge right now, as I declared & paid everything after some thorough documentation about the procedure, and now I’m just clenching my butt cheeks going forward till my subseqent dividends delivery in April.
So, to relax after all the insane beaurocracy courtesy of our beloved government, I got an idea. Beware, this gets technical. It’s one side of me that I rarely write about because usually it involves my work and NDAs, but fun fact: I also get technical in my personal life. Hope this won’t bore you, but below is the idea I had.
What if I install Skyrim again on my Personal Computer and play it with some mods like back in the day? (I’m also nostalgic, I guess that shows in many of my texts)
Sounds magnificent. The only problem was that my PC now runs on Linux, as I gave up Windows after 7, the Last Great Windows. I hate Windows 8 and Windows 10 with a passion, and I have 11 on my laptop, which I hate less but still do. I use StartAllBack++, which makes it look like Windows 7, and I have zero commercials & telemetry in it, I was really careful with that installation.
Running a Linux distribution makes it a bit trickier to install mods, but not impossible. In fact, right now, after everything is in order, my Skyrim installation runs better than back on Windows 7, on the exact same system: i7 4770k and a GTX 1070 Ti.
So, how did I go about it?
First thing: I installed the game. I had the GOG.com version of the Anniversary Edition and added that to Lutris, as I usually do with my games in Linux.
I bumped into the first obstacle: Many mods and mod tools are only compatible with the Steam version of the game, making the GOG version a bit of an unlucky choice. This is sad, because the GOG version is DRM-free, meaning 100% owned by the player (you/me), while the Steam version has the Steam DRM and you basically only have a licence to play it, you don’t own it.
It wasn’t much of an impediment to be honest, since I already had the Steam version as well, although lacking the AE upgrade. I originally kept it down to SSE (Skyrim Special Edition) to avoid breaking my mods on Windows 7, but now pretty much most mods were adapted for AE, so no issues there. I spent 15 euros to upgrade it, then installed the Steam one.
Now comes the Linux part. To run Vortex (my tool of choice when it comes to modding Skyrim and a few others, it replaced the now defunct Nexus Mod Manager), I had to use Steam Tinker Launch, a wrapper used for launching Steam applications with custom launch options. This facilitated the integration of Vortex with my Steam Skyrim installation on Linux, so now I could freely add mods to it however I wanted.
On comes the new obstacle: Recreate the original mod list I had back in the day. Now, when you attempt to load a modded savegame, the game tells you what mods you need (or more accurately, what mods you lack that prevent you) to load the savegame. However, it doesn’t have room on the screen to list ALL of them if you have 200+ mods (I had a save with 70, my main one, and another with 200+, my experimental one), so I had to find a way to get that list easily without launching the game and attempting a save load after every 5 or so mods added to my configuration.
Enter Wrye Bash, a self-titled swiss-army knife for modding Bethesda games. This tool, among other functionalities, can list every mod your savegame uses, and you can copy and paste that list in a Notepad or Excel sheet or whatever you want to make it more readable and use it to track all your mods.
After succesfully getting the correct list of mods, I bumped into the following obstacles:
Almost all mods were updated, so I got the latest versions, and sometime the latest versions lacked files that the older versions had - this is simple to solve, you just force load a save and then once succesfully inside you can save the game and it regenerates the mod list with the current ones. So it disposes of any old requirements by cleaning up the mod lists.
Some mods had disappeared completely or I couldn’t pinpoint what they were. This was due to the fact the list of mods the save asks for is actually a list of *.esp files, and if that *.esp file is named differently than the mod, I can’t properly tell from what mod it was. I just left those out (it doesn’t seem to have affected my experience at all)
After a few test runs, I had an issue where characters (both the player and NPCs) where plagued by something called an A-Pose (something less encountered than the T-Pose, at least in Skyrim) caused by a mod that I couldn’t pinpoint. They were also floating in said A-Pose instead of walking normally.It took me a while, but I realized that activating the FNIS functionality in Vortex was what caused it. FNIS stands for Fores New Idles in Skyrim, and it’s basically a modification that deals with body animations - it has to process and re-process any mods dealing with body animations after installation, however as I was reading about it on Reddit I found out that many people weren’t using it at all, so I simply deactivated it when I ran out of options, so that it doesn’t process anything. I basically let the mods do their own job. Lo and behold, no more A-Pose and every character moved naturally!
The next issue was encountering crashes whenever Sofia, the funny fully-voiced follower, entered the player’s visual field. I troubleshot this manually by deactivating mods related to Sofia one by one, until I pinpointed the issue was related with High Poly Head, so I had to remove it altogether. Not even the Sofia patch made specifically for that mod helped, I had to get rid of it completely to avoid the crashes.
Being over that, and having all required mods compiled, I started playing the game, only to run into random CTDs (an acronym for Crash To Desktop, not related with STDs, I promise!). These were the most painful part because I had finally made everything work, my game experience was finally *almost* perfect, only to run into this issue that annoyed the hell out of me. Wether I was fighting a dragon or going through some dungeon, or entering a store, there did not seem to be anything connecting the crashes, so I couldn’t find a pattern. They were occuring every three to five minutes during gameplay. Ultimately, I installed a mod called Crash Logger, however I had to troubleshoot this mod itself, because it wouldn’t generate a log at all initially (basically defying its very purpose). Turns out the latest version is flawed, so I used version 1.0.0.5 from the Old Files section instead. This ultimately worked and showed me that the CTDs were generated by a mod called All Couriers are Dogs, which I was actually very eager to try.
