The Skyrim Virgin... What Mods... Advise Please...

[N7R]

First and foremost, let me thank you guys for your replies.

 

@ N7R... What are your machine specs so that you can play at that incredible level of detail in that screenshot? For my machine, other than a few studders every onece in a while, I have prety much been able to run ultra at 5760x1080. I did disable the 4 cores of the 8350 and OC to 4.5(tested for a while today at 4.6 and it does seem to use less juice) and upped my 6950s to 840/1325 in Afterburner and it's running very playable. I'll probably have to downgrade some of the ultra settings and AA and AF to get graphics improvements to run well I guess. Also, thanks for the YouTube links, during my mass download of mods I'm going to get those too.

 

 

My machine specs are:

Windows 7 64bit

i7-960

Standard Western Digital HDD

12 Gb of Ram (Skyrim sadly can only use 3 of it though)

GTX 680 4GB GPU

 

My GPU is really what Skyrim uses the most, even my cpu doesn't go abover 40% barely. I don't have the most 'up to date pc' you could say but it runs modern games great. I run the game at 1920x1080 max settings, plus all the extra filters that the ENB lighting adds as well.

 

My Skyrim has been very optimized though as I said in my previous post. Optimizing textures, cleaning files with Tes5 Edit, and making sure mods are compatiable with eachother makes all the difference in performance. Also to the above poster, you don't have to worry about the annoying intro of the game if you use a mod called 'Live another life'. It makes the game way more fun than having to go through same boring beginning over and over again.

[Maverick827]

 

QuoteCrossfired MSI 6950s Twin Frozer 2 (each has 2G of ram)

3 1920x1080 monitors which I intend to Eyefinity to 5760x1080 or 4800x900 (I am well versed in playing games with Eyefintiy, played Oblivion and F3 and New Vegas all at said resolution... although rusty:)

One immediate problem I'm noticing is that vram isn't additive. Both of your cards of 2GB of vram, but this doesn't mean you have 4GB of vram. Your limit is still 2 GB. I play at 2560 x 1440p and with many texture mods and an ENB I regularly go above 2GB of vram, so you need to be careful at those resolutions. You say you're experienced with Eyefinity so you might already have known this, but I felt it was worth mentioning. I recommend you download Skyrim Performance Monitor to...monitor your Skyrim performance. This way you can see how much vram you're using and how much room you have to mod further.

If no one else has listed it yet, you really should download and install Nexus Mod Manager (NMM). I'm extremely computer literate, and I always scoffed at people who needed something to help them copy and paste files, but it does so much more and it is very, very helpful. You just click the "Install with NMM" button and it installs the mod for you. You can enable/disable mods at your discretion, and it has a much better mod order list than the default game.

Anyway, my list:

Bug Fixes

- Unofficial Skyrim Patch

- Unofficial Dawnguard Patch (if you have it)

- Unofficial Hearthfire Patch (etc.)

- Unofficial Dragonborn Patch

- Double Cursor Fix (if you tab out of Skyrim and then tab back in, sometimes you'll have the Skyrim pointer AND the Windows pointer; this mod fixes that)

Gameplay/Balance

- Deadly Dragons

- Enhanced Enemy AI

- Enhanced Mighty Dragons

Skyrim is really swingy; you can be one shotting every bandit in a cave and then the Bandit Chief at the end just pummels you. Typically late in the game you'll just massively overpower your enemies, though, so it's nice to have something to make them more difficult. I've found that using mods like these to make the enemies more difficult but then adjusting the in-game settings from Adapt then gradually Legendary, or back and forth as needed, allow me to keep the game pretty consistent.

