Hello. First thanks to bethesda for this epic game and thanks to the modders for making it better.

I love this game although I admit it has its faults. I'm still on my first play-trough and have learned the mechanics of the game fairly well. Although there are lots of awesome mods out there that I cant wait to try, I want to keep a version of the game that reflects bethesda's vision and testing while at the same time improving that experience. I will list here mods that in my opinion make the game better without fundamentally changing the game. BY better I mean faster navigation of menus, less interruptions in combat, better inventory management, etc. Nothing that changes the balance of the game. If you know of more please post them here.

These are the ones I use:

1. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/content/modmanager/: Not exactly a mod but it really makes things easy.

2. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=667: We all now that bethesda simply ran out of time with the PC interface( or something like that). Inventory management in vanilla Skyrim is non existent. Because of this a mayor part of the game is broken. QD inventory is a quick temporary fix but it improves crafting and commerce by leaps and bounds. If you don't get anything else get this one

3. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2730: JUst what it says. Instead of having "Iron ore", "SIlver Ore", "Gold Ore" etc it renames items like this: "Ore, Iron", "Ore, Silver", "Ore, Gold". It does this for many different items , but not for everything yet. Still fun stuff.

4. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1598: I dont know how but this work without any noticeable performance loss. On of my favorites.

5. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2356: this mod makes you go WOW sometimes. It improves the visuals of NPC's

6.http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3389#content: makes far away trees look prettier without performance loss

7. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3288#content: makes patces of grass thicker. I have my grass view to 0 since I find this enhances performance, but I tried this and it does makes the terrain more lush.

8. http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=436&navtag=file/images.php?id=436&tab=3: Only use this if you would like to read roadsigns. I know that as a default I can barely read them.


Well thats all I've got so far. Feel free to recommend any other mods that you think fit this categories. I'll try em for a bit for a quick compatibility check then I'll add them to the list. Once I'm done with this play through I'll go crazy with all the other wonderful mods out there that change the heck out of bethesda's vision. I cant wait


Edit: added mods suggested by the baer

Your topic title is very misleading..

Ah nevermind, I see what you mean.

Thanks for posting your list. It's what I was looking for this morning.

http://www.pcgamer.com/2011/11/25/skyrim-mods-the-20-best-so-far/

This is a pretty decent list that should fit your criteria. There are a few that I never installed, but most of these just make the game much nicer looking. I installed Skyrim HD first, and then the other more specific textures.

The FXAA injector I left out as well. This injector below makes Skyrim look fantastic with most of the texture replacers found in the list above.

http://www.gamesas.com/index.php?/topic/1297151-rel-realistic-colors-and-real-nights/

The screen shots that are shown for this mod look darker than they really are. I think in the newest version he lighted it up a bit. Really fantastic job that you have to see in action.

Static Clean, that Lighting/Colours mod is amazing.

OP, you forgot http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3288#content and http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3389#content. Neither of these lower performance, either!

I noticed no difference with this one.

Intentions can be tricky things, but I also prefer to stick with mostly simple visual mods, for now.

At 200+ hours in the game I have added mostly visual mods and not game mechanics modifications. I have added the visual improvement mods because my computer can handle it; Bethesda made the game to work for the most number of people, not the high end machines. Most of what I want to see adds to what Bethesda did, or makes things they way they would have done if they had time.

In addition to the visual mods I am using this mod suggested by Pseron Wyrd:

"The one I use is Reduced Distance NPC Greetings by Cipsis. It cuts down on greetings without eliminating them entirely. Works perfectly. I love it."


TheCastle is planning on making a mod to add eating, drinking and sleeping. I will use that as well; I liked the way they did it in Fallout Las Vegas.

Thanks for your post. There are some very interesting mods there, but mods like Val’s Crafting Meltdown and glowing ore veins significantly alter the balance of the game. There are others fantastic mods that use higher resolution textures. If you have the Vram go for it I envy you. I'm trying to concentrate in mods that do not change the balance of the game and do not hit performance too much. I know xenius mods have higher res and proably impact performance... but it looks so pretty!. I also tried the FXAA injector but it has a significant performance impact on my machine.




