The mods I can't live without

Sunset in The Pale

I have no other way to describe it, I am completely and utterly addicted to Skyrim. I'm closing in on 500 hours of play time and I'm STILL discovering areas I've never seen before and completely new quests from the original unmodded vanilla game. There are a few mods I'm planning to install after I've beefed up my video card that will add some quests, and I haven't even installed the Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn DLCs yet. All this will be fixed next week. But that said there is a good number of mods that I now simply can't imagine going without. I thought I'd give a list of them with a short description and links to the Skyrim Nexus; I do not use Steam Workshop.

The first series of mods are mainly for the UI and the nuts & bolts:

Unofficial Skyrim Patch

This is what it says it is. After updating Skyrim to its latest version, this patch fixes a lot of little things that Bethesda left untouched. There are versions for the original game only as well as for the DLC users. The patch also boosts performance quite a bit so it's a must for all players. 

Skyrim Script Extender (aka SKSE)

This isn't really a mod but most of the bigger mods, the ones that affect gameplay and aren't purely cosmetic, require SKSE to be installed. If a player only intends to use cosmetic mods it can be skipped but for a heavy mod user like me, can't live without it.

SkyUI

It's no secret that the original Skyrim GUI is simple at best. It was designed more towards the console users and it's very gamepad friendly. When SkyUI came out it was a boon to all PC users because it made manageing the inventory, magic and powers, and also player bonuses and curses much more intuitive. Now in its third iteration, SkyUI is clearer than ever with its colored icons, sortable lists and even a search engine when one is looking for a particular item. Nowadays when I see a video of someone playing without it I simply can't imagine going back. With the third version there is now a mod configurator so mod makers can build little UIs to, well, let players configure their mods without console command hassles. But SkyUI also has a little brother...

Categorized Favorites

Where the original Skyrim GUI was simple, the original favorites menu was downright stupid. A tiny display list showing 6 or 7 favorited items, spells or powers when one can easily have over 30 favorites... yeah, something had to be done. This mod replaces the tiny lower left-hand corner list with a full-screen window displaying all the favorites in well-defined lists like Weapons, Apparel, Potions, Powers, Magic, and also Other to include items or spells coming from mods. And each list is scrollable too.

A Quality World Map

Ever noticed how hazy and unclear the original map can be? With this mod the problem is fixed. Simple as that! You can also see the roads and paths a lot better for those players emphasizing on avoiding fast travel. I have another mod for those players further down.

Now that Skyrim is a lot more comfortable to play with, let's make it look better:

Project Reality: Climates of Tamriel

Adding a lot more detail to Skyrim's days and nights, Climates of Tamriel turns the game from "very beautiful" to "absolutely stunning!". Not only are the skies more beautiful, but the weather events like snow and rain are much less taxing on one's computer than in the unmodded game. The aurorae borealis also move! The mod also changes the way lighting works so building interiors appear much more natural and the dungeons darker, "a tad" to "a lot" depending on what module was installed. Nights are also darker and can lead to a few bad surprises; one must either carry a torch or use the Candlelight spell, or use another mod I'll describe further down this list.

Pure Waters

The original Skyrim waterways, lakes, oceans and waterfalls look alright, but when one has the opportunity to make it better "alright" just doesn't cut it. Water in the original game looks more like molten metal than actual H2O. The Pure Water mods adds a lot of transparency to the water and the way it moves in waves and ripples looks a lot more natural. The best examples is when looking at the shallow streams or lake edges. The mountain streams and rapids are also affected and look much better as well.

Expanded Towns and Cities: Villages & Morthal

Out of all the ETaC mods I use only the Villages because I find the ones affecting the major cities to add way too many trees. Some may like this but there should be a medium somewhere between "barren" and "overgrown mess". But that said, the Villages mod steered away from the greenery and concentrated on adding life to the smaller places in the game world like Rorikstead, Ivarstead, Dragon Bridge, Shor's Stone, etc. It also did quite a number on the city of Morthal, which for a hold capital looked too small and unimportant. There is also a module to make the city of Winterhold truly look like it's been hit with a magical nuke, with ghosts eerily walking around the ruined part of the city.

