Ok, before we even get to the graphics, you will want two things that just make Skyrim better in literally every way and that pretty much all of the most popular mods require.
First is Skyrim Script Extenter. It allows your game to run more scripts than just the vanilla game. You can pick the current version of the alpha version. I prefer the installer, it's perfectly safe.
Second is Sky UI. This is more than a menu changer, it also adds an "MCM" menu to your options that many great mods use to allow you to configure them in game. Sky UI will be a prereq to those mods and it really is awesome in it's own right.
While not required, you really, really really should install the unofficial patches for all three vanilla esps. Base Skyrim Patch.HD patch.Dawnguard.Hearthfire. And Dragonborn. They fix so many bugs and help improve stability. Vanilla Skyrim is quite unstable at times with a lot of bad edits, broken quests, and horrible memory leaks. These patches don't fix all of that, but it fixes a lot and I've never had an issue with them.
For basic graphics improvements, install in this order on the mod manager and allow overwrites.:
Skyrim HD Fire. I love this mod. Awesome fire improvements. I personally use the medium version, but I honestly don't see a difference between the low, mid, and ultra versions.
Static Mesh Improvement is awesome. Doesn't increase textures, but the meshes that those textures attach too. Super great.
This one I love, WATER. It makes water super pretty. There are other water improvements that people will recommend, but I like WATER cause it adds waves to the beaches and other immersion improving effects.
Now you can reinstall yourSkyrim HD and overwrite all files.
There are a great many other things you can do to make the game look better, like lighting and weather mods and ENB. But as you add more and more, you take a system hit. It depends on what rig you are running. But the above should give you a noticeable improvement.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
I forgot. Get a mod sorter. Some mods need to be placed before or after others in the ESP load order. You can do this manually, but... you don't want to do this manually.
I use LOOT. Just run install and run it. It will reorder your ESP's and is constantly updated.
Others may have a different recommendation for a mod sorter, but you definitely want one of them.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
ShimshaiFlush with Success!Isle of EmeraldRegistered Userregular
Honestly it sounds an awful lot more complicated that it actually is.
Once you've settled on which mods you're going to run and have them installed and sorted, cleaning mods is another pretty useful skill to know, it should help stability and reduce conflicts.
TES5Edit is the program you need to clean mods, and it has a handy-dandy tutorial on how to use, here.
It looks a lot more intimidating than it really is, but once you understand mod load orders and cleaning, you'll have a much more stable experience overall.
Steam/Origin: Shimshai
0
Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
It's funny. I've played with dozens of mods and the only 'mod' that caused any trouble for me was Dawnguard.
As long as I don't install Dawnguard, I've never had trouble modding Skyrim just letting Steam Workshop manage everything.
Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
Well, when I was trying to fix Dawnguard, nothing would fix it (I had the problem that a character file would be damaged by going into the Soul Cairn, and then the game would crash on the character within minutes of loading, even if Dawnguard had been uninstalled. I played to the Soul Cairn three times on three characters testing fixes before I said 'Fuck it' and decided I would never install Dawnguard again.
The only thing Dawnguard really added that I want is craftable arrows, which is like a 5 minute mod, so I just made my own mod that did that.
0
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
Dawnguard actually adds some great stuff if you're a big fan of the horror/supernatural elements of TES (especially if you're forced to play vanilla). New transformation for vampires, Perks trees for both Werewolf and Vampire, tweaks to improve vampire feeding options and best of all, those unholy glowing yellowing eyes.
Aside from the cool crossbow and crafted arrows, it has some amazing environments (except for the Soul Cairn). Really aesthetically pleasing. Serana is also a fantastic companion, especially for Bethesda. Also new magic and shouts. The random vampire attacks are fun too. And vampire/werewolf perks. And the quest isn't too bad either.
Worth it imo.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
+2
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited June 2014
Serana was the first follower Bethesda made that actually felt like a character which kind of gives me hope for the next Fallout.
All the more surprising you can't give her the waifu necklace. The Dragonborn doesn't know how to deal with intimacy I guess.
Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed Dawnguard, but it has a pretty even pro/con value to me. As much as I liked the quests and perks and, yes, Serana was well done, when the vampires started killing off merchant npcs was when I was really convinced to uninstall it for good.
