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MordeaniisChaos

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How I made Skyrim a Completely Different Game, and You Can Too! Part One

By MordeaniisChaos 77 Comments

I've recently undergone a journey of ambitious scope. I've already played almost 250 hours of Skyrim at this point, and honestly it's been awhile since I dedicated much time to the game. Now I have a bit of time for it now though, and I wanted to go back into it with a full mod rehaul spectacular.

Desired End Result: A more dynamic, in depth, and survival focused game.

First of all was the gameplay. While I'm a lot less down on Skyrim's combat than most, I still recognize it has flaws, and could be made better. I also have a lot of mechanics in mind that aren't a part of the game but that I'd love to see in the game to help me encourage to play a 'role' within the game. The role I was most interested in was a hunter type who could rely on himself to survive in the wilderness of Skyrim, but who took part in the events of the land. He's a warrior, but one who knows his way behind a bow and how to field dress game. A rugged, capable adventurer.

Secondly, I wanted to pretty up the game. There are a lot of great texture mods for Skyrim, but it's a bit of a balancing act in Skyrim because you've got to be careful not to go too crazy with them, and focus on the important ones. I have a very beefy PC but Skyrim still isn't the best optimized game. My focus for this stuff was improving the lowest points in Skyrim. Things like the shields and environment textures.

Thirdly, I wanted some new content to keep me going. I wanted new placed to explore, new characters to meet, and most of all new gear to play with. I despise anything that doesn't legitimately fit into the lore and tone and aesthetic of Skyrim. I avoid all of the anime bullshit and try to keep to stuff that looks less "special" and amazing, and more functional.

I'll go into more depth on how I achieve these goals on a mod by mod basis when I get into the actual list of mods you'll need.

Getting Started: Essential Tools

First thing's first, you need to go over to the Skyrim Nexus, the premiere source of Skyrim mods. Pick up the Nexus Mod Manager, another essential tool in modding Skyrim, which will help you more easily download and keep up to date your mods, as well as help you control load order (you need to do this if you plan to use many of the primary mods I will be suggesting) and even launch the game. Then, make sure you have the High Resolution Textures downloaded and installed. If you can't run the slightly better textures in that pack, you're not going to get much out of this list. It should be easy to nab this on Steam on the off chance you don't have it yet. You'll also need the latest SkyrimScriptExtender (SKSE) for most of the gameplay relevant mods, so make sure you have this installed first and foremost.

The Mods: Survival Gameplay

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Frostfall - Hypothermia Camping Survival -Chesko

Frostfall is a pretty interesting mod that forms the core of my little "Survival module." It adds two major aspects to Skyrim: Cold Weather Survival and Sustainable Wilderness Living.

The Cold Weather half of the mod simulates various elements of surviving the frigid winds, deep snow drifts, and icy waters of Skyrim. It simulates the player's temperature based on certain variables. When the player is in a cold, snowy area they will receive greater exposure to the cold. And if the player gets wet, they will be even more vulnerable to the cold, especially if they have recently been submerged. Falling into the freezing waters of Skyrim is no longer a matter of casual fun. It becomes dangerous, bringing your temperature down rapidly and making it even more difficult to keep warm without a strong fire. Even the rain can hinder your progress in the wilderness, especially if you don't have a good cloak and hood to keep you dry. In fact, clothing and gear plays a large part in surviving now. You can't wander around in Iron armor for days and come out the other side. You'll freeze to death on the frozen tundra without warm clothing. Thick furs, heavy cloaks, and other insulating items of clothing are a necessity.

The Sustainable Wilderness Living aspect of the mod adds several mechanics around constructing and using a camp to rest, cook, and warm your haggard self. This in particular plays into the other mods in the Survival Module such as Needs and Diseases, as they all center around ensuring you keep well fed, parched, and have shelter to rely on. It brings a new focus on hunting and gathering because you need to have firewood and meat to survive.

The reason I love Frostfall is that it makes Skyrim feel like a place you have to survive, not a place you just sprint around to explore. It's very tense wandering around in the pitch black of midnight, almost unconscious from exhaustion and cold, hoping to happen upon a friendly camp. It also helps to solidify the sense of place. You find familiar hunting grounds, a good place to camp, fellow hunters to barter with. It's pretty awesome.

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Realistic Needs and Diseases &Inns and Taverns: Realistic Room Rental -perseid9

As the name implies, Realistic Needs and Diseases adds more "bodily functions" to Skyrim, primarily hunger, thirst, and disease. This mod is key to reinforcing the need to hunt and adding difficulty to survival.

Like Frostfall, RND is broken up into two chunks, and adds a number of mechanics to serve both elements.

The first half of the equation is the "Needs" part of the title. Your character will get exhausted without sleep, or intoxicated if you overdo the ale. You also need to eat or you'll starve, and suffer the consequences of an empty belly. But to make things easy for you, the mod adds a lot of new recipes, making food much easier to come by as you will usually be close to a source of food, instead of having to seek out one of the sparse ingredients of vanilla Skyrim. But food wasn't the only thing to get attention, beverages see a boost in variety and thirst is another metric you need to keep track of. You'll be able to fill your waterskin at the river if you have need, so it should be easy to keep your thirst at bay.

Playing into the other half of the mod, (Diseases) food also ages, meaning that it can spoil if you've kept it in your pack for too long. On top of food spoiling, the diseases of Skyrim have been rehauled, and become much more serious. When you first come down with an illness, the symptoms are easy to cope with. But as the disease progresses, the effects will become difficult to live with. With luck, all you'll need is some rest in a real bed with a warm fire and stew in your stomach. If that doesn't do the trick though, you'll need to resort to science, or magic to cure what ails you.

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Hunterborn - unuroboros

Hunterborn is a great mod to pair with Frostfall and RND, giving a lot more depth to the actual activity of hunting, which is great because it's something end up doing a lot more of with hunger factoring into your wellbeing.

