Front Skyrim Anniversary Editionat launch, a developer behind an important modifier warned that the release can also break mods for Skyrim Special Edition, lousy. Good, Skyrim Anniversary Edition is out now, and as expected it broke many mods. But, good news: the person who warned about this is making better progress on fixes than expected.
That modder is “extrwi” who works on Skryim Script Extender (SKSE). The tool itself doesn’t do anything fancy but allows others to make more game-changing mods than the official tools allow. Many mods require SKSE, including nearly mandatory ones like SkyUI. Thankfully, extrwi has managed to release a preliminary build with support for the Anniversary Edition update.
“In an attempt to prevent the part of modpocalpyse that I can control, I’ve spent all my free time over the past week and a half getting this part ready and only done it about an hour before the update. Japanese push,” they say on Reddit in a few hours. “Thanks to Bethesda for giving me early access to AE so I can get ready.”
I’m happy to hear that Bethesda scored an early goal for them. A decade after launch, mods are a very important part of how people play Skyrim.
It’s typical for SKSE and other methods to accidentally break when Bethesda updates the game, simply as a side effect of how they work. The Anniversary Edition is expected to do more damage, however, as it rebuilds the game in a new compiler that threatens to disrupt known routes to deeper into games. This even affects Skyrim Special Edition players who didn’t purchase the Anniversary Edition, as AE was technically released as an add-on so Bethesda has updated the SE as well.
You can download this preliminary build from SKSE website. Things are definitely not perfect yet, mind. The new version has not been fully tested and the plugin manager is now disabled. But SkyUI seems to work.
“Due to the large amount of manual rewriting required for this release, the likelihood of errors is higher than usual,” extrwi explains. “That said, things seem to be working better than expected.”
If you don’t want to mess around with untested software, and it can be quite difficult, the other option is to not download the new Skyrim patch until the mods and such are fixed. Hopefully you’ve turned off auto-updates when you hear about this. But if not, perhaps start Steam offline to safely disable that for now.
If you downloaded the patch and wish you didn’t, another option is to use a tool like Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition downgrade patch to revert it. Although I found that tool was broken by a small patch. Classic. Maybe that will be updated as well.
As a £16 upgrade, the Anniversary Edition offers all the items, quests and the like released through Bethesda’s Creation Club to date. If you don’t buy it, you can still get a little fresh, as Bethesda has released bits including free fishing for Special Edition players.
