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skyrim special edition visual mods, a brief discussion
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skyrimse_visual_mods.md

Skyrim mods redux

Skyrim mods are why the game is alive eight years after it was launched. They’re amazing and fantastic and disturbing and inspiring. They fix game bugs, add new features, and make the game look fresh.

I am happily role-playing my way through my social distancing 2020 playthrough, posting ridiculous screenshots. Sometimes people on Twitter ask me for a modlist. My modlist is on Modwatch. But... I'm not sure this helps anyway. This list is names of plugin files, not mod names, so it can be super-confusing to read. Also, let’s be honest: this list of mods is bewildering to the newcomer. If you wanted to mod Skyrim so it looks and plays wonderfully, my modlist would not help you get started.

So what would help you get started? Well, how about Ceejbot’s introduction to Skyrim modding?

This is not a modding guide. A modding guide sets out to help you build a specific modlist that works well together, without bugs. I'll link to some guides, but I will not pretend to give you a step-by-step instruction list. What I will do instead is tell you all the things I wish somebody had told me when I started modding Skyrim.

I'm going to give you a tour of the possibilities. I'd like to introduce you to the ways you can modify your game, to the major options available in each category, with some commentary about individual mods if I happen to have used them. If there's a core concept you need to understand in order to make decisions, I'll try to define it. If I think a mod is an important foundation to build on, I'll say so. If a mod is indicative of a broader category of mods, I'll try to introduce you to the category.

I'll show you how to:

  • fix bugs and stabilize the game
  • improve the user interface
  • improve the visuals, from textures to models to animations
  • add new NPCs and deepen existing NPCs
  • add new world locations and deepen existing ones
  • change gameplay systems to be more challenging or more balanced or both
  • add entirely new gameplay systems
  • increase the sense of Skyrim as a place you’re visiting; increase “immersion”

I encourage you to explore the Nexus as you work through this list. Look at a Nexus 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 acting on this 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. You can use either Vortex or Mod Organizer 2. Vortex is totally fine for light modding despite what you’ll read on Reddit. I think if you get into more complex modlists-- say, something over 500-- you'll be better positioned to appreciate MO2's feature set.

The initial setup steps for the Phoenix Gude are worth following. If you do them, you'll get all the tools set up and clean your Skyrim master files. And about that-- yes, modify the game files. This is fine. The tools are good. You’ll crash if you don’t. Why? Because Bethesda, that’s why.

Consider Wabbajack

If you want a modded game but you don’t want to become an expert, use Wabbajack. This is a tool that replays the steps somebody else took to mod their game, producing an exact replica for you. Why do it this way instead of just downloading a full install? Because intellectual property laws, that’s why. You will need a Nexus premium account for this, because you’re about to do some automated downloading from them. (Really, it’s not much money for a couple of months of premium, and they deserve it for this service.) Wabbajack is amazeballs and it works for more games than just Skyrim. ✨

So if this post makes you feel intimidated instead of excited, snag Wabbajack and do the Phoenix Flavour install with it. Or do the even more vanilla Keizaal modlist! Your game will look great and play great, and you can always come back later to layer on some more mods.

Concepts

What's a mod, anyway? A mod is a collection of files: plugins (.esp files) plus assets like textures, meshes, animations, and scripts. Sometimes the assets are packed into a .bsa archive, sometimes not. All of the files are in well-understood formats that Bethesda uses across many of its games.

To add a mod to your game by hand, you copy its files to the data folder inside your game folder and then you add any plugins its includes to the file ~/AppData/Local/Skyrim Special Edition/plugins.txt. (Don't do this. Use mod organizers to help you do this. But you can look at what they've done for you!)

Many mods are just static assets. Lots of the mods I mention in this article are textures only-- .dds files. You can have as many of these as you want, with no penalty. The last one written when your mods are installed is the one the game engine will use. Choose the resolution of your textures based on how much memory your graphics card has. 2K is the common resolution to use for medium-sized modern cards; you should choose 4K textures for things you'll be looking at closely, like your character's armor. High poly meshes (.nif files for models) are also very effective upgrades for things you'll be looking at often, like your character's body.

Plugins are database files that the game knows how to load. They modify and add game records, which affect everything from the stats on an object, where the object is placed in the game world, how the game world is lit & what weather it has, what NPCs are in that area, and what AI packages they're running. 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.

