With Mod Organizer is it possible to have an untouched game folder?

[feathersea]

I've been out of the modding scene for awile, busy with life etc and I recently decided to finally play Skyrim. After doing extensive reading, I was pretty excited by the idea of a mod manager that supported profiles - separate characters and mod sets. The amount of effort I once put into trying to have different saves by having multiple copies of the data or whole game folder on Fallout 3 with FOMM, BOSS, FO3Edit etc. Overall the VFS idea is pretty cool.

 

I'm very rusty but so far I've managed to successfully set up a few mods on SkyrimSE with MO2 and clean a few ESM's thru xEdit.

Without Wrye Bash or SKSE installed in the game directory, as a test, I was able to completely uninstall and reinstall SSE and picked back up from MO and the local save like the game had never been removed.

 

Also, Something I came across while starting to read up on Wrye Bash, was a way to use it from a separate directory from the game by editing bash.ini to point to the game (I haven't tested it)

 

My question then is aside from the SKSE and maybe WB, are there any other things that could cause problems while trying to pull that off?  I know this might sound a little crazy but the possibility of having not just a mod archive but a functioning load order and save to just drop in and run with is hard to pass up.

 

Anyone else have any experience trying this?

[Greg]

If you mean using profiles in Mod Organizer, it's fairly straight-forward but you need to ensure any generated files are stored as separate mods in each profile. Generally the bashed patch in one profile is unique to that profile and can't (or shouldn't) be used in another profile. Looking at this from the Skyrim Legendary Edition (the old x86 version of the game) persective, FNIS generated animations, DynDoLOD generated files, bashed patch, reproccers (like Dual Sheath Redux) are all unique to a given profile so be sure new profiles you create don't use existing versions of these from another profile.

[feathersea]

Yes I did mean profiles. I guess I am wondering if it's possible to make sure any generated files from anything really is kept outside the game folder, stored in profiles. I'm still working on understanding much of how MO stores things, especialy when it comes to the external tools run through it. Some of those things you mentioned I am not as familiar with, and in the case of DynDoLOD/LODGen my computer isn't particularly powerful so I'm not sure I should run that or hires textures.

 

One of the reasons for being so interested in trying to keep mods separate is to help migrating since I may be getting a better computer. Either way trying set MO up like this is interesting but I've come across conflicting info and I'm not sure if it's fully possible.

[GrantSP]

Be sure to read the MO wiki. It is accessible via the help menu inside MO itself, or via your browser using this address.

Take special note of the 2nd item in the "Features" list.

[feathersea]

Thanks. I've been skimming it but it looks like I'm mostly there already. I'll definately come back to it for those complicated parts if need be.