Skyrim On PC Mods

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Hey can anyone with Skyrim on PC recommend mods that will enhance gameplay? Mods that effect things such as difficulty level, economy, add items in the game, stuff like that. I should have a copy for the PC soon and I am really looking forward to trying out some mods! If I find any cool modifications when I have the game, I will let everyone here know.

I'm waiting for Fallout 4 myself. Should be out in a couple of months.

The first thing I'd do, is download the Skyrim SKSE and then install SkyUI. This menu mod massively improves the game experience. I actually haven't enjoyed too many gameplay mods and have primarily modded the game's visuals (with HUGE success). As far as items, Immersive Armors and Jaysus Swords are awesome. Honestly, I'd probably install most of these: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/topalltime using their Nexus Mod Manager. If your computer is powerful enough, Skyrim HD, WATER, SMIM, Skyrim Floral Overhaul and Better Dynamic Snow will blow your mind.

Enhanced Cities (collection): http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/file ... =119264468
This makes each hold look a *lot* more detailed, does not affect gameplay though.

Apocalypse Spell Package: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... d=54586711
This is a compendium of new spells, an essential mod for mages.

Invested Magic: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... d=81259201
Another essential mod for mages. Instead of casting temporary spells (Oakflesh) over and over again, you cast them once and invest some of your magic. It's a simple idea that has a huge effect in the game.

Character Creation Overhaul (collection): http://steamcommunity.com/workshop/file ... d=91132733
Oblivion style character selection and skill progression.

Enhanced High Level Gameplay (plus the Dawnguard patch): http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... /?id=11389 AND http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... =111013106
Makes the enemies more challenging later on in the game.

Increased Merchant Gold Count: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... d=88074066
I got bored of waiting in between sales. All merchants now have 10k gold.

More Dragons: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... /?id=16207
More Dragon Loot: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... s/?id=7423
Spend Dragon Souls For Perks: http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/f ... /?id=13544
I've grouped these together as they are good separately, but awesome together.

I use a ton more but these are the cream of the crop and my internet is at a crawl at the moment. There are some that make the game in to more of a hardcore RPG. Just remember when installing mods; the more you install, the more that can go wrong. Install a few at a time that way if your game crashes you can quickly and easily diagnose the problem.

I'll be in the Bannered Mare drinking mead if you need me.

Unofficial Skyrim Patch.

Add the Unofficial Dawnguard, Hearthfire, and Dragonborn Patches if you have the relevant DLC. They're all by Arthmoor and all available on the Steam Workshop

I haven't tried Wyrmstooth yet, but I have seen nothing but positive reviews for it. I will be installing it soon.

As many have recommended, SkyUI is the essential mod for getting rid of the awful console style menus. Right alongside SkyUI I would put Categorised Favourites Menu, and More Hotkeys Please. Categorised Favourites makes the favourites menu far more expansive and better organised. More Hotkeys Please makes it so you can bind anything to any key, rather than just the number keys. It really helps particularly when you find early on that you really do want to use more hotkeys. It's not just for weapons or spells and potions/poisons, either. You can use it to bind entire sets of equipment to a single key. Useful if you carry around multiple rings/amulets/armor for different purposes.

Better Sorting makes inventory sorting much easier. You'll find quickly that managing your inventory can easily take up half your gameplay time. This renames many items so that they'll appear together in groups by default, using a simple numbering system to differentiate items of similar effect but varying potency. For example, there are five different strengths of many common potions, such as Restore Health. This mod will rename them all so they'll instead be Restore Health I, Restore Health II, and so on.

A Quality World Map puts detail regarding roads onto the world map. The default map can be difficult at times to use to navigate. You'll think you can just head to a location as the crow flies but there will be an enormous, kilometers long cliffside to go around before you can find a path up a mountain. This mod will help keep the map useful.

Warzones - Civil Unrest is by far one of the funnest mods I've seen for Skyrim. If you've played much of the game before you'll know that the entire area is supposed to be affected by civil war, but there's rarely any evidence of this except in dialogue and a handful of quests. This mod will create spawns of small skirmishes, such as between Imperials and Stormcloaks, or other mobs or bandits. It's consistent with the lore and setting. For example when coming across a Stormcloak camp, rather than there being 3 NPCS with nothing of interest to say, there may be a skirmish with about 10-20 people on each side between Imperials and Stormcloaks, stretching over several hundred metres of nearby terrain. It really adds a bit more immersion to the game world, which unmodded can feel a bit static.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rc0DpydUTEw[/youtube]

The last mod is actually more of a graphics tweak, but it does affect gameplay. There are several mods that will change the post-processing, affecting lighting and colour saturation. I personally use Skyrim Enhanced Shaders FX, which is really easy to use and tweak in game. I personally use it not only to enhance the graphics, but to reduce ambient light at night to very low levels. This makes nighttime almost pitch black, and requires that you use torches or light spells, which in the unmodded game are useless.

