Legible Road Signs High-Res
Improves the textures for road signs so you can easily read them from a distance/horseback.
Remove Lydias Trade Dialog
‘I am sworn to carry your burdens...’ it makes Lydia shut up. For a fun ‘look how weird Craig is’ aside - I didn’t install this for a while as it’s created a narrative arc of: Lydia joins me reluctantly and hates it, complaining all the time > [install mod] > she starts to warm to me as we go on adventures > she genuinely likes me > we get married.
Ash Pile Expiration
Tidies up ash piles after an hour from killed ghosts and vampires.
Fixed Followers Lite
Various fixes to followers including increasing their level cap and being stuck with a rubbish bow.
A lot of mods have been installed and then thrown out again while making this list. Here are the ones that I’m not using but that you might be tempted to install.
The Asteria and other places
New places to go are cropping up all the time, The Asteria has been recommended to me several times. They look very tempting but I daren’t install them because of Lore discrepancies. The Asteria, for example, is a working Dwemer airship, but because working Dwemer *anything* is so rare, this should be crowded by people studying it. If this doesn’t bother you, go ahead, but it’s not for me.
Water FX - Get Wet
It makes you look wet when you drag yourself to shore. Frostfall incorporates the shaders from this already, so if you don’t use Frostfall then feel free to install this.
Horse Armours
Having my horse armoured makes sense, but it shouldn’t be free or added to every single horse in the game. If this were added as a dialog option to upgrade a specific horse, it would be perfect. Maybe Bethesda should take the idea and release it as DLC.
Bigger Giants and Bigger Mammoths
I really wanted these mods to work better - it’s such a simple thing: make the giants and the mammoths bigger. Unfortunately, it makes them go a bit haywire when they’re bigger than the mountain pass they’re trying to walk down, so it has to go.
Enhanced Blood Textures
It’s a nice mod but it clashes with Crimson Tide. Take a look and see which gore you prefer, you animal.
Open Cities Skyrim
As appealing as the idea of ‘Open Cities’ is (the cities don’t load separately, they are part of the wilderness) , I have a cautionary tale with this mod: it broke my game pretty heavily. It broke the map markers for the cities it changes, broke the Breezehome quest, and killed Windhelm to the point that it either crashed or dropped me through the floor every time I went in or out of Dragonsreach. To fix it, I had to load a much earlier save which was incredibly frustrating.
Unofficial Skyrim Patch
I don’t trust it. Not yet. At the moment, Skyrim is being patched by Bethesda and DLC is on the way, and as much as the USP fixes issues, it has to embed itself deep into the game files to do it - and with those files being in a state of flux at the moment, I’d leave it alone - I value my save games too much.
And done. For a quick recap: install the fixes and the essentials, pick through the dramatic changes and the might as wells, and give it a try. There are just over 50 mods here, and they all work nicely together. It might take you a bit of time to get them all installed (it’s massively quicker with the Steam Workshop than what we used to have to do with Skyrim nexus though) but it’ll be well worth your time - especially if you’ve been looking for an excuse to start a new character.
Is it perfect Skyrim after this process? No, of course not. It never will be, leaving the search for perfection a permanent addition to my personal Quest Journal. So, be sure to let us know how you got on, and if you have any suggestions of your own, I’d genuinely love to hear them. Also, if you trust me completely and want to subscribe to all the mods easily, then I’ve bundled them up into a collection that you can subscribe to.
Click to enlarge
Improves the textures for road signs so you can easily read them from a distance/horseback.
Remove Lydias Trade Dialog
‘I am sworn to carry your burdens...’ it makes Lydia shut up. For a fun ‘look how weird Craig is’ aside - I didn’t install this for a while as it’s created a narrative arc of: Lydia joins me reluctantly and hates it, complaining all the time > [install mod] > she starts to warm to me as we go on adventures > she genuinely likes me > we get married.
Ash Pile Expiration
Tidies up ash piles after an hour from killed ghosts and vampires.
Fixed Followers Lite
Various fixes to followers including increasing their level cap and being stuck with a rubbish bow.
The Considered But Not Used
A lot of mods have been installed and then thrown out again while making this list. Here are the ones that I’m not using but that you might be tempted to install.The Asteria and other places
New places to go are cropping up all the time, The Asteria has been recommended to me several times. They look very tempting but I daren’t install them because of Lore discrepancies. The Asteria, for example, is a working Dwemer airship, but because working Dwemer *anything* is so rare, this should be crowded by people studying it. If this doesn’t bother you, go ahead, but it’s not for me.
Water FX - Get Wet
It makes you look wet when you drag yourself to shore. Frostfall incorporates the shaders from this already, so if you don’t use Frostfall then feel free to install this.
Horse Armours
Click to enlarge
Having my horse armoured makes sense, but it shouldn’t be free or added to every single horse in the game. If this were added as a dialog option to upgrade a specific horse, it would be perfect. Maybe Bethesda should take the idea and release it as DLC.
Bigger Giants and Bigger Mammoths
I really wanted these mods to work better - it’s such a simple thing: make the giants and the mammoths bigger. Unfortunately, it makes them go a bit haywire when they’re bigger than the mountain pass they’re trying to walk down, so it has to go.
Enhanced Blood Textures
Click to enlarge
It’s a nice mod but it clashes with Crimson Tide. Take a look and see which gore you prefer, you animal.
Open Cities Skyrim
As appealing as the idea of ‘Open Cities’ is (the cities don’t load separately, they are part of the wilderness) , I have a cautionary tale with this mod: it broke my game pretty heavily. It broke the map markers for the cities it changes, broke the Breezehome quest, and killed Windhelm to the point that it either crashed or dropped me through the floor every time I went in or out of Dragonsreach. To fix it, I had to load a much earlier save which was incredibly frustrating.
Unofficial Skyrim Patch
I don’t trust it. Not yet. At the moment, Skyrim is being patched by Bethesda and DLC is on the way, and as much as the USP fixes issues, it has to embed itself deep into the game files to do it - and with those files being in a state of flux at the moment, I’d leave it alone - I value my save games too much.
And done. For a quick recap: install the fixes and the essentials, pick through the dramatic changes and the might as wells, and give it a try. There are just over 50 mods here, and they all work nicely together. It might take you a bit of time to get them all installed (it’s massively quicker with the Steam Workshop than what we used to have to do with Skyrim nexus though) but it’ll be well worth your time - especially if you’ve been looking for an excuse to start a new character.
Is it perfect Skyrim after this process? No, of course not. It never will be, leaving the search for perfection a permanent addition to my personal Quest Journal. So, be sure to let us know how you got on, and if you have any suggestions of your own, I’d genuinely love to hear them. Also, if you trust me completely and want to subscribe to all the mods easily, then I’ve bundled them up into a collection that you can subscribe to.
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