Plugins come in three-ish flavors: master, regular, and light. Master plugins are marked as master to make the game engine load them before everything else. Skyrim's built-in data, like its expansions, all comes from master-flagged plugins. These usually have the .esm suffix.

Regular plugins are limited: the game engine can load only 256 total. Many older mod tools have this number baked in as a hard limit. Skyrim LE only supports regular plugins.

Skyrim Special Edition added the concept of "light" plugins, which are transformative for Skyrim modding. You used to have to bash and smash mods together to work around the 256 plugin limit, but not with SSE! You can have as many "light" plugins as you want, subject to an engine limit of 4K (I think) open file handles. Many plugins built before this change can be marked as light safely; your mod tools will tell you if you can modify them.

Plugins can depend on other plugins. If a plugin foo.esp uses data added to the game by plugin bar.esp, bar is added to foo as a "master". (Yes, the word means a couple of different things.) This means foo must be loaded after bar.

Load order matters for plugins if they modify the same base game record. The last one to load wins. Your load order can cause your game to crash: if you tried to load foo.esp before bar.esp, in the above example. Plugins need to be sorted to avoid this. You can sort your plugins automatically with LOOT.

Scripts are written in the Papyrus scripting language and compiled into a form that the game engine can execute. The Creation Kit lets you associate scripts with game events, or set them up as AI "packages" for characters and critters. Scripts are not a performance concern all by themselves; counting scripts doesn't tell you what they're doing. Many scripts constantly doing background checks might add up, however. Scripts are the reason many mods cannot be safely uninstalled mid-playthrough: they might be running still in your save file. (The ReSaver tool works around this for the brave by cleaning orphaned objects from your save file. Your game might crash anyway. You have been warned.)

Models and textures are tied to scripts and plugin record data using Bethesda’s official Creation Kit. You probably won’t have to touch this unless you have the dread gray faces bug, about which more later.

To recap:

  • Use Skyrim Special Edition.
  • A "mod" is a bundle of assets, including plugins with code & data and/or static assets like textures.
  • Master plugins are loaded before everything else.
  • You can have at most 256 regular plugins.
  • You can have as many light plugins as you want.
  • You can have as many textures as you want.
  • You can freely change textures and most static assets mid-playthrough.
  • You can (usually) add new plugins mid-playthrough, but removing them is likely to cause crashes.
  • Load order matters: last-loaded wins.

Run LOOT. LOOT is built into Vortex, but you'll need to run it by hand for other mod managers. 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.

SSEdit is an editor for plugin files. It lets you inspect and compare records and create new plugin files that copy in the changes you want. It also has useful tools for highlighting conflicts. SSEdit is the tool people use to make patches. You can edit mod conflicts yourself with SSEdit and make your own patches, which is easier than you think. You won't have to for popular mods: you can find pre-made compatibility patches for popular mods on the Nexus. LOOT will often tell you if you’re missing them and give you direct links.

Most of the time all you need to do is download stuff, sort it with LOOT, download a patch or two, and then go.

A note on performance and debugging

Skyrim launched in 2011, which is several geologic ages ago in graphics card time. The textures were released in 2K resolutions for the Special Edition, but you probably have a graphics card that can handle moar pixelz just fine. However, there are limits to how much gravy you can ladle onto this potato.

Clutter matters. Over-cluttering your environments with objects will eventually begin to tax even a modern system, because of overall engine limitations. You'll notice this outdoors far sooner than in dungeons. Lots of NPCs, objects, and trees in cities will make themselves known with sudden framerate drops when you change your view direction or step into an area where the engine is drawing more than it was a moment ago. Riften and Whiterun are the most likely places you'll feel this. (Whiterun is the focus of a lot of modding, because of its importance to gameplay.)

You'll also eventually tax your VRAM. Spend your texture resolution budget on things you'll look at often. The vanilla texture resolution for most things in SE is 2k. Go up for armor and clothing! Probably you shouldn't blow your VRAM budget on that neat septim retexture.

If you find yourself bewildered

In some cases with bewildering variety, I'll call out a safe starter choice with 😅. This isn't meant to claim it's the best, just that it'll get most people started without stress. You can also just stick with what the Phoenix Flavour chooses!

In cases where I think you cannot skip the mod for foundational reasons, I'll mark it with ✅. I'll use ⚠️ to mark mods that are popular but known to have problems. It's possible that I might use 🚫 to indicate something you should definitely not do even if you read elsewhere that you should.

