Director's Tools modification for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim game created by Artisanix 2012/02/19. Description: This modification adds two. May 15, 2012 This video features over 260 Skyrim mods so that every Game of Thrones asset from the Season 1 trailer looks just right. Basically it turns out Skyrim is shockingly perfect for recreating Game of Thrones. Skyrim has such a range of Game of Thrones esque.
Skyrim mods are why the game is alive eight years after it was launched.
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Here’s what we’ll set out to do with mods:
- fix bugs and make the game stable
- improve the user interface
- improve the look of the game, from textures to models to animations
- add and deepen the NPCs in the game
- add and deepen world locations
- change gameplay systems to be more challenging or more balanced
- add entirely new gameplay systems
- increase the sense of Skyrim as a place you’re visiting; increase “immersion”
My modlist is on Modwatch.
I encourage you to explore the Nexus a little bit as you work through this list. Look at a category and sort it by downloads, or by 30-day trends. This will let you know what other people have enjoyed a lot, or what’s new & interesting. You can get a long way by looking at the Nexus’s most-endorsed mods list and installing most of them.
If you have never modded Skyrim before
Don’t dive into this post right away. First get set up for modding by following an existing newbie guide. I recommend The Phoenix Flavour. You will need an account on The Nexus, which is where 99% of your mods will come from. It’s probably worth paying for a premium account for a month or two if you have some spare dollars. I use Nexus’s open-source client Vortex instead of MMO2 to manage my mods. This is totally fine despite what you’ll read on Reddit.
Follow the steps in the guide to get all the tools set up and clean your Skyrim master files. No really, do this. You’ll crash if you don’t. Why? Because Bethesda, that’s why.
Rules
Rules of Skyrim mod loading:
- You can have as many textures as you want. Last one loaded wins.
- You can’t have more than 256 non-light plugins.
- You can have as many light plugins as you want. A light plugin is an innovation for Special Edition. Bethesda changed how mod loading works to remove previous limits. This is widely regarded as awesome.
- Many plugins built before this change can be marked as light safely. Your mod tools will tell you.
- Run LOOT. If LOOT tells you to clean things with SSEdit, do it. If LOOT tells you to fix something, fix it. If you don’t know what those tools are, go do the Phoenix Flavour then come back.
- Mods plugins are database files that the game knows how to load. They modify and add game records. Mods can and do modify the same record. Last one to edit the record wins, which is why load order matters. Sometimes you want the last one to win; sometimes you want changes from both mods. This is a conflict that needs a patch.
- SSEdit will allow you to inspect records and create new plugin files that copy in the changes you want. It also has useful tools for highlighting conflicts, so you can examine them. This is how people make patches.
- You can edit mod conflicts yourself with SSEdit, but you don’t have to for popular mods. Download pre-made compatibility patches for mods that conflict. (LOOT will often tell you if you’re missing them.)
- Most of the time all you need to do is download stuff, sort it with LOOT, download a patch or two, and then go.
Visuals
Visuals first, and let’s start with everything that isn’t a person or animal model.
First, do a texture overhaul mod. Doesn’t matter which one, really, just pick one you like. Noble Skyrim is a very popular choice, but it changes the look of the game from the vanilla feel. If you like the new look, yay! I run Skyrim Realistic Overhaul, which is not on the nexus. Over this I layer a selection of higher-res new textures from some texture-makers I like. For example, I like johnrose’s work, so I use most of his textures for cities & objects. I also like winedave’s work (mostly landscape textures).
Definitely install some of the mesh & polygon cleanup mods. The Phoenix Flavor guide will point you to these, but I’ll mention the important ones here.
- Static Mesh Improvement Mod aka SMIM
Mountains
Skyrim has lots of mountains. Make them look good. Make them look majestic. Majestic Mountains (a Cathedral mod!) is the bomb for mountain mods right now. There are a number of great texture variations for it. I run Granite Mountains right now, but you can’t go wrong with most of them. Northside is nifty. (Pro tip: to see a list of things that build on a mod, click the “requirements” reveal dingus on the mod description page. It show both requirements and things-that-require-this-mod.) To polish off your mountains, add some dynamic snow.
