ON SINITAR
An essay by Phoenix.
Originally published on: 19/06/2021
Last edited: 20/06/2021
(Mirror of the doc by Crithion)
Update, 20/06/2021: Posted this behemoth to reddit yesterday, it, uhh, kinda took off so that’s nice. No drama so far. However, as a result, Sinitar has banned from his Discord server not only me but also everyone credited in this doc as well as anyone who commented on the reddit thread and a few others who had absolutely nothing to do with any of it (but whose names are attached to Wabbajack). I appreciate that he really went out of his way to prove my point.
My spies tell me he has also started to be exceptionally nice on his Discord server which I suppose I should count as a win.
And finally, I rewrote the Sinitar and the Nexus section as I believe I have now mostly pieced together why he was booted off the site.
Preamble
Hi there! I’m Phoenix. I wrote that comment on Sinitar like a year ago, and I keep seeing it linked back to in various posts on the subreddit whenever Sinitar is mentioned. To be honest, I am a bit unhappy about that: My comment was more of a rant, not particularly well-structured, and I do not agree with everything I wrote back then. I do not think it should be the definite answer on why Sinitar is bad, actually. So here we are.
TL;DR: Sinitar doesn’t know what he’s talking about. His “guide” is a list of links to mods with no instructions whatsoever. The end result is not a working setup. Don’t waste your time with it.
The point of this essay is not to create drama. The point is not to attack Sinitar personally. My intention is to educate users, particularly modding beginners, on why exactly Sinitar’s “guide” is bad and should not be used. I will present my arguments in a factual manner with reasonable amounts of objectivity.
Sinitar is a YouTuber. He produces various showcases, mostly modding-related, for Bethesda games and Witcher 3, and they are rather pretty. He also started to write modding “guides” that are available on his website. He makes a living off YouTube ad revenue as well as Patreon.
Sinitar’s “guides” are notoriously broken, and they are known for it in the larger modding community outside of his cult. Unfortunately, this led to a wide-spread assumption that all mod lists and modding guides are bad just by association which is demonstrably untrue. As the author of a guide and two Wabbajack mod lists, I have a vested interest in debunking that claim by pointing out why Sinitar’s “guide” is bad and what other guides do better.
I also believe that he is misleading and lying to his userbase, and people deserve to be informed about it.
Before we go any further, we need to discuss the terminology of various modding resources as I understand them. Note that their meaning may differ in other modding communities (especially where mod packs are concerned).
Mod packs are repacks of mod files. Because the majority of mods have closed permissions, mod packs do not exist as such in the Bethesda modding community. They are considered mod piracy. Of course, some were made anyway, but they are shunned by most members of the community because they are considered unethical and disrespectful toward mod authors.
Mod lists are compilations of links to mods (not the actual files), usually sorted by theme. They can be understood as the list author’s recommendations. Sometimes they come with additional instructions but rarely any custom edits beyond what is recommended on featured mod pages. Users are expected to pick and choose, figure out asset management and load order themselves, as well as do their own patching. Popular examples are Sinitar’s “guide” and LupusHegemonia’s equally awful BOSS guide but also the old (and now hidden) SEPTIM and Nordic Skyrim projects. Because the list authors and their users often do not understand patching and mod/load order management themselves, the lists do not produce stable setups on their own. This is why some believe that mod lists are inherently broken (which is essentially true).
Mod guides are often thrown in with mod lists, but there are a number of important differences. They do not list mods to pick and choose, but rather present a full setup to be installed from start to finish (again, users have to download the mods themselves). This allows guides to give detailed instructions for FOMOD installers, files to be edited, renamed, moved, deleted, etc, and they also include custom patches. Their value lies in the knowledge of their creators, teams of people with years of modding experience under their belt so that users don’t have to go through the same thing. Examples are STEP, mnikjom’s The Northern Experience, Lexy’s Legacy of the Dragonborn, and my own The Phoenix Flavour.
Wabbajack mod lists are all-in-one setups with the same quality of good modding guides (stable, patched setups) that can be installed through the Wabbajack app. They are created by various list authors that, like guide authors, cooperate with each other and many of the featured mod authors. Each new official Wabbajack list is tested thoroughly before publication.
Please do not confuse mod lists with Wabbajack mod lists.
Additionally, I will speak of SLE (Skyrim Legendary Edition / 2011 version) and SSE (Skyrim Special Edition / 2016 version).
Just so we’re on the same page ...
When I talk of “proper” modded setups, what I mean is that all included mods are, where necessary, properly ported to SSE, edited and tweaked where appropriate, and patched in xEdit and the Creation Kit for compatibility and consistency. Occasionally, it is necessary to edit meshes in NifSkope or tweak and recompile scripts. In addition to all this, distant terrain is usually rebuilt with xLODGen and DynDOLOD, and depending on the setup, other patchers are run also. The load order is determined in SSEEdit, then applied with precise, custom LOOT rules or by hand. Asset conflicts are reviewed and corrected where necessary.
Doing all this requires a lot of knowledge on various types of files, how to open and edit them. Hell, after six or so years, I still learn new things regularly. I have huge amounts of respect for many of my modding friends, mod authors and WJ list authors alike, and the things they pull off in their projects.
