Mods for extending a playthrough?

[InDarkestNight]

After you've maxed all your skills, there is no more progression. By that point, you've probably done all the questlines appropriate to your build, and most if not all of the dungeons. Yes, they respawn, but the game doesn't notify you of this for some reason. You're also so powerful that nothing is really a challenge to you anymore.

What would be needed to extend a character's life? Further progression? Most perk overhauls add more perks to gain, which may help a bit. The Community Uncapper or some other mod that removes the skill cap can also help alongside these. What about gear though? You've got max armor rating, possibly max magic resistance. What more do you have to gain other than increasing your damage?

What about gear? What's the point in adding new new tiers of gear? As I said, the only thing you can upgrade to infinity is your weapon. I don't know of any mods that add in higher level spells. Yeah, there's mods that add more spells, but none of them are higher than master for obvious reasons.

There is the mod High Level Enemies which helps to keep enemies scaling well past what they could before, including bosses that level with you indefinitely. It even has patches for Skytest Realistic Animals and Predators and Immersive Creatures.

Of course, doing dungeons gets boring really fast. There are quest mods out there, but sadly most of them are highly narrative focused and thus not really worth playing a second time. The only exception I know of is Undeath, since its essentially a new faction mod that even adds in new gameplay content, including spells and the famous lich form. Of course, I haven't played too many quest mods, so what do I know?

As for dungeons, there are mods like Forgotten Dungeons, Skyrim Underground, and Skyrim Sewers, which give you new areas to explore and clear. The first in particular I hear was designed to have more interesting dungeons than the vanilla game does.

Stuff like this is why I can't wait for the Beyond Skyrim project. It'll increase the game's content by several fold. More quests, most of which are worth repeating, new creatures to fight, more followers to choose from, new spells, new dungeons, and who knows what else. The full project itself would probably be worth playing even without other mods. Besides, who knows if too many mods will come out for them. Honestly, thinking about it, it may divide the modding community. Who is going to make mods for multiple different provinces? We could see a situation where the player base is divided between different provinces, with their mod authors ignoring all others. Of course, given the sheer number of mods mainland Skyrim has, they would need a lot of work to catch-up. Though I do think the warmer provinces like Elsweyr and Hammerfell will finally give some justification for all the 'bikini armors' we see. I just always found it dumb seeing people walking around in Skyrim's climate wearing such things. I was annoyed this one time even with Immersive Armors. I walked up to a bandit camp in the pale, and found a bandit wearing the barbarian hero set (the conan armor, can't remember its IA name now for some reason). That really annoyed me and I played with that armor disabled for quite a while. Of course, I ended up disabling just about every armor other than a handful, which let me to remove it; why bother with it just for Snowbear armor?

Sorry for the tangent. What mods could we make or have already that would help extend a playthrough a bit? How about something that finally nerfs the freaking crafting skills. They do nothing but break the game, and in fact I rarely play with any of them because I just like the game more when things aren't stupid effortless.

[BlazeStryker]

The Legendary skill system handles your first issue. Using it, you can get a bonus applied and reset your skill to 15, refunding all the perk points so you can earn back and re-invest in the skill perks.

[anjenthedog]

FYI, Beyond Skyrim is already available in partial packet form for the Reach, Bruma & most of Cyrodil (albeit most of the walkable Cyrodil landmass outside a small radius around Bruma proper isn't populated by all that much aside from scenery/flora, and in the case of the imperial city, only LOD representations), as well as for Folkstead, and Haafstead, and possibly one other I'm not recalling. 

There's also Republic of Maslea (work in progress), Midwood Isle, and Chanterelle to expand play opportunities. Nothing earth shattering overall, in terms of opponents, but they do extend the world model considerably.

I have all those listed above in my game. And fwiw, if you like "wandering", Chanterelle is, along with its included "secret" sister landmass, absolutely gigantic in size and well populated with harvestable flora and fauna and a high respawn rate, in additional proving some interesting new topography and "footpath" challenges and locations to find. I think I spent ~1-1/2 months (real time. say 4-5 hours at a sitting, dunno how many game days or months) just wandering around there (casually mind you... it's visually spectacular and deserves some rose smelling, if you catch my drift...) before I'd fully done the circuit and found what I believe are all the current sites of interest in the "wild" (as well as interior spaces like caves, ruins, etc)...and it's also a work in progress so we can probably expect things to come (quests, sub locations, etc).

(there's also quite a journey for one of Either Folkstead or Haffinger's few quests too, where you have to make your way far up into the mountains, and a pretty annoying, but somewhat challenging (imo) cave crawl forced by one of the first quests.

Nice fat cave and several large ruins in the Reach too.

fyi,ftr,ymmv

[InDarkestNight]

I know about Chanterelle, and it did interest me in the past due to me liking survival mods. However, its only available for s#*! Edition for some ungodly reason, so I've never gotten to play it.

[anjenthedog]

Ah... that's a drag. great mod. 

[BlazeStryker]

I use Chanterelle for AE just fine. The savage world to explore, patches and tweaks (including outfit tweaks), Gnomes, leeches, snails, the Ark (all those dinos) Crocodiles, the native Alternate Start, even the Botox Patch.

[anjenthedog]

Are the gnomes worth installing, or are they just window dressing?

[BlazeStryker]

They're interesting things. They look like lawn gnomes when you can see them, they're usually cloaked, and if you blunder into their gathering places they may try an ambush or two.

[anjenthedog]

ok, so they do add "enemies". cool might try them, I have the snails. no crocks as I'm not fond of water hazards and already get annoyed by crawlers

[anjenthedog]

Thought I'd pop back in for another go...

Have you looked into the Lost Passages mod? (adds several dozen new ruins/caves, and many associated quests)

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/106061

IMO, best if played via the random quests you'll run into in the wild that direct you to them, (just did one last night that sent me to one very very large ruin, then to another equally large ruin), but also marginally "cool" on their own if one is impatient. Triggering the quests isn't quite so painfully obvious as in DLC content.