Mod Recommendations For New Players

[yk0520]

I finally purchased Skyrim and was looking for recomendations for the best mods to add. Specificly, I'm looking for ideas for:

 

1. Environment
   
2. Appearance (face,hair,body)
   
3. Equipment
   
4. Creature/NPC
   
5. Quest
   
6. Town/Wilderness
   
7. Misc (interface,effect,etc)
   

 

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.Sorry if this has been asked before.

[CalenEllefson]

Many things will depend on your taste, tolerance, and play style. Other things will depend on where on the low-end to high-end spectrum your computer is at.

 

Exploring the Nexus mods by category, and then sorting by endorsements or downloads, in descending order to put the most popular at the top, is a great way to "window-shop".

The Nexus Top 100 most endorsed of all time is another great place to start.

 

Some specific recommendations:

 

The big 3 mod utilities:

NMM - The Nexus Mod Manager.It does a good job of keep track of which files were replaced by which mods. As long as mod authors format their mod archive file correctly, it works great. (Problems with downloading are either the connection or the server.)

 

BOSS. Well, BOSS is the boss of mod load order and bash tags. Get it. Run it. And your mods are put into the "best" load order. This helps greatly to prevent game-crashing conflicts.

Wrye Bash. This uses the BOSS bash tags, to build a Bashed Patch that merges the leveled lists of your mods. It doesn't handle every record type, yet. But, good people are at the helm, it will soon.

 

And, then there's:

USKP - The Unofficial Skyrim Patch. A whole lot of fixes.

 

SKSE - The Skyrim Script Extender You'll need it for some of the best mods. Read the installation instructions carefully, to use it you'll have to let it start Skyrim for you.

 

SkyUI- One of, if not the, best mods. It makes your inventory and barter interfaces unbelievably better than vanilla. (And you'll use those menus a lot in the game.)

Acquisitive Soul Gems - It solves the soul gems "stacking" problem (makes 50 petty soul gems show up as "Petty Soul Gems (50)", instead of 50 identical rows of one "Petty Soul Gem").

 

STEP - Skyrim Total Enhancement Project. Not necesarily everything he recommends (matter of taste), but most of it is about the best in appearance out there.

 

 

Anyhow, that should get you started. Happy gaming!

[yk0520]

Thanks for the suggestions (Esp. the SkyUI mod). All I need to do now is find some decent face/hair/eye mods,environment enhancements and weapon/armor mods that are neither "god mods" or look like they belong on a stripper.

 

Have run into a problem with the SkyUI mod not recognizing the Script Extender.Any ideas?

Edited June 11, 2012 by yk0520