What Are Your Foundation Mods?, Ones that are always in the rotation Options

[SubRosa]

I have a ton of mods, many of which add new weapons, races, armor, etc... But I don't keep them all active all the time. Typically I will only turn on the mods I want to use for a particular character, and turn off the other clothing, weapon, etc... mods that they are not using. The reason is that there is a hard limit on how many mods you can have active - 252 or so. Also the more mods you have active will eventually start to slow you game down, especially script-intensive mods or massive 2k and 4k texture packs. It all depends on how powerful your computer is to begin with of course. 150 mods might not make a beefy comp blink, but could bring one that is slow to begin with to its knees.

But even that said, I have some mods that are always active, no matter what character. These are what I mean by Foundations. They are the rock on which everything else is built. Some of them are:


General Graphics

No Tint and Desaturation (wow, there are colors again!)

No Stretching (textures)

No Blood (No Blood Splatter On Your Hud option)

No Bloom


Landscape Detail

Shrine of Azura LOD Fix

A Clear World Map

A Quality World Map - With Roads

Enhanced Distant Terrain

Enhanced Night Sky

High Quality LODs

Pure Waters (makes the water semi-transparent from above, so you can actually see the shallow parts you can walk through without swimming)

Distant Detail Hearthfire Edition

Footprints

SkyFalls and SkyMills - Animated Distant Waterfalls and WindMills


Quests

Thieves Guild Requirements - No Auto Quest Start Brynjolf

Dawnguard Delayed Start


Armor & Weapons

Auto Unequip Ammo

UltraHD - Stormcloak and City Guards

Open Faced Helmets

Runed Draugr Greatswords

Well Placed Weapons and Quivers


Gameplay

Ash Pile Expiration

Open and Lock Spells

Lockpick Pro

Player Headtracking

Puppeteer Master (pose mod)

You Are Not The Dragonborn

Improved Skill Books


Creatures

Real Foxes


User Interface

SkyUI

Immersive Hud


Other Stuff

Female Mannequins

Neutral Hjerim

Guards Equipment Comment Tweak

Long Lost Smelters of Skyrim


Then of course I have my whole array of body and face mods Listed Here


So what do other people have that is always in the rotation? It is nice to share, because that is how we learn about mods we never knew existed.

This post has been edited by SubRosa: Nov 21 2016, 03:27 AM

[Renee]

I finally get to add to this thread, haha.

Some of these ones have already been listed. I linked to mods which haven't been, so far.

Utilities

SkSE
SkyUI
Wrye Bash

360 Hotkeys Expanded?--By default, if somebody (like me) wants to use a controller instead of mouse + keys, they are limited to only 2 hotkeys. This mod allows us the 8 hotkey configuration that we used in Oblivion.

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Console Commands

Set Timescale to 10

bAllowCompass = 0

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statz n spreadsheet modz

Character Creation Overhaul

Third Era Attributes -- I love seeing my characters boiled down to raw numbers on a stat-sheet.

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"Fix" Mods


Gold Adjustment -- Makes gold and other loot less common.

No Empty Tags on Containers

Open Cities

Realistic Room Rental? -- No more 10 Septim inns all across Skyrim.

People are Strangers -- Talk to someone, if you want to know his / her name.

Scarcity -- overpowered loot is not as common. Combined with Gold Adjustment, it's a guarantee my new character won't become rich in less than a week.

Timing is Everything (Finally I can have dragons in my game, but they're incredibly rare to see. I've seen one already though.

Weapon Degradation (with MCM)

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Clothing

Common Clothes

Peasant Fashions

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4 teh immurshunz

Birds & Flocks

Campfire Cooking

Cooking Takes Time (automatically makes time pass after cooking is done.. ie., a slab of meat = half an hour

Cold & Wet

Darker Interiors There are several mods which make stuff darker. Some of them make nights dark as well, which is cool, but they wind up being waaay too dark. Climates of Tamriel is supposed to have a 'dark dungeons' feature, but it confused me when I read about it. All I wanted was to darken dungeons and some interiors, so that's what this mod does.


Follower Commentary Overhaul * I agree with Grits, sometimes I like hearing NPCs who are usually silent start to turn into Motormouth Mjoll. I still have the setting for FCO turned all the way down to 10% though.

Footprints (Omg wow wow)

Immersive Sounds--Footsteps heavy armor boots go clink clink clink, light armor boots sound different from regular shoes. On top of this, footstep sounds also change according to the type of terrain or road you are on.

Frostfall -- this mod's really harsh. I go for the Lite setting, and my character still almost died from frostbite.

Knock Knock -- if the NPC behind the door likes you, locked doors will get unlocked. Especially good mod to confront merchants who forget to unlock their doors.

Lock Overhaul -- allows lock-bashing, Open / Lock spells, auto-picking, and a few other features.

Mercy

RP Chopping and Mining -- Veins are inexhaustible, but it takes awhile to gain ores. Chopping wood won't allow the player to get ridiculous amounts of money for just a few hours' work.

Realistic Needs and Disease

Splash of Rain

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MISC

A Matter of Time -- Not very immersive of me to have this one, but I don't care. I dislike GPS compasses, but I'm obsessed with in-game time. I put this one right on my HUD, imagine that?

Bank of Skyrim?

Sustained Spells -- Several spells will now auto-cast, including light, shield, and muffle spells.

This post has been edited by Renee: Mar 28 2015, 05:30 AM