DepotDownloader VS nifskope

There's also DepotDownloader that lets you download anything, including past version, from Steam https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader

I use this to download historical versions of a game to help with reverse engineering to archive dialogue trees from a game https://dialogue.destiny.report

I'm not sure how you could just download the launcher. You want the Launcher.exe from this version. A quick google brought up this downloader: https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader

Steam Depot Downloader (requires DotNet)

Continuing to add to the confusion on the topic by trying to argue that Steam is DRM because you have to buy the game through Steam is counter-productive. (And apparently Steam's client isn't the only browser available.)

Not by Steam means. I don't know if it's still functional (update on last year) but https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader is what you're looking for and you need to learn the DLCs depot number from SteamDB to feed that information into this program.

use this https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader

If you are looking for a specific version of the game and you own it on steam you could download it using something like DepotDownloader. An example of this would be downloading the first pubic version of the game

You can still rollback with the help of the DepotDownloader: https://github.com/SteamRE/DepotDownloader

Nifskope can also be useful for viewing your nif files so you don’t have to load the game for each test. You do have to set up the resource directories in settings though.

Another thing is how textures are handled in the game. Essentially Skyrim models are kept in .nif files, which, as far as I know, is also an engine-specific filetype. Textures are linked to models via setting the path within those .nif files. Nifskope is the tool you're going to want to interface with those files. I'm afraid that's essentially as much as I can tell you regarding this side of modding - as mentioned, never really dealt with it myself.

Get the morrowind blender plug-in and a compatible version of blender and import the model. I suggest importing a head, helmet or even just the xbase_anim.nif skeleton from the morrowind game files as well so you can compare sizes (if you’re just adding a helm). It took me a bit to make it look good in game. Once you do that and have the plugin enabled, export it as a Morrowind .nif and open it up in Nifskope to make sure the mesh is correctly imported and has textures applied (choose them in Nifskope if they don’t appear). Then you move to the construction kit and add it as a bodypart/armor.

In-game, use More Informative Console to get the name of the object NIF file. Use the Filter in the MO2 Data tab to locate the NIF file in the mod folder. Open the NIF with NifSkope and find the Texture Set definition, which will name the texture files. The MO2 Data tab can also be used to locate those texture files.

I wish you the best of luck with your ideas, the character meshes are an absolute pain to work with because they're in .nif files, which are a proprietary format. I still haven't quite figured out how to wrangle them myself. But definitely grab Nifskope which can view models. There's also a plugin for Blender that loads in NIF files but it doesn't work with NIF files from Special Edition. So you gotta downgrade them with SSE NIF Optimizer if you want to import them into Blender. I hope this saves you the hours of research I had to do to figure all that out!

You'll need Nifskope

It's right here https://github.com/niftools/nifskope/releases/tag/nifskope-1.0.22

I would try DL again, ( https://github.com/niftools/nifskope/releases ), and just put it on your desktop and play it safe.