SureAI

Bit of background information first. I have a very healthy and solid original Skyrim, heavily modded. Enderal I wanted to try out, but not risk anything happening to my original skyrim.

I'll try explain things. Enderal works 100% fine. I made a separate, vanilla folder of skyrim to install enderal into, which worked fine. (Renamed my original skyrim something else, so enderal would recognise Vanilla skyrim as the one to install in.)


Now, I tried to swap the names back, in order to test my Modded skyrim. Now modded skyrim is completely fucked; whenever I try to load the game, it boots into a crash/freeze black screen with a little loading circle (Much like it is when a program doesn't respond.) I love Enderal, but I want to be able to keep my Modded skyrim too. (Before anybody asks me why I didn't do the original launcher, I was worried about the potential consequences.)

How do you launch your modded Skyrim? Mod Organizer, SKSE, default launcher, etc.?

I use MO with SKSE.

Update. I've checked the My Documents skyrim folder. I think my documents skyrim folder got merged with Enderal and my original files, so both versions are using the same folder. Just not sure how to fix it D:

Enderal works fine, but modded original skyrim refuses to boot.

Yes ... both games are directed to this same folder for game saves and ini file settings at launch, so if you launched both Skyrim and Enderal without making any changes here, they will be merged. Shouldn't be too difficult to sort out though.

• First thing I'd do is look through the game save files and try to sort them out between the two games. Should be able to do that based on the names of the save files or the date/time they were created.
• Then I'd copy the game saves to your desktop in two different folders ... one with each game's saves. Back to that later.
• Next, if you made any changes to Skyrim.ini or SkyrimPrefs.ini for your modded Skyrim, I'd pull those out and save them on your desktop too. I'm assuming you didn't make any changes to the ini files for Enderal since you're just getting going.
• Next, I'd delete the entire Skyrim folder out of "Documents\my games\Skyrim". If it's not there when the game launches, it just recreates a new default set of ini files.
• Start Skyrim or Enderal ... whichever one you can launch with your current configuration. That should recreate the Skyrim folder and ini files. Then close the game.
• Go to that Documents folder and create a copy of the vanilla Skyrim folder and leave it there.
• Once you have two copies there ... I use one for each game and only have to rename the one that I'm currently using to "Skyrim". I will keep the other one named either "Skyrim Enderal" or "Skyrim MO" while I'm using the first one.
• Either game will use the ini settings and store game saves in that Skyrim folder and as long as you keep up with swapping the folders there as you switch between games ... everything should be fine. Works perfectly for me.
• Once you have both folders there ... copy the game saves or modded ini files you put on your desktop earlier back into the appropriate folders and all should be good.

Well ... without knowing exactly what your modded Skyrim looks like ... I'll tell you what I did and maybe that will help some. I did this all with clean installs ... but have since added mods to Skyrim and it still works fine.

• I copied my clean install of Skyrim to "Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim\Skyrim Modded\Skyrim" so I have that for mods and "Steam\steamapps\common\Skyrim" for Enderal.
• I reinstalled Mod Organizer and pointed it to the "Skyrim Modded\Skyrim" installation instead of the default installation. If you already have MO installed and don't want to reinstall it, you'll need to redirect it to the modded installation. I didn't need to do that since I had clean installations, but I read somewhere that you can do that by tweaking settings in ModOrganizer.ini (or whatever it's named ... I'm not in front of my gaming pc).
• I then installed Enderal using the Enderal launcher and its default settings that point to the default Skyrim installation.
• With this setup, I don't need to do anything (renaming, moving, uninstalling from Enderal launcher, etc.) to either installation to switch back and forth between them ... other than the renaming of the Skyrim folder in "Documents\my games\Skyrim" (as mentioned in my other post in this thread).

Hopefully some of that info will help you sort things out.

Your method was better. I just made another skyrim documents folder, copied the INI files from my original into it and that seemed to fix