I love the Skyrim modding scene. There's no other game with such a large amount of options or tools, to extensively tweak every playthrough to your needs. No such thing as too much customization, and I'll be damned if every little rock doesn't look just how I want.
As of writing this, I have approxmiately 500 mods of my selection installed, out of a personalized mod library of nearly 700 files. This takes a load of 62 gigabytes of space on my SSD, largely to the amount of high resolution textures I have. Keep in mind the original game (DLC included) is only about 9 GB!
Over the years, lots of people have made their own compilations of their 'must-have' mods in their load order, showcasing the best the community has to offer. However, most of these feature mods everyone has already seen or are pretty outdated. Instead of the usual 'bugfixes and essentials', here are five of my hand-picked gems I'm sure will have you itching to install Skyrim once more.
1) True Storms - Thunder and Rain Redone
Skyrim sure is pretty during clear skies, but why is the weather always like that? The heaviest of rain in the vanilla game might as well be called drizzles. Combine this with a lack of particles or sound effects and you have a rather lackluster storm.
Talented mod author FadingSignal shakes it up with thunder, ambient rain sounds of varying intensity, and new rain/snow particle effects for all your downpour needs.
No amount of screenshots can do this amazing mod justice, I highly recommend you watch it in action here.
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2) The Notice Board
Inspired from other games like The Witcher, this mod adds notice boards to every major hold in Skyrim. I always thought it was ridiculous that bounties and the like could only be given from innkeepers. This mod redistributes and overhauls the system, in a way I think it should have originally been like. Quite refreshing from walking up to every NPC in the game and asking them about their life story.
The best part about this is that you aren't the only one looking at these! Mercenaries seeking gold will actively view and take up the quests themselves. You can sometimes find them in dungeons later, looking to claim that juicy bounty on a bandit or rescue a kidnapped bum. There's even an option to partner up with them, splitting the reward and getting some much needed help for lower leveled players.
But is that what you want? A craftier Dragonborn (with no morals whatsoever) could always use them as pawns, letting them take the brunt of the heat. Eyeing their equipment? Double cross and take them out once the main threat has been dealt with. This opens up a fun bit of encounters and options for you to choose from, after all; you shouldn't be the only one making moves in Skyrim.
Not interested in assisting others? There are many variations of messages, not just chores and to-do lists. They may range from topics of local people, love letters, pranks, nonsense missive, to short stories of all kinds.
3) The Elder Scrolls General Loadscreen Replacer
Skyrim's loading screens are not only boring, but full of shit. Alright to be fair, they are perfectly functional and aren't meant to be very exciting to begin with.
That doesn't mean I should have to sit through the same ones over and over again though! This mod replaces the loading screens in Skyrim with over 200 screenshots that were filtered and processed to ressemble oil paintings. Some of them might be too silly for some people, but for people who hate fun, there's an optional download to exclude those. Here are just a couple of my favourite ones.
4) SeamansFollower
These are companions who will either creep you out or make you laugh. While they don't make very much sense and I'd never be able to take them seriously, I love how they look and refuse to play without this installed.
5) ENB (VandB Nature)
ENB, aka ENBSeries is a graphical modification for many games, including Skyrim. It uses a modified d3d9.dll file, implementing new graphical options such as ambient occlusion, indirect lighting, Bokeh depth-of-field, lens effects, better bloom, HDR, tone maping, parallax maping, vignette, sun rays, detailed shadows, film grain, reflections and much more to come in later versions.
For those of you who didn't understand a single thing I just said: It makes shit look good.
Even if you have the best textures in the world, Skyrim can only overcome it's graphics plateau and aged engine with this mod. It's true that you don't need all these visuals, (it can be painstakingly hard to get all of them to work together) but I would never skip this one.
There are all kinds of different ENB presets to suit all kinds of tastes, which can especially help if you are trying to go for a certain atmosphere in your game. Some are chosen for their colour palettes, others for their latest shaders.
ENB also provides memory fixes that help prevent Skyrim from crashing that everyone can use, simply disable its visual effects if your setup isn't beefy enough, allowing you to benefit with no real cost.
If you do wish to install one, bear in mind that it applies these effects via post-processing, and can be incredibly performance heavy. There are some ENBs that gives you unplayable framerates in exchange for extravagant effects; VandB ENB is not one of them!
I use VandB, as it allows me to play at a stable 60 FPS in most places, dipping to about 40-50 in large-scale battles. I could probably use a 'better looking' one since I have a modest GPU (GTX 970), but VandB excels in a few areas that are of value to me.
For starters, it has compatibility for all the weather mods I enjoy, including the first one on this list. This is unlike some ENBs, which come with many in-built prerequisites that can conflict with your own personal preference of textures or lighting.
Secondly, it looks great at all times of day. Many ENBs look weird at night or dawn, because the authors created a specific look for day, that also amplifies the darkness at night. Some people might like this, but I prefer my nights to not be extremely dark or be pitch black.
Lastly, it's not over the top. I think some ENBs really push the bloom, contrast, and lens flares a bit too much for my liking. It's not to say they're bad, they're just not my style; my eyes are too sensitive for that sort of thing.
Hope you've enjoyed this second peek into my personal modded version of Skyrim. Thanks for reading, I'll see you n'wahs in my next post.
"Sky above, Voice within."
Credits and download:
True Storms - Thunder and Rain Redone by FadingSignal
The Notice Board by MannyGT
The Elder Scrolls General Loadscreen Replacer by TESG
SeamansFollower by m150
VandB ENB Nature by kek668
Check out my original Skyrim post if you haven't already!