Growing things
Definitely do something about trees and flora. There are tons of options here, and some of them are more confusing to set up than others. Tree mods usually push you into running Dyndolod, but you want to do this anyway if you are not running on a potato. My current choice is Myrkvior, which does not yet include grass despite the description.
Now demand a shrubbery.
Definitely run a grass mod. There are a lot of choices here and it gets a lot of modder attention because grass has a very obvious impact on how the outdoors looks. The good ones have a lower fps hit than vanilla grass. I run Northern Cathedral Grass. This is a mashup of Northern Grass & the Cathedral Project’s grass mod. I link the most popular options below, and then include a mod that cleans up clipping issues for all of the above.
- Landscape Fixes for Grass Mods: to go along with whatever one you picked
Water
Water. Skyrim has a lot of rivers and streams and ponds and stuff. The engine has a flow concept in it, but Bethesda’s rush to hit the 11/11/11 release date meant it never really took advantage of this. There are seams and other unsightly graphical problems with the water even after 8 years and versions of Skyrim being released for your toaster. RWT is the most popular choice here, but be prepared to patch. I’m running SSE Water for ENB because I am a hipster. I recommend Cathedral Water to you, as the easiest to cope with.
You can also supplement with additional water textures.
Lighting
Lighting overhauls: Mostly the goal here is realism. Bethesda was more interested in even lighting in interior spaces than realistic lighting. There is a whole mess of mods that make changes either to light number & location and/or to light colors: Relighting Skyrim, Enhanced Lights & FX (ELFX), Realistic Lighting Overhaul, and Enhanced Lighting for ENB (ELE). The Luminosity page explains how all these lighting mods interact with each other. This decision can come down to how dark you like your nights and dungeons. I suggest you start with Luminosity and see where it goes, because Luminosity will let you choose how dark you want everything to be.
Weather
Now you need to make your weather gorgeous. This is a heavy decision, because your ENB choices depend on it. This is also an area with lots of modder activity— Bethesda apparently put a robust weather engine into the game and then didn’t do much with it. You have nowhere near enough information to make a decision, so either you get yourself off to YouTube and watch a million Hodilton videos or you just run Cathedral Weather until you develop an opinion.
What were the skies like when you were young?
They went on forever and they, when I, we lived in Whiterun
and the skies always had little fluffy clouds
and they were long and clear and there were lots of stars at night
They went on forever and they, when I, we lived in Whiterun
and the skies always had little fluffy clouds
and they were long and clear and there were lots of stars at night
ENBs: color grading & shaders
Now we come to ENBs. I have no idea what ENB stands for. I do know that it’s a DLL that injects lighting changes into the game at a deeper level than Reshade does. (Reshade, IIUC, does only post-processing.) This is the single most obvious change you can make to the way your game looks. It will also be the single worst thing you do to your FPS. I get infinite fps in Skyrim with my rig at 4K until I turn on an ENB. They’re worth the hit, though, because Skyrim’s graphical engine was not particularly cutting-edge even in 2011. Its lighting and shadows are beyond dated today.
Once you install the ENB dlls, you’ll need to choose a preset to run. This sets up the particles, the skin shaders, the depth of field, the color grading, and a million other things. (ENBs are deep.) Preset effects range from “where did my FPS go?” to “why the fuck is everything more than 3 feet away blurry?” to “holy shit gorgeous”.
I spent forever choosing a preset. Here are screenshots from that phase. Name of ENB & the fps I got in the scene is in the upper left.
I am going to recommend the Cathedralist’s preset as not being heavy-handed or extreme in its color grading. It’s based on The Truth, which is my overall favorite preset.
- ENB binaries: http://enbdev.com/download_mod_tesskyrimse.htm
- ENB Helper: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/23174
- Cathedralist’s ENB: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/25296
- All presets: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/categories/97/?BH=0
NOW if you feel ambitious, you can explore ENB lights. This turns in-game particles into light sources which is a) very cool and b) makes the game lighting feel far closer to what modern game engines do. Install the ENB Light plugin and then a small selection of mods that turn game objects into light particle sources. Glowing soul gems!