GUI

- SkyUI (better overall GUI)

- A Quality World Map (better map)

- Better Dialog Controls (when you're presented with a list of dialog options, sometimes what's highlighted and what you're really highlighting aren't the same, and this fixes that)

- Better MessageBox Controls (this allows you to navigate yes/no popup boxes with your keyboard)

- Customizable Camera (lets you adjust the offset of the third-person camera, if you don't like the over-the-shoulder perspective)

- Immersive HUD (lets you toggle the HUD on and off, running around with no HUD really brings the experience together)

- Main Font Replacement (I find the default font to be difficult to read at times; there's many types to choose from with this mod, I like Tara Type)

Immersion

- Live Another Life

- Etheral Elven Overhaul (makes elves look better; I suppose it's more immersive for Tamriel that elves look like ass, but I'm putting it under immersion anyway)

- Guard Dialog Overhaul (guard's ambient dialog often makes no sense; they might berate you when you're very powerful and well respected later in the game, this mod fixes that and opens up other lines of ambient dialog that are rarely used for some reason)

- No More Glowing Edges (removes the glow around your character when equipped with a magical item or casting a spell)

- Player Headtracking (allows your character's head to move and face other characters rather than stoicly look forward at all times)

- Realistic Ragdolls and Force

- Run For Your Lives (Important, non-combant-oriented NPCs will run and hide when dragons attack, not try to help with their Iron Dagger and then die)

- When Vampires Attack (same as above, but with Dawnguard's vampires)

You might not care too much about Live Another Life right now, but after you've made your fourth or fifth character, you might be sick of the way the game starts. This circumvents the main plot and lets you start in one of about ten pretty cool ways, like "I washed up on the shore" (you start on a shipwreck in the ocean) or "I'm a bandit" (you're put into a random bandit camp somewhere, and the bandits are friendly to you). You can always start the main quest when you want. I highly recommend this mod for subsequent play throughs.

Lighting

- Realistic Lighting Overaul

- Climates of Tamriel

Not much to say here. These just make the lighting more realistic. Certain settings can make your game too dark; some people like to walk around caves blind. Make sure you install these alone so you can see a good before and after to see if you even like them.

Quality of Life

- Auto Uneqiup Ammo (automatically unequips arrows when you uneqiup your bow)

- Even Better Quest Objectives (makes vague quest directions better)

- Faster Mining (typically while mining you have to tap a node 9 times for 3 pieces of ore; this is 3 for 3)

- Follower Trap Safety (followers won't activate traps)

- Glowing Ore Veins 300 (ore veins glow so you can actually see them)

- The Choice is Yours

- The Choice is Yours (Dawnguard)

- Ultimate Follower Overhaul

- Ultimate Follower Overhaul (Dawnguard)

- Ultimate Follower Overhaul (Hearthfire)

- Unread Books Glow (books you haven't read yet have a blue (regular book) or orange/red (skill book) glow around them; really helpful if you like collecting books)

You might not want to get The Choice is Yours for your first play through. Normally when playing the game, you're going to pick up quest lines just by hearing random bits of ambient dialog. These quests can't be dropped so on later play throughs this mod is handy for letting you, as the mod says, pick which quests you want to do. If you plan on using some sort of master list for quests to 100% complete the game and you're typically OCD about things like quest journals, then you could pick this up for your first time playing. You'll just have to look up how to start some quests.

Ultimate Follower Overhaul is also an iffy one for a first time player. It allows you to control more than one follower, which you might not want to do on your first play through because that can mess with the balance of the game (UFO allows for, I think, up to 16 followers - that many followers will kill most things before you even get a chance to attack). That said, there's also some handy things even for just one follower. It allows you to set your followers to be unkillable (when they die they'll just kneel down and be taken out of the fight until their health regenerates to a certain amount or combat ends) and it also sets you to let your followers not attack you back if you accidentally hit them in combat which is handy because followers tend to like to jump into the path of your arrows).

