Skyrim: Recommended Mods

Note: After installing new mods prior to loading either an existing or new game remember to always run LOOT, Wrye Bash, FNIS, and any Skyproc patchers that you have installed. Also, check your mod load order in the left panel of Mod Organizer to ensure that mods with conflicting assets overwrite each other the way you want them to.

Patches

• Unofficial Skyrim Patch  - Bug fixing mod that corrects hundreds of gameplay, quest, NPC, object, item, text, and placement bugs.
  
• Unofficial Dawnguard Patch - Bug fixing mod for the Dawnguard DLC.
  
• Unofficial Hearthfire Patch - Bug fixing mod for the Hearthfire DLC.
  
• Unofficial Dragonborn Patch - Bug fixing mod for the Dragonborn DLC.
  
• Unofficial High Resolution Patch - Bug fixing mod for Bethesda's High Resolution DLC.
  
• Acquisitive Soul Gems [video] - Fixes soul trapping by only allowing souls to be trapped in gems that match their level (ie. a petty soul will only ever fill a petty soul gem and not go into an empty grand soul gem, effectively wasting it). It also makes black soul gems function in a more lore-friendly manner by only allowing black souls to fill them. Also includes a bug fix related to dropped soul gems that subsequently lose their charge.
• Brawl Bugs Patch - Fixes a vanilla bug that would inadvertently cause a bar brawl to turn into a fight to the death. Choose the Compatibility Edition.
• Clothing and Clutter Fixes [video] - Adjusts the value and weight of select items for greater consistency, provides access to previously unplayable items, robes and hoods separated, hooded robe outfits diversified, jewelry enchantments now affected by the item's base value, circlets can be worn with hoods, jewelry previously hidden by select clothing now can be seen, missing or incorrect item keywords fixed, and adjustments to loot to match the class and type of furniture it was found in.
• Consistent Older People - Corrects the physical appearance of select elder NPCs that appeared too young in the vanilla game.
• Cutting Room Floor [video] - Restores some unused vanilla content such as NPCs, minor quests and miscellaneous stuff to the game.
• Fuz Ro Doh - Silent Voice - Designed for mods without voice acting, this script plays a default silent audio file to keep dialogue text onscreen long enough to read it. This is a workaround for a game engine quirk. This frees up mod authors unable to provide voice acting from having to include their own silent audio files.
• Guard Dialogue Overhaul - Fixes city guard dialogue directed at the player by unlocking rarely or never used audio, making guards more aware of your fame or notoriety and always treating you with due respect, and fixing numerous bugs.
• Run For Your Lives - Causes ordinary townsfolk to run indoors and hide during dragon attacks rather than try to fight alongside town guards and you, risking death.
• Sell Unusual Gems - Stones of Barenziah - For players uninterested in associating with the Thieves Guild, this mod allows you to sell off any unusual gems you may have picked up.
• Skyrim -Community- Uncapper - Unlocks skill level cap beyond the default 100, allowing leveling up to 10000. 
• Weapons and Armor Fixes Remade - Corrects bugs in weapon and armor records. Also improves consistency, balance, scaling, perk application, naming, and crafting categories. Includes optional faster arrows and bolts and material corrections for dragon priest masks.

Animation

• No Killmoves - No Killcams - No Killbites - Removes all scripted, cinematic death animations and the out-of-body camera perspectives that go with them. This improves immersion while removing any glitches, stutters or gameplay frustrations sometimes associated with these scripts. I recommend this mod for survival/realism roleplaying.
• Realistic Ragdolls and Force [video] - Alters ragdolls to behave more realistically when struck down. There is less knockback and more falling quickly to the ground. Download the "Realistic Force" file.
• Size Does Matter - Stops the game from automatically resizing modded children or NPCs of non-standard height while performing certain animations such as sitting or using an alchemy table. This may cause some clipping.
  
• XP32 Maximum Skeleton -XPMS - Adds a more advanced skeleton to characters that allows other mods to have improved animations. Be sure to put this above other animation mods such as Realistic Ragdolls and Force in your load order.

User Interface

• Better Dialogue Controls [video] - Makes the dialogue menus more keyboard friendly when using the mouse and keyboard together.
  
