Skyrim: Mod Graveyard
These are mods I tried, tested and may have even used extensively before ultimately abandoning for any number of reasons. They are listed here not to bash them or their authors but to remind me why I ditched them in the first place and to provide you with a quick, critical review of mods to perhaps save you from having to test and troubleshoot them yourselves. Keep in mind that these comments are only my impressions of the mods at the time I played them and may not reflect mod updates since, different mod loads and hardware, or your personal preferences or experiences in game.
- Amazing Follower Tweaks - Once my preferred follower overhaul, this mod has been made obsolete by Extensible Follower Framework. EFF has a much more modern, streamlined command interface and many more features than AFT which has suffered from lack of continued development, no MCM support and persistent follower behavior bugs.
- Audio Overhaul for Skyrim 2 - Increases sound effect volumes, reverb and distance that sound travels to the player. It also replaces or remasters select sound effects to create more crisp and dynamic sounds. I've used this mod for a long time and would say I enjoy about 70% of the changes made to the game's default sounds. Overall, the effect this mod has in game is like having your hearing enhanced. Everything is louder, clearer and you can hear sounds from farther away. The problem is that these enhancements are not actually dynamically applied in a realistic fashion so you end up with reverb effects and boosted volume in locations where your mind knows sound should be muted. Also, some of the effects changes have never been my preference. This is especially true of the spellcasting effects and the absolutely ridiculous fireball impact effect which sounds like a cannon or gunshot. This mod is not about subtlety and while it can sound great at times, it's the constant in-your-face approach to sound enhancement that becomes tiresome.
- Bijin Warmaidens - Dramatically beautifies the appearance of 19 female followers from the vanilla game. Changes their faces, hair, body meshes (choice of CBBE or UNP), and skin textures. They all look really attractive and unique but they're ultimately too dolled up for me or for what I consider to be appropriate for Skyrim.
- Celestine Healer Custom AI - A beautified MCM configurable support follower with spell usage that can be toggled on or off. By default she will cast a variety of buffs, heals and alteration spells such as magelight on party members. She has no unique voice or lines and is otherwise a generic follower. I tried her hoping for a competent healer in battle but she's more reliable in a buffing/support role while dishing out minor damage with her staff.
- Cerwiden -SMART Healer- AI Configurable Companion - An advanced follower mod with extensive dialogue, custom scripts and a quest of her own. She makes for a decent healer companion but the mod has been abandoned and needs updating and polishing. Also, I personally don't care for the voice acting, non-lore friendly idle dialogue and some of the scripting that does not play nice with EFF.
- Enhanced Lights and FX - Once my preferred lighting overhaul mod. Became annoyed by inconsistencies, incompatibilities and glitches with light sources flickering on and off or not being lit at all under certain circumstances in the vanilla game and in modded DLCs such as Falskaar. Some of this the result of limitations of the game engine and how it poorly handles dynamic light sourcing. Even when working as intended the mod makes light sources too saturated and all interiors too dark, especially when using certain ENBs.
- Ethereal Cosmos - Retexture of the night sky. Strong fantasy feel with colorful nebula and clusters of large stars. It looks too much like enlarged Hubble photos of deep space rather than an actual night sky from a planet surface.
- Extended UI - Tried with the hope that it would streamline the skills menu. It actually clutters up the menu screen more by displaying the perk trees and all skills below it. It doesn't add any useful functionality for me. The mod does allow you to sleep or wait for up to 999 hours but there are other mods that do this without the skill menu changes.
- Female Enemy Monster Aesthetics Leveled Encounters - More Sexy Creatures - Adds at least 25 creatures to leveled lists including nude, or semi-nude female variations on undead, spiders, atronachs, constructs, and more. It's a fun idea to spice up the same old creature spawns with a little morbid sex appeal but the mod is rough around the edges. Female undead are missing custom hand textures to match the rest of the body and their body textures do not handle certain lighting properly. They tend to spawn in crypts while laying down in the wrong position.
- Grass on Steroids - Adds dense, overgrown versions of the vanilla grass throughout Skyrim. Claims to actually increase framerates. While I have found no evidence of this I have found that even the shorter grass variants of this mod result in too much yellowish ground cover to look at and navigate through in game. It changes the landscape too drastically and uniformly for my tastes.
- Lush Trees and Grass - Fills out grass to look more dense and alters conifer trees to look fuller but also changes the tree and tree branch shapes to a different variety of conifer. Not a bad mod at all and paired with a Detailed Terrain and Tree LOD mod patch, it gives Skyrim a look some may prefer. I prefer the traditional, vanilla style of conifer and how it looks in game up close and at a distance.
- Populated Skyrim Civil War - Script-free NPC encounter mod from Erkeil that adds Stormcloak and Imperial battles at select spawn points throughout Skyrim. It's similar to Warzones in giving the illusion of the civil war being larger and more active but comes without the scripting bloat and advanced behavior that goes with it. These encounters are fun the first few times but quickly become repetitive, immersion-breaking and distracting. Even if you have joined a side and are wearing faction armor, NPCs from either faction will not acknowledge you unless you attack them. If you attack the wrong side by mistake, don't expect to be able to sheath your weapon to get them to stop fighting you in retaliation. Because spawned soldiers have no custom scripting to guide them, the're dependent on detecting enemies to do anything other than mindlessly patrol or stand in place with weapons drawn. Looting massive quantities of weightless steel arrows from fallen soldiers is too easy a temptation for serial looters looking for easy cash. Another problem with no scripting is that the mod is unaware of the status of the war. Should you complete the quest, encounters will persist. The mod author acknowledges this and recommends manually uninstalling the mod after the war comes to an end.
