Skyrim Update 1.7.99 Is Live: SKSE 2.3.0 Is Ready, Console Mod Storage Hits 15GB
Bethesda pushed Skyrim update 1.7.99 to The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition on Thursday, the first substantial patch the game has received in roughly two and a half years. It lands on PC via Steam, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Xbox, and its headline change is console-side: mod storage rises to 15GB on PS5 and Xbox.
PC players got the version bump they had been bracing for. Steam moved the runtime from 1.6.1170 to 1.7.99.0, which is the number every script-extender plugin checks against before it will load.
Does Skyrim update 1.7.99 break your mods?
Partly, and the answer depends on what kind of mods you run. Plain plugin mods and texture replacers are unaffected. Anything that relies on the Skyrim Script Extender is version-locked by design, and that is where the disruption is.
SKSE itself was ready. Build 2.3.0 for the Anniversary Edition runtime shipped alongside the patch and supports 1.7.99, so the extender is not the bottleneck. The bottleneck is the layer above it — the DLL plugins that sit on top of SKSE and each need their own recompile. Address Library entries, SSE Engine Fixes and JContainers are the ones players are waiting on, and until each author publishes a 1.7.99 build, a heavily modded load order will fail to start.
Bethesda's own guidance is narrower than the community's worry. The studio said the update "should not affect load orders" but told players to log into a save afterwards as a precaution. That statement is about the load order file consoles store in the cloud, not about PC DLL compatibility, and the two are being conflated in a lot of the panic.
How to stay on the old version on Steam
Steam updates Skyrim automatically by default, which is why a lot of PC users woke up to a broken setup rather than choosing one. Setting the game to only update on launch, then not launching it, buys time. Community downgrade tools that roll the executable back to 1.6.1170 are also circulating and were updated within hours of the patch.
None of that is Bethesda-supported. If you go back to 1.6.1170 you also give up the fixes below, and Creations downloaded under the new store behaviour may not behave as expected.
What changed on consoles
The console side is the genuinely new capability, and it is the reason the patch exists at all. Mod storage limits move up sharply:
- PlayStation 5: 15GB of mod storage
- Xbox: 15GB of mod storage
- PlayStation 4: roughly 16GB, though Bethesda warns installed space and download size will not match because of hardware constraints
The Creations menu also picks up bundling, bringing Skyrim in line with what Fallout 4 and Starfield already had. Categories can now be sorted by Most Popular, work-in-progress Creations stay viewable once bookmarked, and detail pages now spell out how to report abuse. Storefront art was resized to 3640 x 900 and 900 x 506 to match the other two games. If this pattern sounds familiar, it is the same groundwork Bethesda laid in the Fallout 4 Creations update two days earlier.
Crash fixes in the patch
Several of the stability fixes are specific enough to be worth naming. The one Steam Deck owners will care about is a crash when opening the virtual keyboard, which had made the Creations menu awkward to use on handheld.
- Virtual Keyboard crash on Steam Deck
- Crash on selecting an empty search result in the Creations menu
- Crash when the player transforms into a new race
- Crash on closing dialogue for a Sound Descriptor
- Crash during loot analysis in encounter zones
- Crash when reloading a mod with no masterfile
Load order upload and restoration reliability was improved, the Creations store loads faster, and "Delete All Creations" now only removes mods pulled from the store rather than everything present. Free Creations from Verified Creators also show up in the right store category again.
Creation Kit changes for mod authors
Authors get localisation export, multiple master loads enabled by default, and the ability for Verified Creators to flag a submission as Achievement-Friendly on Xbox or Trophy-Friendly on PlayStation. PlayStation submissions now accept .nif, .dds, .bink, .wav and .fuz files, and Bink video can be uploaded through the Extra Files browser.
Patches that reshuffle a game's plugin layer tend to land badly with the people most invested in it — the same tension played out when Konami shipped Silent Hill 2 patch 1.07 and immediately began investigating it, and again when ARC Raiders update 1.42.0 left known crashes standing. For PC players weighing whether to update at all, the calculation is the same one that governs any change to a tuned PC gaming setup: wait until the tools you depend on have caught up.
There is no indication Bethesda plans further Skyrim patches on a schedule. This one was announced on 14 August and shipped on 20 August, with no version cadence attached to it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the new Skyrim version number after the August update?
On Steam the game moved from 1.6.1170 to 1.7.99.0. That number is what SKSE and its DLL plugins check before loading, which is why the bump matters more to modded setups than the patch contents themselves. Console versions do not expose the same runtime number.
Does the Skyrim update break SKSE?
SKSE itself was updated in time. Build 2.3.0 supports Skyrim 1.7.99 and shipped alongside the patch. What is still broken is the wider set of SKSE plugins built on top of it, such as SSE Engine Fixes and Address Library, which each need a separate rebuild from their own authors.
How much mod storage do consoles get now?
PlayStation 5 and Xbox both go up to 15GB. PlayStation 4 gets roughly 16GB, but Bethesda cautions that download size and installed space will not line up on that hardware, so the usable figure is lower in practice.
Can I stop Steam from updating Skyrim to 1.7.99?
You can set the game to update only on launch and then avoid launching it, which delays the patch rather than blocking it outright. Community downgrade tools that restore the 1.6.1170 executable exist and were refreshed the same day. Neither approach is supported by Bethesda.
Did the update fix anything on Steam Deck?
Yes. A crash that occurred when opening the virtual keyboard on Steam Deck is fixed, which had made searching the Creations menu unreliable on the handheld. A separate crash on selecting an empty Creations search result was also addressed.