The point is not to gatekeep or frighten newcomers away. But we do have to contend with reality, and in reality all the above things are absolutely non-negotiable for a stable, coherent setup with several hundred mods. Running LOOT and calling it a day is not enough. Installing patches provided by third parties is not enough. Creating a Bashed Patch is not enough. This is the reality.
Why is this so important to establish? Because Sinitar’s “guide” does not account for that reality.
Sinitar’s Skyrim Guide
In the following I will specifically critique Sinitar’s “Skyrim SE Ultimate Modding Guide” because Skyrim SE is my specialty.
Back in 2016 when SSE just released, SLE was indeed much better for modding, but this has not been true in a very long time. Originally it was not clear if SkyUI was ever going to be ported and, even after that happened, a lot of major mods were still unavailable on SSE for a long time. ENBSeries was far less advanced for SSE than for SLE, there was no HDT physics, and some major overhauls that many people considered essential were not yet available.
However, since then, all of those major mods have been ported or superseded by better alternatives on SSE. Most modders exclusively develop for SSE nowadays, so the latest advancements are not even available for SLE. HDT Physics have been available for SSE since 2019. Admittedly, ENBSeries for SSE still lacks a few features present in SLE, but approximately 98% of regular mod users don't know about these features to begin with. Boris continues to port over SLE features to SSE, so this small disadvantage is unlikely to last for very much longer.
As for stability, it is common knowledge that the engine upgrade for SSE has brought vast improvements. Modding SSE is infinitely easier than modding SLE, particularly for beginners, simply because it is much harder to get the game to crash. For example, thanks to the engine update, SSE is able to allocate more memory, fixing many of the out-of-memory crashes that SLE was suffering from. Additionally (as will be touched on later) you can safely include more plugin files in your modded setups on SSE via the new ESL file type, meaning that less or no merging is needed on larger lists.
The only advantage of SLE is that it does indeed run better on low-end systems. Think GTX 760 low-end. This is not Sinitar’s target audience though - he specifically states that his “guide” was intended for high-end machines.
The claim that there are more bugs in SSE because of hastily ported mods simply goes to show that Sinitar does not consider being able to port mods properly a basic modding skill. Maybe he does not know how to do it himself. I would estimate that 90% of mods are trivial to port for most users, and for the few that are more complicated it’s highly likely an official SSE version already exists. All modding guides that I know of contain SLE mods and porting instructions for them. Unfortunately, Sinitar’s “guide” does not include any actual instructions of any kind.
Which mod manager takes the crown is a point of great contention in the modding scene currently. The debate is centered on two options: the community-made Mod Organizer 2 and the Nexus’ Vortex mod manager. To give you my personal opinion, I don’t think Vortex should even be considered as an alternative to MO2 for a large project (like a setup of hundreds of mods developed over the course of years). But again, the topic is controversial.
Here is Sinitar’s take:
Even as a huge MO2 fan, I have to admit that Vortex is nowhere near as bad as Sinitar claims. It is not glitchy or broken, not in 2021 at least, and my dislike of it stems from how it handles mod conflicts and load order sorting, and the lack of QOL features I consider essential (like a good UI, note-taking, the Data tab, etc). Vortex works well enough though.
Stranger than his strong but unfounded opinion on Vortex is Sinitar recommending Nexus Mod Manager instead. You know which mod manager is actually notorious for being glitchy and broken? Nexus Mod Manager. There are good reasons why the Nexus dropped NMM and began development on Vortex from scratch - with the developer of the original Mod Organizer.
NMM is kept on life support by a community team, but it’s always been an awful mod manager, and it still is. The only reason it was ever successful is because it carries the Nexus’ brand, and there was no better alternative for a long time. For example, NMM still installs files into the Data folder. That means if you overwrote a file, it’s overwritten for good. Want to go back and get the original? More often than not you’ll have to reinstall the game and start modding it from scratch. In MO2 and Vortex changing the mod order can be done anytime; and no files are actually being replaced or deleted.
Whatever you do, don’t use NMM. Even Vortex is infinitely better, however much I dislike it.
In the modding beginner’s “guide” video, Sinitar recommends people watch before following his written “guide”, there is a segment on mod compatibility. It is very brief and glosses over many relevant things which can be excused because it was supposed to be a short video, but some of it is also just plain wrong.
“Mods compatibility means that two or more mods installed together will work without interfering.”
Just poking around for a minute in SSEEdit for a hot second will quickly disabuse you of the notion of mods “not interfering”. The most obscure mod combinations “interfere” on the plugin level because of the way that plugins are structured. The point isn’t to avoid conflicts - that’s virtually impossible. The point is to find these conflicts and deal with them.
What does dealing with conflicts entail?
An easy fix for some plugin conflicts is changing the load order. Record 1 in Plugin A overwrites Record 1 in Plugin B. If you want Plugin A to win, place it below Plugin B in the load order. This is something that LOOT is capable of.
But LOOT is very limited. It is possible that you want Record 1 from Plugin A but Record 2 from Plugin B, and suddenly changing the load order won’t help you anymore. The solution is to combine both records in a new Plugin C, something that can be done in SSEEdit.