Thanks! I tried them and added them. I like the distant trees one, but my viewing distance for grass is set to 0. I upped my viewing distance and added this mod just to check it out and it works great.


Thanks! this sounds great although I can't find it in skyrimnexus. DO you have a link for it?

Like I said, I didn't install them all. Pretty much just the texture replacers. I try to keep Skyrim as "vanilla" as possible when it comes to game play mechanics. Trying to find many that don't impact performance will be difficult though.

You might want to expand the thread to include some that would take an impact on performance since many players on PC would rather have the higher resolutions that a console version can't handle. I mean, right now, basic Skyrim it's up to par to be ran on the XBox 360, a five year old system.

Not to be nitpick... But what? All Glowing Ore Veins does is make them more noticeable.. That's it.

Anyways, I to stick to just visual mods as well.. I don't want the crazy junk that's in Tytanis... I just want the Vanilla mechanics, better visuals, and maybe a few slight tweaks I feel should have been in the game anyways.

Mods I use...

Glowing Ore Veins
Vurts Floral Overhaul
Realistic Water
Realistic Night Sky
Enhanced Blood
HD High Resolution Armor
High Res Dragons
cXe Character Enhancement
Realistic Hair
CBBE body mod (non nvde version)
Beauty Female Faces
More craftables

A bit of a list, but besides More Craftables, all visual stuff. More craftables just lets you craft a few basic items without enchants on them. Nightingale, Dark Brotherhood, and Legion armor for example.

Beauty Female Faces is a nice balance between having more "attractive" female NPC's, while keeping with the original design and not making them look out of place, or glamazons.

High-Res Dragons increases fine detail on all dragon types, and bumps up color contrast a TINY TINY bit. Looks great in game.

Well the thing about glowing ore veins is that it makes it easier to find ore. If finding ore is easier then you will have more ore. IIf you have more ore then yo can craft more and faster, thus affecting the intended balance of the game. Don't get me wrong, its an awesome mod, I just think that it changes the balance of the game thus it is not included in this list.

Well I can't believe you'd actually prefer Bethesda's idea of balance.. but http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1702: sound mods are nice too

Besides, finding more ores (which wasn't really intended to be a challenge) is a lot less unbalanced than the way smithing (and other crafting) is as Beth intended

You don't know what Bethesda did or did not intend. This is nothing more than your own personally preferred mods (which is fine), given a trumped up name to make it sound like more than that (which I find rude).

I use the ore mod because I am old and my close-up eyesight is poor (ore is hard to see on my laptop). It doesn't change the game mechanics, it just helps me see things.

You are right. I don't know what Bethesda intended, but I do know what they actually released. I'm willing to bet that a lot of thought, testing and math went into the designer's idea of balance. With all due respect to modders, I'm pretty sure that most balance changing mods are not tested as thoroughly as bethesda did. Given time and feedback I'm sure that modders will improve the experience of the game by leaps and bounds and will allow every player to change the game in a way that suits their style. In the mean time I would like to play Bethesda's version of a balanced game and improve on things that have negligible impact on the game.

Take the UI for instance. Each item in the game has many different attributes, yet to compare those attributes with the vanilla UI means selecting one item, commit the attributes to memory and then select another item for comparison. When you have hundreds of items this becomes unmanageable. You could argue that Bethesda intended for you so compare items this way. If that was the case Bethesda purposely made a obscure UI to in order to slow your item management. In this case QD inventory changes the balance of the game since it speeds it up considerably. It could be that way, but given the hands down sloppy programming of the UI, a reasonable assumption is that they either ran out of time, or contracted out the UI PC port to a very amateurish company. Changing the UI to a UI that allows you to play the inventory and commerce parts of the game migth be what the top level designers intended. You are right it is only a conjecture, but based in very good logic.


