This post was migrated from Cohost. It was originally posted June 19, 2023. It has been copied as-is; I have not checked to confirm if the mods listed below are still listed.

Mostly just making this so I can share with my friends, but these are the mods I’m using on my current save. Maybe you’ll find something new!

My current save character is Harrava - a Khajiit mage. Her skills focus on Illusion, Restoration, Conjuration, Enchanting, Alchemy, Archery, and Sneak. (If you want to know more about Harrava, I have a tag for her; I plan on writing more about her on my main account)1

Sorted by Nexus category (some of these make no sense to me either, don’t worry):

Before We Begin

  • Skyrim Script Extender: You WILL need this. For a lot. I’m not going to mark which mods require SKSE because a lot of them do. Make sure you launch the game using the SKSE launcher!
  • I’m running on the most recent Skyrim version (Anniversary 1.6.640, with Creation Club content).

Alchemy

  • Alchemy Plus: Improves Alchemy products by changing their name and model to the nearest in-game equivalent, appending (Impure) to denote impure potions, and appending +1, +2 etc to denote additional effects

Animation

  • EVG Animation Variance: Adds some variety and minor variations to vanilla animations.
  • Feral: There are some pretty cool unarmed animations for Khajiit Argonians, their respective Vampire counterparts, and Werewolves that the devs never finished, but left in the game files. This mod enables them and recycles some other animations to fill in for the ones that never got finished.

Armor

  • Immersive Armors: Adds a LOT of new lore-friendly armors. Pretty comprehensive settings let you control distribution, crafting, etc
  • Kitty Hoods: Adds ESO-style ear bumps to hoods, instead of smooshing Khajiit ears down. I have the “No Ears for Non Kitty”, “Creation Club”, and “Immersive Armors” versions / patches.
  • Skyblivion Necromancer Robes: Adds Master Necromancer robes from Skyblivion.
  • Skyrim Unlimited Rings and Amulets: Lets you wear multiple rings / amulets instead of just one of each. Certain unique rings and amulets are unaffected. (I don’t know if that’s intended or not; I just consider it “balancing”)
  • Sokco’s Helmet Hider: Lets you hide your helmet using a power.

Audio

Body, Face, and Hair

  • BeastHHBB: Adds a ton of new options for Khajiit and Argonians; adjusts NPCs as well as player. Don’t forget the Patches and Addons!
  • Khajiit Eyes Extended: Adds a lot more Khajiit eye colors and heretochromia options.

Bug Fixes

Cheats and God Items

  • Hearthfire Building Materials God Chests: Adds chests near the Hearthfire building areas with an ungodly amount of materials so you can quickly finish building your Hearthfire house. (After building them normally a few dozen times, it gets tiring!)

Cities, Towns, Villages, and Hamlets

Clothing and Accessories

  • Better Archmage’s Robes: Improves the enchantments on the Archmage’s Robes, makes them diseanchantable, adds a version without a hood, and lets you craft unenchanted versions at a tanning rack
  • Different Bonds of Matrimony: Offers different options for the Bond of Matrimony depending on your playstyle. I have the Magickal one right now
  • DreamBurrow Regal Huntsman Armor: Assassin’s Creed style armor mashup; actually pretty OP light armor, my go-to when using light armor

Combat

  • Human Enemies drop Hearts and Flesh: Random enemies have a chance to drop Human Heart and Human Flesh on death
  • Wildcat: Combat overhaul; adds injury effects (e.g. head injury = drains magicka and stops regen) and adjusts difficulty

Creatures and Mounts

  • Bantam Guars: Cute lil chubby reptilian fellas, raised for eggs and meat like chickens in Morrowind. I just think they’re super damn cute. I mean look at that. Look at themb
  • Creatures of Nirn: Alfiq: Adds Alfiq Khajiit NPCs & followers to the world and replaces the Courier with an Alfiq
  • Guar Mount and Wild Guars: Adds Guars to Solstheim
  • Realistic Horse Breeds by Kritta Kitty: Greatly improved horse textures. I also have the Frost patch to make him uniquely colored
  • Simple Horse SE: Very simple horse usability mod; adds horse whistle, horses can avoid fighting, adds fast dismount, and followers will ride a summoned horse. I also use the 1.3x sprint speed optional file. (If you read my prior post about my fighting with Immersive Horses, this is the mod I swapped to after I finally cleaned up that mess)
  • Skyrim Immersive Creatures: Adds a ton of new creatures, including critters from other TES games, including minotaurs, goblins, ogres, dwemer constructs, etc