You may also have conflicts within records. For instance, who would have thought that No Grass In Caves and Realistic Water Two conflict? RW2 changes the water flow in many worldspace and cell records; overwriting its changes can lead to cut-off water and different water types next to each other. This is how you may come to the conclusion that Plugin X breaks Realistic Water Two - no, it does not, all you would have to do was forward RW2’s water flow changes.
Conflict resolution and consistency patching are far, far more complex than “making stuff green” in SSEEdit. The above example, if unfixed, will also not completely break your game. I chose this specific example just for the purpose of explaining the basic concept of conflict resolution. Also, conflicts are not universally “bad”. Conflicts just are. Some have to be resolved or rearranged, some don’t.
As we have seen now, LOOT and a Merged Patch will not solve certain conflicts. If you dig deeper into your load order, you will find that they may not even fix the majority. Third party patches by the original mod author or from other Nexus pages may resolve some of those that remain, but the only way to fix everything for that stable, consistent setup Sinitar promises is to dig into SSEEdit and patch your setup by hand - regardless of whether your load order has 20 or 200 plugins.
But Sinitar doesn’t know that - or at least his “guide” doesn’t mention it. As such its result will never be an improvement over what any modding novice can do in an afternoon with basic reading skills.
Ah yes, LOOT.
We already established that LOOT does not, in fact, work miracles as Sinitar claims here. Do you know how it works? The load order it applies is based on a master list by various contributors. That means, theoretically, to work as well as people think it does, the master list would have to be aware of every conflict between every combination of plugins. Of which there are hundreds of thousands. This is literally not possible.
So LOOT sorts to the best of its ability, and the resulting load order will probably be better than not sorting at all. It doesn’t even approach being sufficient though. Some people, like Lexy, use LOOT with a ton of LOOT rules (that define where certain plugins and groups of plugins should be placed), but how did she find out where these plugins should be put in the first place? By checking them in SSEEdit for their conflicts, of course. Using LOOT with custom rules is a viable option but only if you use SSEEdit to determine the correct order in the first place.
“Also LOOT shows you all you need to know about your mods instlalled [sic] - errors, missing records etc.”
These notifications are once again drawn from the aforementioned master list which may, for example, include a link to a missing patch. This works by checking your load order for the specific plugin name of that patch and alert you if it didn’t find it. What if the plugin was renamed, or merged, or you actually fixed what that patch does in a custom plugin? LOOT has no way to tell. LOOT only knows what has been entered into its database. And that database is filled by a handful of people as a hobby. It doesn’t approach comprehensive. Don’t get me wrong, I respect the people working on it. But I know I cannot trust them with fixing my load order because they are not actually omnipotent.
This constitutes one of the core problems with Sinitar’s “guide”. He doesn’t give you any instructions whatsoever. He tells you to install some tools (LOOT, NMM), but he cannot be bothered to help you use them and instead links to other people’s instructions. He gives you a massive list of mods but he cannot be bothered to help you install them. Many of those mods have special installation or configuration steps. Many of them conflict with others - conflicts that need to be reviewed and sorted out where necessary. But there are no instructions at all.
And he calls it a “guide.”
The practice of cleaning the master files is ancient. It has been called into question in recent years, but it continues to be done because it’s always been done. In any case, I have never seen any proof for uncleaned masters causing actual crashes, certainly not in vanilla.
There is one case I’m aware of: Bethesda replaced a navmesh in Solitude for compatibility with CC Saints and Seducers, and this caused crashes with Interesting NPCs. As far as I’m aware Interesting NPCs was updated and that was that.
Sinitar implicates that the masters in their vanilla state are inherently unstable and that is, to the best of my knowledge, simply false. Technically, cleaning does very slightly improve the game’s initial loading speed which is practically unnoticeable on modern hardware.
Also Sinitar links to GamerPoets’ tutorial for cleaning master files which, as far as I can see, didn’t cover adding the -DontCache argument to the SSEEditQuickCleaning executable. That means cleaning Dragonborn.esm will destroy parts of Apocrypha which will leave you unable to progress. It is another example of many where Sinitar is missing actual useful information that could have given his “guide” some genuine value instead of just breaking people’s games.
What’s commonly referred to as “dirty” or “wild” edits are records that are added to a plugin by the Creation Kit when you accidentally click something (which happens a lot in the CK). These will be copies of vanilla - they are “identical to master” (ITMs) - and mod authors should check plugins made in the CK in SSEEdit to clean out any ITMs and other unintended changes.
The only way an ITM can ever cause trouble is when it overrides the same record in another mod. If that mod, which is now overwritten, changed the record in question, it may not work properly in various ways depending on the type of record. However, this is easy to catch while checking through your load order in SSEEdit (which you should always, always, always do). When you actually find an ITM overwriting another mod you can usually delete it…
...unless the mod it is part of actually depends on the vanilla records, which is rare but possible. When editing anything in SSEEdit, always look at the full plugin and make sure you understand the implications of your changes.
