Improving Skyrim / Recommended Mods thread (Mostly about Requiem)

[Butter]

If you were only allowed to install 10 mods (5 gameplay and 5 quest mods) which would they be? What are your ten most essential mods that you just can't live without?

Unofficial Patch
SkyUI
Morrowloot Ultimate
Alternate Start - Live Another Life
Ordinator - Perks of Skyrim

Legacy of the Dragonborn
The Forgotten City
Cutting Room Floor

 

[Jack Of Owls]

If you were only allowed to install 10 mods (5 gameplay and 5 quest mods) which would they be? What are your ten most essential mods that you just can't live without?

Unofficial Patch
SkyUI
Morrowloot Ultimate
Alternate Start - Live Another Life
Ordinator - Perks of Skyrim

Legacy of the Dragonborn
The Forgotten City
Cutting Room Floor

From what research I've done, this sounds like a pretty solid list. Legacy of the Dragonborn & The Forgotten City intrigue me, and maybe Requiem and that highly regarded companion mod. A good alternate start is probably a must for me since I kind of hated the shoehorned beginning of vanilla but don't want anything to break. I wish I could avoid the main quest altogether or at least delay it indefinitely until I choose when to begin it. I wish there was a mod that encouraged replayability by not allowing you to be a Jack of All Guilds and gently forced you to focus on a single guild and save the other guild specializations for another playthrough.

ETA: I have to make a general comment about unofficial patches that make me wary of them. I remember installing the highly recommended Unofficial Patch for Oblivion and it actually broke an important guild quest, and I had to look up a workaround on forums and fiddle with console commands to get a certain object back that allowed me to progress. Been very leery of these community or fan patches ever since then.

 

[mastroego]

I think it's a safe bet than they fix more than they break anyway.
Also, they get updates.

Anyway, seriously, if you don't want to get mad, just do a "minimal" setup, you'll still want Requiem BTW.
So basically it's Requiem + UI Mods, fixes and stuff like that.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I think it's a safe bet than they fix more than they break anyway.
Also, they get updates.

Anyway, seriously, if you don't want to get mad, just do a "minimal" setup, you'll still want Requiem BTW.
So basically it's Requiem + UI Mods, fixes and stuff like that.

Sounds good but I think I'll wait for an official release of Requiem for SSE (which is what I have) by the original developers before I do my new playthrough with the modlist. I don't trust that LoversLab hack that patches Requiem for Oldrim to work with SSE. It shouldn't be too long. Right now I'll content myself with either OpenMW or Enderal.

 

[cretin]

Some of these mod packs and lists seem ridiculous. I mean, 400-500 fucking mods (!)? Imagine all the garbage and bloat in there. If you were only allowed to install 10 mods (5 gameplay and 5 quest mods) which would they be? What are your ten most essential mods that you just can't live without? I'm pretty sure I'd do something like this for my first complete playthrough since I disliked vanilla but don't wanna go nuts about it. I like the controlled edginess of certain modders but there are plenty out there who are talentless and a bit ill in the head. I remember playing an eerie quest mod for Oblivion years ago and the main questgiver was disfigured. He told this creepy story about being abducted by a Dark Seducer as a kid and kept as a plaything for her as she tortured him for days. I don't think you'd ever see something like that from Bethesda.

Yes, it is absolutely ridiculous. These people arent curators, they're uploading their personal games after 10 years of autistic modding addiction. It is every bit as grotesque as people who get too much plastic surgery, not because they are objectively improving their looks with each surgery, but simply that they are addicted to changing things.

As for mod recommedations..

been a while since i was actually playing skyrim instead of just uninstalling it but...