If you've followed my advice and used a modding guide, you'll have the guide authors' choices for many of these categories. What I offer is a sampling of the other options out there. I'm also going to try to introduce you to entire categories of mod, which the guide you used might not have had any opinions on. Think of this as a survey of the territory, a lightly-curated sampling of the tons of stuff on the Nexus.

Foundations

Skyrim is a buggy game, even today. Fortunately modders are on the case. Definitely do install the SSE engine fix mods. If you followed a sensible guide, it'll start you off with the foundational fixes. I recap them here:

  • ✅ 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.
  • ✅ Address Library for SKSE Plugins - frees many plugins from needing to be updated every time a new version of the game engine & SKSE come out.
  • ✅ SSE Engine Fixes
  • Havok Fix: because the physics engine is locked to framerate in hilarious ways, if you want to go over 60fps you'll want this or another dll with it built in
  • ✅ SSE Display Tweaks: has the HAVOK fix built-in and does a lot more
  • ✅ .NET script framework: adds crash logging you will rely on

Those mods cover engine behavior fixes. You'll also want some gameplay bug fixes to get yourself started.Here’s are some bedrock choices:

User interface

Look, you’re running SkyUI. There is no choice here; it is the foundation of all UI modification. On top of this I will recommend a handful of quality-of-life fixes.

Visuals

This is probably why you wanted to mod the game, so let's start our tour here with everything that isn’t a person or animal model. So let’s pour on the textures!

Start by choosing a major texture overhaul mod. This category of mod sets out to cover a lot of ground and replace most or all major visible textures. Doesn’t matter which one, really, just pick one you like. You will eventually overlay many smaller texture packs on top of your major texture choices, but this is fine. Remember that last one loaded wins. Also, you can pick and choose here— many texture overhauls are available as smaller modules.

There are many to choose from, so I’ll select some standouts for you:

Here’s a video tour for Pfuscher & Skyland that covers many of these texture recommendations! Here’s one that shows off SRO & Noble Skyrim used together.

Definitely install the core mesh & polygon cleanup mods. The Phoenix Flavor guide points you to these, but I mention the important ones here. These mods improve the small things you’ll see in every dungeon crawl and in every walk through a village, so don’t skip them.

Mountains

Skyrim is famously mountainous. Make those mountains look good, because you’re going to be seeing them wreathed in cloud in the distance quite a lot. Hodilton has an excellent mountains comparison video showing you some of the best options, but there are a lot of options. I mean, a lot. This list doesn’t exhaust the possibilities on the Nexus.

😅 If you're stuck on choices here, go with Majestic Mountains Northside.

Supplements:

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; Dyndolod is discussed later. My current choice is Myrkvior, which does not yet include grass despite the description. Myrkvior offers a ton of files to download; select the ones that appeal to you, or just follow the author’s recommendations.

Here are your major options:

The inevitable Hodilton comparison video for tree mods. If you're stuck, choose Myrkvior and just install the main file.

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. Hodilton’s comparison video is helpful but doesn’t cover the newer mods like the Cathedral one. Supplement with videos like this one, and search YouTube for showcase videos. I link a selection of popular and recent grass mods below.

Now you have grass growing in places it shouldn't be growing. You now must install mods to fix the problem caused by your other mods.

Now demand a shrubbery.

  • 😅 Cathedral Plants: retextures of vanilla plants
  • Skyrim 3D landscapes: flora and ground covers
  • Unique Flowers & Plants: hand-placed flowers & plants all across Skyrim
  • Enhanced Landscapes: thousands of objects scattered all over, from rocks to trees; not compatible with 3d landscapes, sadly, but I love this.
  • Immersive Fallen Trees: what it says; also makes the landscape more real by littering it with things you might find in real forests (also the river bridges are convenient!)
  • Blended Roads Redone: not technically a foliage mod, but makes the roads blend into their landscapes more; requires the base Blended Roads mod.

Water

Water. Skyrim has a lot of rivers and streams and ponds and waterfalls and oceans. You’ll be near a lot of water; why not make it look better? The engine has a flow concept in it, but Bethesda’s rush to hit the 11/11/11 release date meant it shipped with bugs that remain to this day. They changed all the flows for the Special Edition, but it still has bugs. There are seams and other unsightly graphical problems with the water even after 8 years and versions of Skyrim being released for your toaster. Fortunately, a fix is a click away.

