Part 3: Characters and ‘Stuff’
With most of Skyrim now looking like an absurdly detailed still life painting, Bethesda’s odd looking characters are begging for a solid fixing. While we’re at it, we’ll efficiently add new hairstyles and beards, make followers easier to manage, add a slew of new NPCs, and enhance the variety of gear available in the game. Sounds pretty good, right? Let’s do this!
Character Mods:
Borrows hairstyles from several sources – The Sims, The Witcher, etc. – and makes them work on Skyrim’s characters. They’re slightly less, uh, lore friendly than the standard hair, but the quality is great. Secondary mods distribute the hairstyles among Skyrim’s people (ApachiiSkyHair NPC Overhaul), and make the hair textures more natural (ApachiiSkyHair Natural Retexure)
Replaces the stock hair textures with something a bit more realistic looking without getting insanely shiny.
Includes a heap of new hairstyles to give your character a unique look.
The Nords of Skyrim have some pretty epic beards – this mod makes them A) look like hair, and B) adds sweet braided breads into the mix.
This very broad mod fixes a lot of little things to do with characters in the game. It provides improved textures all around, fixes face shapes, and inserts more detailed character models into the world. It’s been around forever, but it’s still a solid option.
One of my very favourite character mods makes Skyrim’s elf-goblins look more, well, elf-ish. It completely restructures the heads of all the elf races in the game, and makes them much believable. Download this patch to make the mod work with DLC.
Since we’ve overhauled the humans and elves, we’d best give some love to the beasts! This mod will bring the Argonians and Khajiit in line with what we’ve done with the other races.
Granular control of follower actions, group command functions, and a much higher follower limit make this mod essential. You’ll wonder how you tolerated followers before!
This fantastic mod adds interesting people and dialogue to all corners of the game, all of it fully voice acted, and including several quests. It’s an amazing piece of work.
Equipment Mods:
To be clear, all of these mods are purely optional, but can inject some freshness into Skyrim if you’ve experienced it a few times already.
Want 55+ new styles of armour in the game? Want them to be properly inserted into the game as loot? Want them to fit into Skyrim lore? This is your mod. This is an excellent piece of work that prevent you from seeing the same few armour sets all the time.
Does exactly what the last mod does, but with 227 unique weapons. So good.
A collection of lore friendly swords that complements the above collections very nicely.
Yet more weapons and armour added to your game experience.
Reshapes the vanilla Skyrim weapons – generally making the swords thinner and more sword-like, etc. Once you’ve seen how this mod changes things, it’s tough to get rid of.
It’s almost criminal that cloaks weren’t included in vanilla Skyrim. Seriously. This mod adds 100+ cloaks all over the place, which both look good and are functional – Part 4’s mods will necessitate protection from the elements.
There we have it! A stable of characters and equipment guaranteed to increase your enjoyment of and immersion in the world of Skyrim. Stay tuned for Part 4, where we’ll dive into modifying actual gameplay.
Part 1:Â Interface & Overhaul Mods
Part 2: Technical Mods
Part 4:Â Gameplay Mods
Part 5:Â Quest & Follower Mods