Environmental

Followers & Companions

  • Amazing Follower Tweaks: Follower overhaul that lets you have multiple followers, give them better AI, and adjust their combat style and whatnot more thoroughly. (Inigo ignores this, he has his own brains, but this helps with vanilla followers)
  • INIGO: Everybody’s favorite blue cat. Talkative, immortal, 1H/Bow, has his own pretty extensive quest detailing his history. (Inigo ignores most mods that control followers; he has his own brain and is not treated as a normal follower by the game)

Gameplay

  • Alternate Start: Live Another Life: Lets you skip the intro cutscene and pick a different starting location and scenario. You can start the main quest by visiting Helgen.
  • Andrealphus’ Tweaks - Locket of Saint Jiub: Changes the Locket of Saint Jiub from Light Armor to Clothing
  • Andromeda - Unique Standing Stones of Skyrim: Changes Standing Stones to have much more robust and unique effects: each stone has 2 effects, with a 3rd unlockable power once you discover all of them
  • Cutting Room Floor: Restores a ton of cut content from the base game
  • Hearthfire Multiple Adoptions: Lets you adopt up to 6 children; adds a spell that lets you easily mark any home as your current home, even custom homes (as long as it has enough beds for your children)
  • Instant Mining: Instantly mines ore nodes, skipping the animation. Be careful with Clay and Stone deposits, they will chuck a LOT of materials at you because they’re “endless” mining nodes!
  • Run For Your Lives: Makes NPCs run and hide when there’s a dragon attack instead of… trying to fistfight them and dying
  • The Eloquent Reader: Get Speech XP for reading books

Guilds / Factions

Immersion

  • Fixed body collision: Enables collision on dead bodies
  • Gildergreen Regrown: Fixes the Gildergreen after The Blessings of Nature if you choose to replace it with a sapling, so that it starts as a small sapling and slowly re-grows over time
  • Hold Border Banners: Adds banners on the roads by hold borders to let you know which hold you are entering
  • Holidays: NPCs and towns will decorate for and celebrate lore-based holidays (and your birthday!)
  • Hunterborn: Changes animal looting into a process of dressing, skinning, harvesting, and butchering; adds new materials and goods you can craft from them, as well as foraging. “Campfire” mod recommended but not required
  • Immersive Children: Enables child mortality, pickpocketing, other miscellaneous bug fixes (I got this mod specifically for one child: get rekt Britte, you hateful thing)
  • Immersive Citizens: Improves NPC AI to help them behave better
  • Immersive Patrols: Adds patrolling Stormcloak, Thalmor, Imperial, Dawnguard NPCs to Skyrim and Reaver, Riekling, and Skaal patrols to Solstheim
  • iNeed: Simple needs mod, very easily able to add in unrecognized foods and drinks from other mods
  • Khajiit Has Wares: Makes Khajiit caravans prettier
  • Khajiit Speak - Complete Dialog Overhaul: Overhauls all player dialog to better follow Khajiiti speech patterns
  • Khajiit Speak Extended: Patches for Khajiit Speak to cover popular content mods
  • Lore Friendly Ghosts: Ghosts can only be affected by magic and specific weapons, following how they behaved in prior games
  • Player Headtracking: Enables headtracking; lets your player character look at other NPCs, things, etc
  • Skyrim Reputation: Adds a Reputation system similar to Oblivion and older Fallouts; your actions will change how people react to you through idle dialog, and you will get letters from various NPCs for certain actions
  • Wet and Cold: Adds cold, wet, and dusty effects to yourself and NPCs
  • Wintersun: Lets you follow a chosen deity and perform acts and prayers to earn Favor and unlock perks and skills. Adds a ton of shrines, includes deities outside of the more commonly known Divines and Daedra (including Elven deities like Syrabane and Phynaster; Redguard deities like Morwha and the HoonDing; and other powerful entities like the Hist, the Old Ways, the Magna-Ge, Ebonarm, Mannimarco, and St. Alessia)

