Whenever I hear someone recommend NMM as the simpest way to start installing mods right away, I get flashbacks from people threatening to sue me because 'my mod blew up their power supply' on my Nexus comment page, lmao. I've had to explain a couple dozen times to people like this why it's literally not possible for a texture replacer to break their quests or BSoD their computer. Open a new window and access your Skyrim game folder. Unzip the mod and make sure it generates a non-zipped copy of the folder. My skyrim has been at a constant 255 mods for a while, but with LL's amazing mod authors putting out new quality mods I always want to add more. Yeah, it just gets tiring wading through the 1000 users on the Nexus who never read descriptions, don't understand how to unzip a file, flame comment sections if a mod doesn't work with NMM, and then demand that everyone walk them through uninstalling a mod that 'broke their game' when they just set their ugrids to 27 or something. ( Updated : Octo) Transfer the newly downloaded mod to your New Mod folder.

Its an easy way trying new mods and removing them after if you dont like them or they break the game. I personally have a couple of overhaul mods for skyrim that dont use the manager but all the others I use do. Agreed also some mods do not work with mod manager but a lot do. I agree its not the best way to do it but it is the easiest and thats what was asked for, yes you do need the SKSE with some mods but like i mentioned, read the instructions the come with the various mods, the links a for extra files ect are usually in there.

Manually installing skyrim mods