Normally in Skyrim, hunting is pretty simple. You shoot the deer, and then you might get something from doing that. Like, a ring! But with Hunterborn, loosing that fatal arrow is the simple part. From there, you have a number of options depending on your situation. If you have a camp nearby, you can pick up the carcass and transport it to your camp where you can dress and butcher the animal. You can also harvest organs and the like from animals, and skin the pelt. Once you've gotten what you need from the animal, you can dispose of the remains.

This makes hunting much more active and requires that you do more than just "Hit X" to get everything you can out of the animal. But it also means that you'll be able to harvest realistic amounts of what the animal has to offer, instead of hoping you'll get some meat this time.

Another added bonus is that the mod expands upon the alchemical and culinary fields in Skyrim, adding recipes and ingredients to the game, many of which cater to the hunter in all of us. Hunterborn is an excellent mod for any marksman/ranger type, but fits in with my character as well.

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SkyTEST - etayorius

SkyTEST is pretty to explain but is still a really great mod, which further enhances the player's encounters with the wildlife. It focuses mostly on the behavior of the critters of Skyrim, making them a little more interesting, dynamic, and organic.

With SkyTEST, predators stalk their prey, creatures seek sources of food, and even socialize amongst themselves.

Mods: Gameplay Balance

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Skyrim Redone [SkyRE] - T3nd0

Skyrim Redone is, as the name suggests, an overhaul of Skyrim's base mechanics. Many people had issues with Skyrim's combat and perk system, but for me this is more about giving a more tactile experience. This makes combat more demanding, engaging, and dynamic.

I won't get into the details of it, if you want to read up on the mod's page you can do that, it goes into great depth there.

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Locational Damage - Kahmul

Locational damage is a pretty no-nonsense kind of mod, but it goes a lot further than you might expect. This isn't as simple as damage based on headshots.

Not only are there an entire fourteen separate "zones," from limbs to necks to faces, but each zone has unique possible effects when hit, sometimes even based on what is hitting the zone. Some effects only happen when a bow is used, other only if a bash attack, and other still require a heavy weapon to be used. This gives the player a lot more to do in combat, making things much more intense, engaging, and dynamic.

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SER Market Fix - MD Wolfe

This is a very handy mod to make the economy of Skyrim more sensible and less exploitable. It increases the amount of coin a shop owner might have, and plays with the costs of items to be a little more logical. Very handy if you plan to make a living in Skyrim.

The creator of the mod claims that the prices are being changed based on the values of base materials and demand and more, meaning every item is worth what it's actually worth.

The Mods: Immersion

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Mike Fox's Darker Nights- Mike Fox

This is one of, if not the absolute best, way to fix Skyrim's ridiculous nights. While most solutions use post processing, Darker Nights actually reduces the light in the world, avoiding the image destruction of other options.

There are a number of different version as well, allowing you to get the flavor you prefer.

Its sister mod, Darker Dungeons is an interesting mod, but because it acts upon every interior in the game, some of which end up far too dark (especially inhabited buildings like inns and shops and homes) so I wouldn't suggest that one unless you really really want it. I find Skyrim does fine at keeping interior darkness at an appropriate level, so I'm not using it with Darker Nights.

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Open Cities- Arthmoor

This one is extremely simple to explain: Cities are no longer instanced, meaning you can walk right through the gates and around the strongholds of Skyrim without a loading screen. It's a small but very awesome touch.

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Relighting Skyrim - NovakDalton

Relighting Skyrim is one of my favorite graphics mods for Skyrim because it has one of the most dramatic effects and on one of the most important parts of an engine's quality in my book: lighting.

This mod adds actual light sources where they previously had been missing, and also makes some light sources cast shadows that had not done so in vanilla Skyrim. It's probably not something you'll usually notice when it's there, but you notice when it isn't so I consider this an important mod, especially if you have mods like Darker Dungeons.

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Immersive HUD - Gopher

This is a simple, but very effective mod for my goals with modding skyrim. It allows you to have much greater control over the HUD and when its various elements are on screen. I use it to keep as little on screen as possible at any given time to add to the immersion of the world. No more HUD elements cluttering my view as I trek through the tundra or forests of Skyrim.

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Travel by Boat - Joubarbe

Travel by Boat adds a number of docks and boats around the rivers of Skyrim, allowing the player to use a more contextual "fast travel" to get around Skyrim. I mostly like this because of the added objects in the world, but I was also hugely drawn to the real time ferry along the coast of Skyrim. It's that kind of stuff that really gives me a kick.

The Mods: New Gear!

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Immersive Armors & Immersive Weapons - hothtrooper44

These two great mods add a ton of gear to the game, making the enemies far more varied in their gear and giving you a lot more toys to play with! And the best part? It's all lore friendly.

No silly Final Fantasy swords that look like they were modeled and textured by a 13 year old, just a lot of high quality gear that fits into the world, while still doing a great job of expanding on the weapons and armor of Skyrim.

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Weapons of the Third Era - Created by 747823 & Updated by MasterofShadows

Weapons of the Third Era is a Morrowind inspired weapon pack that adds a little bit of old school Elder Scrolls flavor back into Skyrim. If you're lucky, you just might might happen upon some weaponry imported from the marshes of Morrowind!

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JaySuS Swords- JaySuS

JaySuS Swords focuses, obviously, on bladed weapons, which I like for a couple of reasons. For one, most of the swords in Skyrim are a bit on the fancy side of things.

Swords seem like they should be the most common weapon you see in Skyrim, so I like this adding to the chance you'll see a sword in someone's hand instead of an axe or mace.

JaySuS swords have a very realistic feel to them, and they fit very well with the not so vaguely Viking tone of Skyrim very well. There are a few quirks that I'm not a huge fan of like references to the crusades which obviously didn't occur in the universe that takes place in Skyrim, but it's mostly just on the pommels of swords so you don't ever really notice it.