• Better Messagebox Controls [video] - Allows you to navigate all of the game's messgeboxes with the keyboard.
• Blessings - Alter Descriptions - Convenience mod that displays the temporary enchant offered by alters scattered throughout Skyrim when you mouse over them.
• Blocksteal Redux - By default, this will keep the player from accidentally picking up any items flagged as owned property. MCM options include the ability to steal these items only while crouching in sneak mode or by double tapping them. There is also a function to make it so the player cannot accidentally pick up other select useless objects such as baskets while looting their contents.
• Face to face conversation - Auto zooms in on NPC faces when conversations initiate, similar to how it worked in vanilla Oblivion. Occasionally zooms off center but you can easily mouse around to center your view.
  
• Immersive HUD - Automatically hides the UI during normal exploration and brings up relevant UI elements only when needed such as the health bar during combat or the crosshair when using a bow or magic. Can be customized in MCM.
• moreHUD [video] - A customizable UI addon to SkyUI that provides additional information about lootable objects in the game world when mousing over them. This includes indicators for books already read, skill books, enchantments, alchemical effects, and more.
  
• SkyUI [video] - Essential mod that overhauls the game's entire user interface to streamline it for high-resolution PCs with new fonts, icons, improved inventory sorting and information, themed UI elements, and a categorized favorites menu. It also adds the Mod Configuration Menu (MCM) which is used by hundreds of mods to display custom settings in game which literally makes this the most essential mod next to SKSE.

Audio

• Better Animal Footsteps for Skyrim [video] - Reduces the intensity and volume of creature footsteps. Be sure to place after any other mods that alter footstep sounds.

Creatures

• Armored Skeletons and The Walking Dead - Adds new and more dangerous skeletal and undead creatures that wear leather, iron and steel armor and use associated weapons. Also adds a new iron armor-clad draugr and several lich types.
  

Followers

• Vilja in Skyrim - The most well-rounded, immersive and feature-rich follower available. She makes the perfect companion in Skyrim for all but criminal-minded characters. Features include extensive professional voice work with over 9000 lines of dialogue, vanilla quest and location awareness, standalone follower controls and menus with many options, advanced wardrobe management, new quest lines, romance and marriage options, custom combat scripts that gradually include player healing, and much more. She'll cook, clean, craft, sing, read, and offer up opinions on many subjects, all upon request. Vilja will also remember how you conduct yourself and treat her and this can affect her behavior and feelings towards you. Possibly the most impressive feature is her ability to engage in dialogue with other followers and various vanilla NPCs. This includes substantial dialogue options for Inigo, another popular modded follower.