Dynamic levels of detail for distant viewing
Definitely run DynDOLOD, which is both a tool and a plugin. This makes dynamically-loadable levels-of-detail data for distant objects and landscapes. It will make your outdoors views gorgeous. It will not run well on potatoes. You will need to follow instructions for running DynDOLOD, but it goes like this:
- run texgen first to generate textures that DynDOLOD will use
- install the texgen results as a mod, loaded after anything it conflicts with
- run DynDOLOD & set it to as fancy as your rig will allow
- install the DynDOLOD results as a mod, overwriting etc
When do you run Dyndolod? At the very end of your modding, after you’ve added all textures, trees, and buildings.
AT THIS POINT you have a game that looks gorgeous until you get into a town and look at the people, especially the children. Also it’s buggy. And the magic system is inherently broken. And late-game enchanting is insanely overpowered. This will not do, oh no.
Bugfixes
Skyrim is a buggy game, even today. Fortunately modders are on the case.
Install the Phoenix Flavor’s essential list. The only one that I wouldn’t call essential is “Live Another Life”.
Here’s my essential bugfix list:
- Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch: aka USSEP. Required by a lot of mods.
- SKSE: Skyrim Script Extender. Used by a ton of things. This is a set of DLLs that hook into the game to extend the papyrus scripting engine, IIUC. Install the latest, no matter what anybody tells you. It must match your game engine. Instructions here.
- Havok Fix: because the physics engine is locked to framerate in hilarious ways
- Weapons Armor Clothing and Clutter Fixes aka WACCF: fixing up random stuff through the game
User interface
Look, you’re running SkyUI. There is no choice here. On top of this I will recommend a handful of quality-of-life fixes.
- SkyUI: not optional
- Widescreen fix: if you have a widescreen monitor, adjusts SkyUI to use it
- SkyHUD: customize your HUD; optional IMO
- Immersive HUD: toggle-able HUD elements, for a nice clean view of your now-pretty Skyrim
- moreHUD: more data for objects you’re hovering over
- Better MessageBox Controls: a tweak to something you’ll be interacting with a lot
- Better Dialogue Controls: same tweaks to the dialog boxes
- Yes I’m Sure: removes the extra confirmation step from many actions
- A Quality World Map: gives you exactly what it says
- QuickLoot RE: this is not yet updated for the latest SKSE, but when it is, oh when it is, you want it. Fallout-4-style looting.
- RaceMenu: improved character creation. More sliders.
- Stay at the System Page: mostly you press ESC because you want to save, after all
Human models
Bethesda’s character models for Skyrim took some big steps forward from their hilarious work in Oblivion, but they’re still very bad. By modern standards they’re painfully low-poly. The children are so weird-looking that they’re best described as potatoes. There are enormous numbers of Skyrim mods devoted to fixing this. It is absurd. It is occasionally disturbing. I am going to recommend some work/kid-safe easy-to-use well-supported options that will make your people prettier.
You could do a lot worse than just following the Phoenix Flavour’s instructions. I don’t use the NPC overhaul that guide recommends, however. I run Humans, Mer, and Beastfolk instead, because this picks up most of the same mods The Phoenix Flavour recommends and pre-mushes them into a single click install.
If you load into the game and you find gray faces on NPCs you have the infamous dark faces bug, where the game just punts on rendering faces because its pre-rendered data doesn’t match its texture data. The causes of this are subtle and it’s hard to fix without getting in deeper than you want to. If this happens to you, download facegen files for HMB to match the mods you’re running. This provides prerendered face data for the game engine.
You will want to supplement whatever overhaul you pick with body replacements. Beware NSFW nexus pages, but note that all these have safe options for underwear in-game. There are even better males bodies than the Nexus has but they all have dangly bits and require you to log into sites devoted to working dangly bits in Skyrim.
- CBBE: for female human bodies
- Hi Poly Male Body: for male bodies.
- Better Males: another male option, watch out for NSFW screenshots
You have two excellent choices for fixing the kids. Pick one, and then download patches. The patches fix kids added in your other mods.
- RS Children: recommended by Phoenix
- The Kids are Alright: the one I use; has adorable adoptable khajiit kids
You can move on from here and download some mods that beautiful specific NPCs, like Bijin All-in-One and Men of Winter but this is strictly optional.