Realistic Water 2 is the most popular choice here, but be prepared to patch. I’m running SSE Water for ENB because I am a hipster. Here's a comparison of Water for ENB & RW2.

You can also supplement with additional water textures and water-related things.

One thing to note later: your needs mod choice— the thing that will make your character need to eat & drink, if you choose to run one— will probably require a patch to make it work with your water mod. Here’s why: your needs mod will depend on the causes damage flag being set on the water record. Any mod that makes a water mod work with iNeed will be fine for most (all?) other needs mods, because they follow this pattern.

Lighting

Lighting overhauls: Mostly the goal here is realism. Bethesda was more interested in even lighting in interior spaces than realistic lighting. I found this area pretty confusing when getting into modding, because there are a lot of mods that make changes either to light number & location and/or to light colors, all of which are known by their acronyms.

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. A good followup would be Relighting Skyrim, which doesn’t require tons of patching. If you like your dungeons dark, though, ELFX is awesome.

😅 Luminosity + Relighting Skyrim should get you started without the fuss of patching ELFX.

Weather

Now you need to make your weather gorgeous and varied and seasonal. Skyrim is known for its climate: It’s cold and windy. You should be rained on and snowed on and you should wake up to mists on the water.

😅 If you want the tl;dr starter recommendation that will look gorgeous and not torment you with the paradox of choice, run Cathedral Weather + Rudy's ENB for it.

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. Cathedral is an excellent choice all-round, and it’s based on a very popular weather mod that came before it.

However, because the Nexus makes searching for this stuff a major PITA, I list here the major options in alphabetical order, including some promising newcomers:

Supplement your weather mod:

Your chosen weather mod might have specific mods written to create variations on it. Search on the Nexus to find other mods that mention its name. Here’s the modlist I was running at the time I wrote the first draft of this post:

What I’m running in my very latest play through is Haze, which does weathers, seasons, fogs, and comes with an ENB/Reshade combo. It’s pretty, but I miss how much Cathedral made it rain.

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

You have more choices here, as with everything, but these get you started.

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 rendering and lighting changes into the game at a deeper level than Reshade does. (Reshade, if I understand correctly, 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.

You should run an ENB unless you are on a potato, in which case you should see if your potato can handle Reshade.

Once you install the ENB dlls, you’ll need to choose a preset configuration to run, which is what you download from the Nexus. This sets up the particles, the skin shaders, the depth of field, the color grading, and a million other things. Presets range from “where did my FPS go?” to “why the frack is everything more than 3 feet away blurry?” to “holy shit gorgeous”.

Install the DLL & the helper, then take a look through the ENB presets:

You can change ENBs freely mid-playthrough. Nothing about the ENB is baked into your save, so you can download a bunch and experiment. I use ENB Man to switch ENBs. This is a tool, not a mod, so don't worry that it's for plain Skyrim instead of SSE.

If you have no idea where to start, pick an ENB that’s recommended by your weather mod. Or pick an ENB first and let that drive your choice of weather mod. Obsidian & Cathedral are very similar, so you can usually pair an Obsidian-intended ENB with Cathedral.

😅 If you’re stuck here, try Rudy's ENB for Cathedral or Rudy’s for everything else. I also want to give a shout to Rembrandt and The Truth for Obsidian.

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!

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.

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.

You could do a lot worse than just following the Phoenix Flavour’s instructions, but if you want to explore your options, let's explore! I am going to recommend some work/kid-safe easy-to-use well-supported options that will make your people prettier. Look for the 😅 if you just want to pick one and get out.

Here are three mods that overhaul all npcs in the game at once by replacing basic assets:

⚠️ Note! Nearly all of the links in the next two lists have not-safe-for-work screenshots on their Nexus pages. They mostly have safe underwear-clad installation options for your game in addition to nude versions.

You will want to supplement whatever overhaul you pick with higher-polygon-count body replacements. 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.

The default CBBE body can be customized with something called "BodySlide" that I have never investigated. These are tools that let you reshape the body to fit your taste. There are, um, a lot of anatomically improbable presets available on the Nexus if you wish to vary beyond the two variations available built into the mod. Modder thirst is a thing.

The same is true for HIMBO and SAM, by the way: these can be customized to suit modder tastes. LoversLab & VectorPlexus have a surprising selection of mods to fit a wide variety of interests. NSFW content warnings apply in the extreme for those sites.