Claiming zEdit was a “successor” to xEdit is simply untrue. zEdit is similar, sure, but it has different functionality and, in its current state, cannot fully replace SSEEdit. Once again, don’t listen to Sinitar.
The Merged and Bashed Patch are automatic patches created with SSEEdit and Wrye Bash, respectively. What they do is look through your plugins, see where changes are made, and merge all edits together into one plugin layer. This fixes some conflicts that LOOT (changing the load order) cannot address.
Another falsehood.
Remember the conflict from earlier, between Realistic Water Two and No Grass In Caves? Generating a merged patch does not fix that . Automated patchers are, by definition, imperfect. In most cases, how a conflict is handled is pretty complex and based on the mods’ intentions/implementation as well as what change YOU want to end up in your game. An automated patcher cannot factor these things in; instead, it will just smash stuff together.
The Bashed Patch can be a little more precise through Bash Tags which determine how conflicts in a certain plugin should be revolved. This won’t give you a perfect result either though, and anyway the vast majority of plugins have no Bash Tags assigned in the first place. Much like with LOOT, this tool is only as useful as the amount of custom “rules” you put into it. If you do not know how to add those Bash Tags yourself, you’re just as likely to end up with a more broken setup than a “fixed” one.
Again: Automated patchers are not enough. LOOT is not enough. Sort and patch stuff by hand if you want a stable, working setup.
The prompt to merge mods demonstrates how stuck Sinitar is in SLE. Since the introduction of ESL-flagged plugins (which do not count toward the 255 plugin limit) in SSE and FO4, merging mods has become nearly irrelevant. There is simply no reason to go through the hassle of building and rebuilding merges when you can simply ESL-ify half your load order. The only modern Creation Engine game that still has to put up with merging mods is Skyrim VR (which sadly does not have ESL support like SSE).
Yes, pretty much all mods that can be merged can also be ESL-flagged. And ESL-flagging is a million times easier. With merges, every time a mod contained in a merge is updated, the merge has to be rebuilt. Every time you want to add or remove a mod in a merge, it has to be rebuilt. This may not sound particularly annoying at first, but I can tell you from personal experience that you will be thinking very hard about whether or not that plugin really has to be added or updated very soon.
This is not how you test mods. How would you “check it’s stable”? Are you going to visit a few dozen locations, maybe play through a bunch of quest lines after installing 10 mods? That is completely nonsensical, a waste of time, and, worse, it will probably not help you find actually existing problems.
This is my workflow for building a new setup:
At this stage, I jump into SSEEdit often - but I also know some things by heart. Always dump RW2 at the bottom of the load order, don’t want it to be overwritten. Place the lighting mod below it though, cell records get overwritten otherwise. And so on.
As I work my way through to gameplay mods, I frequently go back into SSEEdit. Maybe a good rule of thumb is “after every five mods with plugins, go into SSEEdit and see if there are conflicts that need to be handled”.
Only when I have everything installed do I go for some in-game testing. There is always something I miss, like mismatched facegen or a weirdly placed object that I can then screenshot and fix in SSEEdit or the Creation Kit.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but to me this sounds like he constantly installed and reinstalled mods in NMM (where, remember, mods overwrite for good and overwritten files cannot be restored) and then “play-tested” the combinations. Because that is extremely unnecessary.
Using NMM is the first mistake. You have no adjustable mod order, so you need to install mods in a specific order which is a massive headache - but I already talked about this.
Textures can very easily be compared in MO2 - the conflicts tab makes this super simple, you can directly preview them side-by-side if you have multiple versions of the same texture. Alternatively, you can load the meshes into NifSkope to get an idea of how it looks when applied to the mesh. Handpicking textures is a lot of work - don’t make it harder than you have to.
This one is quite funny. Sinitar claims that you cannot see the difference between a 4K and a 2K texture if you do not have a 4K monitor. That is, again, not true because models are not flat. They are three-dimensional and textures are wrapped around them. At any given time, you only see a part of that texture.
For instance, a dragon has a single large texture that is wrapped around its model, the body. Look at its head and you only see a small part of that 4K texture. Even on a 1080p monitor you can easily get close enough in regular gameplay to make that part look blurry. This is why it absolutely makes sense to install 4K or even 8K textures for dragons and mountains, then 2K or 4K for most other large objects, 2K for armor, weapons, skins, etc, 1K for smaller clutter items or beards, 512 for eyes and other tiny objects.
The point is not using the texture resolution corresponding to your monitor. It is picking a resolution appropriate for the size of the object in question. What is true is that on a 4K monitor, you will benefit more from 4K textures than on a 1440p monitor because you see more of the texture at the same time.
If you ever modded Skyrim SE before and have left-overs when starting to follow Sinitar’s “guide,” you are already in a bad place. Sinitar should, at the very least, tell his users to clean up the data and root folders before they get started.
A huge part of TPF and Lexy’s as guides is teaching users how to use Mod Organizer 2. Getting acquainted with the tool and utilising it to its full potential is the most important step toward becoming a better modder. Sinitar links to a five minute video by GamerPoets for MO2 - good content to be sure, but it is just not enough. Clearly, it is too much to expect his “guide” to teach actual modding skills.