I went on a rant a while back that most of the graphics mod you are told are essential are anything but, and often actually look worse (can look at my old posts for examples) but some sort of collective delusion exists in the modding community where bethesda art = BAD, modder art = GOOD. The texture work in the special edition, is largely, very good. Many big retexture packs merely look different by way of color scheme and so on, but arent actually higher quality texture work despite ostensibly often being higher resolution. Good luck trying to explain to a mod addict that higher resolution doesnt automatically make for a better visual, its like trying to explain apples and oranges to a dog. So, i think you should omit most big retexture packs everyone tells you to get, even if only for the fact most of them dont retain the vanilla style/presentation. However, one exception would be some of the cathedral project mods, I'm thinking specifically their grass/landscape mod because it manages to disguise the ground LOD transitions very very well, better than any mod ive ever seen.

Static Mesh Improvement Mod and ruin clutters improved are the only two visual mods i consider "essential". They're simply that good.

Weather mods are very overrated, in fact, possibly the most overrated. Vanilla SE weathers are quite good, and some mods, including ones i like, change the contrast and color for the worse. As far as visuals go, the biggest improvements are ALWAYS the result of an enb, and in fact this is one of the dishonest things the community does is they will compare their modded with enb setups to vanilla without enb and be like see how much better this 80gb of shit looks? and actually its the 400kb enb that is doing 90% of the work.

To me the bigger problem is gameplay, if its not fun/interesting, you'll spend 24 hours modding it, and 2 hours playing it before you get bored. To that end: Requiem, or YASH. There is also the new combat gameplay overhaul which i have not tried, but looks to be very good. I'm not sure about compatibility with these mods.

 

[Funposter]

Some of these mod packs and lists seem ridiculous. I mean, 400-500 fucking mods (!)? Imagine all the garbage and bloat in there. If you were only allowed to install 10 mods (5 gameplay and 5 quest mods) which would they be? What are your ten most essential mods that you just can't live without? I'm pretty sure I'd do something like this for my first complete playthrough since I disliked vanilla but don't wanna go nuts about it. I like the controlled edginess of certain modders but there are plenty out there who are talentless and a bit ill in the head. I remember playing an eerie quest mod for Oblivion years ago and the main questgiver was disfigured. He told this creepy story about being abducted by a Dark Seducer as a kid and kept as a plaything for her as she tortured him for days. I don't think you'd ever see something like that from Bethesda.

The thing is that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the mods in any given pack, and then a huge amount of it ends up being superfluous or relatively minor in terms of what is added. If you had to ask me for five gameplay mods (discounting QOL stuff like SkyUI) it would probably look like:

Morrowloot
Ordinator
Apocalypse, or your spell pack of choice
Ultimate Combat, or your combat overhaul of choice
JK's Skyrim, or (you'll never guess it) your city/town overhaul of choice

I don't have much of an opinion on quest mods. Vigilant is very, very good and I didn't mind Helgen Reborn when I played it. I'm sure there's something to make the College of Winterhold and the Dark Brotherhood less shitty, since the community likes those factions. Oh, I guess Beyond Skyrim: Bruma would count.

I went on a rant a while back that most of the graphics mod you are told are essential are anything but, and often actually look worse (can look at my old posts for examples) but some sort of collective delusion exists in the modding community where bethesda art = BAD, modder art = GOOD. The texture work in the special edition, is largely, very good. Many big retexture packs merely look different by way of color scheme and so on, but arent actually higher quality texture work despite ostensibly often being higher resolution. Good luck trying to explain to a mod addict that higher resolution doesnt automatically make for a better visual, its like trying to explain apples and oranges to a dog. So, i think you should omit most big retexture packs everyone tells you to get, even if only for the fact most of them dont retain the vanilla style/presentation. However, one exception would be some of the cathedral project mods, I'm thinking specifically their grass/landscape mod because it manages to disguise the ground LOD transitions very very well, better than any mod ive ever seen.

Static Mesh Improvement Mod and ruin clutters improved are the only two visual mods i consider "essential". They're simply that good.

I really like to get autistic and go all out with 4K textures and stuff, but you're largely right, and I tend to find that the best texture packs are the ones that stick to the vanilla aesthetic and are therefore less likely to clash with things. However it's also likely that I'm pretty much blind to what vanilla Skyrim really looks like, because I haven't played genuinely vanilla Skyrim for more than 30 minutes since 2011. SMIM is essential for visuals, and I still think the best texture pack for armour and weapons is Amidianborn's from what, 2013?