You can replace the skin textures for both female and male bodies. There are a million more options for female than for male, because of the aforementioned modder thirst, but here are some good ones:

NSFW alert ends here. ⚠️

Cool. Now let’s improve the character creation user interface, so you can make your shiny new character look exactly the way you want them to look. You might find that your other mod choices require RaceMenu, which will lock you out of ECE, but they're both good.

Skyrim's potato children

You have two excellent choices for fixing the kids. Pick one, and then download patches. The patches fix kids added in your other mods. I alternate between these depending on whether I want to adopt khajiit or not. They're both gorgeous and lore-friendly.

  • 😅 RS Children: makes all the vanilla kids look cute
  • Realistic RS Children: yes, this is an overhaul for the overhaul
  • The Kids are Alright: has adorable adoptable khajiit kids; optionally adds lots of kids to dungeon populations, including vampire, witch, and skeleton kids. UPDATE: Removed from the Nexus because people suck, but the author is working on a renewal which you can check out on their Tumblr.

Makeovers for named NPCs

You can optionally move on from here and download some mods that beautify specific NPCs. There are lots and lots and lots of makeover mods that improve the looks of named female NPCs. (Somehow thirsty modders skip the men, but recently this trend has shifted!) This list is not comprehensive, because there are too many options but I’ll try to touch on some that don’t turn all the women into anime waifus.

There are "salt and wind" retextures for hair for many of these makeovers, which make the characters look a bit less like they used a lot of Product™ on their hair.

😅 In my modding the high-poly-count heads used in Northbourne's really stand out as being good-looking. The only downside is that they don't yet cover important NPCs like Elisif, Tullius, Ulfric, and so on. I use HMB as a base, load Men of Winter & Bijin next, then layer over it all with Northbourne. If gray faces give you fits, skip the named NPC overhauls entirely.

The dark faces bug

So. You might load into the game and find that some npcs have dark gray faces. This is a very obvious and unsightly rendering problem. The most common cause is a mod that changes a character's record data being loaded after a visual makeover. The prerendered files found on disk from the makeover mod don't match the face data in the plugin record. The game will render the face as the plugin record demands, but it will fail to load the tint mask data, the information that gives faces their color and shading.

There are a number of approaches to fixing this, most of them annoying and one of them magical.

Run Face Discoloration Fix. This mod fixes it all at runtime, at the cost of a little performance because you're no longer hitting the pre-cached renders.

Change mod load order. Easiest if it works. See this article on how to figure out what your load order needs to be. The tl;dr is to move your NPC makeovers to later in your load order, after the mods that change other NPC data. The mod installation order should match the plugin load order. To do this with Vortex, add a rule to the makeover that says it needs to load after the other mods.

Use mods that give you premade facegen files. Second easiest. Find mods on the Nexus with facegen files for whatever mods it is you're using. Loose files on disk take priority over facegen files packed into archives, so the pregenerated files will be used. You might not be able to find anything, though, so move on to...

Forward facegen data using zedit. Use the Visual Transfer Patcher to build a patch that forwards visual edits to characters. You put all the edits into a plugin that depends on all the others, then load that plugin last. This is less difficult than it seems! Use the "NPC Visual Transfer" script from the SSEdit script collection in zEdit UPF Plugin Loader Generator, build a loader for zEdit, then run the patcher! Piece of cake! (I usually have to do this plus make sure it's all correct with SSEdit then fiddle with load order anyway. Sometimes I give up and do the next thing, which always works.)

Generate the pre-render data yourself using CreationKit. The most reliable fix. The Phoenix Flavour guide led you through installing CK, so you have it. I will attempt to generalize the steps here:

  • Run the CK.
  • Use the Data item in the File menu to load the mods you need to build faces for. This will be all the mods that modify faces and their textures (skins, paint, hair) and the mod that added or modified the characters that show up with dark faces.
  • Mark the mod that added the problematic characters as the active plugin. This will get the CK to store the things you're about to generate in subfolders named for the mod.
  • In the object window, expand the "Actors" node. Marvel at the vast number of NPC records in Skyrim! In the list in the right pane, select the NPCs that look bad, or preferably, all the NPCs added by or mentioned in the mod. This might be the single worst thing you ever do in Creation Kit, unless the mod author has very thoughtfully named their NPC records with a common prefix.
  • Press CTRL-F4. Say yes to the facegen dialog. Press OK in the dialog shown when it finishes.
  • If you're brave, generate 'em ALL.