As another example, when you talk to a horse stable NPC he tells you that you will be able to change the name of the horse to whatever you want. Yet this is not in the game. It would be a safe assumption that renaming horses was in Bethesda plan when they wrote the script, but somewhere along the line of this massive game it was simply dropped. A mod that allows me to change my horses name would not have an impact i the game but would make the game better.

I apologize if you think the tittle is rude, but is honest.

yeah I know, but they must hav done something right. The word of mouth of this game is amazing. Thanks for the sound mod btw. I'm installing it right now to tested out. As soon as I'm done testing it I'll go head and post it.

Well, these are good mods, but the list would be more accurately named 'Mods I Like'. XCE is quite nice, but some of the eyes change their appearance drastically. Legible Road Signs changes the feel of the signs; they're no longer worn at all. And Lush Grass completely changes the feel of some areas, as if Bethesda meant for grass to be so thick, they'd have done it themselves.

I hope you're kidding. I really hope you are kidding. The game mechanics are a mess and I bet they didn't test them at all except maybe for a short time when they implemented them. This game has more loopholes than swiss cheese. If you want examples I will gladly post a few.

A bit off-topic, but I just had to say that. Bethesda creates fantastic worlds, but their gameplay is always a mess and something they seemingly implement because they have to. If someone says Bethesda's game mechanics are thoroughly tested and that a lot of math went into their idea of 'balance' (even the word sounds weird in that context) then that is as far off from the truth as something can be.

Ah, why it had to be you to jump on that. Now I can't be brutal towards Beth




But no, LOL their(bethesda) testing is crap. Oblivion and Skyrim were released under the status of [censored] up. The vibe I get "just deal with it" screams across the time put into this game.

Don't forget grab moveable statics. One my always load mods.

http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3562#content

These are the mods I'm using.

No More Blocky Faces : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=30
Detailed Faces : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=26
Enhanced Blood Textures :http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=60
Realistic Water Textures : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=711
Realistic Smoke and Embers : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=836
QD Inventory : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=667
Proper Clean Female Body : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=43
Improved Destruction Magic : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=611
Armor Improvement : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=106
Black Forsworn Armor : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1057
Clothes Improvement : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=113
Forsworn armor properly retextured : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1035
Map Improved : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=272
Fountain of Youth - Beauty Project : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2535
Descaled Uniques : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=2604
Enhanced Distant Terrain : http://skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1598
SKYRIM ENHANCED SHADERS : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=822
Sparkles - Lush Environments Texture Pack : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=521
Breezehome Enchanting Table : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=1302
Enhanced Distant Trees : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3389
Lush Grass : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3288
Vurts Skyrim Flora Overhaul : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=141
Skyrim HD - 2K Textures : http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=607
Re-Defined Dungeons : [url]http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3147

You would be extremely surprised... I tell you, I would never, ever release an armor mod with the amount of clipping you can see in every armor in the vanilla game. \
You should've stopped right there. The UI is horrendous because it was developed strictly with a 9-button game pad in mind, making it "easy" to navigate with 2 buttons and a joystick. Even console users complain about it. With a game like ythis in which you have to constantly deal with menus, switch from object to object, I 100% welcome a mod that will give me a different experience as the crappy experience Bethesda "intended"... Unfortunately I don't work with Flash worth crap, otherwise I'd do it myself and spread the "non-Bethesda intended experience" around.


This is actually a good example of bad developing... not so uncommon for developers to try to cram too many features on a program, resulting in many features not working as intended. And honestly, this game isn't as "massive" as you think it is.

Truth. Also, since FO3's level scaling was patterned of a famous OB mod, one could say even Beth acknowledged a mod did it better.

But, its your game. I don't know how balance altering you think this is (since you could always argue that Beth only intended you to have 8) but here's http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3865 fresh off the nexus

The precious

thanks

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Or is this a better option: http://www.skyrimnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=3331 ... Nah that is just a shameless re-upload.