Textures

I'm not going to list all of my texture mods (I think I have 70, and that's not even a lot compared to some people). I will say that you should try a few here and there and monitor your vram usage. If you can manage it, any texture with the name "aMidianBorn" on it is really good to pick up. Skyrim HD - 2K Textures is also a popular one. For some misc ones for you to try as you like:

- W.A.T.E.R. (a water texture mod)

- XCE - Xenius Character Enhancement (skin texture mod, among many other character-creation enhancements)

- Brows (eyebrow texture mod - it's literally called just 'Brows')

- Beards (beard texture mod - again, just 'Beards')

- The Eyes of Beauty (eye texture mod)

- Apachii SkyHair (hair style mod)

- Apachii SkyHair natural Retexture (a retexture of the above mod to be more realistic and natural; default textures are glossy and "glamorous")

- Enhanced Night Skyrim (night time sky texture)

- Realistic Paper (makes reading books easier, what without cringing at the default paper texture)

You should install Skyrim 2K Textures first and then let a 'specialized' texture mod override whatever it needs to. Essentially, you use 2K Textures as a catch-all for everything your other texture mods miss.

Edited August 6, 2013 by Maverick827

[DeltaWulf]

@ Deltawulf... What is the best way, or is there a way, to keep track of how much memory you are using? What is the difference between A Quality World Map and the High Quality 3D Map? I've noticed, while downloading(I'm editing this), that some of the mods like the HD 2K Texture pack haven't been updated in around a year, when you played with them last were Dragonborn and Dawnguard out? There are a few like that.

 

Before I posted the other post I went through the Top list of mods and found 37 of them I thought would be useful or add to the game to my liking. Every one of Deltawulf's mod suggestions were one's I now have open tabs for so I am going to take the plunge and download those that he mentioned and start playing around with them tonight, starting with those first three lines of links from Deltawulf along with the Skyrim Performace Monitor(nobody mentioned that one, any comments?). Since I know that without them the game is... weak at best, I am going to put off actually starting to play seriously until after a good 3-4 days(at least) of mod testing to get the basic things added and some graphics enhancements(it really does need some). I don't have a problem with losing the 10 hours I've already because I didn't really understand the perk system, which is much more like F3 and NV than Oblivion and requires some planning beforehand(which I can do now that I have a feel for the game). If your looking at this then keep an eye out for this thread because if I have specific questions or problems I'm going to put them here and I'll need your help.

 

Here are a few I've been thinking about that there has been no mention of...

 

UFO Ultimate Followers Overhaul

Civil War Overhaul

Interesting NPCs

Falskaar(for after the main game is mostly over)

 

These seem to be more designed to enhance the depth of the game. Since I wasn't aware that this was lacking before I wasn't interested in them and willing to do the possible work to get them working well. Has anyone used these? Good, bad, known problems?

 

Again, thanks for the replies so far, they are exactly what I was looking for, a list and your opinions.

 

The High Quality 3D Map increases the LOD of the map and makes it look better in general by adding more details. A Quality World Map does some texturing, but doesn't enhance LOD or anything like that. Basically, with both together you get an overall better looking map and roads you can actually see.

 

The texture pack runs fine, there shouldn't be any complications regarding Dawnguard/Dragonborn.

 

Civil War Overhaul is good, I've never tried UFO and Interesting NPCs (I use a lot of custom follower mods, so I just don't want to deal with the hassle of possible conflicts). Falskaar is good to add, I've not personally gotten into it because I encountered some bugs with the first gate not opening, which I had to disable before I could go further, then had some kind of weird faction conflict (I'm assuming) that resulted in me having to kill everyone I encountered since every guard, jarl, etc in the game was hostile to me. I chalk that up to a random odd bug though, and I've since started a new character.

[TenderHooligan]

I got about 85% through Falskaar before I encountered a bug that made it impossible to progress in the main questline. While it was only a problem for a small number of people, there was no solution (at least not as of a couple weeks ago). It's not a big deal. I got a lot out of the mod and I'm watching a Let's Play Falskaar so I'll see the part I missed out on soon enough.

 

The issue is that the mod maker strongly advises against uninstalling the mod mid-playthrough. Again it's mostly not a problem since I can just ignore it while playing, but it does take up quite a bit of memory which is a problem if you're approaching the 3.1gb limit. And if you're on your first playthrough, you probably don't know which mods you'll be keeping or how much memory they all eat up.

 

In fact, I'd recommend holding off on most of the quest mods for a first time play-through. A lot of them are pretty buggy and many more aren't compatible with other essential mods. The vanilla game has a LOT of content, and I'd recommend just exploring that the first time through before adding more.