Pro tips for the Creation Kit: It supports typeahead in its file dialogs, so you can, say, type "HMB" to make the dialog reveal that mod. You can see if you have all the right assets loaded if you select one problematic npc to edit, then check the box that shows a preview render. The bug will be visible in that preview window if you're missing anything.

You might also need to coax the Creation Kit into loading your overhaul mod's assets if they're packed into a .bsa archive (which they probably are) Edit SkyrimEditor.ini and add the mod's file here:

SResourceArchiveList=Skyrim - Textures.bsa, Skyrim - Meshes.bsa, Skyrim - Animations.bsa, Skyrim - Voices.bsa, Skyrim - Interface.bsa, Skyrim - Misc.bsa, Skyrim - Sounds.bsa, Skyrim - VoicesExtra.bsa
SResourceArchiveList2=Skyrim - Shaders.bsa, [...] Dragonborn.bsa, YOUR_OVERHAUL_HERE.bsa

While the annoyance level on that fix is high, it's not as high as the annoyance level of using ZEdit's patcher to transfer visual data to a patch plugin. Why is this annoying? Because ZEdit doesn't support light plugins yet. You'll be comfortable with ZEdit if you get deeply into ENB Lights, but if you're at that point in your modding trajectory, you should be writing this introduction instead of me.

Animation

Skyrim's animations were not great at the time it was released. (The places where nobody ever makes excuses for Skyrim are the open world, the dungeon crawls, and the range of roleplay opportunities.) They're wooden. Mods can help! Yes, you will be installing XP32MSSEE or however they abbreviate it. This skeleton is the base for all modern animation replacements.

This section goes into detail about what you can do next. There are many options, changing every month, because this is where active Skyrim modding innovation is happening in 2020. I'm going to shortcut here by giving you some opinions you can use to get started.

The tl;dr version is to install the following:

Run Nemesis to build behavior files. Enjoy a very solid base upon which to layer other animations.

And now, the gory details.

In addition to the skeleton and some animations, you need to install an external tool to transform animation replacements into something usable by the game. In particular, you'll need this if you want player-exclusive animations. (This, btw, is what PCEA stands for. You'll see that a lot.) Many guides recommend FNIS here, because it used to be the only option. Now, however, Nemesis is out of beta and nobody should ever use FNIS again. Most mods that say they require FNIS work just fine with Nemesis.

Most of the time, all you need do is install the mod and run Nemesis. Check off the mods you have installed. Run "update engine" so it scans for installed mods, then run the updater.

Things get fussier if you want player-exclusive animations. It works like this: You download mods that add player-exclusive animations. You make a prioritized list of these animation sets by copying them into folders inside the Nemesis mod folder, with names that start with a number. You then run the Nemesis tool. The "Update Engine" button scans your installation for FNIS-compatible mods and for these animation sets. The "Launch Engine" button builds behavior files from all the animations plus the ones you checked off in the list, which the game engine will use.

Confused? Yeah. Read the mod page and watch the video tutorial. It’s not so bad really. What's harder is sorting through which combat mod is compatible with which other ones, and which of the half-dozen mods that add dodging to the game you should use.

Another base utility you should install is Dynamic Animation Replacer. This is a mod that enables other mods to swap out animations on the fly. This can do things like:

  • play animations when you're cold, sick, or suffering from poison
  • give different races different animations, making Khajiit and Argonians different from mer races once more
  • give older people in Skyrim different animations
  • play different animations when you're wounded, or overburdened
  • play random idles

Modders are rising to the challenge here, and I expect quality animations to be making a new appearance in the Skyrim scene.

Right now the best mod I've found built on this is EVG Conditional Idles. This uses the dynamic animations replacer to make the player idles change in response to conditions, like being cold or not wearing any clothes.

DAR-based mods to consider:

Browse the animation category on the Nexus and pick out what you like. I like these for starters:

You should run Nemesis late in your modding process, right around the time you've finalized your list and are ready to run tools like Dyndolod.

Vanilla locations

Town and city overhauls make Skyrim feel more believable by adding more 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; probably the single most popular city overhaul. I haven’t played without it for a long time. If you want to make individual Whiterun interiors more awesome, check out JK’s series of mods overhauling six locations.
  • Dawn of Skyrim, Director’s Cut - more detail in cities, particularly in Whiterun. Has patches to make it work with JK's.
  • 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. His village mods add expand small location so all the people found there have places to live.