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Armor Compilation - Omegared99

The armor in this set is not only pretty great, but also serves to add just enough flair here and there. After all, it's only realistic that highborns and jarls and emperors would have finer armor sets than those adventurers and soldiers bear. It has some nods to other worlds, but in this case I'll let it slide because it actually fits in the aesthetic without being overbearingly from-another-world-y.

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Skyforge Shields - Dreogan

Shields don't get a lot of love in Skyrim. There aren't a ton of em, and a lot of them have pretty piss poor textures. Luckily, I have a few fixes for both. Skyforge Shields adds a few pretty awesome looking and of course very lore friendly shields intended to mirror the style of other Skyforge items.

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Bandolier: Bags and Pouches - Dragten

This is a good mod that adds some flair to your character and also gives some neat functionality in the way of added carry capacity. This adds a ton of new bags and pouches and straps and doodads to add a lot of cool details to your character and to help you carry more gear.

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Ritual Armor of Boethiah - Wasbunny

This armor looks pretty awesome, and fits pretty perfectly my idea of what a loyal servant of some dark and malicious deity would earn in through their service in Tamriel. It may be a bit too spectacular for some, but I think it looks too awesome to pass on.

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Insanity's Shields - InsanitySorrow

Another mod to buff up the selection of shields, this adds a number of new Round Shields to the game with over 50 patterns to add some variety to the gear the inhabitants of Skyrim carry.

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Cloaks of Skyrim - Noodles

Cloaks of Skyrim is pretty obvious, but one of my favorite mods to add to the feel of the world: adds cloaks! And not only that, but it interacts in really awesome ways with Frostfall. Skyrim just makes more sense with cloaks, and I'm surprised that they weren't in the game to begin with!

Plus, you look badass with a cloak!

The Rest: Minor Mods and Fixes

Here I'm going to list all of the smaller mods that don't impact the gameplay. For the most part, they are visual mods. For those that have multiple quality levels, I'm pretty much always just picking the highest version.

I'll probably add the Gear Visuals up top with pictures and all that because they really are essential in my opinion, vanilla gear looks pretty terrible. But this list needing to have links took forever and I don't have the patience to continue with this today. That change and the full install guide should be up tomorrow by about 6PM PST. After that I'll consider doing a big screenshot gallery and a video of me showing the basics of how this collection of mods has changed the way I play. Which may or may not be cheesy and "lore" friendly. But will almost certainly involve green screen silliness at some point.

Immersive Skyrim Thunder - Wordeee

No Radial Blur - Holugar

Real Night Eye- Ichibu

Real Rain - PlayerTw0

Sound Propagation Overhaul - rohverK

Supreme Storms - mannygt

Better Dynamic Snow - SparrowPrince

Quality Snowflakes HD - Yuril

Real Shelter - Robinsage

Remove Interior Fog - rgabriel15

Wet and Cold - isoku

Bones and Skeletons Retexture- Andre789

Dark Brotherhood Tenets Restored- Rathinosk

Detailed Rugs - raiserfx

Dragon Glyphs HD - Valstein0

Enhanced Blood Textures - dDefinder1

Hi Res Battle Maps V2- Bosphorus670

High Definition Ivy - Josh Ezzell

Real Effect Candle - Yuril

Roadsigns Redone - Hanaisse

Skyrim Effects Project - Deanoman

Static Mesh Improvement Mod - Brumbek

Ultimate HD Fire Effects -rheadude

Visible Windows - isoku

Gear Retextues

Book of Silence -CaBaL

Hvergelmirs Armor AND Shield Retextures - Hvergelmir

Improved Weapon Enchantments FX - darkman24

Ultra HD Silver Sword - FrankFamily

Virtus Imperii - EcthelionOtW

A Quality World Map - IcePenguin

Alternative Snow - Yuril

AOF Detailed Mountains - AnOldFriend

High Realistic Tundra Moss for AOF Detailed Mountains- Hein84

Benjamin318s Door Retexture - Benjamin318

Benjamin318s Tents - Benjamin318

Better Embers - lavigne77

Distant Decal Fix - SparrowPrince

Footprints - jonwd7

High Quality 3D Map AND LOD- Ethatron

Skyrim HD (All) -NebuLa1

The Skyrim Distance Overhaul - Grieche

W.A.T.E.R. - SparrowPrince

Character Visuals

AOF Believable Hair - AnOldFriend

Beards - Hvergelmir

Brows - Hvergelmir

Beards Unleashed - osdiaus

Benjamin318s Beast Races - Benjamin318

Better Vanilla Hairs - kebrus

High Res Face Maps for Men - Geonox

High Res Warpaint and Dirtmaps for Men - Geonox

Horse HQ Retex - Helendia

Nuska Real Skin for Women - Currently unlisted :(

Ponytail Hairstyles - azarkiowa

Realistic Teeth - Brumbek

Straight Hair Retexture - navetsea

77 Comments

79 Comments

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Funkydupe

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Edited By Funkydupe

This is really cool!

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aerobie

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Edited By aerobie

I tried to give Skyrim another go, but after spending hours putting together all of the mods I wanted, it just crashed at launch, so I figured I would just wipe everything and stick with the basics. I wish there was an easier way to figure all the mod stuff out, I probably have dozens of mods just taking up space, and they're probably not helping trying to get it to run right. I wish there was a way to clear out EVERYTHING without having to redownload the entire game.

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leohere2001

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leohere2001

I know this is an old project (read it a while ago), however, I keep thinking back to this mod suggestgion and wonder if it could be converted to a "Hunger Games style" mod.... Is there anyway to make it multiplayer?? Is there anyway to restrict movement to a certain area?? Is it possible to have slow moving 'hunger' bars and slow 'poison' bars similar to the 'breathe' bars shown when swimming?? weapons could be restricted, backpacks could be left out for people to find (or chests with random goodies).... first aid kits for being ill or injured, water sources, hunting realism..... the possibilities are endless, but is it possible? I don't know....

