MGO’s requirements call for a clean install of Skyrim VR. That is, it needs the game to be exactly as Steam delivers it, with nothing modified and nothing extra. Wabbajack verifies the game’s files against the exact fingerprints of the originals and builds the list on top of them, so a folder polluted by an old modding setup can break the install. And if you do get past the install, it can break the game in ways that nobody else can reproduce.
If you’ve never modded Skyrim VR on this PC, you’re probably clean already, and a quick verification will confirm it. If this machine has previously seen ENB experiments or another mod manager, then you may have a little bit of cleanup to perform.
What belongs in the folder
A vanilla SkyrimVR folder (under steamapps\common ) contains exactly the following (though the files may be ordered differently):
- Data
- SkyrimVR.exe
- steam_api64.dll
- binkw64.dll
- openvr_api.dll
- atimgpud.dll
- High.ini , Medium.ini , Low.ini , Skyrim.ini
- installscript.vdf
One or two of these may be absent, and that’s actually fine. Missing files aren’t the primary problem; extra files are. Common remnants of past modding include d3d11.dll or dxgi.dll (ENB and other injectors), enbseries folders, SKSE loaders, and OpenComposite files from a previous setup (such as a a different, non-working version of openvr_api.dll ).
Inside Data , vanilla means only Bethesda’s own .esm plugins and .bsa archives. If you see folders like Meshes , Textures , SKSE , or Interface , or any .esp or .dll files, those are from mods installed outside a mod manager.
Creation Club castaways
Data folder, they probably won’t actually hurt anything (though they won’t help anything either). Those
cc*
files show up in MO2 as Unmanaged mods, and having them sit in
Data
does no actual harm. MO2 won’t actually attempt to load them unless you go out of your way to enable them.Removing the extras
Delete anything that isn’t on the list above. Make a backup if you like, but get the files out of the actual game folder. If your Data folder is so packed that you can’t tell what’s vanilla, the nuclear option is simplest: delete the entire Data folder, and let the verification step below re-download it fresh. This guarantees a vanilla installation.
Verify your game files in Steam
Whatever you removed (or even if you removed nothing), finish with Steam’s built-in check, which compares every file against the originals and re-downloads whatever is modified or missing.
- In your Steam Library, right-click The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim VR and choose Properties… .
- Select the Installed Files tab.
- Click Verify integrity of game files and let it finish.
If it reports files that “failed to validate and will be reacquired,” that’s good. It means that Steam is replacing bad files with clean ones.
How a dirty installation manifests
If you skip this and things go wrong, here are a few examples of how it may go.
- Wabbajack fails partway through installing the list, with file-hash mismatch errors. It expected the original game files and found something else.
- The game crashes at launch with a message about a missing master file. Something in your Skyrim VR installation is missing or altered.
- An OpenComposite error dialog at launch. When the game folder holds leftovers from an old OpenComposite or other VR-runtime setup, OCU can fail to start a VR session and abort with a dialog like this:
- Shaders “compile” in seconds, and the game looks wrong. The first launch should spend multiple minutes compiling shaders. If it blows through in moments and you load into a world of wrong-looking textures, don’t marvel at your luck. Compilation didn’t really happen, and a dirty install is the likely culprit.
- Bugs that only you have. Leftover loose files in Data and stray injector DLLs load alongside the list and override or fight with it unpredictably. The result is often crashes and visual glitches that nobody else in the Discord can reproduce, because nobody else’s install has your particular set of extra files. If your problems are unique, a dirty install is often the first suspect.