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ELDER SCROLLS OMNIBUS THREAD


JLSigman

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Do any of y'all mod yer Skyrim's? If so, what do you use? I know about the Nexus webpages (I use it for a lot of DA and DA2 mods), just curious as to what people use. It seems pretty straight forward for the most part, thanfully...

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Skyrim's Nexus is pretty solid.  The Steam Workshop has some interesting stuff pop up sometimes, though it has a file size limit that prevents some of the Bigger mod files from going up on it.  And there's the auto-updating thing, which can get annoying if you prefer an older version of a mod.

 

Also worth at least taking a look at http://www.skyrimgems.com/

 

This is a wiki-style page put together by Something Awful fans of Skyrim as a sort of compendium/encyclopedia of skyrim mods designed to be easily searchable for the type of mod you want. 

 

I don't remember my personal list of preferred mods off the top of my head, as GTA5 has managed to accomplish the impossible and actually get me to stop playing Skyrim for a while now.  I do remember the first (and still favorite) mod I installed was of course this one:

 

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SkyUI was the single most useful thing when I played it. I have no idea if the official high resolution textures were better than the fan made ones. Last time I played Skyrim was back in February of 2012. I also remember Quality World Map and a mod that added in a clock on loading screens. Really though, the most important mod is that one that adds dangling wieners to trolls.

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This is all stuff I used. Note I do not have the current patch, or any of the expansions. But I am 99.9% sure all of these are current version compatible. I use a few other small mods that are just personal choices, but I'd say these are essential tries. From there you can just fiddle with what works/what doesn't for you.

 

ACE Skills Overhaul:

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/10037/?

Basically makes the skill trees deeper, and more feeling like an Elder Scrolls game again. Skyrim is great for its pick up and play simplicity, don't get me wrong, but as a long time RPG player and fan of the series, this was really good.

 

Frostfall - Hypothermia/Camping/Survival Mod

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/11163/?

I avoided this for a long time because I thought it would be too much of a change but it became one of my favourite mods. You can now freeze to death in arctic water or in a blizzard, and fire sources of all kinds warm you up, basically. This is seriously great, it adds to the feel of the game a ton, for me.

 

Deadly Dragons

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/3829/?

This does what it says on the label. Do not try and fight dragons at a low level with this installed, but it's fucking awesome for high level characters. Also note it adds a "console" on the upper level of Dragonsreach you can tweak damage/health for different kinds of monsters: dragons, animals, and people IIRC. I personally liked using it to also crank animal damage as you level up, so things like Sabrecat attacks remain a somewhat meaningful event. This also adds several new variants of dragons that show up as you level, some of which are just ghoulish strong. Loved this, personally.

 

Dragonbone Weapons

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/1935/?

Simply put, adds some items to the game's crafting system so you can make Dragonbone weapons to go with that bitchin' armor. This may have been addressed in an official expansion already, but I can't remember. Anyway, this was solid. There should also be a link somewhere in either this, or the above ACE Skills Overhaul, that patches it so it works with the ACE change to light and heavy bows, but I didn't look that hard just now. I do remember it being there. (The ACE overhaul has some specific patches for a number of other popular mods to prevent conflicts.)

 

Real Wildlife - Skyrim

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/9778/?

Adds a ton of animal variations (different classes like young, regular, elder wolves that get harder as you go), new diseases, some new alchemy/cooking ingredients. Simple but adds a lot that is worthwhile.

 

Like I said there's tons of little things you can fiddle with (Werewolf mods that make them high level viable, extra armors weapons, reskins, wildlife mods etc) but to me this is a good core of stuff to try out and build around. And if shit isn't compatible with these mods, honestly, you're probably better off with these.

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  • 1 month later...

The mod community has been busy while I was away.

 

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/35841//?

 

Has anyone tried this? If it's actually stable, it sounds... really good.

 

There's that Falskaar thing floatin' around too but I haven't tried that either.

 

I found the voice acting and dialogue to be jarringly, cringe-worthy bad to the point where I uninstalled it even though it played well enough and had a Really Nice "show off and store your stuff" underground batcave of a house that unlocked early on in the quest line.