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geirr

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geirr

If I manage to clean my Skyrim install of the hodgepodge of mods and BOSS and whatnot I've inflicted upon it - I might give this a go over the holidays.

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emfromthesea

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Edited By emfromthesea

@lucidfir said:

I cannae get this to work. Anyone have an idiots guide? Do I need to uninstall and reinstall? Used Nexus for it all.

I'd recommend looking up Gopher. He has in-depth tutorials on just about everything. It's possible your load order is wrong, so consider looking up the program called BOSS.

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LucidFir

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LucidFir

I cannae get this to work. Anyone have an idiots guide? Do I need to uninstall and reinstall? Used Nexus for it all.

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Pie

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Edited By Pie

Argh. Eveything seems to be working but it crashes to desktop when I go to jail or when I pay my bounty. Anyone know anything about that?

Hmm. Seems to be a problem with skyRE

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Soap

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Soap

Looks like I've been using mods all wrong! Are these all/mostly on workshop? (any chance of a collection? :D)

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Pie

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Edited By Pie
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Bollard

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Bollard

@pie: There's another spoiler tag inside the spoiler tag which has the content, at least for me. I've seen that happening on a lot of blogs recently, double spoiler tags. Dunno if it's a bug.

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Pie

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Pie

Is there meant to be stuff when you click on the spoiler tags in the main post? Nothing appears for me

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Claude

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Claude

I used you like a whore on Saturday. But we repented on Sunday. Play the games until they don't play.

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Bollard

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Edited By Bollard

@mordeaniischaos: I'm a little confused about the realistic needs mod - particularly with food. Most food I eat has no effect on my hunger stat, is this normal? Like if I ate bread or something I would not get any less hungry. Are there only certain things you can eat to decrease hunger?

It kinda sucks blindly eating everything in my inventory till I find something that actually fills my character up.

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Bollard

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Edited By Bollard

Finally got round to giving this list a go, but got a crash on startup. Probably should have checked the game still ran after each new mod instead of going for 10 at once ahahah.

Ah, it would be because I got the version of SkyRe which requires the DLC. Dangit.

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TheHT

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TheHT

Favourited. Thanks for this!

One day Skyrim, one day.

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TheManWithNoPlan

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TheManWithNoPlan

I've played too much Skyrim as it is, but it's fascinating to me that through collective modding you can change a game so drastically.

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kerse

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Edited By kerse

this is pretty amazing, the survival stuff specifically sounds like fun

I was pretty disappointed there was no survival mode, especially since there was one in new vegas which I enjoyed, especially with the amount of kinda pointless food items in the game

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MordeaniisChaos

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Edited By MordeaniisChaos

@punkxblaze said:

Oh my god, thank you, I've been looking for a sort of definitive current mod list for a while now, and this seems to fit the bill. I'm gonna have to try this shit out later and have myself an adventure.

Glad I could help! I'll probably be expanding on this, because even as I was doing this blog, especially linking the author pages, I was finding new stuff I didn't have yet. So definitive might be a strong word but it's definitely a strong start :p

@darson said:

Insane. I always felt cloaks should have been implemented in the final game. I actually don't have Skyrim (PC) at the moment because I haven't found many game-changing mods to differentiate the 360 and PC version. I think that's changed.

Yeah, cloaks change how the entire game feels. Any time you're in a snowy area, everyone's got them on, and it's awesome. And it makes the guards stand out a bit more, which I like.

@jaycee13 said:

Nice blog. I already use a lot of these but you've opened my eyes to some new ones so thanks. I think I prefer "Requiem" to "SkyRE" since it's altogether more challenging. Although I think the latter perhaps adds more to the game.

There are definitely other options. But I'm not looking to make the game more "challenging." If anything, I'm trying to balance it out a bit. And SkyRE certainly doesn't make things easy. But I already play on Master or whatever, and that was usually pretty good for me, other than when I was melted by a mage. I want the game to be interesting, not necessarily difficult. Plus, it's a lot harder to survive when you're crippled by disease, hungry, and can't see because it's pitch dark.

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jaycee13

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Edited By jaycee13

Nice blog. I already use a lot of these but you've opened my eyes to some new ones so thanks. I think I prefer "Requiem" to "SkyRE" since it's altogether more challenging. Although I think the latter perhaps adds more to the game.

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Darson

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Darson

Insane. I always felt cloaks should have been implemented in the final game. I actually don't have Skyrim (PC) at the moment because I haven't found many game-changing mods to differentiate the 360 and PC version. I think that's changed.

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vaiz

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Oh my god, thank you, I've been looking for a sort of definitive current mod list for a while now, and this seems to fit the bill. I'm gonna have to try this shit out later and have myself an adventure.

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zeforgotten

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zeforgotten

@mordeaniischaos: Sweet, thanks, time to go nuts with mods!
And yeah, the editor sucks. Especially if you messed up a post and want to edit the post -.-

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MordeaniisChaos

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MordeaniisChaos

@bourbon_warrior: @tarsier: @atomic_dumpling: @sin4profit: @believer258: @darson: @giantstalker: @chavtheworld: @vman: @jouseldelka: @zeforgotten: @starvinggamer: @butler:

Okay, next part is up. All mods are now listed. Please ignore the horrible formatting: I fucking hate the giantbomb text editor, this is as good as I could really get it for the moment and this has all been a bit slower today than I hoped so I won't be putting up the install guide today. That'll be up tomorrow by 6PM PST, should be easy. I'll also put in a gallery and maybe some footage. Video may wait if I decide to do something a bit more "produced."

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MordeaniisChaos

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Edited By MordeaniisChaos

Sorry guys, got caught up in stuff, I'll hopefully have the final part up tomorrow, around 2PM PST once again.

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Bane

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Bane

@mordeaniischaos: You're welcome.