[Meester]

Ones immediately below are good

 

Climates of Tamriel

 

Pure Waters

 

Static Mesh Improvement Mod

 

Footprints

 

Open Cities

 

Unique Uniques

 

Benjamins Realistic Rocks and Textures [if you can find it]

 

Dual Wield Parrying

 

Blood Witch Armour

 

Wearable Lanterns

 

Jaysus Swords

 

Lost Longswords

 

Weapons of the Third Era

 

Ones I havn't tried but am thinking about include a Joy of Perspective, Dual Sheath Redux, Enhanced Distant Terrain, Realistic Lighting Overhaul and Enhanced Enemy AI.

 

Its always good to play a little of Skyrim first before you mod it, then you can experience the game and decide what you want to change about it as you play along. Good to see you aren't falling into the trap of modding before you play it.

[JohnRandolph]

I don't know more than one dragon shout but I am hoping that the other ones use the syllables like jon and ran and dolf so at some point I can turn to one of my followers and say... "My name is a killing word." If you got that, then you know the level of nerd I am and yes, I do talk to the characters while playing the game, mostly because the the character's responses are nowhere near of what I would say. Actually, now that I think of it, do any of you speak to the characters too?

 

You may notice it's been a few days since the other post. I said I would be posting for help of the problems I'll be having but... I've had no problems! I know they will be coming but I haven't had one crash, mostly because I've been playing it rather safe. I took R7N's advice, which was the best advice I've gotten(Thank You Sir!) and went to that Gopher YouTube list. I'm going to guess everyone here know's who Gopher is. I then watched like 10-15 hours worth of videos(that isn't an exaggeration) of tutorials and Skylights of mods all provided by Gopher-r-r-r. You've got to love that rolling R he has. I learned about the NMM and SKSE and BOSS and how to install mods and then installed a bunch.

 

I started with the patches and SkyUI, which is just amazingly useful(sad that Bethesda left it like it was), and then A Quality World Map and Bandoliers(they almost break the game but are so damm useful for a packrat like me). Next were all 3 of the Sounds of Skyrim and then the 2k Texture Pack and Flora Overhaul. I did bunch of running around Whiterun with these, I killed that Bandit Leader in the mamoth caves and got launched(golfed) into orbit by that giant dude as I was tweaking to get it to run well at 5760x1080. After that I installed Inconsequential and Interesting NPC and talked to the wine obsessed lady and the junk man and the corpse fetish lady in the Drunken Huntsman. I figured all those first ones were pretty simple and wouldn't cause any problems and the NPC one were the first more complex ones I would try.

 

But I was really starting to get a bit overwhelmed with the huge range of choices and I was starting to take to heart what Kleinstaff said about turning the game into whatever I wanted it to be, you really can. My thinking began to change to what kind of game do I want Skyrim to be this first playthrough. I don't mean disrespect to anyone who falls into this category, but I kinda feel sorry for people who played it vanilla for the first time in the first 6 months that it came out. I really think the game is pretty weak in it's vanilla state and one of the videos I watched on YouTube summed up a bunch of the problems I have with it, link below this. I don't agree with everything this Samyoul guy says but this video kinda became a list of things I wanted to try and improve upon. It's kinda funny how he really dislikes Oblivion, as a devolution of Morrowind, because I really love Oblivion and don't see it's flaws compared to Morrowind because I've never played Morrowind. But I can very much understand where he's coming from because of X-Com, which I think the new one is an abommination compared to the REAL one, which I bought in the store and played endless hours of(which shows my age).

 

Link Mentioned

 

 

Edit - I didn't know that the video itself would be added so I'm sorry if I wasn't supposed to do that. I'm kinda new at posting in forums, I usually lurk around... sometimes for years. But since you can't download without becoming a member I am a member. I'm glad I am.

