The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim - MODS & TWEAKS

I would also recommend playing unmodded first - the only things you may want to use immediately are the Unofficial Patches and SkyUI.

I wouldn't use anything else until having played through the main quest and DLC once - then you've got a good idea of how you want to improve the game.

Everyones idea of improving the game is personal and someone else's mod list may not work exactly for you.


When you do get around to creating a modded install, I would focus in the order of priority:

1. Patches, UI and foundation tweaks
- stuff you need to have setup before you can build your mod "house" on top of it. Things like Unofficial Patches, SkyUI, Alternate Start.

2. Core gameplay mechanics
- this stuff is the backbone of a modded skyrim. Stuff like combat, magic, stealth, improve NPC AI, or entire overhauls - but personally I don't believe skyrim needs any large overhaul and I'm not a fan of SkyRe for example.

3. Vanilla NPC/quest polishing additions and improvements
- stuff like Civil War Overhaul, guard dialogue overhaul, Companion Guild, Even Better quest Objectives, and so on. Things which affect or enhance the allied and enemy npcs and vanilla quests.

4. Non-essential npc and environment additions/improvements
- for example interesting NPCs, inconsequential NPCS, extended towns and cities, Touring Carriages and so on.

5. Foundation audio/visual improvements
- Audio Overhaul, Enhanced Lights and FX, Weather/Water mods and so one.

6. Non-essential quest additions
- Falskaar for example.

7. Texture/Mesh replacements
- your landscape retextures, ENB and so on.

8. Non-essential item/npc additions/improvements
- stuff which adds 1000 unnecessary weapons and armour to your game for example, or 1000 different creature variations. I consider this stuff mostly useless fluff and unimportant compared to the gameplay mechanics themselves. I don't bother with this unless I really like the mod. Yes I don't use Skyrim Immersive Creatures, Immersive Weapons or Immersive Armour because I feel they add too much that is not necessary in my opinion.


Personally I find visual improvements (number 7 on that list) to be the least important thing - they can always be messed around with at any time without messing up your save. Core gameplay mods cannot be swapped in and out whenever you feel like it and as such are the most important things to get nailed down first.
 
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Guys can anyone help, I just got a new screen which is a slightly different resolution (1920x1200 instead of 1680x1050)... I thought I'd have to change the resolution in Skyrim via the launcher so I was planning to make a backup of the .ini files in My Documents (I believe the launcher re-generates them), changed the settings in the launcher and launch the game, then restore the files and all would be fine...

But even launching through the launcher the game just crashes immediately as the title screen tries to load in... Whether or not I make any changes or not... Anyone have a clue what's going on here?

Edit: Nevermind - I worked it out, seems that as well as re-copying the .ini files the other thing the launcher does is automatically activates all mods that exist in the Data directory, so it had enabled several modules which I had specifically disabled before because I didn't want them (so the game is crashing due to dependencies of those)
 
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Okay, I've come back to Skyrim after a pretty long hiatus and the first thing I noticed it was really putting my 670 SLI setup to the test. Frame rate is okay, for the most part but I noticed the GFX fans were really having to crank up to cope with it and there some weird graphical bugs I couldn't remember noticing before.

I figured it had to be my modding. I've been here before, start off intending to only add a few mods, just essential improvements here and there. Before I know where I am, more and more mods become 'essential', I'm making my own mods to plug gaps and the only playing I'm doing are stability tests which sap all the fun out.

Anyway, I tried taking stuff out to see if it improved matters without success so went last resort, nuked the lot and reinstalled a vanilla game. Even that seems to be having the same effect on my system. I could just not be remembering the impact it had properly but to me it feels like it's not right. Has anyone had driver issues recently, especially with nvidia?

Also I've tried using mod organizer. Seems like a great tool, well put together and everything but I just can't get used to it.
 
Verponian said:
Okay, I've come back to Skyrim after a pretty long hiatus and the first thing I noticed it was really putting my 670 SLI setup to the test. Frame rate is okay, for the most part but I noticed the GFX fans were really having to crank up to cope with it and there some weird graphical bugs I couldn't remember noticing before.

I figured it had to be my modding. I've been here before, start off intending to only add a few mods, just essential improvements here and there. Before I know where I am, more and more mods become 'essential', I'm making my own mods to plug gaps and the only playing I'm doing are stability tests which sap all the fun out.

Anyway, I tried taking stuff out to see if it improved matters without success so went last resort, nuked the lot and reinstalled a vanilla game. Even that seems to be having the same effect on my system. I could just not be remembering the impact it had properly but to me it feels like it's not right. Has anyone had driver issues recently, especially with nvidia?

Also I've tried using mod organizer. Seems like a great tool, well put together and everything but I just can't get used to it.
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is that BOSS you're talking about.
 
So here's a question, who here has turned Skyrim into the most immersive experience (Mods)?

Which mods do you use?

Screenies ;)
 
I posted a few videos (took me ages as well and nobody bothered to check them lol) Think it looks quite nice and more importantly acceptable frame rates so very playable (much better than vanilla) I might play a bit more tonight..if so i will take screenshots. I will probably be able to play for an hour or two before my pc crashes!
 
porushinobu said:
is that BOSS you're talking about.
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Not BOSS, I know that quite well. I'm sure I saw it being raved about here but I can't go through the thread to find it. Basically it's supposed to be an equivalent to NMM for safely installing and organising mods except it's able to do it where you compartmentalize installations and according to the blurb, have different sets of mods for different play throughs.

http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/1334/?

Great, I just find it a little baffling.
 
Mod Organiser is fantastic, what difficulties are you having with it?