Weather mods are very overrated, in fact, possibly the most overrated. Vanilla SE weathers are quite good, and some mods, including ones i like, change the contrast and color for the worse. As far as visuals go, the biggest improvements are ALWAYS the result of an enb, and in fact this is one of the dishonest things the community does is they will compare their modded with enb setups to vanilla without enb and be like see how much better this 80gb of shit looks? and actually its the 400kb enb that is doing 90% of the work.

I always end up installing a weather mod but you're absolutely correct that I wouldn't even be able to tell you what they do. Some of them have really bizarre aesthetic choices too, like Vivid Weather, which ends up turning the entire worldspace orange as soon as you get a hint of sunset. An ENB is absolutely essential for playing Skyrim if you ask me, mainly because the vanilla colour balance is very brown and aggressively bland.

 

[cretin]

Some of these mod packs and lists seem ridiculous. I mean, 400-500 fucking mods (!)? Imagine all the garbage and bloat in there. If you were only allowed to install 10 mods (5 gameplay and 5 quest mods) which would they be? What are your ten most essential mods that you just can't live without? I'm pretty sure I'd do something like this for my first complete playthrough since I disliked vanilla but don't wanna go nuts about it. I like the controlled edginess of certain modders but there are plenty out there who are talentless and a bit ill in the head. I remember playing an eerie quest mod for Oblivion years ago and the main questgiver was disfigured. He told this creepy story about being abducted by a Dark Seducer as a kid and kept as a plaything for her as she tortured him for days. I don't think you'd ever see something like that from Bethesda.

The thing is that 90% of the work is done by 10% of the mods in any given pack, and then a huge amount of it ends up being superfluous or relatively minor in terms of what is added. If you had to ask me for five gameplay mods (discounting QOL stuff like SkyUI) it would probably look like:

Morrowloot
Ordinator
Apocalypse, or your spell pack of choice
Ultimate Combat, or your combat overhaul of choice
JK's Skyrim, or (you'll never guess it) your city/town overhaul of choice

I don't have much of an opinion on quest mods. Vigilant is very, very good and I didn't mind Helgen Reborn when I played it. I'm sure there's something to make the College of Winterhold and the Dark Brotherhood less shitty, since the community likes those factions. Oh, I guess Beyond Skyrim: Bruma would count.

I went on a rant a while back that most of the graphics mod you are told are essential are anything but, and often actually look worse (can look at my old posts for examples) but some sort of collective delusion exists in the modding community where bethesda art = BAD, modder art = GOOD. The texture work in the special edition, is largely, very good. Many big retexture packs merely look different by way of color scheme and so on, but arent actually higher quality texture work despite ostensibly often being higher resolution. Good luck trying to explain to a mod addict that higher resolution doesnt automatically make for a better visual, its like trying to explain apples and oranges to a dog. So, i think you should omit most big retexture packs everyone tells you to get, even if only for the fact most of them dont retain the vanilla style/presentation. However, one exception would be some of the cathedral project mods, I'm thinking specifically their grass/landscape mod because it manages to disguise the ground LOD transitions very very well, better than any mod ive ever seen.

Static Mesh Improvement Mod and ruin clutters improved are the only two visual mods i consider "essential". They're simply that good.

I really like to get autistic and go all out with 4K textures and stuff, but you're largely right, and I tend to find that the best texture packs are the ones that stick to the vanilla aesthetic and are therefore less likely to clash with things. However it's also likely that I'm pretty much blind to what vanilla Skyrim really looks like, because I haven't played genuinely vanilla Skyrim for more than 30 minutes since 2011. SMIM is essential for visuals, and I still think the best texture pack for armour and weapons is Amidianborn's from what, 2013?

