The Glade 4.0

These are the decent ones I recommend. Bolded ones are musts, in my opinion.

Appearance - Player and NPC's

Armor/Clothing/Weapons

Atmosphere/Immersion

Crafting

Followers

Gameplay Mechanics

Improvements Over Existing Features

Questlines

Races

I have others, but these are the better ones.

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The Dude abides.

You actually use all of those mods? Holy crap.

The Soul Gem filter one near the top is handy, but I don't use it because you can "empty" a soul gem that's underfilled by just dropping it and picking it back up again.

That Schwerteleite set is an awesome mod if you like that kind of armor, but even if you don't, it's fantastic for a 2-hander specialist trying to raise 1-handed and or block. the 1-hander is overpowered, but when you use it with a 1-handed skill with no perks it's not so bad, so you can raise that skill without fighting like a gimp. The shield is decent too.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

o_O Wall of text! XD

Can you sort it a little more into 'everyone should try' or 'cool but not really OMG' or something XD

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I'll put my list up a bit later.

Screeling has a lot of great mods in there, though. Just browse through the list and check out ones that strike your fancy. That's part of the fun for me, browsing Nexus to see what's there.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Mods list:

Favorites:
1. Armed to the Teeth – Allows weapons, shields, and staves not currently equipped to still appear on the character model. This is a scripting base; there’s weapons packs that install the scripts for the actual weapons, or you can make your own in the CK. This mod is tricky and can cause issues, but when it’s working right, the effect is very cool.
2. Skyrim Weapons Positioning – A supplement to AttT that moves 1-handed swords (not axes or maces) to the back, parallel with 2-handers, and daggers to the right boot. You can even use it without AttT but in that case it will only move weapon locations, not allow more than one to display
Alternate Start – Live Another Life – Allows you to start new characters in one of several alternate locations, skipping the initial script and travelling to Helgen to start the main quest by alternate means. HIGHLY useful for roleplaying, and also allows different starting gear. I just started using this one, but I’m already a fan.
3. Lost Art of the Blacksmith – allows a lot of otherwise non-temperable items, like the Ebony Blade to be tempered, and has a number of other features. Be warned, it also MASSIVELY increases the rate of smithing skill gain, so a few craftings and you’ll be at 100 and your character at level 18 if you’re not careful. This is great, though, if you’d like to start out as something other than a new adventurer; you’ll have considerable reserves of perks, health and stamina. Your other skills won’t be as high though, so challenge will still be there.
4. JaySuS Swords – extensive collection of new swords to craft and use, most very much in the historical model. A few more fantastical ones.
5. Tamrielic Lore – Chrysamere – Not only adds the artifact, but duplicates its Arena abilities, and adds a pretty challenging quest to obtain it. If you’re a fan of the older TES games, I feel this one is a must-have.

Body Mods
6. Calientes Big Bottom Edition: General re-do of females that can make them slim, curvy, or in-between. Makes them naked or in undies as you prefer.
7. Hair Pack – unimaginatively named. Adds more hairstyles, many rather different
8. UNP Fitness Body – also CBBE – re-does the CBBE body to look more fit, most noticeably in the abs. I like this; I want my female adventurers to look like they work for a living
9. Nude Males – this one may raise some eyebrows, but since I use nude women (the insistence on underwear just irritates the hell out of me, not because I really need to see naked pixels; moral guardians can suck my equally-Christian dick; sorry, rant over) I figured this was only fair. There’s also an added “darkness” factor to it; nothing like leaving your Forsworn, Bandit, or Vampire enemy’s naked corpse laying pitifully by the roadside as a warning to others.