 

 

From watching about a million of Gopher's Mod Sanctuary videos the thing that I decided was that the 'centerpiece' of my configuration of mods is going to be Skyrim Redone and everything else built around that. First from watching Gophers video on the changes and how to install it with all the proccing and reproccing of the weapons and then from Urtel's call on that. Ask yourself, if you've played with Skyrim Redone, if you wouldn't choose to play with that the first time if you could? Actually, that handful of mods that Urtel mentioned is exactly what I was looking for, it adds the complexity in that I feel is so greatly missing. I played Fallout - New Vegas the first time on Hardcore mode so I had to sleep and eat and the kinda funny thing is that I've been playing Don't Starve the last few months so I am into a whole survival thing. So, Frostfall and Realistic Needs and Climates of Skyrim, because they compliment Skyrim Redone were obvious choices for me.

 

What I'm going to do is put a list of the intended mods and why by groups and then what I would like is everyone's opinion and the issues that you've encountered... I've used X and Y that you are planning on using and I was getting CTDs or performance drops in this situation, that type of thing.

 

 

The Interesting and Inconsequential NPC mods I mentioned before helps with the sparce dialogue, which I mentioned in the last post. Also, in this department is Guard Dialogue Overhaul.

 

SkyUI and More Hotkeys and Immersive HUD and Less Intrusive HUD, the latter where I can move around all the pieces is really sweet for me with 5760x1080.

 

Immersive Armor and Weapons so at higher levels there is more variety in random baddies as well as JaySuS's Swords.

 

Better and Even Better Quest Objectives to help with the poor journal.

 

Harvest Overhaul and Flora Overhaul because I'm an alchemist at heart and don't fast travel much and gather along the way.

 

Sound Propagation and Sounds of Skyrim to enhance the sound in general(the latter is already working).

 

Convient Horses and Touring/Scenic Carriages because, as mentioned, I very rarely fast travel.

 

General Immersion - Dance of Death, Run For Your Life, When Vampires Attack, Realistic Ragdolls and Force

 

Destroy The Thieves Guild - I'm interested in this because I play the ultra boyscout Superman type of character(yes, I'll go get that for you... it's what I do). I'd rather it be the Brotherhood but I'll take the Thieves out just as well. I recall when playing Oblivion, when the Brotherhood guy came to me when I was in the Imperial City very early in the game I tried to kill him about 25 times before I realized it simply couldn't be done because he wasn't killable :smile:

 

Civil War Overhaul and Open War - the videos of the Civil War Overhaul make me want to use it but I am wary because of the mention of bugs so I'm not sure about it. What are some specific instances of things that have gone wrong with it for anyone whose used it? Just before posting this I saw the Open War video from Gopher(still watching more of them) and thought that was just awesome looking. Although it doesn't seem to be on the Nexus, any idea of why and or where I can get it? Is it just too old, it was on video 18 of like 65. I was thinking that would be cool with UFO, having a handful of followers in those battles.

 

HD Skyrim for graphic enhancements. As I guessed I had to lower a lot of settings from Ultra for that so I'm not really going to add much more in terms of graphics unless the texture optimization that N7R mentions really helps. I used the Flora Overhaul to enhance the general wild. Using the categories from Sounds of Skyrim, WIld and Dungeons and City, what are a few texture mods to improve Dungeons and the Holds? I'm pretty much going to be adding these depending on performance. Sometime this fall I'll probabely be getting a Asus 7970 Matrix Platinum(see NewEgg) and I'll think about a second replay that is more graphically oriented or perhaps I will go with one monitor(somewhat of a horror to me:) but it might be worth it to really load on the textures and ENBs. I'm also interested in a general NPC graphics improvement. I see on many of the lists here NPC improvements for specific races like the elves or hairstyles. Are there any general improvement mods that do to the NPCs what HD Skyrim 2k does to the general textures?

 

 

And now for some specific responses and questions to the posts, for which since I haven't said it yet, Thank You.

