Mods-a-plenty! My Current Mod List

Just as a reference, here is the list of mods that I'm currently using to make Skyrim better. These are not in true load order, but roughly organized by category. Want to hear more about any of these, or why I use them? Let me know in the comments and I'll write an article about it!


- Makes the game harder. May lead to increased player character death.


STEP - Skyrim Total Enhancement Project (Extended)
Can't start without STEP, now can I? And neither should you. Fixes and improves basically everything about the vanilla game. I always use it as a baseline before I install anything else

Climates of Tamriel V
Adds of 500 unique weather systems and massively improves the entire atmosphere of the game. Makes winter feel legit cold! No single mod has a greater impact on the feel of Skyrim. I don't recommend installing any of the interior lighting or darker nights options.

Expanded Snow Systems for Climates of Tamriel
More types of snow for even chillier winters!

Vivid Clouds and Fogs
Re-textures clouds, and adds moving fog clouds in valleys and on mountain tops. Pretty!  

Frostfall
Adds hypothermia to the game, so now the cold is an ever present danger! Suddenly those nice warm inns look a lot more inviting.

Campfire
Required for Frostfall, lets you go camping. Meh. Cool people stay at inns :P

Real Shelter
You might notice that rain and snow fall through roofs in Skyrim. Real Shelter will fix that. Now you can hide under an awning to keep out of the rain! 

Open Cities Skyrim 
Removes the load doors on cities, so you can ride your horse into town, among other shenanigans. Open Cities is notorious for breaking every other mod on earth, so I DO NOT recommend it for beginners.

Caliente's Beautiful Bodies Edition [Link is NSFW]
Caliente's Vanilla Outfits for CBBE
STEP includes a male body replacer, but leaves female meshes untouched. When used improperly, CBBE can turn Skyrim into a busty stripclub. Using the "Vanilla Slim" and "Nevernude" options keeps things pretty close to vanilla. Just a bit nicer looking.

Relationship Dialogue Overhaul 
This newer mod is likely to be included in STEP once all of the kinks get worked out. It adds follower commentary and fixes all sorts of issues with NPC dialogue (removing annoying lines,  fixing improper etiquette, etc). For now, it's great, but still a work in progress that requires a lot of patches.

Alternate Start - Live Another Life
Alternate Start - New Beginnings
Tired of riding the carriage into Helgen again and again? Live Another Life lets you pick from dozens of alternate start scenarios. Great for role-playing!

Dragon Combat Overhaul
Makes dragon fights more unpredictable, more dangerous, and more epic. Dragons can now attack in groups, and basically anywhere. This mod is the main reason I use Open Cities... nothing like dragging the city guard into the fight!

Disparity
Overhauls racial differences and perks. Favors exchanges most "once-a-day" abilities for passive ones. Makes different genders and races have different heights. Also adds an optional class system that affects your starting skills among other things.

SXP - Skyrim Experience Project
Replaces the game's experience system. Gives you generic XP for finishing quests or doing basically anything of consequence. No longer must you craft thousands of iron daggers! Choose what skills to level and when.

Ordinator
I got back and forth between several perk overhauls, but I currently use Ordinator. Adds 400+ perks to the game, and allows some really unconventional character builds (combat blacksmith, anyone?).

ASIS - Automatic Spells, Increased Spawns
Gives NPCs access to additional perks/spells based on their level. No longer will level 50 fire mages still only cast "Flames". Also lets NPCs use potions, and can randomly increase spawns (I don't recommend increasing spawns, as it can actually break quests).

Extended UI
Makes the perks screen oh so much nicer to look at. Some mods take advantage of Extended UI in really cool ways.

Less Intrusive HUD II 
Cleans up the HUD a bit. I like this better than iHUD, which is included in STEP.

Wearable Lanterns
Since STEP's lighting enhancements make dungeons actually dark, wearing a lantern on your belt can be pretty handy.

Signs of Skyrim
Adds some really well done and elaborate signs to shops and inns.

VioLens - A Killmove Mod
Lets you control every aspect of those slow-mo killcam sequences, including just turning them off entirely.

EFF - Extensible Follower Framework
Lets you have up to 100 followers and gives you better control over them. Also combines with Convenient Horses (included in STEP) to give your followers horses.