The fact that I was never able to deal with the soul cairn bug was the real impetus, though. You can always resurrect NPCs with the console. Usually. If they lose their merchant associations, though, it can be a huge pain. But as far as I could find there was no resolution for the constant crashes to desktop after the soul cairn.
0
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited June 2014
Skyrim NPC behavior really is the best.
Guards will defend livestock to the death and every man, woman and child with an iron dagger will brave a dragon confrontation.
So I decided to reinstall this and mod the fuck out of it. I downloaded a collection someone put together of about 80 mods. Everything runs great for the most part. If I do end up finding something that really fucks with my game, am I pretty much fucked since I now have upwards of about 90+ mods? Also, that seems like a lot, is that too many?
My other question, is there a recommendation for a good render distance mod? I'm happy with the way everything looks aside from seeing small islands in a body of water that look extremely pointy/jagged and sloppy looking trees starting at a certain point. The consensus I gathered reading online was that people don't really care since increasing detail from a distance detracts from their immersion. Which is fine, but pretty>immersion for me.
These mods make civilian NPC's run indoors when dragons and vampires do their random attacks. Guards, members of The Companions, Vigilants of Stendaar, and the player's followers/teammates will not run, they will stand and fight. Farm animals will not run either, because they're stupid.
Amazing mods there.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
+4
Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
I used the one When Vampires Attack for a while. Then everyone got trapped in the Inn and couldn't leave. And I mean everyone. In Whiterun. In the Inn. You should have seen it. They were all trying to get out, but were bumping each other off the door so no one could open it.
Damn chickens and/or horses snitching on my thievery/assassinations.
For crime, I use Crime Overhaul. It prevents animals from reporting you, but dogs can still bark. Guards will follow you if they catch you sneaking.
I also use Realistic Crime Radius. Which lowers the range at which people can automatically report a crime 4000 whatever unit of measure Skyrim uses, down to 1000.
Neither is overpowered, but seriously adds to my immersion.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
I used the one When Vampires Attack for a while. Then everyone got trapped in the Inn and couldn't leave. And I mean everyone. In Whiterun. In the Inn. You should have seen it. They were all trying to get out, but were bumping each other off the door so no one could open it.
I've had that happen. Frustrated the hell outta me until I discovered that vampires were attacking outside the Whiterun gates, down by the stables. Once I cleared them out, people went back to work.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
The base stuff from Bethesda is chock full of dirty edits and broken shit. TES5edit and the unofficial patches should fix that for you.
Statements like this continue to bug the hell out of me, especially if (as I suspect) they're true. I expect Bethesda to know their own shit better than outsiders, and for the official patches to be superior to reverse-engineered third-party hacks. They're the professionals, this is (or should be) their job. But that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Maybe it's the "many eyes" thing that open source folks are always going on about. But to me it just seems like really bad quality control on Bethesda's part.
The base stuff from Bethesda is chock full of dirty edits and broken shit. TES5edit and the unofficial patches should fix that for you.
Statements like this continue to bug the hell out of me, especially if (as I suspect) they're true. I expect Bethesda to know their own shit better than outsiders, and for the official patches to be superior to reverse-engineered third-party hacks. They're the professionals, this is (or should be) their job. But that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Maybe it's the "many eyes" thing that open source folks are always going on about. But to me it just seems like really bad quality control on Bethesda's part.
I agree, but I disagree.
Bethesda gets a lot of shit for broken elements, but a lot of that is because they let people fuck around with their engine. I bet 100% dollars (yes, percent) that if they did the same to Mass Effect or Batman or whatever AAA game out there, people would find all sorts of bad scripts and dirty edits and ask what the fuck.
I'm not excusing them. Just sayin.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
That happened to me as well with that mod. Everyone in the city and outside city walls all dogpile into the inn. These mods didn't seem to work reliably for me, run for your lives seems to work okay when a dragon comes but the vampires one is wonky. People will go to the inn with no vampires in sight, even after waiting, and when vampires do come they fight anyway sometimes.
Instead I've been using "My Skyrim People Protected!" mod. It sets most NPCs as protected, so you have a good chance of them surviving vampire/dragon attacks. Dragons/vampires do seem to change targets quickly compared to mages once npcs take a knee. I think it's only available on the steam workshop though.
