Introduction
Welcome to A Dragonborn's Fate, a fully modular vanilla-plus modding guide for Skyrim Special Edition!
IMPORTANT: Everything in this guide is written down for a reason! It is vital to read everything!A Dragonborn's Fate is a modding guide for Skyrim Special Edition that will carefully walk you through how to install all the mods you will need for a perfectly stable, smooth and enjoyable experience.
You can NOT skip any paragraphs/instructions and expect your game to function as it should.
The guide is highly accessible for everyone, no matter your modding experience. It is still incredibly important that you read all the instructions very carefully, even if you believe you are experienced enough to skip them. There are many small instructions that are vital for your game to function, and could be easily missed if you aren't careful. Although you don't need any modding experience to use this guide, it is expected for you to be relatively experienced with operating a computer in general.
- Stability: The guide includes all essential stability enhancements and no placebo/dangerous mods.
- Performance: Every tool, setting and mod in the guide has been carefully selected and play-tested to ensure maximum possible performance.
- Customizability: The guide is split into 2 sections; all the mods required for the game to work and perform better are contained in the first section. The mods that can be considered subjective and that alter or add game content are in the DBF Extended section.
- Better Gameplay: The guide includes many mods that greatly improve the gameplay, without drastically overhauling the core experience or straying away from the game's lore. The gameplay section is headlined by SimonMagus616's gameplay overhauls. The guide is specifically designed to fit any play-style and difficulty.
- An English copy of the game from Steam.
- Only the English version of the game is supported for maximum compatibility; translations can conflict with mods and cause issues. The Bethesda.net and Xbox Game Pass versions of the game are also unsupported, as they do not work with SKSE which is essential for many mods.
- The guide is tailored for the basic version of the game. You will need to disable the Anniversay Upgrade DLC if you bought it.
- Any and all individual Creation Club content is NOT supported. If you have any installed, they will have to be uninstalled for the mods in the guide to function as expected.
- At least 28GB of free drive space (22GB if you delete all the downloads).
- Windows 10 or higher (64-bit).
- Mod Organizer 2 does not support ARM64 Windows. Vortex works, but is not supported by this guide.
- VC++ Runtime Libraries.
- Extract the archive and run the included install_all.bat as an administrator to install all of the required libraries at once.
- A text editor (Notepad++ is recommended, but the default Windows notepad will work).
- An archiving tool (NanaZip is recommended).
- The latest GPU drivers (either NVIDIA, AMD or Intel).
- A Nexus Mods account (a Premium subscription will allow uncapped speeds).
- CPU: Matching or surpassing the single-thread performance of a Ryzen 3 1200.
- RAM: 8GB or more.
- GPU: Matching or surpassing the performance of a GTX 780 or R9 290. 3GB or more of VRAM.