The ENBSeries section of Sinitar’s “guide” has some minor INI tweaks and there are grass density changes later on but comprehensive INI tweaks are missing. The performance increase from optimising your INIs with BethINI is absolutely substantial without causing noticeable visual degradation. Additionally, various mods (such as Map replacers) may require specific INI alterations (as sometimes noted on their mod pages) to even display properly.
After reading the Conflicts and Compatibility section, you probably know (roughly) why custom patches are non-negotiable. Sinitar does not cover this anywhere, and he does not mention SSEEdit beyond “cleaning” plugins. He literally instructs users to run LOOT sometimes, smash some plugins together in Merge Plugins, and then build some automated patches.
This is how you break Skyrim.
Scripts are PEX files written in Papyrus, Skyrim’s scripting language. Understanding scripts, the impact certain functions can have, script lag --- this goes way over my head. It also goes way over the head of the average mod user.
Sinitar has always been very particular about the potential dangers of script lag and has been counting scripts in the past to determine whether or not a mod was “script-heavy”. Thankfully, he seems to have since learned that the amount of scripts is irrelevant and removed the script counts from his guide.
Here is a great explanation of scripts in basic terms by Catir:
Upon which DavidJCobb elaborated:
Sinitar claims that:
This is a bold assertion. There used to be a lot of claims of “bad scripts” floating around in the SLE days that never fully dispersed even after they were disproven or the mod in question was updated. Additionally, there were a number of INI tweaks recommended in various places that supposedly improved the Papyrus Engine’s performance; however, most of these were either placebo or actively harmful.
This caused a general fear of scripts with many misconceptions about how scripts and the Papyrus Engine work, what to do, and what to avoid. This fear is largely caused by the simple fact that only very few people know enough about scripts to accurately judge whether a mod’s scripts are efficient or potentially dangerous. Sinitar marking some mods as “script heavy” with no explanation whatsoever sufficiently demonstrates his own ignorance in this regard.
Since his “guide” is pretty bad and barely explains anything, it is perfectly normal especially for modding novices to run into issues of varying severity. Sinitar is running a Discord server which includes the #tes_troubleshooting channel, ostensibly to help users fix issues in their setup. Scrolling through the channel, however, reveals that more than half of all responses by Sinitar and his staff are nothing more than “read the guide” with facepalm or wtf emotes for maximum condescension. This is repeated ad nauseam - the implication being that “you wouldn’t have any issues if you had followed the guide.”
Which is quite laughable, now that we established how little the “guide” does right in the first place.
In this example, somebody encountered bugged water in their game. Since they did not receive any help on Sinitar’s server, they Googled for a solution and found one. For that, Sinitar ridicules the user and claims they should have just followed the guide. The solution was to disable the ENB water effect, apparently the preset’s water shader was broken. Whether it is one of the presets listed in the ENBSeries section of Sinitar’s “guide” is impossible to tell just from the screenshot, but either way following the “guide” would not have helped with this issue at all.
To me, the screenshot looks more like there are location edits that conflict, a plugin problem rather than an ENB problem. Disabling the ENB water effects altogether may just be bandaid, and unnecessary to boot.
Anyone who persists with their questions and claims to have followed the guide and still experience problems, is insulted and often kicked or banned altogether. Unfortunately, these instances routinely get cleaned up (deleted) by Sinitar afterwards but they can still be seen in some overlooked cases.
Anecdote: On my (the TPF) Discord server, we’ve had plenty of users coming in after they realised how useless Sinitar’s “guide” was. We’ve been referring to them as Sinitar refugees. Here’s one example that I found particularly telling:
The above has happened multiple times. I can understand being impatient with users to some degree, as I can be very impatient myself when I do support. But when you go through Sinitar’s support channel, you will find that he is condescending and unhelpful on principle. He demonstrates time and again that he does not understand anything about modding on a particularly in-depth level. If I had to hazard a guess, he feels deeply insecure anytime a question is asked that he can’t answer so the mistake must always be the user’s.
He’s also received a formal warning on the Nexus for his unpleasant behaviour.
Okay so there is a lot to process in this paragraph here, let’s go one at a time.
“Mod packs are easy to find.”
Not really. There are some available on obscure Russian or Japanese websites, pirating forums, and a few actually had websites. Out of curiosity, I tried Google and found exactly one mod pack (that is four years outdated). Other results were mostly mod lists that call themselves mod packs but still required the user to install everything themselves (so as to not violate sharing permissions).
“If you’re installing some list of mods via automated tool, even if all the mods are installed in correct order, you still will have to solve a lot of conflicts, merge mods, make bashed/merge patches, setup the MCMs and so on.”
This is completely false. The automated tool in question is, of course, Wabbajack. Any mod list installed through Wabbajack is already patched and sorted; in fact, some of them even have automated MCMs. As mentioned before, merges are largely irrelevant in SSE, although some WJ lists do include merges. The point is that you have to do none of these things after installing a WJ list. They have already been done for you. That is why Wabbajack is so popular to begin with.
