Getting Started with SKSE Plugin Development

[SKSE64 2.2.6 Revision]

Requirements

• Skyrim Special Edition
• SKSE for Skyrim SE (Also referred to as SKSE64), which you should already have installed.
• Visual Studio 2022 Build Tools. You don't need to install the entire IDE if you won't use it.
• An IDE like Visual Studio, VS Code or CLion. xieve recommends using CLion if you have not used Visual Studio before, as it will manage installation of vcpkg automatically, among other things.

Ensure that your Windows and SKSE installations are up-to-date. If Skyrim Special Edition has not received an update in the previous week or so, you will want that up-to-date too. See the official SKSE page to see which version is currently supported. Please keep in mind that this guide does not guarantee backward/forward compatibility, and things keep breaking in unforeseen ways.

Setup

The easiest and recommended approach is to use a template plugin. This one is currently (as of 2024-11-16) recommended for CommonLibSSE-NG. See here for a comparison of the different CommonLibSSE versions.

Follow the documentation that the template plugin of your choice provides, it will be more up-to-date and applicable than any external resource.

Should you want to, you can set environment variables inside CMakeLists.txt like so:

set(ENV{VARIABLE_NAME} "Variable value")

For example:

set(ENV{SKYRIM_MODS_FOLDER} "C:\\Games\\MO2\\mods")

Resources

As of 2024-11-16, there is no definitive resource on SKSE plugin modding.

Please note that instructions may differ from one source to another and that some might simply be completely wrong/outdated.

• Ryan-rsm-McKenzie's Tutorial on GitHub. Most notably, includes documentation for debugging setup and CommonLibSSE's Papyrus API.
• The original SKSE64 source code on GitHub, which, in contrast to CommonLibSSE, has comments! You should definitely check this out as it is probably the best documentation you will find. I recommend cloning (downloading) this repository and checking it out in your IDE so you can search it more easily.
• Skyrim.dev - SKSE
• Unofficial auto-generated documentation for CommonLibSSE, CommonLibVR and CommonLibSSE-NG
• MrowrPurr's Discord. You can ask SKSE- or Papyrus-related questions here.
• Zartar's "noob tutorial" on Bethesda's old forum. The whole discussion may contain other helpful information too.
• This Reddit discussion on weird errors while trying to set up a plugin template

Generally, SKSE plugin development heavily depends on a good IDE that allows you to browse the SKSE and CommonLibSSE sources, and on reading other people's source code on GitHub.

If you chose to use CLion, navigate to <Project Directory>\build\debug-msvc\vcpkg_install\vcpkg\pkgs\commonlibsse-ng_x64-windows-skse, right-click it and select Mark directory as→ Library Files. Now, when you hit shift twice to invoke Search Everywhere, all the CommonLibSSE symbols will show up in your search!