Once the mods are installed using the tab at the bottom, simply select the mod out of the list to install or uninstall the mods by choice using the green check on the left. Note that to download the mods on the nexus website, you can either manually download a file, which you can then open with the Nexus Mod Manager's "Add Mod From File" option, or use the NMM link to have the mod manager automatically act as the download client once you input your Nexus login information, the same information you used to download the manager. That's what the rest of this article is for. Once you select that you want to mod Skyrim Special Edition, the manager will appear with a lot of default categories, which seem appropriate enough. Following this advice, I kept these folders on default so that my Skyrim install, mod manager, and future mods would all be on the same drive. While you can run the mod manager as an administrator to allow access to installing mods on different drives, the application gives some warnings basically saying that the best compatibility is guaranteed if you keep everything on the same drive. Next you need to choose the directory info for the mods to be installed. Obviously we see that Skyrim Special Edition was located correctly and continue on. You can see in the image that I have roughly half of the programs in the list. One you choose your location, Mod Manager will automatically find the compatible games accross all of your drives. In addition to this, I ran the mod manager as an administrator anyways just to be sure. I found it much easier to install the manager and future mods to a folder on the drive root I picked the same drive as the steamlibrary directory that my Skyrim Special Edition install was located. Note: I highly suggest NOT installing Mod Manager or anything else within Windows' program file directory, unless you want to worry about admin privilege requests down the road. Simply choose an install location and you're on your way!
exe setup file will download, and you do not need any extra software to extract any sort of zipped file.
Nexus Mod Manager is a free open-source application that you can install for free at the nexusmods website, provided you register for a free account.
Since not all (or even most) of these PC mods can be found on Bethesda's mod website, I also go through how to use the Nexus Mod Manager to install and configure the mods found on this website.
Here are some additional mods available over at the Nexus modding community in order to maximize your personalization of your Skyrim Special Edition experience. But you're playing on PC and want to customize your Skyrim experience even further. So you've read our article The best mods for Skyrim Special Edition on Xbox One, PS4 and PC and maybe you've found a few things you like.