What I find revealing is how he does not even mention actual hand-made patching beyond “bashed/merged patches”, as if he was not aware these things exist. There is some irony in Sinitar claiming Wabbajack lists are “glitchy” and do not cover the basic steps when his “guide” is actually guilty of that. He himself seems entirely unaware of the work involved in creating a stable setup the way Wabbajack devs do. It’s like a Flat Earther calling out a geologist for being misinformed.
“Modpacks are like those ads in internet that are promising you 6-pack in 7 days without diet and training.”
This is quite funny because he very accurately described his own project. His “guide” promises that you can download and run whichever of the listed mods you want with absolutely no extra work. You do not have to learn anything or follow any additional steps. You do not have to patch your mods; creating an automatic merged patch with xEdit is enough. All these things that people claim takes effort and experience and a lot of time, you can get within a few hours thanks to his guide. Like a six-pack in a week without exercising.
There is another collection of Sinitar’s false assertions about Wabbajack here.
Sinitar originally hosted his “guides” and some other projects on the Nexus. He still uses his old account (DonProtein) but there are no published pages attached to it. Sinitar has since moved on to his private website.
So what happened?
Sinitar has been working on a “guide” for Fallout New Vegas for a while (see here). Unlike newer Bethesda games, FNV (like Oblivion and FO3) still had a bug where the game would slowly break upon exceeding 140 plugins. This has since been fixed and the mod page of the fix has a good explanation of the original bug.
This fix hadn’t been available in 2019 but his guide already claimed that “your game will run smoothly, without crashes and stutters even with hundreds of mods” (Wayback Machine snapshot from April 2019). Accomplishing this in FNV, especially then, was not something Sinitar’s “guide” was capable of.
As a result, FNV mod authors were flooded with bug reports and users claiming that any issues they encountered had to be the mods’ fault because Sinitar said his guide was completely stable. One mod author then requested Sinitar remove their mods from his “guide” as they did not want to see their work in something they described as “a disaster that will lead to crashes”.
Sinitar reacted combative as one might expect after, claiming that his “guide” was perfectly stable and that he was one of the most experienced modders in the community. He brushed off the idea that he was causing issues that users then blamed mod authors for and accused the mod author of being “paranoid”.
Central to the discussion was Sinitar’s completely unfounded assertion that the 800+ mods in his “guide” were 100% compatible with each other. We already established that mod conflicts are very normal. There is no such thing as “800 compatible mods” without extensive patching which Sinitar’s “guides” never had. The mod author pointed this out for which Sinitar called them “delusional”.
The full conversation can be read here or viewed on YouTube here.
The topic of Sinitar and the FNV modding community was also covered in another YouTube video aptly titled The Scourge of the New Vegas Modding community which discusses instances of mod piracy and Sinitar claiming another person’s work for himself.
In March 2019, Sinitar published a repack of various textures as the Skyrim Community Texture Project. A “teaser” can still be found on YouTube. It appears to have included some assets without the authors’ permission. To give credit where credit is due, Sinitar seems to at least have credited the contributors (willing or otherwise) and did not attempt to give the impression that he created the assets himself.
There was also a mod sharing channel on Sinitar’s Discord server that is mentioned in the YouTube video about FNV linked above. It was removed later in 2019. In his explanation, Sinitar outright admits to mod piracy:
Reuploading mods, regardless of whether or not it is “without any attempt to earn on them” breaks sharing permissions and constitutes mod piracy. At least the channel no longer exists.
On April, 3 2019, Sinitar’s Nexus pages were all put under moderation review by Nexus staff (SCTP, FNV “guide”, SLE Graphics “guide”, SLE Gameplay “guide”).
Sinitar reacted with this video. He claims to be “happy” about being booted from the Nexus and that his removal was due to him featuring off-site mods. An example that he gives is of a mod that apparently included assets from another game and was removed from the Nexus for that reason.
He asserts that the author of the mod in question does not make any profits off that mod and is working on it “just for fun”. Obviously, this doesn’t change the fact that they are using assets without permissions (hence the removal from the Nexus) which Sinitar describes as “not illegal but in sort of grey zone”. This and the reason he gave for removing the mod sharing channel on his Discord server (see above) suggests that Sinitar’s idea of asset theft only applies to commercial use.
Unfortunately, that is not how sharing permissions work: Licenses may also specify that reusing and redistributing assets is not allowed for non-commercial purposes, and doing so anyway is illegal just the same. It is safe to assume that this was the case as the Nexus would not have removed the mod otherwise.
Interestingly, Sinitar’s reaction video has comments and votes disabled. Sinitar may not have wanted to risk third parties to offer alternative explanations in the comments which might have cast doubt on his.
While it is difficult to piece together in 2021, it appears that the actual reasons for Sinitar being kicked off the Nexus was primarily pressure from the FNV mod author community. However, the fact that Sinitar’s SCTP contained textures that he was not allowed to share and that story about the mod he falsely claimed (see the “Scourge of the New Vegas Modding community” video linked above) will likely also have factored into the decision.
If his “guide” is so bad, why does it do so well? I believe there are multiple reasons for this:
The bigger the lies, the more they want to believe them. When you first start modding Skyrim and see those cool mods and mod showcases, you just want to play that, right now. And Sinitar is there to tell you that you can and that it’s easy. If you do not know what SSEEdit is in the first place, how could you possibly realise that his “guide” is worthless?
