I’m a bit late to the game here, but for those that don’t know Ian Patterson, Stephen Abel, Paul Connelly, and Brendan Borthwick will launch Skyrim Script Extender 64, or SKSE64, sometime during the mid-part of this March. Skyrim Special Edition is out now for PC, Xbox One and PS4.

I’m sure a lot of invested fans of Skyrim on PC already know quite a bit about the progress of Skyrim Script Extender 64 designed for the 2016 release of Bethesda’s Skyrim Special Edition. However, I’m sure that there are others out there who don’t know that the release for SKSE64 is literally right around the corner.

Some of the things that the team set out to work on includes the hooks needed by SkyUI and MCM and keyboard/input processing. This will enable popular mod functionalities to be ported over, but in the meantime the SKSE will not work with the Special Edition correctly as noted below:

“Skyrim Special Edition has been released, and the original SKSE will not work with it. We are creating SKSE64 for the new 64-bit Special Edition. We appreciate your patience while work continues. Currently we estimate a mid-March time frame for a beta release of SKSE64.”

The good news is that the team noted that excellent progress continues to be made, with a Beta to release in March followed by the full release:

“Our betas are really only betas to get some testing in on them in case we missed something. It should be fully-featured when available in March. And I am still hoping to pull that time in”

This isn’t to say that it will release without any problems, but it is also noted that the next step is to dive into the code to flesh out all of the major systems. That will be followed by a wider path of supporting papryrus classes.

In general the team decoded and hooked up the papyrus functions for weapons, spells, objects, references, forms and event systems. In addition to the above this changes button and control input events, and crosshair reference events.

Though the video below is quite old, it does stand to be a reminder as to what has been accomplished and what will later be added in SKSE64. The video comes in by Behippo (Stephen Abel).