No More Blocky Faces and Better Females

These two very small mods were some of the first to come out and make everybody look a lot better. There are plenty of other mods that affect the characters' looks (nude hot babes anyone?) but these two are very simple and do only what's necessary.

Now that the game plays better and the world looks better, here are more mods I use to increase the enjoyment I get out of the game:

Deadly Dragons

By the time you reach level 30, the dragons in the original game are nothing short of pushovers. One can stand right in front of a dragon's snout, take the entire brunt of its breath and kill it with a few swings of *insert your favorite melee weapon here*. With Deadly Dragons set at its hardest setting you will start saying "oh shit!" repeatedly as soon as you hear wings flapping. I've tested the mod set at Hardcore on the Master game setting with a level 81 max-skilled with all perks character using max-crafted armor and weapons and this flying lizard called "Zealot of Akatosh", which normally appears only after reaching level 65, made mince-meat out of me. Yep, this setting requires multiple followers with long-range support. There are plenty of ways to play with the dragons' amount of armor and health, the frequency of spawns, etc. The mod can also affect the toughness of other NPC's and monsters. The mod also has Armory and Spells modules which add many crafting parts and craftables in the former, and new spells unlockable with dragon souls in the latter.

Immersive Armors & Weapons

In reality these are two seperate mods. Both are compilations of many armor and weapon mods made since Skyrim came out, but they do more than simply adding them to the game for the player to craft and wear. You can find them randomly in the game world. You can find them in stores. You can even find them worn/wielded by random NPCs both friendly and hostile. All the armors and weapons are very tastefully made and none are overpowered. Definitely adds a little something to the game.

Dark Brotherhood TS Edition Armor

The original Dark Brotherhood armor looks OK. On Astrid. On a male character it looks much too weird for my tastes, and on the Khajiit and Argonian characters it looks ridiculous. The TS armor looks a lot better overall and it also modifies the Ancient Shrouded Armor which can be found during a quest or by stumbling upon it. The mod also changes the looks of vampire child Babette; she's more like a vampire teenager with this mod but she does look a lot better.

Better Fast Travel: Carriages & Ships

Are you one of those hardcore types that avoid using the fast travel to get from Point A to Point B, but don't mind spending a few Septims to use carriages? Then this mod is for you. The original game allowed for travel between the hold capitals, but Better Fast Travel adds all of the smaller settlements, and also shipping services between the port cities of Solitude, Dawnstar and Windhelm.

Various homes, abodes, castles, lairs, etc.

OK this is where one can easily cross the line into overpowered territory; I don't like using the word "cheat" in a single-player game because you have no one to cheat but yourself. And sometimes you can do some extremely fun experimentation using overpowered stuff. But I digress. As soon as a game of Skyrim is started, it's pretty clear that the character will pick up stuff. LOTS of stuff. And will use a bed to get a "well rested" bonus. While it's very easy to obtain the first house, some variety is always welcome, especially when replaying the game. Now the choice for dwelling mods is simply astonishing so go by taste and what you want for the type of character you play. I have a few house mods currently installed but the one I still use the most is the Dovahkiin Hideout, which links all in-game player houses plus the Ragged Flagon, the Archmage's Quarters and Jorrvaskr. I also use Reaper's Dark Tower and Bathing Beauties Luxury Suite. What can I say, I'm a guy that loves female eye candy :))

Alternate Start: Live Another Life

Speaking of replaying the game, this mod gives a lot of alternative ways to start the game with a new character, including the original "prisoner caught crossing the border heading to his execution" start. The options vary; I'll try to enumerate them but I may forget a few: a home owner in a hold capital (except Windhelm because of the quest), a farmer near Dragon Bridge, a new member of a guild (mage, thief, companion or assassin), guard for a merchant caravan (Khajiit only), member of an Orc tribe (Orc only), Morrowind refugee (Dunmer only), shipwrecked somewhere on the northern shore, member of a bandit gang, member of the Forsworn, a hunter in the woods, left for dead out in the middle of nowhere... easy to see that the choices baffle the mind! Some choice make the start easier than others though. Starting as the owner of Proudspire means you have tons of gold and access to all the stuff the huge house has to offer. In the Orc tribe the new character is penniless but has very good heavy armor and weapons. The Left for dead start can be quite grueling as you have nothing but some ragged clothes on your back. The character must get to civilization ASAP! All starts have one thing in common though. Upon starting you are given a quest to investigate Helgen. And for the sake of not spoiling the mod I will stop writing :)

