Comment on Weekly Recommendstions Thread: What are you playing this week?
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 day agoI really need to get into modding Skyrim at some point. After playing and modding Morrowind and Oblivion heavily back in the day I just never got into it with Skyrim. I never played Skyrim much at all frankly. I was too invested in playing and modding New Vegas at the time. And then later on I found other games, and recently over the past years it’s been STALKER Anomaly filling the craving of “heavily moddable sandbox game”.
BurntWits@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
You should really give it a shot. It’s the most modded game on Nexus by a very large margin. To give you an idea, there are 18.7b downloads and 766.5k mods on Nexus. Skyrim Special Edition is in first place with 9.2b/118.9k. Fallout 4 is number two with 1.9b/68.4k, and Oldrim (Skyrim non-special edition) is at third with 1.9b/72.5k. SSE alone is just under half of all downloads, and combine the two Skyrim versions and you’re at nearly 60% of all mod downloads being for Skyrim. Pretty crazy.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 1 day ago
Do you have any large and complete modpacks to recommend? I don’t know that I have it in me to learn the lay of the land from scratch.
Also, have you used the Mantella mod any? It’s actually a similar mod that got me back into STALKER Anomaly. Really fun immersive use of AI for roleplaying and forming attachment to your companions.
BurntWits@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I’ve never used a modpack before, I actually like doing the research and finding which mods to use. In general I actually quite like the look of vanilla Skyrim so my graphics mods tend to be pretty tame.
Here’s some mods I like to use, with links to their Nexus page. A lot of these have prerequisite mods so you’ll need them too obviously, but I didn’t bother writing them out here. The mod pages will link to their required mods.
Absolutely necessary mods for every playthrough, even vanilla:
Skyrim Special Edition Unofficial Patch - fixes many, many bugs and exploits in the game.
Skyrim Script Extender (SKSE64) - not really necessary if you’re just running the mods in this section as all it does is allow certain mods to work, but I always keep it enabled anyway since it doesn’t hurt at all.
SkyUI - if you’re using mouse and keyboard. The original UI is great if you’re using a controller but it’s definitely not designed with M+K in mind. SkyUI makes playing Skyrim with M+K so much nicer. I’m sure it also works well with controller too.
Mods I always use:
A Quality World Map - makes the map much nicer to look at. There’s a few versions, pick your favourite. I like Vivid with Stone Roads personally.
Realistic Water Two - self explanatory. Makes water look way better.
Alternate Start - definitely necessary to me, lets you choose how to start the game. It’s the main reason I’m able to have so many playthroughs of the game.
Immersive Patrols - adds patrols for different factions, and they can interact with each other too.
Cutting Room Floor - adds cut content to the game.
Blended Roads - fixes weird visual problems with some roads.
Footprints - adds footprints when walking in the snow and ash.
Open Cities - makes cities part of the overworld so there’s no load screens when entering/exiting, similar to Morrowind.
JK’s Skyrim - improves cities.
Some mods I’m using right now:
Obscur’s College of Winterhold - vastly improves the college, which is by far the most underdeveloped major area of the game in my opinion.
Lightened Skyrim - removes some objects you can’t actually see (rocks under the ground and stuff) which makes the game run a fair bit smoother without a noticeable difference in the landscape.
Magic Sneak Attacks - using magic while sneaking counts as sneak attacks. Not sure why this isn’t in the base game but it’s getting used on all future magic runs for me now.
Apocalypse - Magic of Skyrim - adds a ton of new spells to the game, great for a mage playthrough.
Ordinator - Perks of Skyrim - overhauls the perk trees. Works really well with Apocalypse.
Remember Lockpick Angle - when lockpicking, if your lockpick breaks, the new one starts in the position where the previous one broke, making it much less annoying.
Instantly Skip Dialogue - lets you skip unskippable dialogue. Most dialogue is skippable but some of the annoying monologues aren’t. This fixes that.
Beyond Reach - content expansion. Haven’t used yet, so I’m not sure what’s involved with it. I’ve got it loaded on my current character but I haven’t explored there. It’s supposed to be really good though.
Beyond Skyrim - Bruma - adds Bruma from Cyrodiil to the map. It’s so cool to see what the city (and surrounding area) looks like post-Oblivion crisis. It’s been a long time since I’ve used it, I’m really looking forward to going back again. It’s probably my favourite content mod.
Medieval Markets - vastly improves the markets in the cities.
Glorious Doors of Skyrim - new door designs. They look way better than vanilla to me.
I’d recommend getting an ENB, as well as Lux. I don’t usually, since I like the vanilla look, but ENB+Lux definitely looks objectively better.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 23 hours ago
Thanks, I’ll definitely save this for some day in the future!
I also tend to enjoy the process of setting up your own custom modlist, but after being deep in that rabbit hole before with Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout: New Vegas, Baldur’s Gate 2 and STALKER (all 4 games + Anomaly) I don’t know if I have it in me to learn the ins and outs of another mod landscape 😅