You're right, BOSS isn't perfect, but I use it as a starting point since it's a quick and simple way to get things mostly correct. I run it once, manually order unrecognized plugins, run it again, and then check it against my mod spreadsheet to make sure any critical load orders are correct.

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MordeaniisChaos

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Edited By MordeaniisChaos
@bane said:

You missed two essential tools: BOSS and Wrye Bash.

BOSS is designed to assist mod users in avoiding detrimental conflicts, by setting the correct load order for the plugins they have installed. BOSS also provides thousands of plugin-specific messages, including usage notes, Bash Tag suggestions, requirements, incompatibilities, bug warnings and installation mistake notifications.

What does Wrye Bash do? It makes it safe to try out new mods because it will restore everything to the way it was when you uninstall a mod. It makes more mods compatible with each other by importing information from different mods into a "bashed patch". It allows you to exceed the 255 mod threshold by automatically merging mods for you.

The Bashed Patch is absolutely critical. Any mods that alter the same thing, such as leveled lists, simply will not work correctly without it.

@chavtheworld What I do is make a backup copy of the vanilla Skyrim install. I copy/paste it to somewhere else on my hard drive. That way if you want to start over from scratch just nuke the Skyrim directory under Steam and copy the backup over. If all you want to do is remove a mod or two or three I've found Nexus Mod Manager does a fine job of uninstalling any mods it was used to install.

Wrye Bash is totally an essential, thank you for reminding me. I'll update the post with that :) I'll even give you credit for reminding me. That would have been messy. It's been so damn long since I installed the mods that this stuff matters with.

As for load order, I am a grouch and believe in doing things the right way just because I feel it's important to understand, and BOSS isn't perfect. If you end up with BOSS not making everything work right, you're going to have to do things manually. My way might be messy and all that, but it's working and I have an understanding of what works with what.

I may have to look up how to fix the Bashed Patch stuff because I remember struggling to find the way to get to the dialogue and all of this blog has pretty much obliterated recent memory.

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MordeaniisChaos

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Glad you're not pimping Aesir's armor. Really not into the way that guy talks to people. Treats them like idiots. Plus, his mod is all kinds of fucked if you don't do everything exactly how he wants.

Also, I've been all over Nexus and never spotted Open Cities. I'm glad you brought that to my attention before I went and tried making my own version.

I'm not sure why it's not easier to find. I only found it because I knew of it back in the Oblivion days and wanted to see if it had been made for Skyrim so I did a search. Luckily that was before search was awful and sorted by most recent by default or I never would have found it in all likelihood.

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development

Glad you're not pimping Aesir's armor. Really not into the way that guy talks to people. Treats them like idiots. Plus, his mod is all kinds of fucked if you don't do everything exactly how he wants.

Also, I've been all over Nexus and never spotted Open Cities. I'm glad you brought that to my attention before I went and tried making my own version.

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MordeaniisChaos

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Can anyone recommend a decent ENB?

I'm going to say "no" but hear me out. I'm not saying that because ENBs are inherently evil. I don't use ENB, but I see the appeal. However, they are all wildly different. Some push for a much more stylized look by blowing out the shadows, adding grain, messing with colors. Others are at the opposite end, keeping things vanilla and really only enhancing rendering a bit. And there are plenty in between.

The best way to find a good ENB? Just look through a bunch of ENBs, sorting from the most endorsed down. This'll give you the best quality stuff up top while still showing you a good variety of the different flavors available.

Here's the link to a search on Skyrim Nexus for "ENB" sorted from most to least endorsed (basically "likes," a la Facebook).

This is the best way to find a good ENB for you. The cool thing about ENB is how many profiles there are for it, so browse through the first couple of pages and find one you like instead of just taking a suggestion and thinking "well, it's better than vanilla!" because there just might be something even better, ya never know :)

Keep in mind performance hits can be significant with some ENB mods, so read the description for an idea of how much that'll be.

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@karkarov said:

@mordeaniischaos said:

A) If you don't want immersive survival mods, you should probably know better. Not my job to decide that stuff for people. I made it clear that the mods make just staying alive more engaging and difficult. I'm not going to list every feature. As for tweaking, with my mod set there are only about 5 mods to tweak and they are very quick to tweak the important things, they have a lot of superficial tweaks. It's not that hard.

Also, there are more than 3, absolutely. JaySuS and Third Era are awesome weapon mods that add a ton of new weapons, and there are some good armor and other random gear bits, so please, don't just say " these are the only ones."

Also, I've been playing with this full mod list, I have yet to find a compat issue.

ENB is also more of a screenshot tool in my opinion. Almost all of them are destructive, and as a result can degrade image quality. Plus, performance is sapped enough by my texture mods, which I care a lot more about than tonemapping. I'll take AA and AO over tonemapping and AO any day.

Again, this is just me doing a list of the mods I use. Please understand that. It's not what YOU think is good or worthwhile, it's the stuff I use and enjoy.

Also, SkyRe does change a lot, which means you don't need 40 mods to slowly overhaul the experience. I've yet to run into a mod that was truly incompatible with it.

Fair enough but you are posting it as a "makes skyrim a new and better game" mod list but not mentioning any of the drawbacks to some mods. Also uh.... ENB's do not "destroy the graphics". I have a pc that won't run into issues running ENB's and playing the game at the same time. It is not a "tool for screenshots" to me. Also I can say without any doubt that the game looks vastly better with them on than with them off. Not all ENB are these insanely over saturated crazy high contrast things you see in videos. Just like there are dozens of mods to just "make nights darker" there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ENB's.

As far as JaySus swords go maybe you should mention most of them look plasticy in actual game, have horribly unbalanced stats, don't mesh well with skyrim to begin with (swords that are modeled on real world knightly orders, torn out of other video games shamelessly) and overall are a bit... weird. Just look at the Jaysus dragon bone sword, it does not look like a skyrim weapon, it looks like it is from WoW or Terra. Third era weapons is great, but it is also 90% included in Immersive weapons. I think only a handful of them are missing and if you install both you have repeats of the same weapon in crafting lists. That said the immersive series is guilty of pulling some Witcher armors and weapons.