***

There are other mods I play with and I admit some are a little on the overpowered/cheat side. For example I have the option to start the game with all crafting skills and perks maxed so the new character can work on only the skills he's interested in. But even then, the best armor does NOT make you invicible, not by a long shot. Another one I have is Lock Overhaul; I absolutely hate the lockpicking mini-game. This mod changes the mechanic quite a bit. Earlier I was talking about the dark nights of Climates of Tamriel, so I installed a mod called Predator Vision, made with the werewolves/vampires in mind. There is a night vision that makes everything brighter (the brightness is fully adjustable) and the predator vision makes heat sources glow, including humanoids, monsters and animals. The Undead are quite cold! And there you have it. I have more mods than this but to me the ones I listed are absolute must-haves and have kept me interested in Skyrim for over a year now. And I'm only getting the DLC's next week !!!

May your road lead you to warm sands!

o7 

My office in Reaper's Dark Tower

Revisiting Northern Tamriel

The sudden break from all-out drumline rehearsal rush means I've been getting back into my gaming hobby something fierce. While I do try to keep on top of my drumming form, at least I don't have to go places every other day to meet up with the rest of the drumline and fine-tune every bar, every break, every stick opening, etc. I can do my own practice casually. This gives me plenty of time to be active at my 'puter doing the things I love, which is a good mix of flying the New Eden space lanes and exploring and adventuring throughout the province of Skyrim, carefully avoiding low-flying arrows. When summer was just starting and the drumline rehearsals started getting serious I was already unsubscribed from EVE but my computer was starting to die while playing games. It turned out it was my video card that was roasting alive and a quick swap later the computer was running like new. There is only so much drumming I can do before I need to frag something!

Over the summer I played a lot of Fallout 3 because I found it was easy to get in and out of my game, but I was avoiding getting back into Skyrim because I knew what all Elder Scrolls games do to my own personal space-time continuum. So I waited until after the show to dive back in, and I rejoiced when I did because the game was running so much better than even before the old video card started dying. And of course because I play Skyrim on a computer and not a console (cue Nelson Muntz "HAHA!") I dove right back into mods, updating some that needed it, removing some superfluous ones, and browsing Skyrim Nexus for anything of interest that may have come out during my summer hiatus. I haven't bought the Dawnguard and Hearthfire DLCs yet but playing the game with mods I already have so much more; though there are more and more mods appearing that require one or the other DLC so I just may get 'em soon-ish.

While I do have some weapon and armor mods, and also some HUD mods and even a few for the environment (Morning Fogs is awesome), my main interest has always been player abodes, from quaint little cabins and camps all the way to fortified castles as big as cities. I try to look for mods that meld seemlessly into the vanilla game; a lot of people give modding a shot and sometimes the results are either buggy or atrocious, or both. When a castle sticks out of the landscape like an eyesore I will avoid it like the plague. Or sometimes the setting is really nice and all but the insides turn out to be a gawdy over-stuffed laggy mess where the modder tried to cram every single object the Creation Kit will allow. And once in a while a jem pops up. For the longest time I've been using the Dovahkiin Hideout which is like a small Bat-Cave giving access to all the game's original player houses, and a couple other areas like the Ragged Flagon and the Archmage's Quarters. It's very well made but now being used to playing with a god-like character (don't laugh; the Deadly Dragons mod can chew up a level 81 character with max skills and all perks with ease if set properly) and having completed the entire game a few times I felt it was time I moved in somewhere more approriate to a Dragonborn who is Thane in all the holds, Archmage, Listener and all-around bad-ass.