I also use the Unofficial Skyrim Patches, which are essentially massive bugfixing patches. You won't play a game of Skyrim without encountering some bugs, and these patches go a long way towards reducing the likelihood of that. (I've played Skyrim to completion only after 180 hours, and that's because two previous playthroughs I ran into bugs that prevented me from progressing through the main quest. When this happened a third time I installed this patch which fixed the issue).

Going to try out a bunch of these mods out now! So stoked... Thanks for responding!

I didn't realize the massive amount of high quality mods that were out for Skyrim! I've already got 53 running at the moment and I have not even got past Riverwood.

Apachii hairstyle, really cool and plenty of new hair for every race and both male and female. No helmet mods i enjoyed a lot. There is also a mod that makes your body appear in first person, including shaking of camera when attacked/running. It's SO realistic it's not normal how cool. Unfortunately there were some bugs like not being able to fire arrows well, but perhaps there is a version that has fixed those things.

Does anyone know how to fix the thieves guild bug that happens after you intimidate 3 shop vendors and are escorted to the cistern by brynnjolf? All he does is says hmm once we both enter, and the other thieves attack me for "trespassing"... I've tried using the setstage and player move to console commands but they will not work.

Have you tried the unofficial patches? They fix a lot, though not all of those sort of bugs. If you've already tried setstage commands there's not much else I can give you. Hopefully you have an earlier save.

Yep I have the unofficial patch. I tried going back to past saves, tried deleting all of my saves and starting over, nothing changed except my anger level.

Okay so I found a way over the bug with a fresh install...

Here's some of the mods I really enjoy at the moment that I found to enhance the game.

Firstly, this isn't a big deal mod or anything according to the votes it has got on steam, but it's still one of my favorite mods out of the hundred something I have running at the moment. "The Fox Hole" mod, is a modest and warm looking house mod, with it's own fox inside as a pet. I like how this house doesn't break the lore of the game or spoil you. It's also located in a nice area of the world in Skyrim.

RNG Guards is/was great. It makes guards look and play different from each other. I D/L this one twice a couple days apart, the first time it worked as described, the second time only the helmets changed. I'm still going to rep it though, because changes may come, or perhaps another mod I have is affecting this one in some weird way. Basically almost all guards have new custom armor and/or random different non lore breaking parts of vanilla gear and other various mod gears. They have different boots, chest/leg gear, arm gear, helmets, cloaks, and weapons. This makes sure that when you run into guards, you're not running into the same copy and pasted look for guards. The problem I'm having at the moment is that only helmets are different on the guards, but it can be somewhat fixed by using the console command "resurrect" individually on each guard, but the costumes tend to be the same as one another or very close.

The unofficial patch apparently helps with a lot, so of coarse it's a must have.

SkyUI is great for organization. Categorized Favorites is a great add on that saves a lot of time.

The Enhanced Cities collection, The apocalypse Spell Package, and Enhanced High Level Gameplay mods. Enhanced cities adds a lot of new items to these selected areas, and if I'm right, there is another collection that enhances various villages, farms, and other less important places in the game, ah it's Inns. A Low-Mid level PC can still run these enhancements without problems too. The Apocalypse Spell Package is good for obvious reasons, adds more variety to the game, while for the most part remaining balanced. There are some spells that are OP but you can avoid using them. Enhanced High Level Gameplay sounds great, from what I've read. I have it D/L'd but at the moment I am only level 5, although I notice that monsters are harder on PC when playing Master, than they were on the Xbox 360 console, so maybe the mod affects lower levels too *shrugs.

Random Alternate Start- A great mod for starting off somewhere random. No more long intro screen or spawning in Helgen, and having to do the boring and long intro quest. You also get the choice of starting out with various beginner gear.

XCE - Xenius Character Enhancement- The greatest add on for character creation I have found. Steam has the entire collection of the author's work in one download. I believe it is not compatible with Apachii Hair Styles, which is fine for me, I'm not a fan of the hairstyles it adds, too feminine, females mostly benefit from that mod, and I use masculine looking male characters only.

Climates of Tamriel- Adds thousands of skies, weather effects, ect... Great for pairing up with Realistic lighting and Improved Interior Lighting. It has various settings to choose from. Realistic lighting can make night time very dark, good for realism. Improved Interior Lighting improves lighting duh, and it's more realistic, you see light coming directly from the window, fog, dust, ect... If there is no candles, lanterns, windows, forges, it will be pitch black in the area.

Unread Books Glow- self explanatory.
Improved Skill Books- You just pick up skill books instead of reading them and learning the skill.

Shenk thievery Overhaul- Adds various guards or guard animals to the game so it is harder to steal. A few different ways to enter certain cities. Arrows that have certain effects to help with thievory. Adds thieves into the game that have better AI. and much more...

Better Embers- Fire looks better.

