There are thousands of mods available for Skyrim. Perhaps the most creative among them are the total conversion and overhaul mods. When looking to explore new lands or experience intriguing quests, this collection of mods should satisfy even the most prolific Skyrim players.
Like other total conversion/overhaul mods that drastically alter the setting, the attention to detail in Beyond Reach is impressive. Fans can expect to encounter brand new factions, collect unique weapons, armor, and spells, and explore dozens of outlandish dungeons to occupy their time.
Ordinator totally overhauls everything to do with the perk trees in Skyrim. In total, there are 425 perks, all of which have been improved for realism, immersion, and depth. Building and playing your favorite style of character is now far more fun and interesting, as the perks actually mean something overall.
Skyrim Re-Evolved is one of the biggest overhauls to the game currently. The content includes offers a far better, more expanded-upon experience for the player. The developer promises a new update every single week, including new enemy encounters, dungeons, followers, new races, and a few new quests to indulge yourself in.
Reborne is a complete gameplay overhaul that promises to enhance and diversify everything about character choices in the game world. Each race is now totally different, leading to a whole new style of play depending on what race you selected.
Basically, this is a balancing overhaul mod that allows the player to smelt hundreds of different items into raw material, including ingots and ore. You can break down those unwanted items and craft something far more useful, like a new sword or a chestplate. Almost everything can be reworked into something greater.
Downloading and installing an overhaul mod for Skyrim can be a big step, especially for those who are only used to playing the vanilla RPG. The above ten overhauls will vastly improve your experience, though, so they are at least worth checking out.
We all know how difficult it can be to keep track of everything once you're deep into an adventure, so this overhaul of the user interface on PC shows you greater information for items, displays active effects on screen, and much more.
An almighty overhaul of Skyrim's perk tree, this adds 400 new perks, bulking out each basic skill to give a ton more options to spend your precious perk points on. From 'Fog of War' in the stealth tree to 'Flee Fool' in the two-handed tree, there's plenty of new abilities to master!
Mods come in all shapes and sizes literally! From small graphical tweaks like changing the color of an NPCs eyes, all the way up to complete overhauls which add entire new lands full of new characters and quests. Some popular categories of mods include character customization options like new hairstyles and clothing sets; AI (Artificial Intelligence) improvements which tweak NPC behavior; quest line expansions which add hours upon hours' worth of content; music packs featuring orchestral scores written just for Skyrim; armor retextures which change the look of various weapons; weather effects systems which introduce dynamic climates; plus, much more! The possibilities truly are endless when it comes to modding these days.
This can be a subjective question, as different players have different ideas of what "good" is in terms of gameplay or graphics. Generally speaking, though, some well-regarded mods include Falskaar (a large new area with over 20 hours of additional content), Unique Uniques (an armor overhaul with balanced stats and charming visuals), Realistic Water Two (adds realistic reflections, rippling water effects and more to rivers and lakes), SkyUI (improves menus and inventory sorting) and Climates of Tamriel (makes weather more dynamic by adding new storms, snow drifts, wind effects and more).
The best Skyrim Mods range from character overhauls to texture improvements, bug fixes, and more. Some of the most popular Skyrim Mods include Fluffy Manager, a mod manager that helps players keep track of their installed mods; Enderal, an entire new game built on the Skyrim engine; SkyUI, which provides better menus and UI (User Interface) for the game; and Unofficial Skyrim Patch which fixes numerous bugs left in the game by Bethesda.
Skyrim Redone doesn't teleport your character to some far away land or add a ton of new quests and voice acting to the game. Instead, Skyrim Redone overhauls the base game from its mechanics to its racial modifiers to its skill trees. The mod also dramatically changes combat, including encounter scaling, and provides a much more complex experience than the one that was delivered in Bethesda's version. If you want the full details on what Skyrim Redone does to the game, they're available here; just note that the mod literally has over 100 pages of notes tracking the many changes it makes, so you're going to be there a while.
- Better Dynamic Snow by SparrowPrince and Brumbek
- Signed by Accela
- An overhaul to the snow textures from the game that makes the snow on objects actually look like snow instead of a flat white blob.
- Link
- Realistic Lighting Overhaul by the Realistic Lighting Team
- Signed by Accela
- A lighting overhaul mod that is both easy on performance and creates a more... um... realistic atmosphere for the game. The lighting in Dragonsreach and the Blue Palace are particularly nice.
- Link
- W.A.T.E.R. by SparrowPrince
- Signed by Accela
- This mod completely overhauls the water effects and appearance, including adding waves to the coastline and flow physics in rivers. Much more realistic and very beautiful.
- Note that realistic flow physics were implemented by Bethesda in Skyrim Special Edition.
- Link
- RS Children Overhaul by Ranaline (converted to SE by Azrael_wtf)
- Signed by BossKey
- The identical-looking, unexpressive children in the base game are, to put it bluntly, creepy as balls. This mod overhauls their looks, making them all distinct, memorable, and much more natural-looking, and also gives a number of them their own unique outfits to fit their background. Whether you're interacting with your adopted son/daughter or just playing tag, you'll be dealing with actual kids rather than unsettling clones.
- Link: Original, Special Edition
- Ultimate Follower Overhaul by Original, fLokii, and Vamyan
- Signed by Accela
- A huge overhaul to the follower system, this mod allows to have more than one companion at a time, customize their fighting style, train them in new skills, and much more. Recommended for anyone who doesn't like to wander Skyrim alone.
- Link
- (It's important to note that UFO has not been updated in some time and is considered to be extremely buggy. AFT is preferred.)