Enhanced Skyrim Factions - Companions
Adds tons of content to the Companions Guild questline, which never felt finished in the vanilla game.

Immersive Patrols - Aggressive
Adds wandering patrols of various factions that will pick fights with the people they aren't supposed to like. Possibly including you. The Imperials and Stormcloaks will now have random battles you might stumble upon in your travels.

Complete Fast Travel Overhaul
Adds more carriages and ferries to the game for more immersive travel.

No Road Predators
Moves the larger wildlife spawns (bears, tigers, etc) away from the main roads and off into the woods.

Posh Mudcrabs
Gives mudcrabs top hats and monocles. Because they were ridiculous anyway.

Swearing Mudcrabs
$%*&^#$!!!!!

Unread Books Glow
Makes it easier to be a bookworm. Useful with SXP, which gives you experience for reading.

Mod Showcase: The Skyrim eXperience Project (SXP)

Skyrim's experience system has always been a bit controversial. In order to gain experience you have to "learn by doing". This is fun when, for example, landing a hit on an enemy in battle is rewarded with a level in One-Handed. It is less fun to master Smithing by crafting roughly eight thousand identical Iron Daggers. Then there are those game breaking exploits like being able to reach level 100 in Illusion by standing around and casting Muffle over and over again.

Realism be damned, there's a reason that D&D rewarded you for actually accomplishing things, not for repeatedly walking into a spike trap while casting a Heal spell. And you can bring that experience (pun intended) back with one of my favorite mods, the Skyrim eXperience Project (SXP). So how does it work?

SXP disables the game's skill learning system and gives you generic XP any time you do something of consequence in the game world. Obviously you get XP for completing quests (more for big quests, less for small quests). You also gain XP by doing all kinds of smaller things including the following:

• Crafting, buying and selling goods
• Harvesting ingredients or mining ore
• Visiting new locations
• Committing crimes (there's a bonus for "Murder" :D)
• Killing enemies (even by using traps or followers)
• Reading new books
• Learning spells
• Picking nirnroot. Specifically nirnroot, which the author seems to have some kind of a thing for.

Once you get your generic experience points, SXP provides a separate levelling screen (through the MCM) where you get to cash in your points for actual levels. Select any skill to purchase a level in it. You can purchase lower levels in skills very easily, but the XP cost ramps up significantly as levels get higher. Player levels are gained just like in vanilla skyrim (get enough skill level increases and the game raises your player level) and perks are also untouched by this mod.

SXP really opened up my game, and at this point I almost never play without it. While the levelling screen is slightly inelegant, I can't think of a better way to implement it. And this is a small price to pay for making levelling fun again. From a role-playing perspective it can be fun to spend the early part of the game exploring, searching for books to read, hiring followers and doing non-combat oriented quests until my character has fully prepared themselves for deep dungeon crawling.

SXP is a lightweight mod that plays well with others and doesn't even conflict with most perk overhauls. You will also need to install the following mods as prerequisites:

• Skyrim Script Extender 
• SkyUI
• Skyrim Community Uncapper (See the SXP install instructions for how to configure the Uncapper)

Recommended:

• Unread Books Glow (now that being a bookworm gets you levels, this is a big help)

Mod Showcase - Skyrim Total Enhancement Project (STEP)

One of the nicest things about Skyrim modding is that the community has continued fixing the game long after Bethesda stopped. The most well known example of this is the Unofficial Skyrim Patch (currently known as USLEEP), which contains literally thousands of bigfixes and is continually updated. Just installing that one mod will do wonders for the game's stability and performance. But what if you want to go farther? Perhaps all the way? What if you want to get SERIOUS?

Then you need the Skyrim Total Enhancement Project (or STEP), the ultimate Skyrim overhaul. STEP is for people who just want the entire game to be improved, without dramatically changing it (that part comes later). The resulting game is very clearly still Skyrim, just superior in every way. The game looks and plays so much better that I can't imagine ever playing without it. Take a look at the main wiki page to see a list of the included mods... it's massive.

 

Obviously there are graphical overhauls, replacing textures and meshes throughout the game and tweaking the ini files to turn on all of the graphic enhancements the game didn't include in the menu. But it goes far deeper than that, fixing elements of gameplay that you probably never even thought of. For example:

• Wildlife will no longer report you to the guards for stealing.
• Light now comes from actual light sources instead of emanating from nowhere in empty rooms.
• Barrels, chests and other containers visibly open when you root around in them.
• Eye slits on closed-face helmets now actually line up with peoples' eyes.
• Clams randomly drop pearls.

