The Elder Scrolls IV: Skyrim - Modding Guide
Skyrim is a brilliant yet flawed open-world, action RPG made infinitely better through modding. It's relatively easy to begin customizing your game with mods that improve visuals, sound and interface or add new gear, quests, NPCs, and even entire worlds to explore. However, mods vary greatly in quality, reliability, compatibility, and in their demand for system and game resources. Regardless of how powerful your PC is, these resources have been capped by the limitations of a product originally designed for a 32-bit gaming console with limited resources. Thus, as the player begins to add more and more mods to the game it becomes necessary to keep them working well together, as well as avoiding script lag and crashes. The ultimate goal is to strike a balance between improving the look and functionality of the game with maintaining the game's stability. This modding guide aims to help you achieve this. Of course there are many factors involved that can affect performance from hardware used to the very order in which mods load. Also, modding Skyrim to look better and increase content can be a purely subjective exercise where one player may prefer mods that are immersive and realistic and another may prefer purely fun, non-lore friendly mods that drastically alter every facet of the game. My preference is a mostly lore-friendly, moderately realistic experience in Skyrim where vanilla game assets are enhanced and expanded upon rather than replaced or drastically altered. As such, some of my mod recommendations will reflect this bias and it will be up to the reader to find additional mods to suit their tastes. Through many hours of trial and error on my part and testimonies from other players online, I've discovered that script-heavy and ultra-high resolution mods are best avoided or used sparingly. In the end, stability and performance are what's most important. The good news is that there is a wealth of amazing modded content to transform Skyrim into a dramatically improved game at minimal cost to performance and stability.
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