How so many people use his “guide” and still believe Sinitar is the god of modding is a question I have asked myself many times. I believe a major part of the reason is the audacity of Sinitar’s original pitch: the Skyrim of your dreams, compiled and one-click-sorted in an afternoon. The fact that it’s literally too good to be true is obscured by Sinitar routinely insulting or outright banning people on his Discord server for asking benign questions.
If someone has a broken game as a result of following his “guide”, it’s because “they are stupid and didn’t read properly”. Unfortunately, a modding beginner is more likely to accept his assertion that it is indeed “their own fault” and give up at that point, never realizing that they are being scammed.
Sinitar makes a living from modding - he says so on his Patreon page. Thus, his entire life revolves around the YouTube videos and guides (plus that strange online game store he also runs). It explains why he is so hostile to anything and anyone he perceives as a “rival.” One example is Dylan Perry, who created Ultimate Skyrim before Wabbajack was even conceived:
You can find an example of Sinitar falsely claiming that Ultimate Skyrim was broken here.
As discussed in the Sinitar and “Mod Packs” section, he also falsely claims that Wabbajack produces inherently broken setups. Nowadays, Wabbajack is substantially more successful than Sinitar himself in the modding community, so it is vital for him to discredit this supposed competitor as its continued existence is a serious threat to his income.
He also claims that “mod packs” are similarly unstable. This appears to include guides like TPF or Lexy’s because his primary argument is that not every setup runs well on every system (performance-wise). Of course TPF and Lexy’s are both instructions to install a very specific set of mods that cannot be customised, and while it is true that the performance will depend on the user’s hardware, there are many ways in which it can be improved (TPF, for example, will get a dedicated performance guide in the next major update). Additionally, such guides usually also include some target system specs for their specific loadouts upfront and center at the very beginning, so anyone who goes further generally knows what they are getting into.
So Sinitar’s “guide” is bad, actually. But he makes a living with it, and so his first priority is the reputation of his work and disparaging any critics or perceived competition. If you behave in a sufficiently submissive fashion on his Discord server, you will be rewarded with a smiley or two, as long as you accept that any problems you run into are your own fault and not caused by the “guide”.
Criticism of any kind is not tolerated. Questions that may imply that the “guide” contains an error are not tolerated. Dissent of any kind is not tolerated. These things lead to bans after which the conversations are typically deleted. Any mentions of (Dylan Perry’s) Ultimate Skyrim, Wabbajack, TPF, etc, are deleted.
Sinitar obviously does not know a whole lot about modding, and I’d argue that he is nowhere near competent enough to write a guide to try to teach people. Of course he claims the opposite - it’s everyone else who is just bad at it. And if you are not familiar with the intricacies of modding yourself, there is only one thing you can do: Believe.
After all, his videos and screenshots look good, don’t they? His guide promises fantastic things and contains strong opinions on various topics so he must know what he’s talking about, right?
So that’s what Sinitar’s users do: They believe, very strongly, that Sinitar knows what he’s doing.
Sovn joined Sinitar’s server shortly after the start of the Covid-19 pandemic. Like many others, he gave the “guide” a try “simply because his videos looked clean and it was the first result on the search bar”. He became active on Discord and participated in the support channel the same way everyone else did: “I would just spam ‘go re-read the guide’ or stuff like ’are you sure you relaunched bash or made the tes5merged patch’”.
At the time, Sinitar was not particularly active on his own server. According to Sovn, “the few times he was coming to speak really, was to either say: go read the guide, go check your enblocal settings, buy a better pc or subscribe to his Patreon, that one he liked to say.” Sovn stuck around, befriended other users, and had no cause to doubt the “guide” in any way - until he did.
Inevitably he ran into a problem: He recorded a video of it and posted it on the Discord server: “Basically I got to be the user, for once, and I got shat on, caus I obviously followed it, and I had this issue, and so we had an argument which got me banned because I disagreed with the fact that he was, in fact, not helping me solve the issue.”
Fortunately for Sovn, at least, he was directed to another Discord server after getting banned from Sinitar’s. There he learned more about Wabbajack and realised that Sinitar’s claims about the tool had little to do with reality. Today he is a Wabbajack developer, best known for his list QWEST!.
Read his full story here and here.
On his Patreon, Sinitar has listed the names of (apparently past and present) supporters which includes some big names. One of them is Dave’s (winedave) who was quite surprised and dismayed when I told him about it.
For all his claims of how modding yourself is the one true way, Sinitar does sell premade mod lists if you have the money. For no less than $200/month, you can snatch the “High Chancellor” Patreon subscription tier which includes “a heavy-modded setup for your Skyrim.” While I have heard claims that he actually shares mod files zipped up (which would constitute mod piracy), it appears he remotes to the user’s machine to set (explained here).
There is no proof that he is breaking sharing permissions in the process, but I believe it is a sad example of how he scams his users. Installing a list through Wabbajack costs at best $4 (because Nexus Premium is highly recommended) after which you will be able to install a wide range of different complex, thoroughly patched setups. You may not be able to customise them but at least they actually work.
