What is the 'best' animal mod set-up?

[InDarkestNight]

I've long sworn by Skytest, despite some of its models being in desperate need of an update. I finally removed it long ago so I could finally test out other animal mods. After years of testing, I've concluded that nothing seems to appeal to me.

 

What does Skytest do that I like? It makes animals smarter, adds in some rather nice farm animals, some new age variants, and extra spawns. Of course, the stat changes poses numerous issues such as consistency with animals from other mods or combat overhauls making animals TOO powerful. Fortunately, I know enough to make my own patch to fix that.

 

The integration project has a lot of patches, but honestly pretty much nothing in there I'm interested in running.

 

Animallica is nice, but I can't stand its lack of loot. I find it highly immersion-breaking looting a wild animal and finding pre-made leather on it.

 

Real Wildlife is similar to Skytest in many ways. My only gripe with it though is it does nothing to the animals on Solsteim (though neither does Skytest for some reason). It does have a patch for Animallica, which fixes the loot problem, but it doesn't cover EVERYTHING. I'm also not sure as to its compatibility with the Redux version. I asked years ago but never got a reply. Besides, it doesn't add new variants like RW does to vanilla creatures, though I could easily fix that myself by just removing RW's new variants.

 

Beasts of Tamriel used to be part of my core load order, but I got sick of its instability, and its models are really badly outdated.

 

Immersive Creatures mostly just felt like a variety expander. I could get something similar with Automatic Variants if I could get my stupid anti-virus to stop blocking it.

 

Monster Mod I haven't tried in years, but I found its difficulty was highly inconsistent. This was the SE version mind you, which I hear had an issue with the game ignoring the leveled lists, doing things like spawning in end-game boss monsters on the side of the road at level 1. That's long been fixed I here, and probably didn't apply to the LE version anyway.

 

All In all I've thought that maybe I was approaching the problem wrong. I was wanting a more interesting creature experience in this game. I thought simply putting actual monsters into the game (outside of trolls, giants, and wispmothers pretty much) would fix this. Of course, as we all know newly added creatures have to just be re-skins of vanilla ones, meaning they're not a new experience. They're only worth if it you like looking at them really.

 

Thinking that maybe what I really want instead is a combat overhaul. Of course, seemingly all combat mods focus entirely on humanoid npcs, making combat with animals no different than it is without the mod.

 

Combat aside, I do like having wooly rhinos in my game and whatnot. Thinking of trying Skytest with Animallica Redux and Real Wildlife. The patch for the three may not be compatible with the redux version of course, though to be honest I could probably fix that myself if its not. Either way, as long as the redux patch doesn't work by straight deleting animals, it should be fine, which I think it doesn't do (best as I can tell, it just removes them from the leveled lists). Not so sure though how consistent of an experience this would be. Would there still be animals dropping obviously man-made objects even with the redux version? Could there be consistency issues? Like I said, I already made a patch to undo Skytest's stat changes, though I have yet to make one that removes Real Wildlife's extra variants.

 

I have actually tried to make my own mod that adds in new skytest-friendly animals into the game, but I just lack the skill to actually do it. I can't unravel how Skytest fully works, and regardless I highly doubt I could get permissions for all the assets I need to ever upload the thing anyway.

 

So, does anyone else have an opinion? Is Skytest simply the only way to go for animal mods? Is there anything you can use alongside it without issues? Literally the only animal mods I've ever run beside it is Hunterborn, though that itself has compatibility issues with animals added by other mods (assuming they aren't just a variant on an existing creature, like a muskox or yak being basically the same thing functionally as a cow).

 

I have recently discovered Etayorius's Skytest Harder Creatures mod. Maybe that's actually the way I should go. Of course, it would surely pose issues with any combat mods I install, and I may not be able to fix that given what all it does (such as increasing the size of a number of creatures such as trolls most notably).

 

I don't know, is there anything I can really use other than Skytest and Hunterborn?