Gameplay

• Bounty Gold - Simple mod that adds MCM options to increase the amount of gold offered for fulfilling radiant bounty quests. You can customize a fixed bounty between 100 and 5000 septims for bandits, giants, forsworn, and dragons. You can also add an incremental amount that stacks with each level to ensure that bounty hunting remains profitable as your skills increase and your opponents become more challenging to fight. Vanilla bounties with their pathetic payouts were never worth collecting. This makes being a bounty hunter in Skyrim a worthwhile venture.
• Complete Crafting Overhaul Remade - The ultimate overhaul of vanilla smithing that adds a wealth of customizable features and built in support for other mods such as Immersive Armors. It adds smelting of weapons and armor and smithing skill leveling when mining, smelting or leather crafting. It cleans up the forge crafting menu. It adds craftable artifact replicas, unenchanted versions of faction gear and the ability to convert setpiece helms to alternate circlets. Also includes new recipes, immersive crafting and mining options and much more.
• Enemy AI Overhaul---Revenge Of the Enemies - Enhances enemy behavior in combat to fight more intelligently and use more special abilities. Can be used alongside combat overhauls such as Ultimate Combat.
• More Interesting Loot for Skyrim - Unlike other loot mods that add items to general loot lists, this mod focuses on stuffing boss chests, dragon corpses and treasure chests with more valuable loot to make the fight or journey to reach these stashes worth the effort, unlike the vanilla game. Loot includes themed stashes such as alchemy stores filled with valuable ingredients, recipes and potions. There are also new artifacts from past TES games and over 100 new enchantments to be found on weapons, armor and accessories. While not recommended for survival roleplay, this makes for a suitable reward when using a lot of difficulty-enhancing mods.
• Pickpocketing Chance Caps - Allows the pickpocketing success cap to max out at 100% instead of 90%. You still have to train up your skill level but now you can actually become a thieving master. Alternately, try the mod 99 percent Pickpocket to allow a slim chance of failure or Pickpocket always succesful (sic) for zero chance of failure at any skill level. This latter mod provides an easy way to quickly train up the pickpocket skill without having to deal with the consequences of frequent failure.
• Skills-Based Damage and Magnitude Multipliers - Elegant, simple mod that allows the player to adjust various damage multipliers in an MCM menu. The benefit of this is to bump up damage output to more realistic levels where combat is faster and more deadly while scaling nicely with player skill progression. A number of other, more ambitious mods do something similar but this one has better cross-compatibility than most, leaves a much smaller footprint on game performance and doesn't throw in any unnecessary or unwanted features.
• Skyrim Expanded Loot Tables - Alters the loot lists of all containers in Skyrim to grant a chance to find almost anything anywhere, even in lowly barrels and sacks. This makes searching through containers a lot more fun and rewarding. Frequent looting from the start will lead the player to find more valuable and powerful items earlier in the game than originally intended but can be easily balanced with the right set of difficulty-enhancing mods to make that extra loot necessary. This mod isn't recommended for survival roleplay but serial looters like me will love it.
• Trade and Barter - Subtle, highly configurable overhaul of Skyrim's economy that offers more dynamic elements to the otherwise bland business of buying and selling goods through merchants and fences. Now your location, reputation, knowledge of the goods you're selling, relationship to the vendor, and race all play a part in earning more or less septims. Through an MCM menu, you'll have the ability to adjust merchant gold amounts, restock time, speech perks related to bartering, and buying and selling prices in general.

Locations

• Expanded Towns and Cities - Huge overhaul of Skyrim's cities, villages and strongholds that adds objects, vendors, buildings, shrines, horses, and much more. For example, Darkwater Crossing has been transformed from a tiny mining camp into a bustling town comparable in size to vanilla Dawnstar, complete with an alchemist shop, general goods store, tavern, four NPC homes, and six new NPCs. Because this mod moves vanilla assets around and adds a lot of new objects there will be incompatibilities with mods that alter the same spaces.
  
• Falskaar - An entirely new land to explore with new quests, voiced-acted characters, items, soundtrack, and more. Adds roughly 20 hours of professional-grade gameplay. The mod community has largely accepted this mod as an unofficial DLC. As such, you'll find patches to make many other popular mods carry over to Falskaar.
• JK's Skyrim - An overhaul of Skyrim's cities and villages that adds new and immersive objects, vendors, buildings, and more. While I currently prefer the larger Expanded Towns and Cities, this is still an excellent alternative that might be more performance friendly and cross compatible with other mods as it has less overall sprawl and largely leaves vanilla assets in place. Players interested in a smaller, less extreme expansion of settlements might prefer this.
  

Models and Textures

• aMidianBorn Book of Silence [video] - Growing collection of high-quality texture replacers divided up into packages covering armor, creatures, the Dragonborn DLC, unique items, and weapons. Download all five main files.
• BodySlide 2 and Outfit Studio - Powerful, one-stop solution for easily creating custom female body and armor conversions with built in support for CBBE and UNP body variations and BBP, TBBP and HDT physics. Includes presets for other popular body mods including SeveNBase, Dreamgirl, Leito, and Top Model. It does require either a CBBE or UNP compatible texture mod such as Fair Skin or SG Female Textures Renewal. Using conversion presets available elsewhere on Nexus, Bodyslide can also easily resize armor and clothing to fit the preferred body shape. The included Outfit Studio is a user-friendly tool that allows you to convert nearly any outfit to any body, create your own sliders and correct animation weights, all without previous modding experience.
• Book Covers Skyrim [video] - Retexture of all books, journals and notes including DLC content with unique covers for each book and journal. Quest books have a star placed on the spine of the book.
• Book Covers Skyrim - Lost Library [video] - Adds 295 books from Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, and developer notes. Books come with unique covers in the same style found in the Book Covers Skyrim mod and they are fully integrated into merchant, loot and NPC lists. Also added are collectible first editions and a hand-placed skill book for each skill in the game.
• Fair Skin Complexion - High-resolution female texture replacer for CBBE and UNP features lighter skin tone with fewer blemishes. It's a good pick for making cleaner and younger-looking females, especially when paired with the Adorable Face mod.
• A Quality World Map and Solstheim Map - With Roads - Re-texture of the world map of Skyrim and Solstheim with greater detail and clarity.
  