- Hunter and Ranger Crafting - Adds custom weapons and armor recipes to the forge that are tailored to hunter/ranger characters. Also adds several new food recipes. Nice idea but I don't care for the implementation. Weapons and armor are slightly altered meshes of vanilla items, modified further with boosted stats and enchants on select items. There are better-looking, more unique weapons and armor available in other mods for hunter/rangers. The enchants are unnecessary and I would have preferred to see these item recipes added to the tanning rack or a spell menu so that players could craft in the wild, rather than rely on a forge.
- Photoreal ENB - Designed for use with Climates of Tamriel and Realistic Lighting Overhaul. Excellent performance but produces visuals too dark, flat and muddy to come even close to living up to its name.
- Real Girls Realistic Body Texture for CBBE - Detailed body texture with a weathered appearance, a little too weathered for a general female texture replacer. It might be a good for select player characters or followers though.
- Real Roads for Skyrim - Covers all roads with 3-D meshes to give stones a more realistic look. Like some of the mesh upgrades in SMIM this mod adds depth to otherwise flat surfaces that looks great up close but suffers from a distracting flickering effect at a distance.
- Sands of Time - Brilliantly conceived yet overambitious mod that adds tons of random and unique enemy encounters. Despite constant support and updates from the author and heaps of potential this mod is a script-heavy nightmare that requires full game and PC optimization and a mod build specifically designed for it before one could even consider using without performance issues and crashes. It also suffers from too many potentially game-breaking updates to the main file and the inclusion of immersion-breaking content that remains unfinished such as an obsessed treasure-seeking NPC that pops up everywhere in dungeons yet does nothing. This one goes into the "more trouble than it's worth" category and at best should be considered a rough alpha release.
- SkyDream Mer-Maids with Healer and Body Changer - Five beautified, non-voiced followers of different races with different skills, scattered throughout Skyrim. I tried this mod for one follower, Healer Qulshiya, who is located at the Dawnstar Jarl's hall. She possesses custom healing and buffing scripts to help keep the player alive during combat. For a no-frills support companion with no custom voice, dialogue or quests, she does her job of healing well. I would say better than the outdated, scripted follower Cerwiden. However, she looks a little odd and the remaining followers included are far too dolled up for my tastes. They could be manually deleted or edited with the CK but I instead recommend Vilja as a superior, custom-voiced player healer so long as you don't mind waiting for her to discover her healing spell.
- Skyrim Immersive Creatures - Monster and animal overall that adds dozens of new leveled and static creatures alongside vanilla ones. The added variation of creatures is welcome and it includes some very cool features such as skeletons that come back to life and ore guardians that randomly spawn when mining. Sadly, the mod commonly interferes with follower behavior, causing them to turn passive (at least in my experience). The mod also adds its own duplicate versions of vanilla loot that isn't compatible with other mods that alter vanilla gear.
- Skyrim Realistic Texture Overhaul Landscape - Textures in this mod look great but do not blend well with the other textures I am presently using. This results in stark contrasts between certain objects that do not look natural.
- SM Essential Player - Offers an alternative to death that results in a temporary bleedout status with optional wound debuffs. Includes an option to recover your corpse and your loot while appearing as a ghost. I left the ghost option turned off but found the other features useful until I made the mistake of running headlong into a fight with too many higher-level bandits. The problem is that with the wound system on you have to run away to recover but if you're surrounded or unable to hide, you'll constantly be attacked and knocked down after getting up. I ended up trapped among the bandits, unable to escape due to a severe speed debuff from a broken leg so I had to reload my last save, thus making this mod pointless. If you can avoid situations like this the mod works but I consider this a flaw that should have a workaround.
- The Sounds of Skyrim - Civilization - One of three mods in a series (see also The Wilds and The Dungeons) that add ambient sound effects to various locations throughout Skyrim. (It does not change or remove any of the vanilla sounds.) These additions include things like stray cats fighting, bustling tavern noises and people yelling in the streets. Once loaded, the mod lets you pick which sounds to include or omit which is nice. Initially, this really adds to immersion but soon the sounds begin to wear on the ears because they are far more obtrusive and far less relevant than any of the game's vanilla ambient sounds. You'll walk into a nearly empty tavern and hear sounds of a packed house of rowdy patrons. You'll hear obvious sound loops repeating infinitely and noises such as domestic cats that do not exist in the vanilla game. If you continue to put hundreds of hours into this game, as many avid mod users like myself do, this all quickly gets old.
- Stars - Another retexture of night sky stars and nebula. Stars are too big. The nebula texture is an interesting alternative but looks off to me.
- Terrain Bump - Adds more definition and coarseness to landscape texture normals. Looks great on some textures and not so great on others such as snow which turns into white gravel with this mod.
- Wearable Lanterns - Craft or purchase travel, paper or torchbug lanterns that you can hold in your left hand or attach to your waist to light your way hands free. MCM options include three lantern positions, adjustable brightness radius, auto light, hotkeys, optional fuel consumption, and fuel meters. I love this mod and it does work but it fills my saves with a lot of messy scripting bloat that I suspect to be contributing to instability over time.