A few mods looked promising but unfortunately fell into either of my previously mentioned categories. Two mods got my attention for a while, Deus Mons and Dragonius Tower, but both were causing my computer to glitch out, and the latter mod to crash to desktop repeatedly so I had to keep looking. And then I found it, Rendspire Palace. Located in a canyon set inside the mountain situated between Bleak Falls Barrow and Whiterun, the first hint of the place is the wooden stair path leading up to a small horse stable and a cave entrance next to a single Greybeard statue. The canyon reminds me a bit of the location of Hircine's quest, with a deep mountain clearing complete with waterfalls, pools, vegetation, and one big building with Solitude architecture. The fun part is that the castle itself is a mini-quest as you have to do some serious exploring to not only visit the place but to discover all the teleporters located within. These are pretty much essential unless you want to take all your time walking around; the secret smithing area is very deep below the castle, and the secret (and epically massive) armory is inaccessible until you've found and unlocked its teleporter, and defeated a vampire which... well I gotta stop talking now :)

The EVE front is a bit quiet these days; I want to give my buddy's corp a chance but us Montreal players are having multiple schedule issues, so sorry if I don't have many New Eden stories these days, but at least my #2 game is still very interesting to me and modders are expanding far beyond what the original game offered at launch. To me, if you're not playing Skyrim on a computer, you're not playing Skyrim. Or at least a very tiny part of what the game can actually be. I'll leave you with some screenshots of my Tamriel-based home; I have a Sovngarde-based home on the way soon but I need Dawnguard before I install it. And maybe a new machine. Yes... soon™ :)

Fly like a dragonbone arrow (yes, you read this correctly!)

o7

Meet Cozmik Debrizzt, the Level 81 mod tester!

The entrance leading to the Canyon of Tears

"This is no cave!"

Rendspire Palace

The Great Hall

This is the public armory. The secret one is secret :)

Minions having a snack in the main dining room

The office... Like a boss!

PS: This is "only" eight screenshots; I'd need about 30 to 40 to show all this place has to offer!

How to stretch the endgame: Skyrim modding

As I was mentioning in my last post, despite still having a lot of side quests and miscelaneous quests to find and finish I am slowly getting closer to having seen and discovered everything there is to see and discover in Skyrim. I hit another benchmark yesterday when I finally pushed Enchanting to 100 and applied the perk that enables two enchanments on the same item. Yep, tonight I have to craft the last set of gear from the vanilla game and it will be devastating! But despite being so close to "the end" there is still a lot of fun to be had in Skyrim. After being done with the story of a game, I like to see what makes it tick, as well as finding little things that help my life without going into cheating territory. Let's enter the realm of Skyrim modding, especially the mods I use and plan to use; no, not the nude mods and that damn Macho Man dragon mod, useful stuff.

Quality 3D map with or without roads: Have you ever wished that the map had more flexibility? Or wanted to zoom in a lot closer to see if there is a way up that 80 degree rock face to reach that remote dragon lair? Or do you want the map to look like a proper medieval parchment map? Well look no further! This was the first mod I installed for Skyrim and every time I play the game I thank the guy who made it. It's that good. I strongly recommend you get it.

No More Blocky Faces: While the faces of the people of Tamriel look far better than they used to in Oblivion, they still aren't perfect, especially the humans. To put it simply it looks like they just came out of molds. This small one-file mod changes this easily and suddenly every human looks far better, especially your chosen wife/husband!

Weightless various items: OK, I admit that this is a borderline cheat mod, but one thing is easily noticeable from Day One of playing Skyrim: the ratio between "what you can loot" versus "what you can carry" is simply ridiculous, especially to a heavy armor character like mine. There are commands that put the weight of everything at zero, or that give the player millions of units of carrying space, but the mod I chose is more subtle than this. It does reduce the weight of some items to zero, but regular items in the world keep their weight. The modified items are all potions, books, crafting items (ore, ingots, alchemy ingredients, pelts, leather, Dwemer metal parts and dragon scales and bones) and quest items because sometimes either because of a glitch or because a quest hasn't been started the related item is stuck in the player's inventory. I will still be weighed down if I loot too much stuff, but if I happen to kill three dragons in a row (it does happen) I will NOT have to do a few trips to haul everything. And hauling in any game sucks donkey balls; I wonder what makes me say this...

