Skyrimcam’s 41+ Essential Skyrim Mods for a Realistic, Next-Gen Experience 2015
Highly Recommended Mods
You’ll need this to jazz up Tamriel with some appropriate banners all over the place. It really helps make Skyrim look more beautiful and full of life!
Variety is the spice of life, and nothing is better than a bajillion new animals to grace your Skyrim game. Really amazing for screenshots. And for killing.
Adds beautiful, colorful HD cloaks to NPCs all over Skyrim.
Adds beautiful, colorful magic spells for you to use. They are seriously amazingly beautiful.
You wouldn’t understand how much of a difference this mod makes in Skyrim’s liveliness until you start using it.
This adds all sorts of interesting clutter all over the place. I prefer to use it without DynoLOD because I don’t like having too much detail in the distance/don’t like my game crashing all the time. This mod is really taxing on your computer, so don’t even bother if you don’t have a pretty decent rig.
I used the 4k darker version of this mod, it really makes the snow look way better, particularly how it appears on the roads.
High Quality Food and Ingredients
A must if you want realistic looking food.
Gives horses armors. Way swankier than those shitty leather saddles those tired ass basic horses usually wear.
This is so nitpicky but I love how this makes all the silverware in Skyrim look more realistic and artisitic.
Radiant and Unique Potions and Booze Bottles
Gives the special beauty treatment to all potions, poisons, and booze in Skyrim. Much more interesting than the vanilla options.
Gives every book cover in Skyrim a unique cover! I love this mod so much. Really makes picking up books even more of a delight.
Ok, I know, who cares? But seriously, the rugs look so much better with this mod.
Haven’t you always wanted your soul gems to glow with the light of trapped souls? I have.
I use the Jumbo peaceful version to add some nice fairy lights all over Tamriel.
Immersive Armors and Immersive Weapons
Adds a bunch of armors and weapons for random NPCs to wear. Great for those accidental screenshot opportunities as you’re traveling around the map.
I love how this makes all the Imperial armor look way more Roman. Not super lore-friendly I guess, but definitely super beautiful!
It’s weird that this is the one flower I want in extra HD, right? Anyway, the results are stunning and better than what is included in the Skyrim Floral Overhaul mod. Trust me, you’ll want this.
That’s it for my enhancement mod list. I’ll try to keep this updated as I come across more “essential” mods.
Also, word of warning, you will need a decent computer rig to use all these mods without crashing your game. Here is my setup:
- Processors: Intel Core i7 4790K Quad-Core 4.0GHz (4.4GHz TurboBoost)
- Graphic Cards: Single 4GB NVIDIA GTX 980
- Memory: 16GB ORIGIN PC powered by HyperX 1866Mhz (2x8GB)
To help with crashes, try using ENBoost, Safety Load, and Showracemenu Precache Killer.
Also, if you’re hoping to do some screenarchery (amazing screenshot taking), read my list of 25+ Screenshot Essentials for Skyrim!
Have any other mods to recommend? Leave a comment!
Great lineup of mods. I’ve been setting up a new Skyrim setup to play after Fallout 4.
For cities I use most of the JK series except for Markarth, Whiterun, and smaller cities. For Markarth I use three mods: Dawn of Markarth, Markarth the White City, and Sky City – Markarth rising. In fact, the “Dawn of” series is a good compromise if JK is too much for your computer.
I also use the “Sexy” series of city textures as they make the cities look much more well kept instead of run down. I use it together with the above mods but it looks great by itself.
There’s also the entire “Rustic” series of mods that spices things up. Some of those are 2k though most also have smaller file options.
Realistic Aspen and Bellyaches HD Dragon Replacer are two mods I’ve come to love.
In a previous post about armors you recommended Blood Witch Armors which is amazing.
One more point … I followed this guide (https://youtu.be/eaorfAchdHI) to modify my .ini files and it made a big difference in the look of my game. The video is 30 minutes long but it takes you step by step through the process. Perhaps your next article could be any .ini settings you use.
Hey i just recently discovered this blog and really love it. I may have a mod recommendation you could like: The Legacy of the Dragonborn. It is difficult to decribe this mod as it is a DLC-sized relic hunter expansion but it integrates some other mods you already have in your articles so i thought you might like it. I’d never play Skyrim again without it. Keep up the nice blog, it’s cool that someone still writes about skyrim modding :)
oOOoo thanks for the suggestion, I’ll check it out! Yeah, my time lately has been crunched on Fallout 4 but I’ll always blog about Skyrim :D
thanks for the mods. I really like your Blogs.
If you could give us some tutorial about modding or give us some names of other modding tutorials it would be amazing.
thanks anyway.
After installing all the mods(well most of them anyway), my loading screen when i travel takes for ever(i mean literally) and it doesnt load.
SO wait: You said install in this order and overwrite, so it’s okay to let the other texture mods overwrite SMIM if they need to?
It’s funny.. you mention the HD Beards mod saying you’ll get lush full beards but your picture is of a 15 year old who’s just starting to grow peach fuzz LOL It would be fitting IMO if you replaced that picture with a character who has a real beard. Good lineup. I enjoyed and used your info happily. I however do Not like having to go through different pages just so the site can show more ads when all the info will fit on one long scrolling html page. I hate that people don’t do that anymore, all for the sake of Ads! UGG!
Lol good suggestion, I’ll find a screencap with a heavier beard ;) I actually try really hard not to break up my pages too much because I also get annoyed at sites that do that. If I really wanted to make ad revenue, I would just do what other sites do and put one mod on each page :) The reason I broke this post up into three pages is because I was afraid all the photos would make it too long to load on a single page. But I’ll try to keep it in mind in the future ;)