[Help] I don't see the issue here, I installed a couple mods into this folder and it was fine but near the end of it all Vortex tells me no, I can't put them here... Why?
First time attempting to mod SkyrimSE. Modding stresses me out because I truthfully don't understand how to install or set up mods, Vortex makes it simple but now it's testing me.
Posted Dec 6, 2018, 10:53 PM UTC
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As the name of it suggests, it's the place where mods go to be deployed into the game folder. The reason for this is because there are mods there that will have files that overwrite each other (this is most common with textures and plugins with the same name), but if you have the mod staging folder inside of the data folder, and for some reason the game is able to read all of them, you will have textures either constantly swapping every time you start the game, or textures that will just plain not be replaced by those in the texture mods.
You know how when you go to the "MODS" section, and there are those that default to "Should X mod load after Y mod". This is why. When you deploy, it takes the file that has the highest priority and deploys it into the game folder. No way for the game to screw it up.
If you've used NMM, when installing, it would have asked you straight up if you wanted to overwrite a file, but this is bad because it meant that it is heavily dependent on what order you install the mods to have it come up. But if you install a patch first, and then the mod, you would have to install the patch again, otherwise the patch would not work, because it's been overwritten, and nothing is calling the additional files.
Back to the mod staging path.
If you click on the small i beside it, you'll see that it mentions {GAME} and {USERDATA} (and talks about how to use it), if you're planning to only mod Skyrim and no other game, you can ignore the rest of this, along with what is in that tip. But, if there is the possibility that you may use Vortex to mod another game in it's supported list of games, you'll want to use {GAME} (I use D:\Modding\Tools\Vortex\mods\{GAME} for mine, with my downloads set to D:\Modding\Tools\Vortex\downloads. For some reason downloads automatically separate themselves but not the mod staging folders). This way, Vortex will then automatically generate the mod staging folders for the appropriate game when you click on install.
Just remember to place it on the same drive as the game, and you're good to go.