Clothing and Armor Mods:
10. Cloaks of Skyrim: Exactly what it says on the label. Numerous cloaks
11. Winter is Coming Cloaks: Even more cloaks, heavy, winter types. Highly lore friendly, and look nice. Does cause some clipping issues with AttT and Weapons Positioning but livable if you just make yourself ignore it for a few minutes. It helps that I don’t wear the cloaks all the time, only in the snow..
Chinese General Armor and Weapon: Looked neat, and I may eventually use it with an orc character.
Dread Huntress Armor: Somewhat of a misnomer since it works for males too, this creates a fantastic set of craftable armor that looks like the Demon Hunter/Huntress from D3. Very well done, and has NUMEROUS advantages: A) You can raise heavy armor with a light armor look, for light armor characters. B) Includes a hood, if you want a heavy armor hood rather than helm-less or in a circlet or actual helm; this counts as a heavy head armor C) Looks sexy without being very revealing; just some cleavage D) adds for males as well, which, sadly, is not the case for a lot of clothing mods. Does not require too much to craft either, although it does take a few ebony ingots and ebony smithing.
12. Ancient Nord/Savior’s Hide re-texture – done by the same guy that did Dark Huntress. Improves those armors slightly
13. Dragon Bone Mage Armor by Natterborne – exactly what the label says. Have not really used it yet but plan to.
14. Falmer Darkseeker armor – a new falmer armor, by the same fellow as Dark Huntress
15. Field Mage outfit by the same guy. Quite tasteful IMO
16. Modest but sexy, similar in theme to Dark Huntress, but by someone else and less armor-looking. This one I have a hard time describing. I suggest looking it up.
17. Matys Mithril Armor: Adds Mithril armor, which by lore, should have been in the game. Based on Oblivion. Includes a cloak with an armor value worn in addition to everything else, so if you want a cloak that boosts armor and looks decent, if nondescript, may be good for that alone.
18. Silver Dragon Armor – Paladin-ish heavy armor, craftable and find-able. Dunno if I’m too impressed with this one; its ok but nothing special.
19. Spellbinder armor – Battlemage armor that’s very crusader-ish. Well done. Same guy does a number of other armor packs and is working on more. Highly suitable for males is a major strong point, and clearly not just a re-imagining of existing armor either
20. Roadstrokers Rogue Sorceress Outfit – Non-craftable, slightly unusual female-only light armor. Nifty mage look and surprisingly modest. Big drawback though in that you can only equip the outfit and its cape; it blocks use of the feet, hands, and head slots. Found in Riverwood in a barrel. Kind of forgot I have this one; I need to mess with it.
21. Thieves’ Guild Duelist Armor – by the Dark Huntress guy as well, this one is really nice, sexy, but still reasonably practical-looking and modest (in other words, it has actual pants and an actual jacket). I actually haven’t used it yet, but I plan to when I do my straight-up thief.
22. Vicky Armor – A very unusual mod. It’s slutty; short shorts and a bra with all kinds of accessories and I don’t usually go for those but this one I liked for some reason. It’s very weird in that it falls under Dwarven and therefore needs that perk to upgrade, but it’s smithable without the perk. That may make it tactically unappealing if you want to only use left-side smithing for a light armor build. It’s nicely done, though, and I may use it.
23. Witch Elf Armor – blatant ripoff from Warhammer, and super-skmipy, but potentially useful for certain concepts. I have a plan for a fanatical female High Elf involving this armor set.
24. Viking Armor – heavy and light chain armor sets that purportedly are authentic Viking. Dunno if that’s true, but they DO look more real-life and less fantasy
25. Heavy Holy Armor – goldish-yellow-white heavy armor set similar to ebony in layout
26. high Tier Iron, Stell, and Hide – adds Tier II and Tier III of the early-game armors if you like the way they look, making them much more viable later on.

Weapon mods
I already mentioned a few above. Here’s the rest
27. Better Bows – large number of additional bows
28. Craftable Crossbows and Bolts – self-explanatory; vanilla crossbows even as a vampire
29. Dancing Crane Katana – 1-handed and 2-handed Katanas with a variety of hilt colors
30. Dawnguard Crossbow Explosive Bolts visualized – makes the Dawnguard exploding bolts visually distinctive.
31. Dragonbone Crossbow- self-explanatory. Just got this, plan to try it out
32. Frostmourne and Lich King’s Armor – just what it says on the label. Well done despite being a blatant ripoff. I may have a use with my SK build. Frostmourne comes in 1H and 2H.
33. Full Ebony Blade – allows access to the REAL ebony blade in the game data, not the downgraded version in the vanilla quest. Along with Lost Art of the Blacksmith, allows smithing upgrades so you can really make that sword something worthwhile
34. FIXED Hybrids Vicious Weapon Pack – upgraded version of a weapon pack that added 3 pretty cool looking weapons
35. Insanity’s Golbrand – adds the classic artifact. Not craftable, findable
36. Insanity’s Umbra – same, for Umbra sword
37. Schwertleite set – could have put this one under armor or weapons. I haven’t used the armor yet so I put it here. The sword is very overpowered, but cool-looking and IDEAL as a 1-hander for 2-hander specialists looking for skillups. Armor is cool-looking too.
38. Enchanted Arrows – adds Oblivion –style enchanted arrows of many types, and includes crafting recipes
39. Heavy Armory - adds vanilla material new weapons like Halberds, Spears, Glaives, Shortswords, and enemies and soldiers actually use the. Great for increased variety