Finally if you don't want feedback on your list don't post it. I am not some newb who doesn't know what he is talking about and my feedback is factual and not opinion based, I have actually personally used all but like two mods you have listed. I am not saying they all suck ass, I am just letting people know some of them have drawbacks and issues you aren't mentioning.

See, this is the thing. This isn't designed to give people the perfect one size fits all experience. I can't tell people what the "drawbacks" are because some people like huge tits, big asses, anime eyes, and fucking cats with dicks. Some people want to turn the whole thing into an anime monstrosity. Some people want to cram as much content from other franchises as possible and just make it fandom land.

If people look into the mods instead of just blindly installing them, they'll know what the "draw backs" are. If they don't, they'll find out and should be able to sus out what the problem is and remove or modify it. And none of your drawbacks are "factual" they are based on preference. I like JaySuS for the precise reason that they are a little more realistic. It's gives the game added depth, instead of just being a bunch of weapons that use the designs already in the game. In the real world, weapon design varied hugely. Having more down to earth designs to mix in with the other designs helps increase the spectrum of weaponry.

And ENB is destructive. Not hugely if it's done well, but it absolutely is unless all you care about is AO and better shadows. That stuff is fine, because it's just rendering new effects. ENB stuff looks cool, sure. But it doesn't work 100% of the time, unless it's just adding those effects. Most of which I don't really care about. I get AO through my drivers and shadows with .ini tweaks. I don't need Skyrim looking softer, or the colors changed. I like the way the game looks and I don't really enjoy anything that uses tone mapping in a real-time environment, because of the way it can behave unexpectedly in specific cases. It's not as bad as Arma 2, but ENB isn't for me. Simple. I didn't say it was shitty, just that it is what it is and I don't need or desire it. Tonemapping is ultimately a "destructive" process because it alters the original image. And in a realtime environment, that means it has to account for a hell of a lot of different things, and most ENB profiles, even the good ones, have downsides. Some are poorly suited for brightly lit exteriors, some for scenes with high contrast, others have bad implementations of things like lens flare, the list goes on and on. I've never seen an ENB profile that A) was perfect and B) fit within my performance requirements. I'm already running a lot of 2/4k textures with AA and AO, LOD tweaks, .ini tweaks, etc. Those are the things that have priority for me. If they aren't the priority for you? Go use the ENB you like.

I don't care what anyone does with this list, I just want to share the high quality mods I use. And they are high quality, regardless of your taste in the matter. It's difficult to sort through the hundreds (thousands, I'm sure) of mods to find the good ones. The purpose of this list is to spread the word about the stuff that I personally enjoy and that people like me may find enjoyable. It's not intended to give a 4 paragraph review of every mod's pros and cons. It's a list, and very little more, especially at the moment.

I'm not looking for feedback because this isn't for you, it's just me sharing what I've found to be generally of a high quality, and it should be up to the individuals to discover what they like and dislike about the mods. You telling me that my mod choice is shit doesn't do anything for you or me, because I'm going to keep using the mods I like because I will continue to like them because what I want out of Skyrim is different than what you want. This isn't to tell people the exact way to play Skyrim. It's to show how I did it, and show how people can emulate that experience, add the experiences I have to the others they already added, or even adjust the experience I have.

I'm fine with you not wanting what I want. Kindly stop telling other people that there is something wrong with my list when it's just a list of what Iwant and enjoy. See, you can't "feedback" that. You can't tell me that I'm wrong about any of that, because it's my taste.

If you feel so strongly about the issue, you should feel free to go make your own list of the mods you think are awesome. I'd love to see what you are running on your game. I'm not however here for you to critique my opinions and preferences. And I'm sure the other fine people of these forums are plenty capable of making their own assessments.

Spoiler blocked to keep from clogging up the thread.

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TyrellOCP

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It's mod lists like these that make me want to build a PC.

Keep up the good work.

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Can anyone recommend a decent ENB?

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A) If you don't want immersive survival mods, you should probably know better. Not my job to decide that stuff for people. I made it clear that the mods make just staying alive more engaging and difficult. I'm not going to list every feature. As for tweaking, with my mod set there are only about 5 mods to tweak and they are very quick to tweak the important things, they have a lot of superficial tweaks. It's not that hard.

Also, there are more than 3, absolutely. JaySuS and Third Era are awesome weapon mods that add a ton of new weapons, and there are some good armor and other random gear bits, so please, don't just say " these are the only ones."

Also, I've been playing with this full mod list, I have yet to find a compat issue.

ENB is also more of a screenshot tool in my opinion. Almost all of them are destructive, and as a result can degrade image quality. Plus, performance is sapped enough by my texture mods, which I care a lot more about than tonemapping. I'll take AA and AO over tonemapping and AO any day.

Again, this is just me doing a list of the mods I use. Please understand that. It's not what YOU think is good or worthwhile, it's the stuff I use and enjoy.

Also, SkyRe does change a lot, which means you don't need 40 mods to slowly overhaul the experience. I've yet to run into a mod that was truly incompatible with it.

Fair enough but you are posting it as a "makes skyrim a new and better game" mod list but not mentioning any of the drawbacks to some mods. Also uh.... ENB's do not "destroy the graphics". I have a pc that won't run into issues running ENB's and playing the game at the same time. It is not a "tool for screenshots" to me. Also I can say without any doubt that the game looks vastly better with them on than with them off. Not all ENB are these insanely over saturated crazy high contrast things you see in videos. Just like there are dozens of mods to just "make nights darker" there are dozens, if not hundreds, of ENB's.