Weather mods are very overrated, in fact, possibly the most overrated. Vanilla SE weathers are quite good, and some mods, including ones i like, change the contrast and color for the worse. As far as visuals go, the biggest improvements are ALWAYS the result of an enb, and in fact this is one of the dishonest things the community does is they will compare their modded with enb setups to vanilla without enb and be like see how much better this 80gb of shit looks? and actually its the 400kb enb that is doing 90% of the work.

I always end up installing a weather mod but you're absolutely correct that I wouldn't even be able to tell you what they do. Some of them have really bizarre aesthetic choices too, like Vivid Weather, which ends up turning the entire worldspace orange as soon as you get a hint of sunset. An ENB is absolutely essential for playing Skyrim if you ask me, mainly because the vanilla colour balance is very brown and aggressively bland.

this "blindness" you mention i think has largely carried over from legacy skyrim to people unfairly modding skyrim SE out of the box, as well as retaining their old opinions about the texture work and what not. Its a shame - SE is a very good looking game, bethesda did a fine job updating the visuals without doing a complete remaster IMO.

As far as texture mods for armor, yeah amidianborn is quite good but I also like cathedral project's stuff, their armor and weapons mod is a merge of some of the best work out there while staying vanilla friendly.

I'm currently about to try The Phoenix Flavour modlist off of wabbajack because TPF seems like the only sensible one. Everything else is 90+ gb of complete fucking nonsense.

 

[Mexi]

ENB's do look great, but my rig doesn't seem to like them anymore even though my graphics card should be fully surpassing the requirements. When I use ENBs, it drags down my FPS and shutsdown my computer either immediately or after a few minutes. Never figured it out, and I even tried to get help from ENB creators. They said it was an odd issue. More likely, my stupid RX 580 or whatever is oddly fucked, IDK.

Anyways, I used to be someone that stacked up mods, but I stopped doing that. Oftentimes, you get utterly retarded shit. I'm now a minimalist. If I'm playing SE, I usually do YASH and a few of the mandatory fixes. Oh, you also have to have Bijinn. Makes the women really fucking hot. IDK how anyone likes those potato-faced vanilla females. Bijin+bombshell body+skimpy armor+tit physics is a must-have.

By the way, IDK when I'm ever going to finish Skyrim. I just keep restarting because I either read up a new mod, and I'm OCD. If I install a new mod, I have to start from square-one.

 

[Yosharian]

Issues with AMD graphics you say? How surprising

 

[Butter]

By the way, IDK when I'm ever going to finish Skyrim. I just keep restarting because I either read up a new mod, and I'm OCD. If I install a new mod, I have to start from square-one.

Yeah I did that with Oblivion once upon a time. Then I realized I had spent months not completing even a single game and I uninstalled it to go play better things.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I saw a topic title on another forum on Skyrim mods called "My slow descent into Madness (or how I destroyed my game)" (there were many participants in this support group) and I didn't even have to open it to know what it about though I did have a good laugh at the amusing self-reflective nature of its author with that title. Children, there is an important cautionary story to be told here. In fact, many.

I'm thinking of trying out YASH instead of waiting for Requiem SSE. I prefer the idea of lightweight but pithy modifications and the idea of something like Skyrim Ultimate kind of makes my balls want to curl into a fetal ball.

 

[mastroego]

Requiem changes the game into an interesting and relatively believable experience. It may not be perfect, but it will be memorable.
Especially if you didn't already burn yourself out with dozens of previous playthrough attempts, and if you make a point not to tinker with the setup again once you start your challenging rise from the rags of imprisonment.

Also, you wouldn't need to delve into modding madness like many of us did before.

Now, I don't know YASH but does it rebalance Skyrim, or change it into something else, as Requiem does?
If it's the former I strongly advise to reconsider.
Balance is overrated

 

[Mexi]

Requiem changes the game into an interesting and relatively believable experience. It may not be perfect, but it will be memorable.
Especially if you didn't already burn yourself out with dozens of previous playthrough attempts, and if you make a point not to tinker with the setup again once you start your challenging rise from the rags of imprisonment.