• Realistic Water Two - High-resolution water replacer.
• SkyFalls and SkyMills - Animates previously static waterfalls and windmills seen in the distance.
• Skyrim Distant Detail - Download the Hearthfire Edition.
• Skyrim Flora Overhaul - Replaces and adds to plants, trees and grass throughout Skyrim and Solstheim (Dragonborn is not required). This includes new LOD tree textures. Make sure this mod loads after other mods that replace tree LODS or else graphical anomalies will occur. Set iMaxGrassTypesPerTexure=7 in your Skyrim.ini file as well. Due to the placement of new trees and plants, this mod may conflict with some other mods that place new objects in the open world. This can be overcome with patches, manually editing of SFO in TES5Edit or by manually deleting clipping objects using the in-game console.
• TreesHD Skyrim Variation - Increased variation and higher resolutions of tree-related textures. Compatible with Skyrim Flora Overhaul.
  
• True Daughters of Skyrim - High-resolution female texture replacer for CBBE and UNP features more detailed and naturalistic skin with realistic blemishes. I recommend this texture replacer as the default for the game while reserving Fair Skin for select characters of your choosing.
• Windmills resized - Offers three options to increase the size of windmill sails to more closely match real-world proportions.

NPCs

• Interesting NPCs [$] - Adds over 250 fully voiced NPCs, 50 quests, 25 followers, and 15 NPCs you can marry.

Outfits (Clothing, Armor and Accessories)

• Cloaks of Skyrim - Adds a large variety of faction, unique and general cloaks to leveled lists, the crafting system and hand-placed locations around Skyrim. Download both the main file and optional Dawnguard file.

Performance

• HiAlgoBoost GPU Upgrade - Utility that runs in the background and dramatically increases your framerate by dynamically adjusting pixel density as your framerate drops. It's quite responsive and really does work well but at a cost. It disables VSync, even if you have it enabled in your ENB ini file. This causes screen tearing if your framrate goes above 60. When the boost kicks in, you will also see pixel degradation on screen and the occasional graphical glitch. Still, this is an excellent performance booster that's ideal for players with older PCs or for balancing out mod loads with too many performance-degrading mods including ENBs.
  
• Skyrim Project Optimization - Removes unseen vanilla meshes from interiors to improve performance. Download the full version.

Quick Start

• Random Alternate Start - Skip the Helgan intro and go straight to the character creation screen. Then pick from one of 21 classes that provide you with a basic equipment loadout. The mod then sends you to one of over 460 starting locations. From there, you are free to begin the main quest by investigating rumors of a dragon attack near Helgan. Lightweight and simplified alternative to Alternate Start - Live Another Life that does a perfect job of getting you into the game world quickly. 
• Alternate Start - Live Another Life [video] - Starts you in a dungeon where you can create your character and select from a variety of roleplay-friendly starting locations with unique situations and gear that might affect your relation to other characters. Sleep in the nearby bed and you awake in whatever life you have chosen, one of which includes the vanilla start. Alternately, if you choose to "escape" from the dungeon this sets off a custom quest that leads you back to the dragon attack at Helgen. Regardless of your alternate choice, you will have the opportunity to either start the game's main quest at any time by investigating the ruins of Helgen and become the Dragonborn or ignore the rumors of a dragon attack and carry on with your alternate life in a world free of dragons.

Visuals

• Enhanced Lights and FX [video] - Complete overhaul of Skyrim's lighting that ditches the artificial, vanilla ambient lighting in favor of actual in-game light sourcing such as torches and camp fires. It balances realism with the ability to still see your surroundings in low light. Works best when game brightness is set to default (medium) level.