World mods
40. Towns and Villages Enhanced: Whiterun – adds a lot of flora to Whiterun. Well-placed and organized, it looks nice and is also a nice source of extra alchemy ingredients
41. Towns and Villages Enhanced: Windhelm – same thing, for windhelm
42. The 418th Step – Gives a distinctive lore-based look to the step of that number on the way to High Hrothgar
43. Black Tower and Black Sacrement armor pack – despite including extensive new armor packs, this is really a world mod, adding an entire new assassin’s guild near Bleak Falls Barrow. No quests, but a very handy place to buy and sell all kinds of stuff
44. WARZONES – Civil Unrest – adds battlefields with significantly larger battles around the world. Not just Stormcloak v. Imperial either. Can be tough, but also can be adjusted to taste. May be system-taxing for older/lower-end systems

Quests
45. The Paarthurnax Dilemma – modifies the quest to allow you to tell the Blades that no, you won’t kill Paarthurnax and yes, they’re going to like it

System mods
46. Skyrim Crash Prevention – supposedly stabilizes the game and boosts FPS. Unsure if it’s effective or not. Has not made anything worse though
47. Races Reviewed by Theme – essentially, re-does all racial abilities, getting rid of 1/day abilities. Great for me since I always forget them anyhow
48. Lore-based Loading Screens – adds a bunch of new loading screens. Hardly essential, but nice to break things up a bit more.
49. SkyRealism – Detection Durations – modifies the detection durations to be more realistic.

There’s a number of others I really want to try out. I’d especially like to de-flag some, or all essential NPCs and there is one that makes murder a lot more difficult and complex by adding investigations and detections….

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Categorized and spoilered to save on space.

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The Dude abides.

Most appreciated

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The Paarthurnax Dilemma sounds like something that should be in vanilla Skyrim. I'd at the very least like to be able to either tell the Blades where they can stick it or murder the crap out of Delphine's justifiably racist ***.

I'd settle for just telling them that Paarthurnax is good people, though.

Delphine is just a self-righteous, unreasonable ***** all the way around, and so is Enser. They seem to forget they serve the Dragonborne, not the reverse. I would have laughed if the Greybeards had FUS RO DAHd them right off High Hrothgar at the peace council.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

foolishly tried installing all of Screeling's mods at once. Now it wont load. I lost patience for taking them all out one at a time. will come back to it once I've got more time/patience.

My advice is only ever install 5 mods at a time. Make sure you can load a save. Then load more.

Additionally, load order can be important. Look for the "mod" called BOSS. There's a YouTube on it by a guy named GopherVids (or Gopher-something). He explains the concept. But for the most part, you can have BOSS assign load order for you and be okay 99% of the time.

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The Dude abides.

I just noticed this one in your mod list, Screeling. I was like "WTF does he want a mod that adds more bugs ... oh "

Here's a few magic mods I found

Black Magic

This one is supposedly a work in progress, as right now it adds only 3 spells, all master-level. All of them make the Black Magic/Necromancy side of things a lot stronger though. I'm hoping he'll add some lower-level spells in later updates. Sorely needed IMO; one of the biggest weaknesses of Skyrim IMO has been the continuing removal of magic effects without sufficient new additions to replace them, nor sufficient variety in those effects.

Lost magic Large assortment of interesting new spells. I wish they were available somewhere other than one dude in Winterhold.

