looking good!

[MacSuibhne]

I'm a complete newbie when it comes to mods. But I am hoping for some suggestions for mods that will upgrade the look of Skyrim. Detailed foliage that moves with the wind, better textures on stone and wood surfaces. More realistic water. Maybe more foliage and animals in town and cities.

Stuff like that.

 

i suspect that such mods are the most taxing on ram and vram but those that affect performance the least would be more interesting (to me) than ones that cause hiccups for everyone but experts and those with cutting edge graphic cards. .

 

Any advice and/or help would be appreciated.

 

PS I have NMM.

[MacSuibhne]

No one?

[BlackRoseOfThorns]

Check STEP guide on nexus. It will help you instal all popular visual mods without getting any mod conflicts. If you want to make it simple and performance friendly just get:

 

Realistic Water 2 or Pure Waters

SFO - Skyrim Flora Overhaul

Tamriel Reloaded

Vivid Landscapes

 

Pure Waters is more lightweight since it doesn't edit cells, just replaces textures. Tamriel Reloaded is very fps friendly, most textures are in 1k resolution. When downloading Vivid Landscapes choose 1k textures for outdoors and 2k for dungeons. SFO can drop fps a bit, but people love it for it's lush trees, grasses and dozen flowers it adds. Sticking just to Tamriel Reloaded .esp instead of SFO, will give you decent foliage and performance.

 

Most of textures (especially does with paralax option) won't be looking as good as in some of the screenshots without ENB. So if your graphic card can handle it, I would recommend getting fps friendly preset. If not get RCRN AE (Realistic Colors and Real Nights Anniversary Edition), it does the same thing CoT (Climates of Tamriel) does, with HDR effects on top for about ~5 fps.

 

 

RCRN + SFO

 

 

Tamriel Reloaded with high end ENB

 

Edited May 31, 2014 by BlackRoseOfThorns