Sorry, I tried to keep it as brief as I could, but I could really use some help. I'm new to modding in the age of Steam, though not modding altogether. I'm after a list of download musts.

OK, so here's the situation. My brother out in the country, who already had Steam because of Call of Duty Black Ops on his computer, has satellite for internet. I bought Skyrim for my niece on PC, and I followed precise instructions (not really all that difficult to be honest) for how to put Steam to sleep, er, offline mode. This involved allowing the client and all games including Skyrim to fully update. This was a fairly sizable download. Even if it had been up here on "real" internet, it might've taken 30 minutes to an hour. Out there, when some of the top speeds I saw displayed in Steam listed 181 Kilobytes/second (you read correctly) it took somewhere around 17 hours and was basically going all night.

I talked him into sending his tower up with my ride for when I go out to visit tomorrow. This will allow me to hook it up here in my apartment and let it update to 1.7 and get sizable things like the creation kit and possibly buy Dawnguard with only a sensible amount of downloading time necessary. I will be getting picked up after work around 2:00 PM, and the person coming up is a friend who knows we're not leaving immediately and will wait a while for me to do some major downloading.

The dilemma: I know I want to let the client and games update, and get the creation kit. But beyond that, I'd like to get some good mods. I have ability to post and search for answers to questions about how to install, how to resolve issues, and basically anything I run into later all next week while I am out there. So I was hoping to get a good idea for some places to start. Suggestions for mods to do the downloading now while up here would be greatly appreciated.

First question I suppose is can you get the mods and/or the creation kit without Steam from the Nexus site or others? I would guess no, and that all downloading will have to commence after the tower gets here. Two of the things I absolutely know I want are to get an XBox controller working with his computer and dual wield parry or blocking.

I can plug an XBox controller in since it is USB I know. I did the same to try and use one with PC Oblivion, but I remember being unable to map everything, particularly the anolog things like the trigger buttons. This wasn't a limitation of the computer, as it could successfully test all buttons including the anolog triggers. It was an inability of the game to map properly to it. I never did resolve this for Oblivion myself, but read someone implying there is a mod that somehow is a piece of the puzzle for Skyrim at least. And I saw one mod already listing parrying.

I believe from what I read so far that ASIS and some kind of character creation mod, maybe some overhaul mods for enemy AI and the uncapper should be on the short list. I would guess BOSS and Wrye Bash probably come highly recommended, though I admit to only understanding what those are for in the most cursory sense. As I say, figuring it all out and actually installing is not the point right now. Just a nice list of "get these downloads started as soon as you hook it up, you don't want to miss this" will help.

I will continue reading and searching for a while, but have to be up at 8:00 AM, so my time is fairly limited. I realized just how many there are as I started looking and despaired of being able to take advantage of the opportunity (it wasn't exactly easy to convince him to send the computer tower up). It is unlikely I'll be able to get more than a few, but any suggestions would help.

I found a post googling about Skyrim with an XBox controller that says it is actually configurable in the game's settings, thus no need of a mod. Wrye Bash, BOSS, and the creation kit all seem to have sizes of around 20 or 30 meg, so I may have some leeway in terms of some sizeable mods to lump in the list. I don't know which Wrye Bash to get (it lists several versions). I haven't got Python and doubt my brother does, so maybe one of the one's that include interpreter commands and doesn't build, er, whatever it is it builds, with dependencies on Python?

Still looking. I forgot that the unofficial patch is likely a "must have'. i read though where there were potential conflicts with Dawnguard, though not many. I could still get it, and just not use Dawnguard while testing things out. All that can be hashed out later though. Going to search up the texture pack and see how big that is.

Edit: just remembered there was something with one of the sites I got mods for Oblivion from that if it was over a certain size required an account. If it's not possible to get them outside of Steam, then that may be moot point.

That restriction is for the nexus sites (not sure if it's still in effect), they don't require you to own Skyrim to download.

Anyways!

For Bash, I'd suggest getting the Standalone version since your friend doesn't have Python -- it should be labelled as such on the http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/1840 page. I'd also recommend downloading BOSS to sort the load order.

Aside from that, I find SKSE, the Unofficial patch, and SkyUI to be the most essential mods for Skyrim. http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/8058 and http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/4929 are also highly recommended.

If your friend's PC is a decent gaming rig, you can look into these graphic mods:

• http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/8655
  
• http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/5400, alot people like http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/607 as well
  
• http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/141
  
• http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/1111 (another good water mod: http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/13268)

A couple of SKSE plugins that I highly recommend, as well:

• http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/1175
  
• http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/14559

And here's few mod that I think are pretty good:

• http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/13268 (smithing mod)
  
• http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/19333

My mod list is pretty small so I can't really recommend that much

Thank you. I'm seeing some of these are in the 20 to 30 meg range and even their official high def texture mod lists at around 80 meg. That's like to nothing for here at my speeds. In fairness, those updates all totalled were a few gigs, so possibly only texture mods would top the size charts. I am packing and already losing sleep, but I want to give this a fair consideration. I want to make the game look and play so much better with what I do get, even if it takes a lot longer to figure out how to use it all, that he will see it was worth the trouble.

Briefly though, BOSS is a program to sort the mod order (capable of adjusting this and such) while Wrye Bash is save editing? I feel I'm missing one I got for Oblivion. OBSE, that was it. Is there a corresponding "script extender" for Skyrim which some mods may require?

Yep, that'd be SKSE (Skyrim Script Extender). Just seeing now that I didn't add a link to it in my post.

