Skyrim on new PC

I was reading through threads on here about transferring modded Skyrim from one pc to the next, and hit a little roadblock. All of my mods were from the workshop, and I believe I used NMM for that? It's fuzzy. It's been a long time since I played. I always started the game through something other than the Steam window, and it was SKSE. It would have this little splash screen and it checked all my mods, then once it was done I pressed start.

Anyway, I assumed that since they were workshop mods, that when I reinstalled on my new pc that they'd automatically come with it, but that doesn't seem to be the case. I totally didn't mind having to start a new character, but none of my mods were anywhere to be found. Will installing some sort of mod manager bring them back, or do I need to go spend an evening re-subbing to all the ones I had (if I even remember them all, lol)? Does Steam save what I've subbed to anywhere?

((I am able to access my old hdd, but I was warned to only do that if I truly must. My reason for the new pc was the old hdd was dying, as were many other components of it. My old hdd is in a casing and I had to jump through a ton of windows permission hissy-fits to take what I could off it the first time. It's possible to take files off it if I must, but I'd rather that be a last resort. I was told if I access the old one too much it may corrupt things or actually die.))

Solution 1:

There is a bit of a conflict in what you're saying here. There are various ways to go about modding Skyrim; one of them being through the Steam Workshop.

But then you also mention NMM - Nexus Mod Manager. NMM is a separate modding system, where you first download the Mod Manager itself and then download mods from the Nexus Mod Manager community site via NMM.

Your Steam Workshop mod subscriptions would (should) follow you anywhere. Your NMM mods would not. So if that's what you used, you would have to download them again.