BronzeKoopa on
0
Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
I used the one When Vampires Attack for a while. Then everyone got trapped in the Inn and couldn't leave. And I mean everyone. In Whiterun. In the Inn. You should have seen it. They were all trying to get out, but were bumping each other off the door so no one could open it.
I've had that happen. Frustrated the hell outta me until I discovered that vampires were attacking outside the Whiterun gates, down by the stables. Once I cleared them out, people went back to work.
Haha, not for me. I killed the vampires and noticed no one was coming outside, so I went looking for them. They were all stacked at the door, trying to get out.
These mods make civilian NPC's run indoors when dragons and vampires do their random attacks. Guards, members of The Companions, Vigilants of Stendaar, and the player's followers/teammates will not run, they will stand and fight. Farm animals will not run either, because they're stupid.
Amazing mods there.
They do help, but it cuts down on hilarity.
"Oh look, a fight!" in a good-natured 'this'll be cool!' tone from a NPC in Dawnstar, so you spin 180 to see what they are looking at and it's an Ancient Dragon touching down and breathing death at your face.
Last pint: Focal Banger / The Alchemist - Untappd: TheJudge_PDX
What normally happened, at least for me using When Vampires Attack, was there were 2 or 3 hell hounds or whatever outside Whiterun whenever there was an attack IN the city. So if I went out and killed them as well as the vampire and/or thrall in Whiterun everybody would go about their days. I thought I had broken the damn city for a week till I checked The Nexus.
0
MongerI got the ham stink.Dallas, TXRegistered Userregular
This one I love, WATER. It makes water super pretty. There are other water improvements that people will recommend, but I like WATER cause it adds waves to the beaches and other immersion improving effects.
If any of you, like me, vastly prefer Pure Waters (or Realistic Water 2 or whatever), there are standalone mods to add some of WATER's optional effects to any setup. Waves (make sure to also grab the updated esp) ports the Dragonborn shore waves back into Skyrim. Realistic Boat Bobbing adds the unused bobbing animations to all the ships around Skyrim.
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
edited June 2014
So a big thing I think that the next actual Elder Scrolls game needs to fix is the weapon enemies are handled versus your level. Instead of keeping the enemy counts the same and chucking higher-level enemies at you, the enemy count should be going up. For one thing, it's pretty silly to keep getting attacked by leader-level characters that should be pretty rare (how many master vampires can there possibly be, after all? Why are there something like three Deathlords per tomb?) just because I'm at a high level. For another thing, mowing through twenty of the same kind of enemy who used to be an even fight on a one-on-one basis is a far better way to show off to people how much stronger they are now; replacing "Grade F Mook" with "Grade SSS Mook" doesn't do anything but keep the combat feeling the exact same way for ages.
Starting the game struggling to fend off a couple of bandits and ending up chopping through warbands of a couple dozen of them when you're at a high level would be way better than the current system.
and BOSS (or LOOT, if people insist that's better)
LOOT is BOSS 3.0. Same team. I don't know why they renamed it. They were calling it BOSS 3 when it was in beta.
BOSS 2, as far as I know, is dead. I don't think the masterlist is going to be updated again, so no new mods are going to be sorted correctly. Use LOOT.
Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
I found the 'getting more powerful' was shown pretty accurately by taking the rare enemies and turning them trivial. :P My bow got to the point my initial shot was taking away half the health of a dragon if I got a sneak shot away before being spotted.
I found the 'getting more powerful' was shown pretty accurately by taking the rare enemies and turning them trivial. :P My bow got to the point my initial shot was taking away half the health of a dragon if I got a sneak shot away before being spotted.
So, did you then draw, crouch, and fire your autosneakcrit for the kill? Or... do you not have the insane perk at sneak 100?
I found the 'getting more powerful' was shown pretty accurately by taking the rare enemies and turning them trivial. :P My bow got to the point my initial shot was taking away half the health of a dragon if I got a sneak shot away before being spotted.
So, did you then draw, crouch, and fire your autosneakcrit for the kill? Or... do you not have the insane perk at sneak 100?
I don't actually remember. My current playthrough isn't that far along and the last one was last June sometime.