Some other expansions to consider if you get into this project:

Do you want even more? Check out the Skyrim Reborn locations guide, written by one of the mod authors who works on mods like these.

NPCs and their AI

Now let’s put some people in these towns, and have them doing things. These mods, by the way, are the kind of mod you want loading before your NPC overhauls to avoid the gray faces bug.

The next few mods are very clever mods that splice dialog from Bethesda's voice actors into new contexts, so the characters have far more interesting or realism-enhancing conversations with you.

Want more people to talk to? There's a mod or twenty for that, too. You probably don't want to run all of these mods at once, by the way. Your game will feel too busy and crowded.

Now let’s make the inns more… themselves.

  • Distinct Interiors - Touches a lot of interior locations to make them look more themselves and distinguishable from other locations.
  • Inncredible - another take on this, focusing on inns.

Pick one mod to add lots of random encounters to your explorations:

Super-into this approach? Look at the Living Skyrim 2.0 modlist for more ideas, or a Wabbajack install that saves you the time and trouble.

Major game systems

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:

For my very newest play-through I’m replacing most of Enai's mods with SimonMagus’s overhauls:

Encounter zones are game areas that have a player-level-related range of leveled enemies in them. An example would be a dungeon, which has a variety of leveled enemies from just below the player to a ways above the player. The Arena revamp makes the game a lot harder IMO. Here's another mod that tinkers with encounter zones:

  • Encounter Zones Unlocked: Skyrim locks some things to the level you were when you first visited them, but this is boring

Now let’s fix crafting. There are many choices here, ranging from small tweaks to major reworks, but many many modders run these two:

Skyrim has gods who get involved in things, as well as sort-of demi-gods who show up and mess with you, as you know from various quests. These two Enai Siaion mods make this a real concern for your character:

  • Wintersun: praying & worship now matter
  • Trua: a more stripped-down approach

Wintersun in particular is a great enhancement for your character if you're roleplaying something in particular. You can choose to follow a specific Daedra instead of one of the nine main gods if you choose. Enai definitely knows his Elder Scrolls lore.

Combat

Want to make combat hard? Yes, you do. It will never be Dark Souls-level hard, but you can definitely make yourself sweat.

[[ TODO dodge mods, other combat mods, Vigor, Mortal Enemies etc ]]

  • Blade and Blunt: a combat overhaul that makes stamina matter
  • 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”
  • 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.
  • Combat Gameplay Overhaul - This is new since my first draft of this screed, and I’m running it in my new playthrough. I might never live without this again. It replaces several of the above items and makes melee combat a joy. I can finally have the spell-blade character of my dreams! This requires that you use Nemesis, but you should be using it anyway.

Dargonz [sic]

Because Skyrim is about the dragons, right? Let’s spiff ‘em up and make fighting them a little harder. Here are some mods that make dragons look amazing and more varied:

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.

Loot & levels

TODO

  • Morrowloot
  • leveled lists
  • deleveling explained

More textures

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.

[[ TO DO: break up this list into sections ]]

Armor, weapons, and clothes

Survival

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 and inclement 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 is a foundational mod for most Skyrim survival modding. It adds the concept of warmth from fires to the game, plus a system for pitching tents and creating campfires. This mod is recommended.

Next you probably want to make staying warm matter to your character. The granddaddy mod here is Frostfall, but you'll need to run an unofficial update.

  • Campfire & Frostfall: the version to run for SE if you want both Campfire & Frostfall
  • Hypothermia: a less brutal cold & wet mod; my favorite; has the concept of "water saturation" which I find I miss in simpler mods
  • Frostbite: lighter-weight cold mod, does not track wetness
  • 😅 The Frozen North: a more minimalist cold mod; what I'm trying in my current playthrough

The official Bethesda Creation Club mod library offers "Survival Mode", which is pretty good, and alleged to have been written by the author of Campfire & Frostfall. If you choose this option, make sure you search the Nexus for "suvival mode" patches. Your choice here depends on how punishing you want the cold to be. Bethesda's Survival Mode is probably the most punishing, followed by the others in the order given above.

Mods that make food & sleep matter:

Some mods, like the CACO crafting overhaul, build lightweight needs mods into themselves. Your choice here will depend on how much you want this to matter to your gameplay, and how punishing you want failing to eat to be.

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.

You will spend a long time exploring these mods. Pick an aspect of Skyrim's world-building that you like. Find mods that expand on this. Try them out.