 

@Rennn... Thanks for the Glossary... OK, I'll come right out with it, are there any actual sex animations to go with those nude female body mods? I seem to recall wooing that redhead Huntress in the Underground of New Vegas by getting all those damn eggs for her and she's finally all "Come to bed my Hunter" and then they just lay there together and I was... let down. I am going to use your Detailed Terrain and Tree LOD and I'll take your word that there isn't any performance hit. :smile: I'm not too worried about breaking lore with Interesting NPCs and I think the benefit from the interesting dialogue is a good tradeoff. I got quite a smile from talking to the wine lady near Kynareth's tree in Whiterun. And while I did like Talos' 'chosen one' ranting against the elves at the same place, actually talking to him was one of the things that made me realize how bad the vanilla dialogue was. He was saying how he is the on to talk to about Talos and then 3 lines later he's says something like "and I'm sure there are lots of books about it". Yes, I was going to be reading the books, I read almost all of them, but if HE is the one to talk to about Talos then he should have more than those dialogue options. You almost couldn't get that guy in Anvil, who was the beginning of the Knights of the Nine DLC, to shut up. with all his lines of dialogue. What didn't you like about Deadly Dragons? In Skyrim Redone the combat system is overhauled but the long read on the web page mentions that he didn't do anything to the dragons. If you don't like Deadly Dragons, what do you like in it's stead because that is one thing I didn't really look at yet, changing the dragons?

 

 

@Urtel... Most of those mods you mentioned are exactly what I wanted for my first playthrough. I played for about 10 hours and got to Whiterun and I kept on thinking about how this was bad and where was this. A good example is that it took me a while to actually realize that there are really only 3 stats for your character and the perks. At first I was looking through the General Stats tab. And one of the reasons I waited for the Legendary version was that I thought that there would be some sort of additional mechanics like in the Hardcore mode of New Vegas... none. But those mods you mentioned actually do make the game somewhat like the NV Hardcore mode so that is what I decided to base the game around, adding more mechanics to it as the main improvement. Just to be sure, you've played through fully with those all together? Were there any issues?

 

@bben46... I didn't follow your instructions fully and I want to know your opinion as to how far off I am and the probably consequences. I had already played vanilla to Whiterun, to get a feel for the game as Rennn suggested, when I read your post and I made my backup of the unmodded saves there. I then started adding those mods, a few at a time, that I mentioned at the beginning of this post and then running around Whiterun as my testbed. Several questions... if I deactivate all the mods with NMM, will it return to a vanilla state if I start a new game? Or will I need to reinstall fresh to get to a "pure" vanilla state so I can redo the initial saves outside the cave? Or can I just continue to test mods around Whiterun and then restart, which I intend to do because I would like to start from the very beginning with Skyrim Redone and the other survival mechanics I'm adding and skip the problems with mods and the intro by using Live Another Life, which as I understand, it is kinda for starting over with lots of mods? And yes, my tone is all happy because I haven't experienced any CTDs but I know they will come. :smile: In January I played F3 and knew next to nothing about modding and I just manually installed a bunch of mods(no manager) and pretty much destroyed the game to the point where I couldn't play it anymore. Luckily I was just starting Broken Steel so it wasn't so bad, I have that to look forward to the next time I play it.

 

@R7N... THANK YOU so much for that playlist of Gopher's videos. That alone totally changed my entire outlook on modding in general. I did exactly what you did, spend a few days watching the million and one YouTube videos about mods.

 

@Mavrick827... Yes, I know that the 6950s in Crossfire do not equate to 4G of vram. I did get the Performance Monitor and got it running but the only problem is that when I am running at 5760x1080 it doesn't show up on the left side for some reason. It only is visible when I am exiting the game. I am assuming that this probably has something to do with the Flawless Widescreen fix so it's probably not going to be able to be fixed. I do get a good graph of all the things monitored but it kinda doesn't do me any good because I can't really look over and see the numbers in game. The ram and vram seemed to be ok most of the time. Now, some questions about those mods. I'm going to be using SkyRe and it has a combat overhaul. I watched the video and read the page about Enhanced Enemy AI and it sounds like exactly the same thing that is described in the SkyRe combat module. Do you know if they are using the same techniques of changing the AI without scripts? What do those Dragon mods do? I've only fought one Dragon(about 10 times though:), what do these do to change the behavior or combat? What do they do differently or do they compliment each other? Am I correct in my thought that Realistic Ragdolls and Force addresses the issue where you walk into an object and it goes flying off in a silly way? I am going to use the UFO because in SkyRe there are those minimum level zones that may be much higher than you. Also, I'm pretty much OK with the ability to have lots of followers because I don't think I would get more than a few. In New Vegas I got all the followers at one point or another and the all ended up walking around my hotel suite, eating my food and drinks. I would have like the option to take out a 2-3 at a time sometimes. I also went out for a while alone to get used to travelling lite and fighting alone again because I was too dependent on them so I understand where you are coming from with that concern.