Animation
- XP32 Maximum Skeleton Special Edition Extended: not optional. This new skeleton is the base for all the animation replacements.
FNIS adds a system for player-exclusive animations, which come from PCEA. This is a little confusing at first. You must install FNIS-compatible animations, then run the tool that builds them into behavior files that the game can use. (I actually run Nemesis now instead of FNIS, because I am a hipster, but the readme there is all the instructions you get for Nemesis. Nemesis supports all the FNIS animations.)
Browse the animation category on the Nexus and pick out what you like. I like these for starters:
Making places more real
There are lots of these. They’re aimed at adding more detail to bare cities, filling out smaller villages that feel unfinished, and adding more regional character to places that Bethesda seems to have run out of time working on. I’m going to recommend the popular, well-patched ones that everybody runs, as being easier to set up and with few to no compatibility problems.
- JK’s Skyrim - adds objects & npcs everywhere
- Dawn of Skyrim, Director’s Cut - more detail in cities, particularly in Whiterun.
- Obscure’s College of Winterhold - Fleshes out one of the major weirdly unfinished areas of the game. I like all of this person’s mods, by the way, and this is the Winterhold overhaul I use.
- Immersive College of Winterhold - More popular than the above. Definitely pick one of the two big Winterhold overhauls
- Arthmoor’s village reworks - This guy is a notorious drama-llama in the modding community, but he’s a comprehensive modder. Install all his village mods.
Now let’s put some people in these towns, and have them doing things.
- AI Overhaul : a must-have IMO
- Tavern AI Fix: tweaks to inn interactions
- More Tavern Idles: more places in taverns for the more people to move around to
- (Less) Lively Inns & Taverns: can be overwhelming, but makes taverns busier
- Diverse Guards: guard variety
- Diverse Skyrim: people variety
- Immersive Patrols: there’s a civil war in progress, after all
- Relationship Dialogue Overhaul: everybody who interacts with you talks more reasonably, using a combo of better scripting & slice-n-diced vanilla dialogue; highly recommended
- Guard Dialogue Overhaul: guards talk more reasonably
- Armor and Clothing Extension aka ACE: people are more reasonably dressed
Pick one mod to add lots of random encounters to your explorations:
- Immersive World Encounters:
Gameplay
As I mentioned earlier, Skyrim’s gameplay systems are pretty broken by default. This has always been true of Elder Scrolls games, and is one of their charms, in my opinion. Leveling Athletics until I could leap over tall buildings in a single bound was one of my favorite things to do in Morrowind. But this gets old after a while, and you want hard combat, or useful Illusion magic, or Enchanting that isn’t totally game-breaking at the cap. As you might expect, Skyrim’s modders are more than up to this challenge. I’m going to recommend the most popular choices.
I run many of Enai Siaion’s mods to overhaul core game systems. People love his mods so much they refer to the collection as “EnaiRim”. They’re good. They’re worth a playthrough, particularly if you know exactly why you hate the vanilla systems.
A selection if you’re feeling overwhelmed by choice:
- Summermyst - super-fun enchanting overhaul
- Apocalypse - magic overhaul
- Vokrii: perk overhaul, more minimalist than the gigantic [Ordinator]( skill tree) overhaul
- Andromeda: standing stones rework
For my very newest play-through I’m replacing three of Enai's mods with SimonMagus’s overhauls:
- Mysticism : magic
- Adamant: perks
- Aetherius: standing stones
Now let’s fix crafting.
- Complete Crafting Overhaul Remastered aka CCOR
- Complete Alchemy & Cooking Overhaul aka CACO
- four million patches for compatibility with the above: to be installed when you’re about done modding
Combat
Want to make combat hard? Yes, you do. It will never be Dark Souls-level hard, but you can definitely make yourself sweat.