Ever since first trying it last year, I would never use NMM again.

Mod Organiser + LOOT is the ideal combination at the moment. Of coruse wrye bash if you need a bashed patch and tesVedit if you want to manually create merged patches.
 
Curunen said:
Mod Organiser is fantastic, what difficulties are you having with it?

Ever since first trying it last year, I would never use NMM again.

Mod Organiser + LOOT is the ideal combination at the moment. Of coruse wrye bash if you need a bashed patch and tesVedit if you want to manually create merged patches.
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I like the idea of Profiles with the mod organiser but would you say that the files at Nexus which are orientated around the NMM install ok with MO or do you still need to manually create a folder structure etc with some of them...?

I have just reinstalled Skyrim and will get around to modding it first but I was tempted to just use NMM as that works fine with Fallout 3, in fact I could never get the Darn UI to work when using the MO, but fine with NMM and F3.
 
^^^ Thanks :)

I had been subscribed to the Gopher vids, as well as using some of his excellent mods. But there are still files, like Darn UI for FO3, which do not work with MO. Hopefully that will not be the same for Skyrim.
 
Curunen said:
Mod Organiser is fantastic, what difficulties are you having with it?

Ever since first trying it last year, I would never use NMM again.

Mod Organiser + LOOT is the ideal combination at the moment. Of coruse wrye bash if you need a bashed patch and tesVedit if you want to manually create merged patches.
Click to expand...

I'm going to stick with it, I've heard so much good stuff, I thought I should. I've not used it in depth yet, I'm still trying to stick to a mainly vanilla game. I've had an issue trying to install some retextures. If I install them on their own, fine but if I install several at once, I get missing textures.


Vimes said:
I like the idea of Profiles with the mod organiser but would you say that the files at Nexus which are orientated around the NMM install ok with MO or do you still need to manually create a folder structure etc with some of them...?
Click to expand...

It's designed to work with nexus so you can link your account and download directly to it. Sometimes it doesn't recognize the file structure and you have to do a quick tweak but nothing complicated.
 
^^^ Thanks I'll check out Gophers vids as I remember one of them saying how you can have NMM for F3, for example, and MO for Skyrim - and NMM will open the correct one when you click download with modmanager on one of their files.
 
Vimes said:
I like the idea of Profiles with the mod organiser but would you say that the files at Nexus which are orientated around the NMM install ok with MO or do you still need to manually create a folder structure etc with some of them...?

I have just reinstalled Skyrim and will get around to modding it first but I was tempted to just use NMM as that works fine with Fallout 3, in fact I could never get the Darn UI to work when using the MO, but fine with NMM and F3.
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Profiles are unnecessary if you only play one character and want one modded install. Just stick with the default profile and ignore the feature altogether.

Download MO and extract it to any location you like - I like having it live in the Documents/My Games/Skyrim, well away from where the game lives and it's together with where your saves are.

MO also works with the "download with manager" function on nexus - all your downloads will be stored as archives in the appropriate sub folder where MO lives. The only mod I had to download manually was interesting NPCS, because it's over 2GB, or anything that doesn't live on nexus - for example enhanced enemy AI if you use that.

When you've downloaded a mod, the option will come up in the right hand pane to double click to install - depending on how the mod is packaged you might get some fancy menus (these are useful for the more complicated mods with many compatibility patches), or a manual method. For the manual method you just have to make sure to select the correct sub folder as the data folder - basically right click and set as data.

Each mod is extracted to its own folder - again within the main MO folder, all nice and neat.

You can then rearrange your installed mods into whatever priority order you like, again like NMM higher priority will overwrite any files from those below, in the case of a conflict.

Then you use LOOT - launch it from within MO (you need to add the LOOT.exe to the list, where it says "edit" in the drop down menu to the left of "run". Download LOOT, extract to another folder within My Games/Skyrim and add the exe to launch through MO). MO has its own built in version of LOOT, but it is out of date IIRC and better to use the standalone version. Now your plugins will be nicely sorted.

The only essential thing you can't install with MO are the SKSE dlls that live in the skyrim directory. Everything in the data folder should be done through MO.

Of course there's so much more to MO that you should do through it:
- ini edits - MO will copy and use it's own skyrim and skyrimprefs ini files so make sure to do any ini edits in here. This also keeps your original inis safe.
- managing bsa archives - can set which order you want these to load, but this isn't necessary to mess around with unless you need to fix something.

It seems Gopher has finally after a long time decided to start using MO and has uploaded a few videos on the basics - I highly recommend watching these for any new user of MO.

I can't really explain everything in detail in one post - but trust me when you get used to it it will become so easy. NMM will look archaic by comparison.

Edit: I forgot - if you have complicated mods messing with the levelled lists, then you will need to also use wrye bash for the bashed patch - this is a little more involved because you also have to launch that through MO, same as what you do with LOOT. The same goes for TESVEdit, if you happen to require that. I don't use either because my mod list is pretty simple and doesn't mess around with the levelled lists too much.
 
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I appreciate the detail, thanks for that :)

I have installed it now but will watch the full set of vids before I try it out.
 
I've only had MO go crazy once - where it randomly decided to reset the version numbers on all the mods in one category when I added another one to that category - I had to manually correct them, but that was a rare thing. Otherwise it works fine.
 
On the first page, it says this :

--> Don't install the Skyrim High Res texture DLC from Bethesda , if you have installed it, untick the high res texture pack ESP's <---
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2 questions...

  1. How do I remove that, I don't know what "ESPs" means.
  2. I have the 2k textures mod installed via NMM... do I need to re-install after removing Bethesda's?
 
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