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I haven't tried that one, it's like 2 gig so it's too large for my tastes (I'm with you in that if I'm going to put up with amateur voice acting it has to be for something adding new land/quests to be worthwhile, because most of it stinks). I did try a much smaller one called "inconsequential NPC's" which just tries to liven up the cities a bit without adding quests or "I put myself into the game" characters, and it uses only existing in game voice files. Looked good and I liked that a lot, but I had stability issues with it. After I installed it my game started running uber slow, like it suddenly developed memory issues. Hard to say if that's the mod's fault because I'm running like a billion things at once. It's more than likely just a conflict with something else I'm running. I liked what I saw of it enough that I'm going to try it again later, but on a "clean" new character instead of dumping it into a game halfway in, since that's often a modding no-no with anything that adds scripts. It may also just be a hardware issue. If I can get it to run more stable cool, if not no big loss for me.

 

Still it has a lot of endorsements too, so clearly it works for a lot of people.

 

For the most part I've had surprisingly little problem with modding, partially because I'm smart enough not to install like 2 or 3 things that effect the same thing. That's when you start generating all sorts of weird problems. But if you tinker enough, problems are inevitable I guess.

 

Still worth it, as long as you know when enough is enough.

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Sounds like a good idear. I haven't started up Skyrim in about 3 months, I'm terrified of touching mods because it took me forever to get it stable-ish yet badass.

 

Have they figured how to get around that 4GB of RAM the game is capped out at? I had to scale down the texture packs and ditch that wonderful civil war mod because of that. My PC is a fucking hulk but I have no games that really push it. UNLEASH THE BEAST, BETHESDA.

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Sounds like a good idear. I haven't started up Skyrim in about 3 months, I'm terrified of touching mods because it took me forever to get it stable-ish yet badass.

 

Biggest issue for me was that when Steam forced me to update my files, it auto patched on me up to the current, so I'm actually running an obsolete version of a couple mods. Amazingly, none of those have produced issues for me, that I am aware of. Deadly Dragons, for one, now requires Dawnguard to run the current version I saw. But, the old version I have and doesn't seem to be available anymore still seems perfectly stable in vanilla Skyrim with the new patch, thank God. One of my faves, since you can damage tweak just about every enemy in the game with it's console which keeps things interesting at high levels (once I get really strong I like to really crank creature damage, so random trolls and sabrecats can still threaten you a bit. No one should just be able to curb stomp a sabrecat, I figure).

 

Hadn't played in like a year but am back into it now. I'm at the point where I don't really intend to do ANY more tweaking of skills/items/basic enemies, as I love the files I'm running. Only things I want to try now are a couple of the new land/quest things, as long as they don't destabalize things. There's a civil war expanding mod that looks interesting (V1 was apparently buggy as shit, but the current V2 is supposed to be much much better), that rebuild Helgen thing, and Falskaar. That's probably about it as far as what I can see doing. If Moonpath to Elswyr ever leaves beta, I will try it, but I won't touch it before then. Someone has also started a rebuild Morrowind mod that is at least in beta stages, but that looks *minimum* a year away from being anything. And if any of those give me stability shit, I would jettison them without thinking about it. The game is good enough it's not worth fucking around with that.

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So how the fuck do you actually liberate anything in this civil war overhaul mod?

 

I'm in the middle of the battle for Falkreath (first hold I got after the Whiterun battle which went fine) and I've killed like 70 billion Imperials, but they just keep spawning more with no quest objective other than kill the bad guys. I'm out of healing potions so if the game spawns one more of those Imperial Archmages I essentially can't win. What's the actual victory objective? 80 billion?

 

EDIT: It does eventually end. 80 billion sounds about right. Only strategy I could work out was spawn camp the Archmage dude's spot on top of the hill so you can fry him before he can start throwing Fireballs of Fireballing on all he sees. If every lib has that many waves, it's going to rule at high levels, but it's just killer hard at the low ones. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as Skyrim is loaded with content that is really good between levels 10 and 30 and then really the mod community has had to fill in the gap for people that want to play one character forever. This seems like something that fits well into that I guess.

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So on the civil war overhaul mod: You really really really need to pay attention to that feature where wearing an enemy uniform makes the other dudes stop attacking you while you try and do missions. Had to fight off every single guard in Markarth last night because I am an idiot. It was hilariously ridiculous and was kind of fun even if I once again burned all my potions doing it but... yeah. There are wiser ways.