Under Evaluation

• Animated Dwemer Lift Load Doors
• Appropriately Attired Jarls - In vanilla Skyrim when new jarls and their retinue take over a hold during the civil war they dress in commoner attire. This mod fixes it so that when they take over the hold they change into regal garb befitting their station.
• Arissa - The Wandering Rogue [video]
• Ars Metallica - Smithing Enhancement
• Better Dynamic Snow [video] - A simple mod that removes a bland shader effect from 60% of the game's snow meshes to reveal the superior-looking vanilla snow textures underneath.
• Better Embers - Improves the look of fire embers.
• Bosmer Armor Pack - Light and heavy craftable armor sets for male and female. Most of this mod is incorporated into Immersive Armors but you can only get the full package from this download.
• Combat Evolved [video]
• Convenient Bridges [video] - Adds dozens of unique crosswalks, bridges, paths, and other similarly diverse means of crossing waterways throughout Skyrim. These bridges are placed in specific locations with convenience in mind. Essential when using Frostfall as it allows the player to more easily reach certain locations without risking a deadly dip in frigid waters. It's optional because it does clutter up the wilderness landscape, even though great effort was made to make the bridges look natural.
• DFB - Disable Mining Anim - Time-saving, convenience mod that removes the animation from harvesting ore. Several optional versions are available including one that allows you to mine ore with one click and no mining pick. An added bonus of removing mining animations is that you can harvest ore that is being mined by other NPCs, whereas you'd otherwise have to wait until they stop mining.
• DFB - Random Encounters - MCM
• Elemental Arrows
• Enhanced Camera [video]
• Enhanced Enemy AI - Script-free mod that alters enemy combat behavior to create more challenging opponents. Works well with larger combat overhauls such as Ultimate Combat.
• FAR - Forgotten Argonian Roots
• Fast Travel Timescale Fix - While I rarely use fast travel, this mod comes in handy for the times when I do, such as taking carriage or boat rides. It adjusts calculated time progression during fast travel to better match the relative time it would take to travel the same distance manually in game (ie. a 2-hour fast travel in vanilla would instead take the 10 minutes it would have if you opted to run to the destination).
• Follower Commentary Overhaul - FCO [video]
• Grace Darkling's Ranger Armor - Female-only light armor set that can be crafted.
• High Quality LODs - Download the hi-res meshes only.
• Honed Metal -NPC Crafting and Enchanting services-
  