As far as JaySus swords go maybe you should mention most of them look plasticy in actual game, have horribly unbalanced stats, don't mesh well with skyrim to begin with (swords that are modeled on real world knightly orders, torn out of other video games shamelessly) and overall are a bit... weird. Just look at the Jaysus dragon bone sword, it does not look like a skyrim weapon, it looks like it is from WoW or Terra. Third era weapons is great, but it is also 90% included in Immersive weapons. I think only a handful of them are missing and if you install both you have repeats of the same weapon in crafting lists. That said the immersive series is guilty of pulling some Witcher armors and weapons.

Finally if you don't want feedback on your list don't post it. I am not some newb who doesn't know what he is talking about and my feedback is factual and not opinion based, I have actually personally used all but like two mods you have listed. I am not saying they all suck ass, I am just letting people know some of them have drawbacks and issues you aren't mentioning.

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tourgen

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great mod list, that looks like fun

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@bourbon_warrior: @tarsier: @atomic_dumpling: @sin4profit: @believer258: @darson: @giantstalker: @chavtheworld: @vman: @jouseldelka: @zeforgotten: @starvinggamer: @butler: Part two is up. Not as much as I'd planned, but to be fair, I now believe everything major is up there. The rest is pretty much the graphical chunk, which I'll put up in a less detailed list because there are a lot of small, very particular mods on that fit into that spectrum and I don't feel like writing up descriptions for things like "High Definition Ivy." I'll probably sort those into "important" and "misc." This should include all of the gameplay relevant mods.

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@karkarov said:

Eh you might want to give a bit better warnings on frostfall and other "survival mods". They can make playing the game a serious pain in the ass. If you don't feel immersion is required for you to have fun with skyrim I would not install any survival mods. You don't mention it for example but with "realistic" diseases a mud crab scratch can give you a fatal disease and encountering wildlife period is almost always going to end with you getting a disease of some kind unless you just never get hit. You have to pack a crap ton of remove disease effects and in the end it just becomes busywork of having to constantly remove diseases. Yes many of these settings can be "tweaked" but you get to a point where you look at your mod list and you see 20 then 30 even 50+ mods having to tweak mod by mod because just an insane time sink.

Armor and weapon wise there are only 3 mods worth taking.

1: Immersive Weapons

2: Immersive Armors

3: aMidianborn Book of Silence

If you roll with SkyRe AKA Skyrim Redone I think there is also one other weapon pack it recommends because it has polearms in it, but it is optional. The main thing with SkyRe is you have to be VERY careful about your other mods. SkyRe changes almost everything and there are a boatload of mods out there that will conflict with it.

As an aside you may want to consider talking about ENB's and such. Most of them bake in what darker nights does already while also making the visual appearance of the game well.... better.

God knows I didn't get this screenshot with the in game lighting: It's a Tavern!

A) If you don't want immersive survival mods, you should probably know better. Not my job to decide that stuff for people. I made it clear that the mods make just staying alive more engaging and difficult. I'm not going to list every feature. As for tweaking, with my mod set there are only about 5 mods to tweak and they are very quick to tweak the important things, they have a lot of superficial tweaks. It's not that hard.

Also, there are more than 3, absolutely. JaySuS and Third Era are awesome weapon mods that add a ton of new weapons, and there are some good armor and other random gear bits, so please, don't just say " these are the only ones."
Also, I've been playing with this full mod list, I have yet to find a compat issue.

ENB is also more of a screenshot tool in my opinion. Almost all of them are destructive, and as a result can degrade image quality. Plus, performance is sapped enough by my texture mods, which I care a lot more about than tonemapping. I'll take AA and AO over tonemapping and AO any day.

Again, this is just me doing a list of the mods I use. Please understand that. It's not what YOU think is good or worthwhile, it's the stuff I use and enjoy.

Also, SkyRe does change a lot, which means you don't need 40 mods to slowly overhaul the experience. I've yet to run into a mod that was truly incompatible with it.

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Awesome post! and super weird that I am curently in the process of doing the same thing with my Skyrim install. Like, I was just taking a break from messing with my load-order to browse the forums. I'm into the same idea of doing a semi-survival playthrough of Skyim, with all sorts of mods thrown in to surprise me along the way. I'll definitely incorporate some of these into my mix.

I just finished doing a ton of work with the different graphical mods for the game, as well as a ton of .INI tweaking that paid off nicely. I spent a lot of time tweaking the shadows, which can be a bitch. I also sifted through the roughly 5,000,000 ENB lighting mods out there to pick out the best ones I could. I'll probably add some links to this post later on with my results.

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I love that all of this exists, but I don't have the patience for it.

Thanks for sharing!

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@karkarov said:

Eh you might want to give a bit better warnings on frostfall and other "survival mods". They can make playing the game a serious pain in the ass. If you don't feel immersion is required for you to have fun with skyrim I would not install any survival mods. You don't mention it for example but with "realistic" diseases a mud crab scratch can give you a fatal disease and encountering wildlife period is almost always going to end with you getting a disease of some kind unless you just never get hit. You have to pack a crap ton of remove disease effects and in the end it just becomes busywork of having to constantly remove diseases. Yes many of these settings can be "tweaked" but you get to a point where you look at your mod list and you see 20 then 30 even 50+ mods having to tweak mod by mod because just an insane time sink.

Yeah, thanks for that I'm gonna avoid any 'realism' mods, they never sounded fun, just more work.

I guess the only survival that really works is the one where the game is designed around it, like the STALKER games, and not an add-on (mod) to an easy game.

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You missed two essential tools: BOSS and Wrye Bash.

BOSS is designed to assist mod users in avoiding detrimental conflicts, by setting the correct load order for the plugins they have installed. BOSS also provides thousands of plugin-specific messages, including usage notes, Bash Tag suggestions, requirements, incompatibilities, bug warnings and installation mistake notifications.

What does Wrye Bash do? It makes it safe to try out new mods because it will restore everything to the way it was when you uninstall a mod. It makes more mods compatible with each other by importing information from different mods into a "bashed patch". It allows you to exceed the 255 mod threshold by automatically merging mods for you.

