It's my hope that this document can be as educational for others as the process of writing it was for me. During the process of writing this document, I managed to personally verify some community observations via disassembly, while also clarifying the scope and scale of other phenomena I had noticed in the past. My goal was to combat misinformation which contradicts what is known through reverse-engineering, while also incorporating observations made in other scenes within the Bethesda RPG modding community by people with other specialties. This document aims to bring these observations together and present a clearer picture of form versioning. Yet scattered findings and observations around the community paint a more complicated picture, and suggest that version 43 content isn't inherently dangerous. There are 圎dit scripts for scanning your load order in search of any version 43 content, and many authors field complaints from users about such content. It's widely understood that version 43 is specific to Classic and heralds Doom and Death, while version 44 is specific to Special and is Right and Pure.

Form versions 43 and 44 Form versions 43 and 44Įver since Skyrim Special Edition's release - and the release of several improperly ported Skyrim Classic mods - the community has paid close attention to form versions, the version numbers embedded into every record in an ESP file.