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. (This mod is an animation mod; run Nememis!)
  • 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
  • Skyrim Better Roads

[ more ]

Followers worth downloading

The first thing you'll notice about the Nexus's followers category is that it's filled with nearly-naked anime waifus with improbable body proportions. If you're not into this, you can set your Nexus content blocking preferences to block tags like "sexy/skimpy" and "sexualized content". This doesn't help with the followers category unless you also sort by download count. YKINMKATOK so long as I don't have to look at it.

I will call out some standouts. The best follower mods are fully-voiced and react to their surroundings and to the player's actions, doing far more than the game's built-in followers ever did. The very best also interact with each other.

  • 😅 Inigo - a blue Khajiit who'll be the focus of your playthrough if you like
  • 😅 Lucien - a timid Imperial who gets letters from his doting parents and is super-into Dwemer ruins
  • Vilja in Skyrim - the great-great-granddaughter of an adventurer in Cyrodil, back in the days of the Oblivion gates (aka an adaptation of an Oblivion mod for which Terry Pratchett!! wrote some dialogue!! yes him!)
  • Sofia - professional voice acting; supposed to be funny though I haven't experienced this one

How about some critters following you around?

  • 😅 True Meeko - Meeko's story in the game is sad, but you can make him a happy dog by taking him along with you. This mod makes him look great.
  • A Cat's Life - Cats in Skyrim!
  • Garm - a good doggo
  • Harold the Pack Goat - how is a goat follower not cool?

Mods to make managing followers easier:

[[ outline only section starts here ]]

Animals

  • SkyTest
  • Wilds

Dungeons

  • reworks of vanilla dungeons
  • entirely new dungeons

Player houses

There are over a thousand of these. They are a ton of fun and I have sunk a lot of time into experimenting with them. At this point, I stay with a core set of reworks for the vanilla homes and then for each new playthrough I try a handful of new houses, spread out around the map. There are some popular spots where modders like to put houses, so you'll want to make sure you haven't overcrowded the roads outside Whiterun and Riverwood.

I suggest you browse the Nexus list and select the ones that look interesting to you or relevant to a roleplay idea you have. If you're overwhelmed, here are some famous ones as well as some I've tried and liked:

Not houses, but of note if you're doing a survival playthrough:

Major expansions

  • huge new questlines - Wyrmstooth, etc
  • entirely new zones (Moon & Star, Falskaar, etc)
  • Requiem
  • Legacy of the Dragonborn
  • Beyond Skyrim
  • Daggerfall
  • Skywind

Clean up and get ready to play

[ review how to clean up loose ends]

Load order

  • why we sort
  • LOOT (build into Vortex)

Bashing and Smashing

  • Automated patching, Wrye Bash, Mator Smash, zEdit
  • the difference between bashing and smashing
  • bashing up your leveled lists

Dynamic levels of detail for distant viewing

It is the very end of your modding, after you’ve added all textures, trees, and buildings. Now is the time to run DynDOLOD. Dyndolod is a tool that generates a specialized plugin for your game from your mods and textures. The tool precomputes 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
  • if you have time to spare, run xLODGen to build landscape LODs (optional, but has nice reaults)
  • run DynDOLOD & set it to as fancy as your rig will allow
  • install the DynDOLOD results as a mod, overwriting etc

You should update it whenever you've changed mods that make changes to outdoor areas, or changes to trees.

The Phoenix Flavour has detailed instructions, which at the time of this writing are on this page. The author of Dyndolod disagrees vehemently with the PF authors about whether tree LOD generation should be disabled. IDEK.

Build animations

Run Nemesis to build your behavior files if you haven't yet. You can re-do this any time you change animations, and nothing about it is baked into your save.

Testing your game

At the game's main menu, type ~ to bring up the console. Then type coc riverwood. This loads a familiar-looking generic Nord character in a horned helmet just outside Riverwood. Run around! How does your game look? Do you like it? Do the NPCs look good? Do all your mods seem to be initializing themselves correctly? Fight a wolf or two. Does it feel right?

There's a long list of locations you can teleport to using the console. If you've just added lots of mods that affect a specific area, jump to that area and run around.

Where to learn more

  • the modder discord
  • reddit

some kind of horrifying conclusion

Please remember to play the game now & then too. Modding is its own pastime, for sure, but it helps to settle into a nice session of shouting at dragons.

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ghost commented Apr 22, 2022

This is a really good guide, even in an unfinished state. Thanks for your time and effort contributing this.

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