The screenshots featured on Sinitar’s website are obviously hand-picked to create the impression that they represent the result of following Sinitar’s guide. Interestingly enough though, many of them were, in fact, contributed by users who were not necessarily running all mods from Sinitar’s setup in the first place:
Zangdar (who nowadays works with Rudy on Rudy ENB) has identified several of their old screenshots which are now used to promote the Skyrim LE Graphics Guide on Sinitar’s website. They had actually taken the screenshots running Lexy’s guide (a solid, functional setup) and shared them on Sinitar’s Discord server.
Apparently, some of the screenshots Sinitar uses to promote his “guide” are literally from a different and far superior setup.
There does not appear to be a credits section anywhere on the site (where credit could be given for the user-submitted screenshots). I could not find any clarification on the fact that the featured screenshots can be totally unrelated to Sinitar’s setup. However, the contributors were aware that Sinitar wanted to feature their screenshots on the website and gave their explicit consent (he did not use them against their will).
This is zangdar’s full statement on the matter:
On his Discord server, Sinitar suggests buying Skyrim LE on MMOGA (here) which happens to be a very shady key reseller.
Conclusion
Quite frankly I believe that Sinitar is a fraud and a scam artist with a cult-like following. He is a snake oil merchant selling grand claims to people who are not experienced enough with modding Skyrim to realise that.
Sinitar’s “guide” is not a guide. It is a mod list.
If there was a disclaimer on his website saying that there was a list of mods he recommended alongside some pretty screenshots, this essay would not exist. He has done the fun part of modding: Scoured the Nexus for interesting mods. But that is also the easy part. When users are still expected to read mod pages and figure compatibility out on their own, then what is the point?
Calling the list a “guide” is extremely misleading. It gives a bad reputation to the actual guides out there (yes, like mine) and allows misconceptions such as this one to build up:
I have seen the notion that “mod lists” are inherently broken in many places, often purported by people who have never opened SSEEdit in their life. Terminology is a problem: By my definition, I would even agree. But generally speaking, mod guides and Wabbajack lists are included in this unfounded claim, and that makes it untrue.
Yes, I have written this essay to defend my own projects. But I have also written it to defend my fellow guide and list authors with whom I am in close contact. And I have written it so modding beginners who simply cannot know any better do not fall into the trap of Sinitar and his clickbait.
You’re just a bully! Leave Sinitar alone!
In this essay, I have discussed the content of Sinitar’s “guide” in a largely factual manner. I have explained my arguments and cited sources. I have not attacked Sinitar personally.
The unfortunate popularity of Sinitar’s “guide” means that newcomers to the modding scene are at a high risk of being drawn into his cult-like community where they will never properly learn. I have written this essay to combat that effect.
If you read Sinitar’s responses on his Discord server (those I already quoted for example), I do not believe that it is unreasonable to call him a bully, however. My intention is to call him out on that.
Is it really valid to criticise Sinitar for not employing methods that most users don’t use either?
My primary criticism of Sinitar’s “guide” is that he only covers rudimentary, inefficient modding practices while creating the impression that there is not more to it. If anything about the load order or patching section was new to you as well, please don’t take it personally.
At the moment, the modding community dearly lacks a good, comprehensive resource for learning how to mod (building a custom setup from existing mods) properly, and no beginner can be faulted for having misconceptions or simply not knowing better in many cases.
The difference between you and Sinitar is that Sinitar claims he does know better, makes a living off that lie, and insults or bans anyone who says otherwise.
But everyone makes mistakes! Why are you so hung up about Sinitar’s?
Everyone absolutely makes mistakes, and I’d be lying if I said I or other guide or Wabbajack list authors have never, ever messed up. We miss things. We have misconceptions. We certainly don’t know everything about modding that there ever was to know.
Sinitar’s “guide” is structurally broken because he does not address compatibility in an efficient manner. Because of that, it is incapable of ever being as perfect and stable and bug-free as he claims it is. And he bans anyone who says otherwise.
That is where the difference is between Sinitar’s “guide” and my own, or Lexy’s, or the various Wabbajack lists out there.
At least Sinitar offers freedom of choice instead of a pre-made set of mods!
This is one of his “guide’s” key features: Pick and choose your own mods! I certainly understand the appeal. A large downside of using any modding guide or WJ lists is the fact that someone else already chose all mods for you. In turn you get to play heavily modded Skyrim without having to learn anything at all.
It is completely valid to dislike WJ lists and guides for their lack of customisation. What you need then is a proper beginner’s guide to explain the basics of modding - unfortunately Sinitar’s “guide” is not that.
I could not have written this beast of an essay without the help and mental support of my friends, fellow mod authors and mod list authors, across several Discord servers.
Thanks to Liz, Aosana, Althro, Timbo, Foxman, Unnoen, Catir, DavidJCobb, VictorF and everyone else who beta-read the essay, left comments and feedback, and sent me links to various sources. Special thanks also go to Sovn, winedave, and zangdar for talking to me about your experiences on Sinitar's server!
