My favorite mods and why the Skyrim Steam Workshop is awesome!
Do you know what time it is? It's a great time to re-visit Skyrim for the first time! That's right, it's been around 4 months since the game's release, and I'm sure most of us haven't touched it for a bit; we've had enough of a break to be at the point where we'd like to make a new character. So try something new and/or more challenging than your first character build and get cracking! Personally, I'm determined to make Alchemy's poisoning worthwhile... somehow.
More importantly, the recently released
Skyrim Steam Workshop is your best friend when it comes to modding, and as we all know, modding is an essential part of any re-play through an Elder Scrolls game.
The Steam Workshop is a database of Skyrim mods built right into Steam, you can "subscribe" to as many mods as you like, and they're automatically installed and kept up to date via Steam! It's really quite awesome and it's the easiest way to keep track of all of your mods. No more reformatting your computer and losing all of the cool additions you've made to the game, no sir. From now on, you'll always have your save games on the Steam Cloud and your mods on your Workshop subscription list. Let's hear it for cloud computing/gaming!
The only downside to the Steam Workshop is that it doesn't support third party scripting mods, so there are a few things that you won't be able to get there. For the most part, though, everything that you want is there.
My subscribed Skyrim Steam Workshop mods are listed below, if you want to try them out all you have to do is
click the link, log in to the Steam website, and click "subscribe". That's it! Steam takes care of the rest for you the next time you start up Skyrim!
Steam Workshop - Bug fixes- Unofficial Skyrim Patch
An absolute must have, subscribe to this mod for constant updates to all of the various bugs in the game. The team behind this does a great job of fixing all of the little stuff that the developers forget about.
Steam Workshop - Graphics- HQ Snow Texture
Replaces the flat white snow texture (or lack thereof) with sparkling, crystallized, real-looking snow.
- Detailed Cities
Adds trees, bushes, vines, and a lot of other great detail to each city. This one is very noticeable.
- More Village Animals
More cows, chickens, dogs, etc. in cities and villages. Adds a nice touch of life to civilization.
Standalone (non-Workshop) - Graphics- Super ENB-RL
*** Use at your own risk, ENB mods are often bug-proned and difficult to set up. I'd recommend skipping this one and other mods like it unless you really want to put time into it. ***
The ENB series mods have always made various games look realistic, this particular edit is one of the best I've seen. Install it for very accurate depth-of-field and an overall highly photo-realistic quality to everything.
There are a few presets that you can pick from, based on performance versus image quality. I would also recommend backing up your Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini and replacing them with the author's to ensure that everything works properly. Just be sure to reset your launcher graphics settings, in-game mouse speed, and in-game difficulty settings after doing so.
- Skyrim Official HD Texture Pack
This huge, 3gb texture overhaul from Bethesda themselves will completely upgrade all of the game's textures. Make sure you have a beefy video card if you're going to use this one. There area few glitched textures that Bethesda has yet to fix, download the HD Textures DLC Fix from Skyrim Nexus for a quick fix to them.
Steam Workshop - Gameplay/Content- Developer Quickstart
Skip the tutorial entirely. This mod lets you start the game and choose stats, race, etc. for your new character at the end/exit of the tutorial cave. Extremely useful for when you want to create a new character but not sit through 30+ minutes of a tutorial you've done ten times over.
- Racial Bonus in description
When creating your character, you'll be able to see each Race's bonus traits in the description just like in previous TES games.
- Non-leveled item rewards
Tired of being punished for doing a quest at too low a level by getting a down-leveled reward? Remove every TES game's most annoying feature with this mod, which gives you the highest leveled version of all leveled quest rewards. No more dinky level 5 "epic" weapons that go bad and get replaced with random loot!
- The Paarthurnax Fix
Tell The Blades to screw off, "ain't no one f*cks with Paarthurnax!", and still complete The Blades quests after doing so.
- Spend Dragon Souls for Perks
Finally use all of those dragon souls that you have stockpiled for something useful! This mod places "Dragon Stones" near Riverwood village that allow you to exchange your Dragon Souls for perks.
- Arrowsmith - Simple Fletching
Make arrows, if you have the Smithing skill required for it. Finally, you can keep a decent supply of arrows!
- Lightweight Potions and Poisons
If you're an Alchemy junkie like me, this mod is a must. This keeps you from killing your character with potions and poisons, which you need to carry a lot of when you're focusing on Alchemy.
- Open Face Guard Helms
Tired of every guard being a faceless robot? Each guard is now a real person, but they retain their "vanilla" look.
- Dragon Priest Mask Graphic Remover
Wear Dragon Priest masks without looking ugly.
- Disable Fast Travel
Self-explanatory, this in-game note that disables Fast Travel. It's really hard to put into words just how much better the game is without Fast Travel, you'll see and do so much more than you ever would normally since you won't be teleporting from place to place. An absolute must for maximum immersion!
- Whistle
This is one of those mods that just absolutely should have been a default feature of the game, luckily the modding community is awesome and picks up where Bethesda left off. It adds a spell that lets you call your horse from anywhere, a great pair with the Disable Fast Travel mod since horses tend to get lost.
- Faster Vanilla Horses
All horses are 30% faster and sprint a bit longer. Not overpowered at all, just a nice incentive to ride your horse more.
- More Carriages
Another must have now that you will have Fast Travel disabled, this mod adds carriages to the "non major" towns of Skyrim (Dawnstar, Falkreath, Morthal, Winterhold, Ivarstead, Riverwood, Rorikstead, and Dragonbridge).
Steam Workshop + Third Party Scripting - Interface- Sky UI
A must-have total replacement for the terrible console-port that is Skyrim's default UI. Note that you will need to download and setup SKSE, a script editor, to get full functionality out of this mod. You have to drop the files in your Skyrim directory on Steam and then start the game with the "skse_loader.exe" file instead of Skyrim.exe, which you can add as a shortcut to Steam if you want.
Well, there you have it! Install some mods, think up a new character, and get to re-exploring the best world in gaming!