Spells of Tamriel Basically more spells, with some added variety. In particular there are the jump spells. THEY REQUIRE SKSE TO WORK! Don't try to use them unless you also use that mod.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

For Screeling especially:

If your armor is overpowered (liek the Schwertleitte) this might help:

Revised armor rating

It revises the armor progression so rather than capping out at 80% damage resist at 567, it's 95% at 1300, which is a lot harder to reach. He estimates that for the most part, you'll take 6-12% more damage. There's graphs and charts at the link that explain in more detail. I highly recommend it, since it means ultra-smithing does not trivialize everything.

At really high levels, or if you're using mods that add more gear slots, it's still easy to reach the armor cap before level 81, but you won't be hitting it at level 20 with ease like you can in vanilla.

[urlhttp://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/12130]greater difficulty[/url]

If anyone is looking to just jack combat difficulty, that one may be for you. Have not tried it myself. I do use Duel Combat Realism 5 which alters some aspects of how combat works, and may make things a bit harder as well.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

If you're tired of citizens getting killed because they tried to fight a dragon:

Run for your lives!

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Installed and configured skyrim over the weekend, this guide was the most helpful of anything I found. It is absolutely amazing, and very comprehensive, however, it will take a while to get through. Skyrim now looks even more amazing than I thought possible though.

Skyrim Total Enhancement Project

STEP is about enhancing vanilla Skyrim
Texture replacements at minimized performance cost and true to vanilla Skyrim
Continuity of all in-game textures, reducing immersion-breaking variation in texture quality (i.e., comparable resolution and style across all armors, weapons, clutter, terrain, etc.).
Graphical mods (ESPs) including new content that "fits" vanilla Skyrim
Gameplay mods that improve the consistency and the authors' perceived intent of vanilla Skyrim
Interface mods which improve the menus and UI for the PC interface
Sound mods that enhance the authors' perceived intent of vanilla Skyrim
Fix mods that truly "fix" malfunctioning aspects of vanilla Skyrim

STEP is NOT about ...
Content mods that conflict with vanilla Skyrim and/or TES lore
Mods that change the authors' perceived intent of vanilla Skyrim
Graphics mods that contrast with vanilla Skyrim in terms of appearance and practicality
Music replacement mods
Gameplay overhauls (unless they truly enhance the authors' perceived intent of vanilla Skyrim)

"Better Vampires" is the latest mod I've been playing with. It's very well done for anyone who wants to go through the game as a vampire and is compatible with Dawnguard.

It's highly customizable with a slew of features that are toggle-able including (but not limited to):

- Reverse Vampirism (feeding makes you stronger and less ugly, starving makes you weaker, ugly, and feared/hated). I've never liked any Elder Scrolls logic of "starving makes you stronger."
- A vampire-specific leveling system (outside of the main player leveling) that makes you more powerful the more you feed.
- The ability to drink the blood of freshly slain enemies (and whether or not you just want it to give you a minor health/stamina boost or have it count towards your leveling)
- Sunlight doing damage to you slightly or heavily (or not at all), powers not working in sunlight but will work in shade, etc.
- Turning any NPC into a vampire or permanent thrall
- Better night vision (more of a red tint, with better contrast than the stock vampire night vision)
- A bunch of other new vampiric flavor powers/spells
- Option for total blood dependency (potions/spells don't heal you near enough) as well as the ability to extract blood from sleeping NPCs to make your own blood potions.
- And much more.

http://www.skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/9717

A tip for anyone who decides to play with this that will save you some frustration that I had: In order to turn on and off vampiric night vision, you have to be crouching/stealthy (but you don't have to remain that way once enabled). You can't be standing up to enable/disable it (that's for regular night vision).

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Les Zombis et les Loups-Garous!

Very nice. You boys seem to be very much into immersion in the game. I'd really recommend hoping onto skyrim.nexusmods.com and going through Gopher's 6-part YouTube series on the mods he's reviewed over the last year. He's very much about making the game as immersive as possible. He touches on that "Better Vampires" as well as a couple other vamp-related mods you might get into.

The mod reviews are quick and he tells you if they're still worth getting. On each of the articles he posted that has the video parts to his "look back," he has links to all the mods he mentions. It was good to have it running the background while I did some work.

Incidentally, the Tera armors (from my screenshots) are now finally available on Nexus. I'd definitely recommend scoring them up.

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The Dude abides.