The Bashed Patch is absolutely critical. Any mods that alter the same thing, such as leveled lists, simply will not work correctly without it.

@chavtheworld What I do is make a backup copy of the vanilla Skyrim install. I copy/paste it to somewhere else on my hard drive. That way if you want to start over from scratch just nuke the Skyrim directory under Steam and copy the backup over. If all you want to do is remove a mod or two or three I've found Nexus Mod Manager does a fine job of uninstalling any mods it was used to install.

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Eh you might want to give a bit better warnings on frostfall and other "survival mods". They can make playing the game a serious pain in the ass. If you don't feel immersion is required for you to have fun with skyrim I would not install any survival mods. You don't mention it for example but with "realistic" diseases a mud crab scratch can give you a fatal disease and encountering wildlife period is almost always going to end with you getting a disease of some kind unless you just never get hit. You have to pack a crap ton of remove disease effects and in the end it just becomes busywork of having to constantly remove diseases. Yes many of these settings can be "tweaked" but you get to a point where you look at your mod list and you see 20 then 30 even 50+ mods having to tweak mod by mod because just an insane time sink.

Armor and weapon wise there are only 3 mods worth taking.

1: Immersive Weapons

2: Immersive Armors

3: aMidianborn Book of Silence

If you roll with SkyRe AKA Skyrim Redone I think there is also one other weapon pack it recommends because it has polearms in it, but it is optional. The main thing with SkyRe is you have to be VERY careful about your other mods. SkyRe changes almost everything and there are a boatload of mods out there that will conflict with it.

As an aside you may want to consider talking about ENB's and such. Most of them bake in what darker nights does already while also making the visual appearance of the game well.... better.

God knows I didn't get this screenshot with the in game lighting: It's a Tavern!

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@mordeaniischaos: Thank you so much, just reinstalled Skyrim the other day and went to look at mods and had no idea what to install.

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@tarsier said:

im awating the more to come any word on when ?? ?

I'll be doing another one today, and should have the last one tomorrow. Look for today's around 2PM PST. Should be up by then :)

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im awating the more to come any word on when ?? ?

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I am going to try this sooner or later, thank you -- sounds pretty great :)

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@tonyp2121 said:

Looks awesome, and been meaning to jump back in to Skyrim but every time I load up the game starts boring me after 1 hour in.

My advice would be to start exploring areas you've never been. There's also the option of alternative starts to the game, meaning you don't need to slog through the game's normal intro. Those are great for trying to get back into the game. Other than that, try to find the factions you haven't done, and go do the quests for Jarls. And just explore duder! There are a lot of really cool places to find and explore in Skyrim if you just wander and go into the first interesting looking Dwemer Ruin or cave you find. And don't assume it won't be interesting because "eh, it's just a cave." Some of the coolest moments in Skyrim are in random caves.

The DLC can also help you get back into things, as it gives new content to go through once you get up a bit in levels.

@giantstalker said:

This is great because while I like modding, for Skyrim there were just too many out there - leading me to say damn it all and just not [re]play the game.

I will likely try these out, and if you have any more recommendations (gear wise) that would truly round out what you've started here.

Gear will be going up sometime today. Hopefully early because most of the mods that will be going up today have their own little thumbnails and stuff so I don't have to generate any. I have a good number of mods that add gear, and some of them add a whole lot. And I have one that replaces meshes and textures for "unique" weapons to make them stand out more, which is almost like adding new loot, even if it's just making existing look more aesthetically interesting :)

@believer258 said:

OK, the thing where cities are now open just got first on my priority list. I thought it would be awesome to see open cities like in Morrowind while playing Skyrim - I didn't think it could actually be done, or would be too hard to do.

Seems like I'm going to wrap up Persona 3, then wrap up the Dark Brotherhood quest, then do this and start a new character. I wanted to play someone focused on the bow-and-arrow, anyway.

Have you heard of Midas Magic?

I have heard of it, but in the past when I looked at it I didn't much care for the look of it. I'm actually okay with the Magic in Skyrim, and Skyrim Redone does some significant rehauling of the Magic system already so I'm staying away from most magic mods. I think I have one that adds a spell that basically creates a bunch of stone pillars to shoot out of the ground to trap enemies, but that's about it. Not even sure if I have that anymore, come to think of it. I'll consider looking into it, I'd be curious to see how such mods interact with SkyRE which as I said does some significant rebalancing of vanilla magic.

woah, the survival stuff alone look like it's worth it. I'll have to check these out when i get the rest of the list.

Should be done by tomorrow. The next chunk will deal with the other major mods later today, then the last one will have the smaller more optional/texture mods, any instructions of order of installation and the full load order I use (which is messy but works with these mods). I'll also try to do a video showing off what the game is like with all of the various mods because I need to start putting content on my Youtube channel again.

I have to laugh at how shitty some of these mods sound. I can change a few variables myself, thank you very much. Hell, you don't even need a sandbox kit for that. Anybody who knows how to use a keyboard and read English can edit a few scripts. Not trying to be condescending, but I just think you're giving a few "mods" like Darker Nights too much credit.

Ho-ho! Big man on campus! Look out guys! We got a coder here!

I also described them as simple when they were exactly that.

Darker nights is also one of the few mods that bothers to actually change the light properties at night, instead of weaseling in to change things in a destructive or inefficient way.

It's an awesome mod that does an awesome thing. That's what I care about. It's also a hell of alot easier to say "hey, download this file" than to describe the process of how to achieve the same effect on your own in a blog that already needed spoiler blocks just to keep from being too massive.

Don't like it? Don't use the guide. It's simple.

Also, make a darker nights mod, and show it to me. In fact, make one that's more customizable so I can chose from a large spectrum of levels of darkness from vanilla to completely devoid of light. Then I'll give a flying fuck about what you think deserves to be on someone else's mod list.

Good day sir or madame.