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I added the unofficial patches for everything, and now that I've beaten the main quest with a toon I'll start diving into the more interesting ones. I'd like some more interesting potential followers, but good grief the boys love putting girl followers in, um, mostly nothing. :-p

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I said this on the old forum and I say it again: I want a special Steam achievement for avoiding all the wank fodder mods for like 2 years. Come on people. Heavy Armory is right there and it's like 5 meg. The one handed hammers alone make that shit worthwhile. So much actually good stuff without having to feel creepy about myself.

 

By the way, the current unofficial patch tried to bork my game. Bad graphics stutters, and a reliably producible crash to desktop in a certain spot. Turned it off and I was perfectly stable. But my mod list is long enough it's awfully hard to say what breaks what. All I know is my game runs a hell of a lot better without it. Everyone on the nexus told me I was full of shit on that, though, so you mileage may vary. I'm sure it works for 99% of people, I just managed to be in the 1% with my current setup somehow.

 

Trust your own results, because every modder in history says their mod is clean.

 

The only general mod (non-quest adding stuff) I haven't tried I still want to is Immersive Armors. I will get around to that. Otherwise I've tried about all I ever need to.

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The Enhanced Blood Textures mod is just absolutely disgusting in all the viking ways it should be. I highly recommend combining it with the ragdoll physics mod, and the one that makes bodies have collision if you want a much more intense experience. Wasn't sure it would really be for me, but I admit it brought out my inner vampire a bit.

 

ScreenShot7.png

 

Darn giants sticking their giant hands in my photos.

 

But yeah. Painted the town red during the Civil War Overhaul there.

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Warzones is, apparently, obsolete and no longer supported. Apparently it's even buggier with current versions than it used to be. Truth is it was never finished. It was a neat concept but yeah if you try and run it, it's gonna crash you from all I hear.

 

I'm running this: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/37216//? I find it stable, personally. Try to ignore that the guy who wrote the mod, based on the "description", is the biggest internet dork that's ever lived. Dude can program, that's what counts. Though I'm up to the end battle for Solitude and fuck me it's insanely hard. tl;dr version, there's a bunch of code actually in Skyrim for a more complex and dynamic civil war but it never made it into the final game, and this guy went in and filled all the holes. It's a lot more fun than the vanilla war where you fight battles that you can't actually lose, that's for sure.

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There was a catch-all Elder Scrolls thread on the old board, but of course it's gone like the rest of it.

 

I'm not sure if people were simply waiting for Rippa to figure out how to restore the old threads including that one (if possible) or if we've just collectively moved on to other games such as GTA5, or if the Modding Skyrim thread is simply enough discussion content to keep everyone content, but there's been no attempt at a new Elder Scrolls Series thread since the new board went up.  Maybe Elder Scrolls Online will pique more interest when it starts up in earnest.

 

The Dragonborn DLC is far more involved and flushed out for the sticker price than Dawnguard is, and if you're a fan of Morrowind OR of H.P. Lovecraft you'll find plenty of amusing nods to both to keep you entertained.  Hearthfire is so cheap it's worth it anyway, I actually had fun with it on it's own merit (the adopting kids mechanic is more fun than it sounds like it is).

 

Dawnguard is very thin for the money and adds a new set of random spawning attacks that kill off your go-to shopkeepers for fencing your dungeon loot.  Least essential of the three and even on a playthru where I ultimately use it I tend to leave it "turned off" until I'm ready to actually start it.  But by now it's probably much cheaper and bundled in with the others so you might as well get it too I guess.  Crossbows are kinda fun.

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yeah I saw the thread for pc modding, but not a catch all.  I can't remember the final page count on the old catch all, but I'm pretty sure it rivaled the GTAV thread.  I'm kinda out of the loop on Elder Scrolls (online) really, last I heard it was due out at the end of the year, but I'm guessing that's been pushed back?

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They're doing beta testing of online now, with a full rollout in the spring. The fact that it's gonna be on the Xbox One (or PlayStation 4) piques my interest, but I'm not sure I wanna pay $15 a month to play a video game.

 

The Dragonborn DLC is well worth whatever they're charging for it. Dawnguard, not so much. 

 

The acutal full rollout of the next Elder Scrolls game will probably be what causes me to buy a next-generation system, job willing.

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