• Hunterborn [video] - If you plan on roleplaying a hunter/survivalist/ranger character this highly configurable mod is essential. It allows you to gradually develop a new hunter skill by using skinning knives to harvest animal and monster carcasses to acquire skins, bones, meat, and alchemical ingredients. Use the scrimshaw ability to turn bones, stone and other raw materials into unique weapons, arrows and enchanted jewelry designed to aid the hunter. Also introduces foraging, craftable storage caches and new cooking recipes.
• Hunting in Skyrim - A Hunting Guild - Ideal for ranger/hunter player characters. Includes a new guild, quests, perks, trophies, skills, animal dens, and animal breeds. There is also a new skinning system but I recommend overriding it with another complimentary hunting mod, Hunterborn.
• The Huntsman
• Konahriks Accoutrements - Dragon Priest Armory
• Legacy of the Dragonborn (Dragonborn Gallery) - Ambitious public "house" mod that adds a museum with themed galleries to Solitude for the storage and display of all of your unused belongings gathered from your adventures including weapons, armor, quest items, paintings, jewelry, books, and more. Also adds new collectibles scattered throughout Skyrim to use as decoration in the museum. A curator will oversee your collection while visitors walk through the large facility, sometimes leaving donations behind for you to collect. This is the ultimate hoarder's player home and while fully functional it's still in early development as the author has big plans to merge it with several other large mods including Moonpath to Elsweyr.
• An NPO Module - Crossbow - Crossbow overhaul that adds new scaled variants and bolt types, adds crafting recipes and tempering options, and distributes crossbows to various loot lists.
• OBIS - Organized Bandits In Skyrim
• One With Nature - Dynamic Animals and Creatures [video] - Allows you to alter the aggression level of select animals and creatures toward the player in game in an MCM menu. Make spriggans allies of your Bosmer ranger or spiders to fear you and run away when they detect your presence. Great for roleplaying or for tweaking animal behavior to suit personal taste.
• Perks Unbound - With DLC Support - Adds ability to skip unwanted perks in the perk tree. You will still need to meet the perk requirements and there are exceptions where perks such as Steady Hand is reliant on Eagle Eye.
• Quality Snow HD 4K - High-resolution texture replacer for snow. Works great with Better Dynamic Snow. Just be sure to load this after. Eight optional downloads available. I recommend "2K Quality Snow HD."
• RaceMenu - Streamlines and adds functionality to the character creation screen to allow for more diversity and customization. Requires SKSE.
• Ragdoll Paralysis
• Skyrim Realistic Archery Bows and Arrows
• RIS - Real Ice and Snow - High-resolution retexture of ice and snow that comes with several options in the installer. Use as a texture base for other snow mods such as Quality Snow HD 4K.
• Ruins Clutter Improved - Download "NMM Installation" and install everything.
• Septim HD - High-resolution retexture of the gold coins that serve as currency in Skyrim.
• skyBirds - Airborne Perching Birds [video] - Advanced, highly polished wildlife mod that adds several new birds to Skyrim that are fully scripted to fly around, perch, nest, sing, and react to their surroundings including your approach. Killing them, which isn't easy due to their cautious nature and small size, allows you to loot several items from a collection of 20 new alchemical ingredients.
• Skyrim HD - 2K Textures - Recommended starting texture replacer to use as a foundation for upgrading Skyrim's graphics beyond Bethesda's own high-resolution texture DLC. Download all five of the full (2k) texture packs.
• SkyTEST - Realistic Animals and Predators
• SkyTweak
• Sofia - The Funny Fully Voiced Follower
• Ultimate Combat - This is my favorite combat overhaul mod that greatly alters enemy AI to use more blocking, dodging, countering, and bashing. Enemies will now recognize and respond to your actions in battle, fighting smarter and using special attacks. It adds other advanced combat elements including damage-adding effects of character movement speed, stacking stagger resistance, timed blocks, locational headshot damage, and increased cooperation between NPCs. An MCM menu includes many options including damage multipliers. Note: The mod does make significant use of scripts and may contribute to instability if you're already using a lot of script-intensive mods.
• Ultimate HD Fire Effects - Upgrades fire effects in game to look more realistic. This covers campfires, candles, torches, and magic. Download the Ultra version.
• Ultimate HD Torch - Upgrades the common torch texture. Download the 2K version.
• Unique Grasses and Groundcovers - Nature and Landscape Enhancement - Adds new grass and flower groundcover throughout Skyrim. It doesn't edit existing groundcover so it's compatible with other grass overhauls. I prefer this to the Skyrim Flora Overhaul because it's more subtle, more performance friendly and more compatible with other mods since it doesn't add any trees that might clip into new objects. Download the main file only. During install choose the "Default" version.
• Unique Border Gates of Skyrim
• Wanderer Cuirass by Frank and Cabal - Light and heavy armor for males.
• Weathered Road Signs [video] - High-resolution retexture of road signs to make them look better and be easier to read. Bits of flora or other minor objects have been added to the area surrounding many of the signs to make them a little more interesting.
  
• The Wheels of Lull [video]
• The Way of the Dovahkiin - Ultimate Deadly Encounters aka Sands of Time
• Whiterun Trellis Redesigned and HQ
• Winter Is Coming - Cloaks [video] - Adds a selection of lore-friendly fur cloaks and hoods to leveled lists and the leather working craft station. Fully compatible with Frostfall.
• Wyrmstooth
• Wintermyst - Enchantments of Skyrim [video]

Looking for another opinion on what mods to use? Check out the Skyrim GEMS guide for more content-related mods or the STEP Mod Anthology for more base game-related mods.

[$] Indicates a mod that I have donated money to in support of the author(s) work to make Skyrim a better game. I encourage everyone to support their favorite mods with a donation that can usually be made by clicking on a link on the mod's main Nexus page. Donations will encourage mod authors to create new mods and maintain support and improve their existing mods. It will also help keep the mod community commercial free so that collaboration and asset sharing can continue to thrive.