Basically everything works better, even stuff you never knew needed fixing. There is a trade-off however, and that is your time. While the end goal of STEP is to have a semi-automated installation process (and they're inching in that direction with each release), there are just too many mods and tools involved for that to work at present. I'm not gonna lie, you will spend several days downloading and installing this. Consider this the start of a new hobby.

But your time will not be wasted. You can be assured that when you are done all of the mods that STEP recommends will play nicely together and the resulting experience will be smoother and more stable than vanilla Skyrim ever was. The project is well supported by the community, and any incompatibilities or conflicts are noticed fairly quickly after being introduced. After you've got STEP set up and working as a base, you can add mods one by one on top of it to customize the game to your liking with minimal headaches.

I can't emphasize how massive the difference is between vanilla Skyrim and STEP. Basically you will give new life to a five year old game and make it new again. Oh, and when you're done, you can add all of the crazy stuff you want and really make Skyrim into whatever you want it to be. I've been doing this for about a year now, and it keeps getting better.

Got any questions? Hit me up in the comments!

Skyrim Modding 101: Intro

I don't think a lot of people understand the true power of Skyrim modding. You might think "I could replace the dragons with Thomas the Tank Engine!" or "I could change my horse into a Unicorn!", and you would be right. But lulz are only the beginning.

Skyrim is uniquely well suited to modding because the story and characters (which are easily the weakest parts of the game) are so easily ignored. The engine is extremely flexible, and elements can easily be dropped into the many places where blank spaces were conveniently left. Entirely new storylines can be enjoyed, and tedious aspects of the game removed. The world of Skyrim is fairly generic fantasy boilerplate, true. But, you can take the building blocks that Bethesda has given us and custom build a game that is entirely to your liking.

In addition, as fun as it is Skyrim is full of bugs and shortcomings. Many questionable design choices were made so that the game would run well on home game consoles at the time. Bethesda has stopped patching it years ago. But modders have systematically repaired, enhanced, and overhauled practically everything in the game, down to the quality of the paper and bindings of the books. And bugfixes continue to be released, which is a godsend in a game this complex.

"But I don't have time for this!", you cry. "Who has time to compare a dozen mods that tweak the textures and color of grass?". Other people on the Internet, that's who. Resources like STEP (the Skyrim Total Enhancement Project) and Skyrim GEMS have done much of the hard work for you. It's surprisingly easy to just make the entire game better, even before you begin radically changing it.

I won't lie, I've spent more time than is probably healthy modding my game. But the only reason I've built and rebuilt my load order so many times is because I enjoy playing around and seeing what I can do. And since I've already run into a ton of problems, I can save you a lot of time by helping you avoid running into them yourself.

Whether you just want to fix the game's bugs, enhance the graphics, overhaul the gameplay, or even fill your game with sexy ladies and hot bodybuilders, I'll help you out. Stay tuned, and let me know what aspects of modding most interest you in the comments!

FUS ROH DO IT!

I'm starting this blog because five years after Skyrim's release it is still the most frequently played game on my computer. Just as I started The Metal Philosopher years ago because my wife was sick of hearing me talk about Videodrome, I have too much to say, too frequently, about Skyrim and this blog will be my outlet.

I picked up Skyrim shortly after its release and got bored with the story very quickly. But I loved the immersive feel of the world, the moody (if squishy) feel of the combat, and most importantly the fact that you could completely ignore the story and have a pretty good time (which I did). After a year or two I did move on to other games and there our story would have ended...

...if I hadn't gotten sucked into the black hole of Skyrim modding and become trapped forever never to return. Almost every aspect of the game has been enhanced, removed, replaced, or tweaked in at least a dozen ways, leading to an almost infinite number of ways to play. And mods keep getting released, faster than I can keep up with them. Just when I think I'm getting bored of the game finally, a new fill-in-the-blank overhaul comes out and I get pulled right back in there again.

This blog will be a vent for my musings on Skyrim mods, the occasional fun gameplay story, and hopefully even tutorials to help aspiring modders / players make the most of a truly fascinating game. Bring it on!