Also, you wouldn't need to delve into modding madness like many of us did before.

Now, I don't know YASH but does it rebalance Skyrim, or change it into something else, as Requiem does?
If it's the former I strongly advise to reconsider.
Balance is overrated

It just makes it a hardcore experience that you can modulate with other mods. You can add Wildcat, etc. and make it disgustingly difficult or not. I got killed by a mudcrab then I decided to just go with YASH. It just makes the vanilla experience more bearable. IDK how the guy does it, but I feel like if you want a light, hardcore Skyrim experience, it's the best one out there. I've not seen a better one.

 

[Mexi]

I saw a topic title on another forum on Skyrim mods called "My slow descent into Madness (or how I destroyed my game)" (there were many participants in this support group) and I didn't even have to open it to know what it about though I did have a good laugh at the amusing self-reflective nature of its author with that title. Children, there is an important cautionary story to be told here. In fact, many.

I'm thinking of trying out YASH instead of waiting for Requiem SSE. I prefer the idea of lightweight but pithy modifications and the idea of something like Skyrim Ultimate kind of makes my balls want to curl into a fetal ball.

IDK about the hate some posters have on YASH, but it's lightweight and keeps the vanilla experience without completely changing the basegame like Requiem does. I like both YASH and Requiem, but I guess it depends on what kind of build you are wanting to play. YASH was a perfectly good substitute while I was playing SE ages ago it feels like now. YASH is also modular. Try it with other hardcore overhauls for a completely different experience. Was just about impossibly difficult when I stacked a bunch of combat overhauls over YASH. IDK if anyone here has ever attempted to master the best overhauls mixed with YASH. Would be fucking great if someone took that endeavor. Seems like you can get quite a hardcore setup, but I stopped getting addicted to modding the game so much. It bores me now.

 

[mastroego]

The problem with the Vanilla experience is that it's bland.
Requiem isn't about "hardcore gaming", it reverses the relation player-world. Some things are more challenging as a result, some less.
The world is as it is, it's up to your wits and determination to survive it (at first) and gain increasing agency over it (later).

It's not worth - imho - to go crazy with modding and rebalancing stuff only to end up with a slightly novel "vanilla experience". Requiem is entirely another game in many ways, a game that's even more in tune to the concept of open world and player freedom to begin with, so that would be my choice.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

Yes, I agree. The quests in vanilla seemed very bland and generic indeed, to the point that I quit playing about 1/3 of the way through in my first (and only) attempt at a playthrough, though that could have had more to do with burnout and that i attempted to do everything, every side mission, every walking tour, every NPC dialogue. This is deadly for a game of this size that is ultimately shallow. But I'm not giving up because I have such fond memories of heavily modded Oblivion. I need something to spice things up which is why I'm putting my hope into a good gameplay/overhaul mod that makes it more challenging and satisfying without being needlessly frustrating, and also some good quest mods.

 

[mastroego]

You definitely shouldn't play with that mindset (I've been there). The world is supposed to FEEL limitless, it's not meant to be "consumed" inch by inch.
Quests are a problem though. I'm afraid for better quests you'll basically need a different title. Sure there are quest mods though but I'm not sure they're worth the hassle.

Still even vanilla quests feel better when grounded in a more "realistic" background. You certainly won't be able to waltz in and kill that random Dragon Priest in Requiem, if you know what I mean.

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I remember when Oblivion first came out on Xbox 360 and my nephew was completely enthralled with it and the fact that it was so massive and you could do literally hundreds of quests. He didn't want to miss a single one so one day I walked into his living room and saw him all wide-eyed and gape-mouthed leafing through the official Prima guide for Oblivion that seemed as thick as a telephone book. "Please, God." I thought-prayed to myself "Please kill me before I get like that."