0
Ninja Snarl PMy helmet is my burden.Ninja Snarl: Gone, but not forgotten.Registered Userregular
Yeah, but if you have two enemies, one name "Glass-jaw Williams" and "Mega-ultra-super-killer-mans McGee", and they both collapse after a couple of whacks, it feels the same, just with a couple of different names.
But if you have a stack of the William version instead of McGee, even if you're one-shotting every enemy it's just a lot more fun than the same thing you were doing twenty hours ago. It also means that the loot curve stops getting so ridiculous, because you have regular guys coming at you instead of bandits in enchanted ebony armor (why are they even bandits if they're toting around incredible armor that's worth a lifetime of gold?).
Posts
For you said you have the mod manager installed, good, cause it's more or less vital to easily installing and uninstalling mods.
Make sure you have the Official Hi-Res DLC.
Ok, before we even get to the graphics, you will want two things that just make Skyrim better in literally every way and that pretty much all of the most popular mods require.
First is Skyrim Script Extenter. It allows your game to run more scripts than just the vanilla game. You can pick the current version of the alpha version. I prefer the installer, it's perfectly safe.
Second is Sky UI. This is more than a menu changer, it also adds an "MCM" menu to your options that many great mods use to allow you to configure them in game. Sky UI will be a prereq to those mods and it really is awesome in it's own right.
While not required, you really, really really should install the unofficial patches for all three vanilla esps. Base Skyrim Patch. HD patch. Dawnguard. Hearthfire. And Dragonborn. They fix so many bugs and help improve stability. Vanilla Skyrim is quite unstable at times with a lot of bad edits, broken quests, and horrible memory leaks. These patches don't fix all of that, but it fixes a lot and I've never had an issue with them.
For basic graphics improvements, install in this order on the mod manager and allow overwrites.:
Ruins Clutter Improved. Improves the nordin runes and just the dungeon clutter in general.
Skyrim HD Fire. I love this mod. Awesome fire improvements. I personally use the medium version, but I honestly don't see a difference between the low, mid, and ultra versions.
Static Mesh Improvement is awesome. Doesn't increase textures, but the meshes that those textures attach too. Super great.
Better Snow. Makes pretty snow. There's also an offshoot mod for Dragonborn ash.
This one I love, WATER. It makes water super pretty. There are other water improvements that people will recommend, but I like WATER cause it adds waves to the beaches and other immersion improving effects.
Now you can reinstall yourSkyrim HD and overwrite all files.
There are a great many other things you can do to make the game look better, like lighting and weather mods and ENB. But as you add more and more, you take a system hit. It depends on what rig you are running. But the above should give you a noticeable improvement.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
I forgot. Get a mod sorter. Some mods need to be placed before or after others in the ESP load order. You can do this manually, but... you don't want to do this manually.
I use LOOT. Just run install and run it. It will reorder your ESP's and is constantly updated.
Others may have a different recommendation for a mod sorter, but you definitely want one of them.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
Bashed or merged patches always go at the bottom of your load order no matter how they get sorted around. Remember that.
Once you've settled on which mods you're going to run and have them installed and sorted, cleaning mods is another pretty useful skill to know, it should help stability and reduce conflicts.
TES5Edit is the program you need to clean mods, and it has a handy-dandy tutorial on how to use, here.
It looks a lot more intimidating than it really is, but once you understand mod load orders and cleaning, you'll have a much more stable experience overall.
As long as I don't install Dawnguard, I've never had trouble modding Skyrim just letting Steam Workshop manage everything.
The base stuff from Bethesda is chock full of dirty edits and broken shit. TES5edit and the unofficial patches should fix that for you.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
He should open all his videos with him sitting in a chair next to a fireplace and smoking a corncob pipe.
The only thing Dawnguard really added that I want is craftable arrows, which is like a 5 minute mod, so I just made my own mod that did that.
I'm also a pretty big fan of crossbows myself.
Aside from the cool crossbow and crafted arrows, it has some amazing environments (except for the Soul Cairn). Really aesthetically pleasing. Serana is also a fantastic companion, especially for Bethesda. Also new magic and shouts. The random vampire attacks are fun too. And vampire/werewolf perks. And the quest isn't too bad either.
Worth it imo.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
All the more surprising you can't give her the waifu necklace. The Dragonborn doesn't know how to deal with intimacy I guess.
