There are two ways this could happen: 1) Bethesda manage to patch Skyrim SE so that it will have a good go at loading a modded save, in the way that Skyrim original often can even if the mods aren't present. However, it's not impossible that a fix might be found. It's back to tattered rags and poking crabs with rusty short swords for you, chum.

What that means, for now at least, is that you either need to have resolutely bellowed Get The Behind Me, SKSE at mods for the last five years, or that you will have to start a new game in the Special Edition. There will likely be some exceptions I'm sure, when a mod was minor or did not affect 'content', as the game puts it, but I've tried and failed with dozens of different saves across three different characters with no luck. The clean save will still prompt a 'relies on content that is no longer available' message, and if you see that, you're in for a crash. Unfortunately, this remains the case even if you strip all mods from your original Skyrim installation, load a savegame (ignoring its content-not-AVAILABLE messages) then re-save as, essentially, a 'clean' copy. The Special Edition does boast the option to load saves from the original game - achieved via manually copying files from your My Documents/My Games/Skyrim folder to My Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition - but try to load one that ever had a mod attached and the game will crash. And if you ever modded your original Skyrim install, none of your saves from it will work. Blame the ease of Steam Workshop integration, blame the bugs, console-focused limitations and interface problems in the PC version - whichever, modding was both easy and appealing. This isn't much of a problem in consoleland, where modding wasn't really a thing, but over on a PC a great many of us chucked two, three or several dozen mods into our Skyrim installations. Unless, of course, you stick with the original version of Skyrim instead of the freshly-released The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition, or somehow never, ever added a mod to it. It's the end of the world as you knew it circa 2011-2013.

You know that Skyrim savegame you invested hundreds of hours into? All those dead dragons, all those crafted weapons, all those mysteriously naked townsfolk? Gone, all gone.

Bad news, old chum, ol' pal, ol' mate of mine.

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