- Skyrim XP by einsobl (Original) and strudovuckos (Redone)
- Signed by Zaptech
- Skyrim XP allows the player to gain experience points in a traditional RPG fashion that can then be spent on buying perk points or upgrading skills. This allows a player to gain additional perk points (very useful for perk overhauls like Ordinator) as well as develop skills that may be ignored (i.e. a warrior leveling pickpocketing) or are hard to develop if you haven't been using them much (i.e. level-dependent illusion magic). Since you gain experience through simply completing quests, looting, stealing, defeating enemies, creating items, finding locations, and so on, it also rewards playstyles that don't grant as much experience, such as mages who use staves, multi-follower parties (follower kills grant XP), or pacifists. This gives a player a lot more leeway in their builds and playstyles, especially unconventional ones. It's recommended that you either set the XP gain lower or use something like the Skyrim Community Uncapper to adjust normal experience gain to compensate for the speed at which the player will be leveling with SXP installed. The classic version is very streamlined and simple, while the Redone version offers much more precise control over specific XP gain, while also being much more complex.
- Since things which add XP include eating food, discovering map markers, reading books, and learning spells, using Skyrim XP along mods which add new content related to those elements or "realistic needs" mods (those who require to regularly eat-drink-sleep) may result in higher XP gain (and thus, faster levelling) than intended.
- Classic Version Link and Redone Version Link
- Requiem - The Roleplaying Overhaul by The Requiem Dungeon Masters
- Signed by Psychopompos007
- Has its own work page here.
- Requiem aims to "[turn] Skyrim into a better roleplaying experience by making game more immersive, semi-realistic and coherent, with the tend to find a compromiss between old school mechanics and more modern approaches." Requiem completely overhauls the game's mechanics, items, skills, stats, spells, enemies... It makes several important changes to Vanilla:
- The most notable change is the removal of Level Scaling. Every dungeon and encounter has a static level. Don't even think about venturing in Bleak Falls Barrow right after fleeing Helgen. At start, you'll be barely strong enough to fight the pack of wolves living near Riverwood on your own.
- Requiem still has the Vanilla levelling system, but with a major tweak: turning a skill legendary will reset the perks, but the legendary remains at 100. Requiem has a hard level cap. On the other hand, you start with 3 free perk points.
- In general, skill level alone is almost worthless unless you also buy the related perks.
- No natural health regen (unless you take a level 50 Alchemy perk), magicka and stamina still replenish slowly on their own. Healing, magicka, and stamina potions no longer make you instantly regain the relevant attribute, but work over time. Sleep and level ups no longer replenish attributes. Beside potions and Restoration magic, an important way to regain health is to craft or buy health poultices and use them, they grant a weak yet long lasting health regeneration effect as long as you're not in combat.
- You start without knowing any spell. Spell tomes are expensive and spell consumes a high magicka amount without the relevant perks For instance, with starting skill levels and no perks, the Requiem equivalent of the Healing spell you start with in Vanilla costs more that 1500 Septims, and costs a bit more than 50 magicka. Armor weight grants a debuff which increase spells' magicka cost, and heavy armor makes spellcasting very impractical (again, there are perks which mitigates this effect).
- The movement speed depends from a combination of several factors. The maximum speed is calculated from value of full health and stamina, but a debuff is received is health or stamina are less than half of their maximum. The weight of worn armor is also taken in account, there are perks (in both armor skill) which reduce this speed debuff. Also, the total weight of the inventory's content counts as well to calculate your speed, even if you're not over-encumbered.
- Speaking of movement speed, running now consumes a tiny amount of stamina. Standard attacks consume stamina too.
- Gold, lockpicks, and arrows have a weight.
- The Light Armor skill has been renamed "Evasion". It works with both light armors and non-armored clothing, and also includes dodging perks.
- Tempering requires to take a Smithing perk related to the item's material. Crafting equipement requires to carry a book. Crafting jewelry or construction materials require to have a perk, too.
- The level of the Lockpicking skill determines which locks you'll be able to pick, and several of the related perks decrease the skill level needed to pick higher level locks. Note that, if playing a race without an affinity with the skill, you'll start with 5 in Lockpicking and you won't be able to pick Novice locks until you buy the first Lockpicking perk. Also, you only earn Lockpicking experience after successfully opening a lock and broken lockpicks no longer count.
- Drawing a bow is slow and archery's range depends on Archery's level. On the other hand, bows' damage is high, and range combat is the bane of mages and light armor-clad fighters.
- One half of the speech tree is related to barter and trade. The other half is related to Thu'um's use.
- Undead and vampires are much tougher than in Vanilla, unless you use silver weapons against them.
- No fast travel. Save money to buy a horse.
- Food regains a low amount of stamina and alcohol gives a buff to maximum health.
- Warning:
- Most of the features mentioned above make Requiem Early Game Hell incarnate, which is why the mod may not be for everyone. On the other side of the matter, its absence of Level Scaling also results in some content becoming too easy once the player character's level is high enough.
- While Requiem requires Dragonborn to functions, it only overhauls Skyrim, Dawnguard, and Heartfire, while leaving Solstheim's content untouched; the installer indeed has an option to completely disable Solstheim and the Dragonborn plot. Note there is an unofficial submod to port Requiem inside Dragonborn.
- Requiem is a complete overhaul which conflicts with a lot of other mods. While some unrelated mods have compatibility patches to work along Requiem, it's safe to assume that every mod touching skills, perks, NPCs and enemies, spells, or item stats will conflict with Requiem without an up-to-date compatibility patch.
- Requirements: The three official DLCs, as well as SkyUi and the Legendary version of the Unofficial Patch.
- Links: Oldrim Nexus (there's no official port for SE)
aa06259810