The fact that I was never able to deal with the soul cairn bug was the real impetus, though. You can always resurrect NPCs with the console. Usually. If they lose their merchant associations, though, it can be a huge pain. But as far as I could find there was no resolution for the constant crashes to desktop after the soul cairn.
Guards will defend livestock to the death and every man, woman and child with an iron dagger will brave a dragon confrontation.
My other question, is there a recommendation for a good render distance mod? I'm happy with the way everything looks aside from seeing small islands in a body of water that look extremely pointy/jagged and sloppy looking trees starting at a certain point. The consensus I gathered reading online was that people don't really care since increasing detail from a distance detracts from their immersion. Which is fine, but pretty>immersion for me.
That is why these two mods are the best:
Run for your Lives and When Vampires Attack.
These mods make civilian NPC's run indoors when dragons and vampires do their random attacks. Guards, members of The Companions, Vigilants of Stendaar, and the player's followers/teammates will not run, they will stand and fight. Farm animals will not run either, because they're stupid.
Amazing mods there.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
For crime, I use Crime Overhaul. It prevents animals from reporting you, but dogs can still bark. Guards will follow you if they catch you sneaking.
I also use Realistic Crime Radius. Which lowers the range at which people can automatically report a crime 4000 whatever unit of measure Skyrim uses, down to 1000.
Neither is overpowered, but seriously adds to my immersion.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
I've had that happen. Frustrated the hell outta me until I discovered that vampires were attacking outside the Whiterun gates, down by the stables. Once I cleared them out, people went back to work.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
Statements like this continue to bug the hell out of me, especially if (as I suspect) they're true. I expect Bethesda to know their own shit better than outsiders, and for the official patches to be superior to reverse-engineered third-party hacks. They're the professionals, this is (or should be) their job. But that doesn't seem to be the case here.
Maybe it's the "many eyes" thing that open source folks are always going on about. But to me it just seems like really bad quality control on Bethesda's part.
Steam, Warframe: Megajoule
I agree, but I disagree.
Bethesda gets a lot of shit for broken elements, but a lot of that is because they let people fuck around with their engine. I bet 100% dollars (yes, percent) that if they did the same to Mass Effect or Batman or whatever AAA game out there, people would find all sorts of bad scripts and dirty edits and ask what the fuck.
I'm not excusing them. Just sayin.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
Instead I've been using "My Skyrim People Protected!" mod. It sets most NPCs as protected, so you have a good chance of them surviving vampire/dragon attacks. Dragons/vampires do seem to change targets quickly compared to mages once npcs take a knee. I think it's only available on the steam workshop though.
Haha, not for me. I killed the vampires and noticed no one was coming outside, so I went looking for them. They were all stacked at the door, trying to get out.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
They do help, but it cuts down on hilarity.
"Oh look, a fight!" in a good-natured 'this'll be cool!' tone from a NPC in Dawnstar, so you spin 180 to see what they are looking at and it's an Ancient Dragon touching down and breathing death at your face.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.
Plus it looks good.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
And the three programs I'll need for the mods are NMM, SSE and BOSS (or LOOT, if people insist that's better), right?
Should I also avoid using the Steam Workshop to avoid conflicts?
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Starting the game struggling to fend off a couple of bandits and ending up chopping through warbands of a couple dozen of them when you're at a high level would be way better than the current system.
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
No no no, the correct response was "but Ninja Snarl, somebody already made a mod to do that and here is the link".
My shores are broken (rivers, ponds, lakes, sea, whatever). They always have straight ugly lines instead of pretty transitions.
BOSS 2, as far as I know, is dead. I don't think the masterlist is going to be updated again, so no new mods are going to be sorted correctly. Use LOOT.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.
So, did you then draw, crouch, and fire your autosneakcrit for the kill? Or... do you not have the insane perk at sneak 100?
3DS: 0473-8507-2652
Switch: SW-5185-4991-5118
PSN: AbEntropy
I don't actually remember. My current playthrough isn't that far along and the last one was last June sometime.
But if you have a stack of the William version instead of McGee, even if you're one-shotting every enemy it's just a lot more fun than the same thing you were doing twenty hours ago. It also means that the loot curve stops getting so ridiculous, because you have regular guys coming at you instead of bandits in enchanted ebony armor (why are they even bandits if they're toting around incredible armor that's worth a lifetime of gold?).