SKYRIMLE Skyrim Improvement Guide - Best Mods and Tweaks

[Kelmych]

Skyrim Improvement Guide - Best Mods and Tweaks  is another guide that provides suggested mods and configuration parameters for Skyrim. It is inspired by STEP and includes a lot of mods that are in the current STEP guide. An updated version was released a few days ago.  It does have some mods that are not in STEP that might interest this group. Among these are some small texture mods that add high resolution versions of a few textures. These are higher resolution than those in vanilla, the Bethesda HiRes DLC,  or the STEP B1 mods:

Target re-texture (archery targets)

Chopper AXE - HD 2048x1024  

Pick Axe HD 2048x2048  

Better Shadowmarks  

[Farlo]

It has some pretty good suggestions, I picked out 34 that aren't in STEP or formally suggested (that I can recall), I'll be testing them and making a few more threads for sure.

[EisDrache]

I know for me quite a few of thoes INI tweaks broke my game completely not even removing them and starting a new game fixed it i had to uninstall and reinstall the game to fix it it was mostly the CPU tweaks that did it

[Kelmych]

I didn't list all the potentially useful mods since I wasn't sure whether to list in my post, for example, the mods that change meshes or provide small fixes since there aren't a lot of these in the current STEP. I found a number of mods that I was already using, and in some cases that I am now trying, that are not in STEP and have not been discussed in the Mod Suggestions posts.

 

I'm also leery of listing mods that provide only small benefit (e.g., race description info) or are similar to a number of other mods or don't seem to be the mainstay of STEP (e.g., weapon and armor mods mentioned in the list) whenever they add yet another esp or esm file. In the Bethesda games (Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV) I have always run up against the limit of the number of mods that can be added and I've had to eliminate a number of useful mods.

[Farlo]

I didn't list all the potentially useful mods since I wasn't sure whether to list in my post, for example, the mods that change meshes or provide small fixes since there aren't a lot of these in the current STEP. I found a number of mods that I was already using, and in some cases that I am now trying, that are not in STEP and have not been discussed in the Mod Suggestions posts.

 

I'm also leery of listing mods that provide only small benefit (e.g., race description info) or are similar to a number of other mods or don't seem to be the mainstay of STEP (e.g., weapon and armor mods mentioned in the list) whenever they add yet another esp or esm file. In the Bethesda games (Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3, Fallout NV) I have always run up against the limit of the number of mods that can be added and I've had to eliminate a number of useful mods.

Including several I found from this guide, I have almost 20 new mods to compare against STEP.  I'll get cracking on them sometime this week and I'll update a wiki page as I go.

 

I usually stray away from very minor fixes and details as well as it almost seems like a waste to go through and install the mod for something that'll you'll almost never notice, but it's at least worth mentioning it most of the time.  I've never hit the ESP limit, even in Oblivion, fingers' crossed.  I'm up to 140/255 at the moment, but fortunately as more advanced mod managing tools come out we can combine a lot of them.  There's also several such as Sounds of Skyrim, ACE, and EFF where we can ask the mod author for a "complete pack".

[Kelmych]

Someday TESVGecko will be available; for Oblivion the only way I got down to the esp/esm limit was by using TES4Gecko to combine mods (much easier than using the Construction Set). With Skyrim there are already a lot of interesting armor and weapon mods, and some quest mods that are more interesting than many of the "radiant" Fedex quests.