Home Improvement mods: Move over Tim Taylor, some modders have talent! You wish your house had more storage and you also want to display the fruits of your adventuring, right? Or you want your own crafting corner so you don't have to go to the local blacksmith? We got you covered! My favorite ones come from a modder called Shawk and he's been busy lately. Before noticing his work I had installed a mod for my main house in Solitude (mentioned in my previous post) but his mod for the Riften house had something special: a quest to find it! Actually it's more like a treasure hunt because once the mod is installed you find notes from Shawk in your Whiterun house (you must have this one AND the Riften house with all furniture for the mod to work) pointing you to where your "new" house is located, somewhere West-South-West of the city right on a mountain side, with a quest-giving shack and a dragon lair as neighbors. Technically it's the Riften house but with a few modifications for crafting and display purposes. It's also possible to enter it from its original location in the city, but once you get outside, watch your step! But I may have to uninstall this mod and the one in Solitude because Shawk is working on something bigger (more in the "I plan to use" section). I also installed a completely new castle located on the mountain behind "Drelas' Cottage". After installation you have to travel to this cottage (and discover it if you haven't yet) and it will be right there dominating the view. You then have to climb the rock face which is tricky but doable and when you reach the door the castle is discovered and can now be fast-travelled to. And it's awesomely huge! It has everything you would ever need in one single location, including shrines to the Nine Divines and all the standing stones. It also has a large flat area on top and outdoors that would be the perfect helipad... I like where this is going :) The only downside is that so far you can't have your wife move in with you there. Maybe with the release of the Creation Kit...

Speaking of the Creation Kit (CK for short), it is supposed to come out this January and it will put a serious set of tools in the hands of the modders. This is when a lot of player-made quests and dungeons will start popping up, but there are three mods that I can't wait to see where they'll go once the CK comes out. Here they are:

SkyUI: It's no secret that the stock Skyrim UI can be a bit clunky and feels like it was made for consoles. What SkyUI does is give the power back to the PC gamer. As it is right now it has to be used in concert with a third-party application (found here) but it's getting nothing but rave reviews. I have yet to install the current version but I really like what I've seen.

Shawk's Dovahkiin Hide-out: This is the big project I was talking about earlier, and version 0.1 came out over the past weekend. Instead of modifying every house, the plan is to build one big underground area which is accessible from every player-owned house in Skyrim. It's not necessary to own every house to enter this new basement, but to return to a house, or enter another, one must own the desired house's key. The hide-out is pretty much the Bat Cave: it's kind of like the mountain castle only underground, but I'm not sure if it has the shrines and stones. But the amount of storage is simply insane and there are plans of many (like 20 or so, maybe more) mannequins, mounting plaques, weapon racks, and even mini-mannequins of which there are two in v0.1. All this is awesomely nice but I seriously hope this mod is compatible with the next one...

Tytanis Ultimate Mod: This is literally The Big One. New items, new spells, new shouts, new quests and dungeons, new crafting mechanics and recipes for smithing, alchemy and enchanting, new skills and perks, new and tougher opponents with new loot, the whole shebang! So far the version is 0.52 and the changes to the game are significant. Tired of riding a horse? How about a sabre cat, a cave bear, or even a mammoth! And yes, they do have plans for flyable dragons, and with this I can only imagine that there will be plans for new player-owned houses complete with parking/hangar. But that's not all. The Tytanis project is being worked on by three modding teams who got together with a common goal: Multiplayer Skyrim. No less. And looking at the work they've done so far without even access to Bethesda's tools I'd say the possibilities of one day seeing one form or another of Multiplayer Skyrim is fairly high. One thing is certain, this mod will be worth following at every step of its growth, and I sincerely wish the teams all the luck in the world!

And there you have it. A few ways to make an already awesome game even more awesome, and more reason to show that PC gaming is far greater than console gaming. If you don't believe so, well, too bad. I rest my case.

o7

PS: If you search just a little bit, yes there are mods to shut the NPC's up if you're sick of hearing about every other guard's bum knee condition XD