BOSS sorts mods automagically. Bash isn't save editing (there's no such thing for Skyrim at the moment, unfortunately). Bash helps with overall mod managing. You can use it install/uninstall mods and order any mod that BOSS doesn't recognize. It also has this neat little feature where it creates a patch (called Bashed Patch) that helps improve compatibility between mods. Unfortunately, said feature isn't as well developed for Skyrim as it was for Oblivion, but it still does a little bit.

So basically, people are still doing some of this stuff the manual way? That is, some mods for Skyrim may not come as OMODs or recognized by BOSS and if all else fails, you're following the manual installation instructions? I'm actually familiar with that method from the few mods I installed for Morrowind. The only tricky stuff was editing the INI files and copying backups for the switching between playing Nehrim and mods with it and regular Oblivion with its mods. I will need to dive back in for a crash course on all of it when I get out there.

Not sure what his graphics card is capable of, but if I grab something I can't use, no big deal. Better to download as many things as I think might be cool and have them than I may actually get to work.

Edit: oh, by the way, if the Nexus sites don't require you to own Skyrim, does that mean you can get those without Steam? Probably going to bed soon anyway, but just curious about how far "Steam only" goes.

If by "those" you mean the mods, then yes, you can get them without Steam. You might need an account but it's are free and takes about five minutes. I think the "Steam only" thing is just for owning and playing Skyrim.

I'm going to try to list the more universal or ubiquitous mods, but there are many good ones that really focus on a character type, which I'll mostly ignore:

You can download and organize into a set of categorized directories for your brother, then he can mess around with them at his leisure. As people have said, Nexus has no restrictions on downloading.

Absolute Essentials:

User Interface
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/3863 and http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/4862 and http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/4929 - Note that there are good optional categorized favorites mods, too
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/2730 or http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/14412 (absolutely required, IMO)

Fixes
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/4719
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/601
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/19
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/9557 - great mod that's not necessary for the first few characters, but really nice to have after that
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/6- required to load mods in the correct order (prevent mod conflicts)

Combat
(Choose any one, they're all really good)
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/3646 - slower, more tactical combat, increases difficulty and complexity of combat (tries to remove button-mashing from combat, and make it as truly realistic as possible)
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/2700- increased action combat with some RPG elements (percent chance)
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/5485 - faster, more action-oriented combat

Also http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/10037(general overhaul, can work with Duel or Deadly Combat easily)
And http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/10906 works with any of the above

Magic
Use one of these:
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/11139 (magic overhaul)
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/4374 (vanilla magic tweaked to be better)

..plus..
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/16225 - many more spells, the best of breed mod that adds a lot of new, useful, well-thought out spells


Armor
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/19733 - great collection of extra armor
...there are many other great ones, but I'll stick with the above for a minimum, because it provides a lot of new, very well done armors

New Monsters, Better Monster and Enemy Encounters
Use any (or all) of these:
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/9694 with (optional) http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/16411 (absolutely essential)
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/3829 and/or http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/13423
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/9494 - this can eat CPU and grind the game on older hardware, otherwise no problem
http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12479

...these plus trira's recommendations are a good start.

Just a friendly reminder: you said you tried to keep your first post short? I struggle to believe that. A LOT of what you wrote in that post is completely unnecessary. We didn't need to know about your brother, your updating, your download speed, and much more of the post. Your post literally could have said,

'Hey guys; got mediocre internet speed, modding Skyrim for the first time, don't have a lot of personal time to spend on modding, what are the major recommendations?'

That's all we needed to know to help you in any sense.

A lot of the above mods recommended aren't really ones you should be starting with. They're very 'addition heavy', in that they add a lot to the base game, or new features that are otherwise unnecessary. When you're more in tune with modding Skyrim and what mods are out there, the above may be recommended.

For starters, you really want SkyUI, the Unofficial Skyrim Patch and Weapons and Armor Fixes, as omphaloskepsis said. That alone will tidy the game up significantly, enough that it becomes a very enjoyable game. Better Sorting is great, but can be quite fiddly with compatibility unless you get all the compatibility patches for it...

From there, I recommend continuing to fix the default game before adding anything really new. I'd look at a magic fixer next. omphaloskepsis recommended empowered magic or better magic. Not my personal choice - I find their balancing to be quite off in my eyes. http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/2275 I find, is a great vanilla balancer.

I wouldn't worry about graphical or sound enhancements yet, they're the ones that take the most downloading if you're lacking time for downloading.

Uncapper and Smart Souls are nice, but again, unnecessary off the bat. It takes a long while for Uncapper to become useful anyway, and Smart Souls is more for convenience than necessity.

If you're desperate for a good crafting mod, either go Ars Metallica, or my personal recommendation of http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/8003 for a more comprehensive coverage of smithing fixes and tweaks.

omphaloskepsis' recommendations on combat mods are great choices; Duel is perhaps the simplest of them to set up and use, with Deadly combat a close second, and Duke Patrick's a far third for simplicity. Dance of Death is eye-candy; wouldn't concern myself with it for now if I were you.

Apocalypse Spells and Immersive armors are great, but again, more additions, less fixes.

Finally, Monster Mod/Warzones/Occupy Skyrim are big addition mods that can drag your game down if you're not careful.

I'm not bagging or recommending against any of these mods, I'm simply suggesting in an order of simplicity and necessity. Previous posters here have said a few mods are necessary, when they're really not. What's necessary to Skyrim, re: mods are the handful that really fix the game, and make it the way it was intended to be shipped. After that, it's all icing on the cake as to what you want to add, and above posts recommend some really great mods to add.

Hope this helps.