- Ultimate Combat: makes it more action-game-ish
- TK Dodge: adds dodging
- TK Recoil: adds weapon recoil, makes hits feel better
- TK Hitstop: makes strikes feel more solid
- Enai’s Smilodon or Wildcat, for more lethal, faster, and more reactive combat; I run Smilodon
- Violens: more control over kill moves
- Athletik Combat: “realistic movement & dodging”
- Encounter Zones Unlocked: Skyrim locks some things to the level you were when you first visited them, but this is boring
- Realistic Melee Range: what it says on the tin
- Archery Gameplay Overhaul - everything from the camera movement to new animations to new systems for removing arrows that are stuck in you & making you bleed. Definitely ups the immersion, but might be too much.
Dargonz [sic]
Because Skyrim is about the dragons, right? Let’s spiff ‘em up and make fighting them a little harder. Install these:
- Bellyache’s Dragon Replacer Pack: better textures
Pick one dragon combat change-up from the list that follows. There are patches to make them all compatible but let me tell you what happens when you install them all: three dragons aggroed on you outside Whiterun when all you have is a hunting bow and iron arrows. Ask me how I know.
- Ultimate Dragons: the one I’m running right now, fun!
- Serio’s Enhanced Dragons Redone: this is pretty good
- Deadly Dragons: as described
- Simply Stronger Dragons: the minimalist’s choice
![Skyrim Nexus Directors Tools Skyrim Nexus Directors Tools](https://staticdelivery.nexusmods.com/mods/110/images/thumbnails/10431-1-1330551403.jpg)
We’re not done making things pretty
![Skyrim Skyrim](https://i.imgur.com/2zffr9e.jpg)
We’ll never be done improving textures and object details, particularly because the only limit to retexturing is the VRAM on your graphics card. Remember, the last-loaded file wins for file conflicts. Just let your mod organizer overwrite the textures you don’t want with the ones you do.
- Inferno: better fire
- Arctic: better ice, frost, snow
- Embers HD: better embers in fires
- Wet and Cold: you now look wet or snow-covered
- Footprints: you leave footprints behind in snow
- Get Snowy: better-looking snow on you
- Deadly Spell Impacts: different effects for different kinds of magic
- Enhanced Blood Textures: splat
- Smoking Torches and Candles: of course
- Bellyache’s Animal and Creature Pack: critters need love too
- Enhanced Landscapes: lots of objects in the landscape
- mathy79’s 3D objects, like all of them
- Book Covers: with titles & stuff!
- Ruins Clutter Improved: does what it says
- Cathedral Armory: a mashup of the best armor, weapons, and clothes mods
- install most of Kajuan’s 4K retextures for objects & critters
- install a selection of Gamwich’s rustic texture packs to fill out your collection
Immersion
Skyrim has a ton of mods that exist for no reason but to make the game more immersive, that is, to make it feel more like a real place. Since in my opinion the core appeal of Skyrim is the way it feels like a real place, this is something I enjoy leaning into. So do Skyrim’s modders.
The cold and windy Skyrim is begging to be turned into a survival game, and modders have done this. The combination of Campfire (tents and fires) plus Frostfall (cold weather survival) are the granddaddies here. Frostfall can be brutally difficult, but really: shouldn’t swimming in that icy river during a blizzard kill you if you don’t get to a fire immediately? And let’s talk about food. Skyrim is full of food, and it has a cooking system. Why oh why is food useless? What if we made food useful and perhaps even required for your continued health?
- Campfire & Frostfall: the version to run for SE if you want them both
- Campfire: if you want just the camping part; recommended
- Hypothermia: a less brutal cold & wet mod; my current choice
- iNeed: you now need to eat, drink, and sleep; my current choice
- Frostbite: lighter-weight cold mod, does not track wetness
- Vitality Mode: lighter-weight needs mod
Moving from survival to just getting around and doing things, here are some mods I love.
- Become a Bard: Find or steal some instruments, and you can start singing for your supper at inns. You’re not very good at first.
- Go To Bed: You now change into pajamas and lie down in bed before sleeping, which you of course now need to do.
- Keep It Clean: you get dirty after a while, and at risk of disease. Fortunately inns now have baths with soap. Surprisingly fun.
- Cutting Room Floor: half-finished content that Bethesda cut to make their ship date, finished off by modders where possible.
- Immersive Movement: you walk slower
[TO BE CONTINUED]