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AutoSeasons Wiki

AutoSeasons is a standalone tool for Skyrim Special Edition (also supports Skyrim GOG, Skyrim VR, and Enderal SE) that scans your load order for seasonal texture and mesh variants already sitting on disk, and automatically generates the plugin and Data/Seasons/*.ini files that Seasons of Skyrim reads at runtime to swap them in-game. No manual xEdit or Creation Kit work required.

It exists because building seasonal patches by hand — duplicating hundreds or thousands of records, wiring up every texture set, and hand-writing ini entries — doesn't scale to a real, large modlist. AutoSeasons does that scan and generation for you, in minutes, directly from the textures and meshes your other mods already ship.

Why this exists

AutoSeasons started as a tool to help build a seasonal patch for Vanaheimr. Its real purpose has always been aimed at mod authors first: giving anyone retexturing Skyrim's landscape a way to add seasonal support without having to learn xEdit/CK record duplication just for that. If your mod already follows the naming conventions this wiki documents, you get seasonal support for free — an author only needs to drop a seasonal .nif/.dds variant next to the original, and AutoSeasons generates the plugin duplicate and ini entry. The hope is that more mod authors building with this convention in mind, rather than each inventing their own, makes the whole ecosystem easier for everyone to manage — end users included.

A disclaimer worth keeping in mind: AutoSeasons can't catch everything. Load orders are messy, mods reference things in enough different ways that some records genuinely won't swap correctly no matter how the detection logic is tuned. If something doesn't work as expected, check Limitations and the FAQ first, and feel free to report it - but don't assume every gap is fixable.

Pages

• Installation — getting AutoSeasons running for the first time.
• Using AutoSeasons — a walkthrough of the launcher window, tab by tab.
• Naming Conventions for Mod Authors — the exact file-naming rules AutoSeasons looks for, so your own seasonal textures/meshes get picked up automatically.
• For Mod Authors: A Practical Guide — worked examples with real file layouts for retextures, landscape textures, grass, and PBR.
• Grass Mod Guide — a deep dive specifically for grass mod authors: how Skyrim's grass rendering actually works, both ways to add a seasonal variant, and how to get it showing up in-game at all.
• PBR and Complex Material Support — how AutoSeasons' seasonal duplicates flow into a downstream PGPatcher run for both full PBR and Complex Material (CM).
• Season Mod Conflicts — how AutoSeasons avoids fighting other mods that already do their own seasonal swapping, and how to override that when you want to.
• CLI Reference — running AutoSeasons headless/scripted instead of through the GUI.
• Configuration File — what's actually stored in AutoSeasons_config.json and how to hand-edit or share it.
• Limitations and Known Issues — what AutoSeasons deliberately does not do, and situations where its output needs a second look.
• FAQ — quick answers to the questions that come up most.

The short version

Point AutoSeasons at your merged load order (through Mod Organizer 2, Vortex, or a plain Data folder) and an output folder, and it will:

1. Scan every Static, Activator, Furniture, MovableStatic, Tree, Flora, and LandscapeTexture record for a seasonal sibling texture on disk, recognizing several common naming conventions so it works with texture packs that ship their own naming — not just Seasons of Skyrim's own.
2. Duplicate the matching records with the seasonal texture set, and write the Data/Seasons/*.ini files Seasons of Skyrim reads.
3. Detect PBR-folder texture variants and author matching PBRNIFPatcher json rules, and leave Complex Material (CM) textures in place so a downstream PGPatcher run picks both up correctly.
4. Detect and swap grass meshes per season, and optionally drop grass that has no winter variant so nothing looks out of place poking through snow.
5. Skip records another mod already covers via its own Data/Seasons ini, to avoid fighting that mod's own seasonal work — with a way to override that per mod when you'd rather AutoSeasons win.
6. Run entirely offline against your files. It never touches a running game and never writes outside the output folder you point it at.

AutoSeasons requires Seasons of Skyrim itself to actually see anything change in-game — it only generates the data that mod reads.