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User:RobinHood70/Skyrim Mods

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Mods with no likes or drawbacks are new downloads and still under evaluation.

PatchesEdit

Unofficial patches.

Mod Name Why I Like It Drawbacks
The Unofficial Skyrim Patch (et al) Fixes countless bugs that Bethesda failed to.

Visual Enhancement ModsEdit

Mods that in some way alter textures, images, light, etc., without altering actual gameplay in any way.

Mod Name Why I Like It Drawbacks
A Quality World Map - With Roads Makes a much nicer world map that lets you see routes to get to things rather than having to mountain climb or circle the wrong way around a large obstacle.
Glowing Ore Veins 300 For the life of me, I can never see these damned things...this makes them stand out as clear as day. The brightness is a little tacky, which is just fine by me, but there is a Less Glow version as well, for those who want something in between.
Static Mesh Improvement Mod - SMIM Several enhancements to various textures for added realism.
Unread Books Glow I just plain got tired of scanning through libraries of books to see if one of them might be a skill book I hadn't read yet. As the name implies, this makes unread books glow. It can be toggled on and off for quest books, skill books, spell tomes, and regular books. It allows three brightness settings ranging from relatively non-intrusive to "Hey, you missed me, I'm over here!"

Content-Altering ModsEdit

These mods all alter gameplay, add quests, or add content, so have been separated out from those that don't.

Mod Name Why I Like It Drawbacks
Crimson Nirnroot Quest Markers Adds quest markers to the various Crimson Nirnroot plants, which are a bit annoying to have to find. The game limits the number of quest markers displayed at any given time, so this won't always show all of them, and may cause other quest markers not to show up.
Fence Markers Adds quest markers to all available fences. Under construction - basic concept works, but needs expansion and further testing.
Oblivion Spells By our very own Dwarfmp. Adds a number of useful spells that used to be in Oblivion but weren't implemented in Skyrim.
Stones of Barenziah Quest Markers Adds quest markers to all the Stones of Barenziah. The handling of the Dark Brotherhood stone is a little clunky. Would've been better putting a marker on the door, then switching to the stone itself once you'd actually entered the sanctuary.
Vini's Smart Transmute Spell One of several mods that re-prioritizes ore transmutation so that everything upgrades to silver first, and only then to gold, which is what you'll probably want to do about 99% of the time. Adds features that aren't available in the base game: transmuting iron, silver, and gold ore to ingots without a forge; transmuting iron/silver ingots to the next one up; and bulk transmutation. Personally, I avoid the bulk transmutation as game-breaking, but use the other two since they make sense to me as dual-cast options. Increases casting time, which I find pointless and annoying. Some might consider the new features game-breaking, but it's very easy not to use them if that's how you feel.

UI ModsEdit

Self-explanatory — mods that alter the User Interface.

Mod Name Why I Like It Drawbacks
SkyUI Value:Weight ratio on-screen. For me, all other improvements pale in comparison, though certainly their list is a lot nicer to work with than the built-in one. I'm not a big fan of the buy/sell method they've implemented. An earlier version by Kratos had buy and sell lists side by side, which I found easier to work with. In the end, though, this isn't a big issue for me.

Uninstalled ModsEdit

They may have been good, they may have been bad, but for one reason or another, I've tried these and rejected them for my personal gameplay.

Mod Name Why I Like It Drawbacks
Ancient Spells - Morrowind and Oblivion Spells Similar to Oblivion Spells; if I recall, it implemented one or two other spells, but nothing I remember needing. A little too invasive in that it could easily conflict with other mods. Dwarfmp's was better designed, overall, so I stuck with that.
Bound Pickaxe Spell This, to me, should have been included in the base game. I mean, what hardcore mage do you know that would carry around a freakin' huge-assed pickaxe all the time and not think, "Hey, maybe I can summon one of these the way I can for pretty much any other weapon or tool!" There are bugs reported with Mystic Binding, and casting the spell gives no XP unless you cast it while hostiles are around (like any other conjure weapon spell). Also, I found it a little clunky to have to cast, then use on the ore, then have it disappear the moment you were done, so if there was another vein nearby, you had to recast. Attacking might still have worked, I'm not sure...don't think I knew about that method of mining when I last tried this. I liked it for what it was, but in the end, it was easier just to take the weight hit and carry a normal pickaxe.
Darker Caves Dungeons Ruins Towers Nights Like similar mods for Oblivion, this makes nights, caves, etc., much darker, which mostly feels more realistic. Things were a little too dark (which seems to be a common complaint from several posters). Candles should light up a room, albeit dimly, once your eyes adjust; a couple of torches should light up a room quite easily. With this, though, the minute you step even slightly away from a light source, things are anywhere from dim to pitch black. It was just too much.
ENBSeries I don't. My experience with ENB was bloody awful. The graphics looked bad, the "English" documentation was bad, the sample pictures looked bad. I found people raving about it like it was the best thing since Skyrim's release, but nothing whatsoever in my experience made me want it. After fiddling for a couple of hours and downloading various people's presets that were supposed to make Skyrim look "awesome", I tore the whole thing out. I don't recommend it...to anyone...at any time...ever.
Enhanced Lights and FX This was a much better mod than the one above, and if you're going to get any kind of darkening mod, I'd start here. In the end, I decided that darkening mods—even as good and realistic as this one—made my game play less enjoyable, so I got rid of this one too.
No Stone Unmarked Makes No Stone Unturned a hell of a lot less annoying. Also, I designed it, so naturally I like it! :) I discovered that this was preceded by Stones of Barenziah Quest Markers, which was a little more comprehensive than mine, though I would've taken a different approach with the Dark Brotherhood. I didn't have the energy to alter mine, though, so I deprecated it in favour of the other one.
Overhauled Throne Rooms While it makes the throne rooms like somewhat more interesting, it's also a dirty mod. The most obvious change is that it replaces all normal wolves with ice wolves. I'm not sure how the author failed to notice the change, or if it was deliberate and just undocumented. Either way, it makes wilderness encounters both tougher in the early game as well as more monotonous.
RIS - Real Ice and Snow Snow textures are easily my biggest complaint in terms of the visuals in Skyrim—I find most of them so laughably bad as to completely ruin my immersion in the game. I actually thought there was an erroneous texture or something the first time I saw snow on floorboards. I had been hoping this would fix the ones I found so bad (chests and floorboards, mostly). Some of the other snow textures, like roads, were better, but overall, this didn't fix anything I really cared about.
Riverwood-Revitalized A lot of work obviously went into this, but it was just too heavy-handed. It seemed more like "How much stuff can I stuff into Riverwood?" than something I would realistically expect for a revitalized Riverwood.
WATER Makes some noticeable improvements to water throughout Skyrim, including Solstheim-specific water effects. Still didn't really strike me as "natural" water, and I didn't find that the improvements made that much difference to me in any event.

Mods I Want to TryEdit

This is a list of mods that I've come across somewhere or other, but for whatever reason, have not wanted to install right away.

Mod Name Notes