No, no problems at all. But I want to run some mods which conflict, and I want to run toons concurrently. In other words, I want to keep the ones I've got going now with the mods that are pertinent to their games. And I want to start a new game with a new toon or so, with mods which will conflict with certain mods in the current install.

So what I'd like to do, is set up a second complete Skyrim install on a separate drive (I have two physical drives, and several logical ones spread over them) and add the second group of mods to the new install. And then I'd want to start Steam, and start whichever Skyrim install I wanted to play at a given moment....

So.... anyone know if I can do this?

Just use mod organizer on one Skyrim install.

Really.... Hmmm. Thanks, I'll look at it. I'm not really fond of "organizers" overall. I use LOOT, and I'm happy with it. I really really dislike NMM. And I did use MO some years back, didn't really like it either.

I'll take a look. In general, I prefer to micromanage things like this myself....

You really ought to use one of the organizers. Both MO and NMM now do Profiles, and it's exactly the way to accomplish what you want to do.

Also, the organizers will make your life much easier if/when you decide to uninstall something, or update to a newer version of a mod.

I'm.... really not happy with ANOTHER layer of "stuff". I suppose that's reactionary.... and I do trust what YOU say (unlike others....) I would have to go to MO, I seriously do NOT have any use for NMM.

I honestly would prefer a completely separate install of Skyrim - it's not like I don't have the space. I really really don't like "organizers". Truthfully.... I'd rather put an install on my laptop for the setup with the other mods. I can't even say why I feel this way. I just do.

I think MO does a better job of it. I dont think NMM includes the save games or ini files for a profile.

Maybe you like doing it manually rather than a program doing it behind the scenes? Which you can still do with MO or NMM.

You can install Skyrim on another computer. Im not aware of a method to install 1 Steam game in two locations on a PC.

Other than making a new Steam account and buying the game again which is silly.

So yeah, I'm a "manual" sort of person.... but I guess if I really want to do this, I'll give MO a shot. I had at one point with Oblivion three separate installs because I had two different "games" with totally different mods, and a "testing" install.

There are a lot of reasons I'm not thrilled with Steam.... this just adds one more....

But you don't think an entire another copy of Skyrim isn't another layer of "stuff?"

MO is a very powerful tool. I have no .esm files in my Skyrim data folder, the originals are backed up on another part of my hd. Yet Skyrim runs just fine because MO is using my TES5edit cleaned .esms in it's mod structure to run the game. It's a little tricky to figure out the way MO works at first but once you figure it out I think you might like it. The tricky thing for me as a first time user to figure out was that SKSE was both a separate program and a MO "mod". Parts of SKSE still had to go to the Skyrim folder but the rest went into a MO mod, including the all important skse.ini to make the memory patch work.

Setting up a "default" profile and then cloning it for use with other profiles is also a nice feature. I set my default to have my cleaned Bethesda .esms, SKSE, SkyUI, iHud, and Unofficial Patches. Then I cloned it, and started installing mods. Now when I start a new profile I clone the default and then just start checking off mods I want to use since they're already installed in the mods folder. It can separate save games for each profile so there's no looking through a list to figure out which character is which. LOOT can sort your order from MO. TES5Edit, Wrye Bash, etc works through it as well. Testing a mod is as easy as cloning the default profile, installing the mod in the new profile, LOOT it, clean it if needed, Bash it if needed, run it. Don't like it? Uninstall the mod, get rid of the profile. Like it? Switch profiles and check the box, LOOT the order, etc. Gopher has some nice videos about how this works in his Mod Organizer playlist.

Try it out, get frustrated with it like I did, then after using it for a little while it'll "click" and you'll never look back.

Thanks, Krym. But after spending a couple of hours reading all the stuff on MO in the STEP wiki, and not finding anything which said "all you have to do to uninstall is...." I decided to go back to NMM. Which took me another couple of hours to get working, but is now humming along happily. I tend to not really like something which is tied into a site like the nexus so tightly, but *shrug* - it is what it is.

I don't get intimidated by much in software - but I have to say I felt THOROUGHLY intimidated by MO and its "guide" (which was about as obfuscatory as a guide to installing etc. as I've ever run across - even the "docs" I got with win 3.0 all that many years ago were far easier to understand....)

But it still pisses me off entirely that I can't just have as many installs of the game as I want. THAT is the real killer here.

your trouble, it's don't understand how MO is working

it's a skyrim data virtualisation

all app must be launched by MO, without this, app can't seen mods

no mods copy in skyrim data folders

NMM make a mess

Yes, I do understand that about MO. And no, NMM didn't "make a mess". I don't want to use either of them, but NMM is less of a hassle for me. NMM is working fine. I will still be pissy about having to use it though. I just want to go back to the "you don't need steam" days. *sigh*

Yeah, NMM works fine now. They've improved it a lot in the last few months. It's still a work in progress, but it does the job, and it's easy to set up.

I feel pretty much the same way about Steam. In fact, I didn't buy Skyrim until 2014, largely because I was resistant to Steam. It's the second most intrusive form of DRM anybody has come up with yet (the most intrusive is the system that Arena used, where the game stops you and makes you look something up in the paper manual, before you can continue.) I detest the idea that I have to constantly run Steam software on my computer, just to prove that the legitimate version of Skyrim I installed yesterday didn't somehow become pirated overnight.

You're my twin aren't you? Heh. Yeah, I hated those little wheels and looking stuff up in the SSI Gold Box games too, even though I understood the reasoning. I truly hate layers over my games.... In fact, Blizzard's asinine non-private "launcher" layer was one of the reasons (not the main one, but up there pretty far) that I quit playing WoW after 8 years. And RIFT was heading that way too, when I quit playing it.

i used NMM during years, and it make a mess in skyrim's data folders, do a mistake and cry

it's can't happend with MO

now, i m using MO, with 14 differents mods profiles and 325 Mods installed

good luck with NMM

I use NMM but I've never used it for profiles, so I can't really comment on how it works for that.