The folder system that broke my brain for 5 years

Honestly I just realized last week that I was organizing my downloads folder wrong the whole time. I had like 47 subfolders for different mod categories but everything was still a mess. What tipped me off was when Steam showed 400GB of mods installed but I couldn't find a single texture pack I needed for Skyrim. Anyone else ever hit that wall where your setup actually makes things worse?

2 comments

2 Comments

coleman.christopher21d ago

47 subfolders sounds like you were just making extra work for yourself. Calling it "broken brain" seems a bit dramatic for a filing problem. What were you organizing that needed that many categories anyway? Sounds like you overcomplicated a pretty simple thing.

nathan_thompson6221d ago

The real issue nobody talks about is how mod managers like Vortex or Mod Organizer 2 actually hide your files from you. I found out the hard way that those programs use virtual file systems and hard links. So your 400GB of mods isn't really 400GB of loose files sitting in a folder. They are stored in a completely separate directory that the mod manager controls. I spent three days last summer trying to manually clean up a Skyrim install before I realized the mods I was deleting from my downloads folder were just empty shortcuts pointing to the real files buried in the program data folder. The folder system was never the problem, you just couldn't actually see where everything really lived.