Items and Objects - World

  • Hanging Dead Bantam Guar: Adds some hanging dead Bantam Guar around Solstheim, since they are raised for eggs and meat

Magic - Gameplay

Magic - Spells & Enchantments

  • Apocalypse: Adds a ton of new spells and corresponding scrolls and staves
  • Summermyst: Adds a ton of new enchantments and improves vanilla enchantments

Miscellaneous

Modders Resources

Models and Textures

  • Book Covers Skyrim SE: Gives books unique, detailed covers
  • Skyrim Flora Overhaul: Greatly improves tree, grass, bush models and textures
  • Wild Horse Replacer: Makes Wild Horses from the Creation Club use Kritta Kitty’s Realistic Horses textures. Meant to be used alongside that mod but does not require it.

NPC

  • Campfire: Standalone camping mod, lets you set up a campsite and make a campfire. Works very well with Hunterborn.
  • OBIS - Organized Bandits of Skyrim: Adds a ton of new bandit variants, organized into gangs with different difficulty tiers

Overhauls

  • Moonlight Tales: Werewolf overhaul, adding perks, skins, transformation control, etc
  • Sacrosanct Vampires: Vampire overhaul, adding perks, tweaks, new spells, etc
    • Note: My current character is neither a Vampire nor Werewolf, but I find that these mods improve NPC vampires and werewolves, so I keep them installed

Patches

  • Inigo - Bloodchill Manor Patch: Part of Inigo’s questline and Bloodchill Manor occupy the same area; this patch fixes that
  • Inigo Riding Patch: Helps prevent a specific issue that prevents Inigo from properly riding his horse when you have SKSE and RaceMenu installed and take some of his starting items. Can’t fix the bug if it’s already been procced mid-game, but can help prevent it from happening in the first place
  • Wintersun AE Patches: Fixes some issues with Wintersun and various AE CC content

Player Homes

Quests and Adventures

  • Jiub’s Opus: Adds quest markers to the pages of Jiub’s Opus in Impatience of a Saint
  • The Paarthurnax Dilemma: Lets you yell at the Blades hard enough that they leave Paarthurnax alone

Races, Classes, and Birthsigns

  • Race Balance: Tweaks races to add useful passives and perks

User Interface

Utilities

  • Dynamic Animation Replacer: Replaces animations based on various conditions. Required by a bunch of mods.
  • Keyword Item Distributor: SKSE plugin that applies keywords to items / consumables / etc with config files. Required by a bunch of mods.
  • Spell Perk Item Distributor: SKSE plugin that is used to distribute spells / shouts / perks / items / etc to NPCs via config files. Required by a bunch of mods.
  • Unblock - The Activation Fix: do not leave this installed, it is a fix tool! Use this if something breaks and you can no longer activate certain items anymore (e.g. levers, horses).

Visuals and Graphics

  • Footprints: Adds footprint decals to the ground as you and NPCs walk

Weapons

  • Immersive Weapons: Adds a ton of lore-friendly weapons. Robust configuration to control distribution, crafting, etc. Also allows you to melt down those weapons for materials
  • No Soul Gem Required: Certain enchanted weapons (e.g. Daedric artifacts) do not require soul gems to recharge

Uncategorized

  • Better Better Skooma: A mod for Oldrim that actually adds some wild effects to Skooma instead of it just being a stamina potion. You’ll need to convert it to SSE for it to work properly (it does work if you just plop it in, but not as well as it should)
  • Storefront: Lets your spouse actually open a store. You can put items in the store chest for them to sell, too. Works with vanilla and Hearthfire houses.

  1. The posts from the tag will be condensed and brought over as a proper new post. Link to the Cohost tag removed, as most of the posts are from my personal, logged-in-only page, and therefore are not easily accessible. ↩