 

@Deltawulf... you played Civil War Overhaul all the way through? I've read at more than one place that there were bugs, did you encounter any? I don't know much about the whole concept of how the Civil War is fought, other than from looking at the Stewarts map a bit and watching the video on the webpage. I didn't even know that there was an actual mechanic to the civil war with fighting at holds and almost blew my shorts when I found that out in that video. And while I am wary about these bugs, that is one of the mods I am really thinking I would enjoy the most. I am going to hold off on Falskaar till another playthrough on your comment, that last was also @ the TenderHooligan.

 

@Meester... Is there a performance hit with the Static Mesh Improvement Mod? How many holds are done in Open Cities, I watched this video about it by Gopher but it was from a long time ago and there were only 3 done.

 

 

 

And a few general questions about Skyrim. Is there any way to 'undraw' (don't know the correct word) a bow? I seem to remember being able to in Oblivion but heck if I can remember how to. I've just been shooting the arrow into the ground and then picking it up, but that isn't a good idea in a stealth situation. How do you charge a magic weapon with a soul gem? Can it be done in the field or do you need to be at an enchanting bench to do so. Again, I don't recall how to since it's been a few years since my Oblivion playthrough. I do feel silly asking these. And with a soul gems, will a smaller soul go into a larger gem when you kill someone with a soul taking weapon. You get that ax from the Jarl of Whiterun "from his personal armory" and I've killed with it but my soul gems don't seem to get filled. Hehe, in Oblivion I used a Daedric greatsword I made in the flavor of Stormbringer to refill my gems.

 

I'm going to install more mods, the more complex ones, like SkyRe with the Gopher videos as my guides so I hope there won't be any problems but I'll shout out as soon as there is one. Thanks again for your help.

 

Oh, and a few last things, what side did each of you choose in the civil war and why? Just curious about that. Are there any Lovecraft themed mods? They did a little in F3 but it turned out to be lame once you got that book to the altar. Has anyone played Rogue Legacy(platform game), is the shout ability phrase for the barbarian class a homage to Skyrim?

Edited August 9, 2013 by JohnRandolph

[TenderHooligan]

You can undraw your bow by pressing your sheathe key (R I think in default). And for charging stuff in the field, just go to your inventory, scroll down to the item to want to charge and press T and it'll give you a list of your filled soul gems to choose from.

 

Souls will go into larger soul gems if you don't have any of the correct size. This is something you can fix with a mod called Acquisitive Soul Gems that ensures petty souls only go in petty soul gems, common only into common, etc.

 

One reason your soul gems might not be filling is because you're killing humanoid opponents which have black souls and can only be stored in special black soul gems which will be incredibly rare in the early game. Souls of animals, undead and most monsters fall into the white soul category and are the kind you can store in most soul gems.

 

As far as civil war, I always pick imperial unless I'm role playing a specific character. But I don't much like the civil war questline in general as its quests don't fit my playing style and the biggest challenge is avoiding friendly fire than actually fighting the enemy so I'm more of an imperial supporter than an actual member.

 

And there are a couple lovecraftian mods out there, but not many.

[RatcatcherOfKvatch]

Hey, speaking of recharging are there any mods that either allow you to charge follower weapons from the follower's inventory trade screen or allow followers to recharge their own weapons from soul gems in their inventory?

[TenderHooligan]

Amazing Follower Tweaks allows them to charge their own weapons.

[josiiah1983]

Wow! Helpful post! Putting this one as a favorite!