I was sad to give up that mod, as it would have been fun to have dogs come to you and deliver letters, but I had few options if I wanted to proceed. And the end result was nothing short of magnificent!
Check my Whiterun at night:
And Skyrim in general:
Looks pretty good during the day too:
I installed a map mod as well, first time I try that:
Some of the most important mods I always install are:
Achievements Mods Enabler - self-explanatory. If you still have Achievements to get on Steam for your Skyrim game, having this mod enables you to circumvent the (very stupid) restriction of not getting achievements that Bethesda set on a single-player game if you have mods on your savegame.
LockpickPro (Special Edition) - if you are like me and you’ve finished the vanilla game on all platforms, lockpicking is pretty much just an inconvenience at this point. I use this mod to tell me exactly where to place the lockpicking to open the lock in the first try. Some people see it as cheating, and for a first run of the game, it might be so. But for veteran players? It’s a Quality of Life improvement. This mod is vital for me every time.
Alternate Start - Live Another Life - this not only bypasses the original Skyrim intro (which tends to become annoying after a while) but also offers different origin stories for the player’s character, so you can start from another point on the map with a completely different origin. Makes it even more immersive.
Cutting Room Floor - Restores all the cut content that the original developers excluded from the game.
Open Cities Skyrim - Raises immersivity by removing the loading screen whenever you enter a city, and basically making the cities part of the world. Absolutely mandatory for me, but beware of how you mod your cities: might conflict with certain city mods.
JK’s Skyrim - All-in-One pack of all JK’s mods for Skyrim. Enhances all the cities and some other parts of Skyrim as well. Fantastic mod, but can be buggy in certain mod combinations. Some prefer other alternatives, but this one is my favorite.
Essential Dogs - Because why would anybody want their dogs to be vulnerable?
Immersive Autosave SE - Fantastic quality of life improvement, enhances the autosave system and now if you die unexpectedly and forgot to save for a while you won’t find yourself in the scenario of having to play the past two hours again.
Invulnerable Companions - makes all followers immortal. Useful to avoid accidental deaths and having to respawn Lidya using console commands again. :)
JS Lockpicking UI - Changes to the lockpicking interface, looks shiny! Also, is it just me or does the handle to the left look like a pair of balls?
Lanterns of Skyrim II - Complete overhaul of the exterior lightning system of Skyrim. Beautiful, especially at night.
Leveler’s Tower - this is for experiments only, as it can be considered a true cheating mod. You get probably the best player home you can have, and it has facilities to upgrade your character, add perks and skills, enhance pretty much everything. I recommend it for post-vanilla runs, definitely not for your first run.
Point The Way - Another increase in immersivity, it places more roadsings in Skyrim so you can easily navigate the world without consulting your map every so often.
Rich Skyrim Merchants - Quality of Life improvement, and an important one at that. Merchants having little gold to buy whatever loot you came back with has always been a problem for Skyrim, and this mod fixes that by giving them more gold. You can select up to 10x more gold during installation.
Run For Your Lives - Big, big improvement to the NPCs in cities. It makes them run indoors during dragon attacks, so that they avoid being in the path of the dragon, and as such remain alive. One of the biggest issues with vanilla Skyrim is that certain NPCs can die (accidentally) by dragon attack if a dragon spawns at random close to a city. This can break quests sometimes if not prevented, so this mod is essential.
Weightless - Look. Merchants having less money than the value of my loot has always been a pain. So were the lockpicks. But the biggest pain of all was not being able to take all the loot you wanted with you due to the carry capacity limitation. Thankfully, this mod removes that pain by heavily increasing your carrying capacity (I used to previously do that by hacking my savegame). I normally wouldn’t recommend it for first-time runs, however this is my biggest beef with this game, so if you hate games in which your carrying capacity is limited, be my guest and enjoy this mod! Games are supposed to be fun!
In the end, may I present my companions, aka The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles:
Manic Elythra Nymph, aka Yellowy - a yellow spider I piked up from a side-quest.
Sofia, the funny fully-voiced follower - from a mod. She’s wearing Ciri’s armor from Witcher 3 (another mod).
Monk Vasili (how I call him) or Brother Verulus (how the game calls him) - he’s part of a mission. You have to lead him to a cave where some cannibals plan to eat him. You can either side with him or the cannibals, but the best option is actually the third: Once you pick him up, you never lead him to the cave. He just comes with you and helps in combat. He’s invulnerable by default, so he’s basically like a free army!
The Rat aka Master Sphincter - don’t remember if he’s part of a mod or not, but he was there when I loaded the savegame, so if he was, he’s part of the right mod. He can carry stuff and he fights as well.
Inigo the Khajit - follower mod. Pretty funny as well. Found him naked in the Riften jail, it was quite a shock. :))
Demented Elythra Nymph, aka Purply - a purple spider I picked up from that same side-quest I got the yellow one from.
And the funny dog glitched in the door is Barbas. He’s funny and follows you everywhere, he’s invincible and he’s part of a quest called “A Daedra’s Best Friend”. You can keep him as a follower if you postpone the quest completion, just like Brother Verulus. His barking does not alert enemies.
So… did I bore you? Or do you have a sudden urge to install Skyrim with mods? :)