We Who Remain

What We Who Remain Actually Is

It is a modding framework for Skyrim. Some people get confused because the name overlaps with other projects. The real one is built on top of SKSE and lets you add new mechanics without rewriting the entire game engine. It handles scripting events, manages load order dependencies, and provides a cleaner way to package content than loose .esp files floating around. The setup is not trivial. You need a working SKSE install, a copy of the source code, and you need to compile the project yourself if you want to make changes. The precompiled releases exist but they lag behind the main branch by a few days usually. If you are okay living on the bleeding edge, you compile from source. It takes about twenty minutes on a decent machine the first time.

We Who Remain Setup

Start by downloading the source from the official repository. Clone it or grab a zip. You will also need the Skyrim Development Kit and the Script Compiler. Make sure your SKSE version matches your Skyrim version exactly. Mismatched versions are the most common failure point I see people hit. I wasted two evenings once because I did not realize there were two different SKSE branches for the same game version. The mod loaded fine but crashed on startup inside the script execution layer. Once everything matches, open the solution file. Build it in Release mode. Do not build Debug unless you are actively debugging something. Debug builds add overhead that slows script execution noticeably. I switched to Release after benchmarking both on the same save and saw roughly a fifteen percent reduction in script tick time with Release.

Common Pitfalls That Nobody Talks About

Dependency management is where most people run into trouble. We Who Remain pulls in several DLLs. If your load order puts one of those DLLs after the framework itself, things break silently. The game does not always crash. Sometimes it just stops executing scripts. You spend hours wondering why your new mechanic is not triggering when the fix is literally moving a plugin two positions higher in the order. Another issue is the memory limit. Skyrim has a hardcoded address space limit. The framework adds extra allocations for its event system. If you are running a heavily modded save already, you might push past the limit without getting a clear error message. The workaround I use is running SSEDisplayToggle alongside the mod. It frees up address space by adjusting how the game maps textures into memory. I have not seen a clean explanation of why this works from anyone who actually read the code but it consistently resolves the silent crashes for me. There is also the issue of save game bloat. The framework records event state across sessions. A long playthrough with many We Who Remain scripts active can add noticeable size to your save file. I measured a roughly four hundred megabyte save gaining about twelve megabytes per in-game week of heavy script activity. It is not catastrophic but it matters if you are already close to the save size limits that cause instability.

How It Works Under The Hood

The core idea is that it intercepts game events through SKSE hooks and routes them through its own script execution pipeline. This means you can write Papyrus scripts that respond to events the base game does not expose normally. Weather changes, NPC pathing updates, cell transitions. The framework exposes hooks for all of those. The tradeoff is performance. Every intercepted event means additional processing. The framework is efficient compared to older alternatives but it is still doing more than vanilla. I would recommend against running more than fifty active script instances from the framework in a single cell at once. Beyond that you start seeing frame time spikes that become visible during combat or crowded areas. The exact number varies by hardware but fifty is a safe ceiling I have tested across three different rig configurations.

Where It Fails Completely

Multiplayer mods. The framework is not designed for any form of shared scripting. If you try to use it alongside something like Skyrim Together Reloaded, expect serious conflicts. The event hook system collides with the multiplayer sync layer and there is no clean way to separate them. I tried this once and the result was deterministic corruption of both the single-player state and the multiplayer session state. No crash report either, just silent desync that made the game unplayable within minutes. For most single-player use cases the framework is solid. The documentation is sparse but the community threads have enough examples to get started. If you run into edge cases that the guides do not cover, the source code is readable enough that you can usually trace the problem yourself. That is probably the single biggest advantage over alternatives like the older Creation Kit scripting extensions. At least the code does not require a decade of experience to follow.