The places collection- Adds lore friendly cities to the game. They look really good too.

All of the top quests collections- Haven't tried them yet, but more things to do means more fun. Non quest packs that I remember- Wyrmstooth, Markath Undercity, and Gersonia Dungeon. Also all of the quests made by "MadFrenchie" on Steam

Enhanced Blood Textures- More blood and better looking blood.

My favorite Skyrim mod so far has been the "Community Uncapper". Basicly it takes the 100 skill cap off all skills and allows you do develope them up to 999. Long story short after leveling a few characters up to level 70+ I kind of hit the wall on my enthusiasm for the game because leveling up more would require me to use skills I had little interest in. The Uncapper has allowed me to keep leveling using the skills I want to. It's not for everyone. Your character will be extremely OP. My main character is some where around level 250 with a 450 Illusion skill and 300 Pickpocket. Also most skills do not have an effect after 200.

Boo, well I had to delete some mods. They had some dirty edits that I couldn't delete, so that's a bummer. Oh well, none of them were really that important, just a couple quest mods, and a few house mods... No big deal.

Here's some more mods I like that I didn't list...

Lanterns Of Skyrim- This mod places lanterns all over the world of Skyrim, in logical places. This is a huge help if you're using realistic lighting and it gets really really dark outside. It's also an aesthetically pleasing mod in my opinion. There are different presets you can use, I'm using the Climates Of Tamriel Preset since I am using Climates Of Tamriel. If you choose no preset, you will have red lights like they were in Oblivion.***The current versions had dirty edits, but they are fixable 100% with TES5Edit.

Enigmatic Oddity recommended "Warzones- Civil Unrest" and I will have to do the same. It's a great mod if you like adding life to the world of Skyrim, in the form of violence. You can adjust your chances of walking into a random war to your liking as well. I like to get just close enough to watch the battles happen, but far away enough so I don't get attacked. That happens sometimes. *** This had some dirty edits, totally fixable though.

The Immersive weapons/armor mods are pretty cool. They add weapons and armor in the game that you can find from NPC's and craft yourself.

Economics Of Skyrim- This mod is really cool, it obviously effects the economy. Things go very in depth with this mod, and I would do it no justice trying to explain how it works, right now. If you like a more realistic economy, get this mod!

Frostfall Mod- A wet and cold based survival mod. This makes the game more immersive and at times more difficult as well. It comes with a camping set too, who doesn't like camping?

Wet and Cold Mod- Adds cool dripping effects, steam effect, snow effects. By choice you can toggle the gameplay effects these things have on you on or off... Really cool mod though, goes well with frostfall. My favorite thing is how when it rains or snows all NPC characters including your followers put on wet/cold gear right away, and different kinds at that. It's kind of cool to see NPC's wearing hoods over their helmets, and robes and cloaks over their other gear.

Here's a big one for me- It's called SKYTEST.... Holy heck do I love this mod. It's all about the animals here, and realism. Animals have their AI changed, and they can breed and have "babies", it's quite interesting. They have needs now, instead of mindlessly wandering the game as filler. They must drink water, so in order to do that they will go near bodies of water to drink. They have to eat, so animals will hunt for food. At times you'll notice certain pack animals together, hunting, or just hanging out together. The largest pack of wolves I've seen I believe is 5. I believe some of these animals are tougher too, I find them much harder to kill than I usually do. Another thing, they can be territorial, even more now, against other animals and their own kind. That's not all... My favorite part of this mod is seeing little tiny fish in water, or the baby foxes. Animal lovers are sure to love this mod, because of the little babies, large herds of deer, and they will probably resent the mod a little bit too, when they are attacked by multiple bears, large packs of wolves, and so on...

83 Willows 101 Bugs Mod- Pretty cool. Just adds more bugs. Flying bugs and ants are what I've noticed so far. They are all very well done.

More Village Animals- I like this one. It may not be for everyone.

Hacrab House- A Gigantic House built on a river, made out of a mudcrab! The house is really small, but it is the bomb!

Ranger Cabins- A set of cabins aimed at rangers placed in various parts of the world. Anyone can move in them though. These are like hitch hikers cabins, free to enter as you please.

Cloaks Of Skyrim- Adds cloaks to the game. If using RNG Guards, guards get them too, but not all wear them, and they don't all wear the same ones.

RNG Guards- I found this is best placed on the top of the load list as far as .esp files go. It's now working correctly this way!

If you guys can't tell, I'm trying to make Skyrim a much more difficult, and involving experience. I've probably played a couple hundred hours of Skyrim on the Xbox 360 console, and I did not even get halfway through ( I made a new character each time my current character died)... Now that I have the PC version I can use mods to enhance my experience by A LOT and yes I am still going to delete each character that dies and re-roll a new one! Last to die was "Ogren Naugtnice" The Orc. He was so young, but he died doing what he loved, killing all that moves. RIP you dreaded, green beast...