I think one reason I enjoyed that first play-through of Oblivion so many years ago (even vanilla once I modded away the horrible UI with DarNifiedUI) was because, unlike my play-through of Skyrim, I stuck to the main quest (awful as it was) and didn't allow myself to get distracted by all the side quests. So it was relatively mercifully brief. Then I did a few quest mods/dungeon packs, and a few weird mods that multiplied some of the monsters in the dungeons and made them pygmy-sized and I got a big kick out of it. That was the beginnings of The Madness we now know as mod addiction. My addiction eventually became so bad I even played mods by Giskard not realizing who he was and that he was a frothing, raving madman. Starting to sober and on the road to recovery. I did a another more modest play-through of Oblivion a few years later with OOO, some monster packs, and a few high res mods and enjoyed it until I hit that terrible wall of instability with constant CTDs, though I had patched it with the 4GB memory patch. But even then I experienced burnout and couldn't even finish the well-regarded Shivering Isles expansion. But yeah, it was the most important lesson I ever learned playing RPGs - don't try to do everything. It will bring you to your knees before you can complete the main quest. Now I prefer 30-40 hour releases.

If I ever do something like Dragon's Dogma this is certainly how I'd approach it now - stick to the main quest ansd if you encounter a few side quests okay MAYBE do some. But the problem with Elder Scrolls games is the main campaign can be the worst thing about it. I think just random dungeon diving eventually became my favorite thing to do with Elder Scrolls games. I might be a good candidate for the Daggerfall Sickness which I never played because it was too huge and I dislike the idea of procedurally generated dungeons. Speaking of which, I heard there's a mod for Skyrim called Skygerfall which allow you to play the main quest of Daggerfall without all the procedural bloat. Anyone here attempt it?

 

[cretin]

ok here is a prime example of what im talking about. The following a video from a modding guide that includes some 800+ mods and would take you over a week of fucking around to complete... and look how fucking SHIT this looks



Seriously if you have skyrim SE, just install it, and go through the intro sequence and then try to tell me with a straight face that this looks better. IT doesn't, it looks worse, a LOT worse.

 

[Butter]

Not to mention look how fucking long it takes to load.

 

[Hirato]

Not to mention look how fucking long it takes to load.

SSE suffers from the same bug as Fallout 4, in that uncapping the framerate will speed up your load times proportionally.
You can use this mod to disable vsync and/or set a high FPS cap on loading screens https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/18160

 

[Jack Of Owls]

I saw one Skyrim modtard with 1500 mods installed and it was so bogged down it ran like shit through a catheter. These people are ill. Seriously.

 

[racofer]

...it ran like shit through a catheter.

Sounds like Skyrim to me.

 

[anvi]

I played it recently and it ran well and looked mostly photo realistic. I had 52 mods which was a record for me, but it ran ok. A little low fps but enough for me. Beautiful game, I was impressed they have made a framework that other people can finish off. Modders did a good job with textures and ENB and whatnot. UI still sucks. Problem for me is that the game itself is boring. The world is better, the quests were meh but it was only really the combat that fucks it for me. I tried with no mods and with mods and it is just lame no matter how you look at it. If you have played something really good, Skyrim seems really bad. They would be so much better off scrapping the stupid learn by using system and just give people the classes they want to play. A melee class that could be ninja ish. A ranger that has good bow mechanics and preferably more interesting magic and bow abilities etc. Tank, healer, and a couple of casters. Instead we get enough spells and abilities for about a quarter of those classes, and because they are all lumped together it seems nice to the choice of 50 spells and 50 traits or whatever. When really a better game would give you 50 spells and traits for each class and have 12 classes. But they get away with it so whatever. I just keep hoping all these other action RPGs will put the pressure on to make them to do Elder Scrolls properly.

p.s. I sorta like ESO though.

 

[coldcrow]

To the defense of some Skyrim modders: Ultimate skyrim is relatively fast to set up (most of it is automated now, except some ingame settings through MCM menus), runs pretty stable and looks much better than vanilla.

Uncapping the fps fucks up the engine (physics and npc schedules)