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

[Lopov]

A Matter of Time adds a clock to the HUD. I

Hey, thanks for this one, it'll be really good to know the exact time before pausing the game.

I use a lot of mods, I have no idea how many, but all of them are active for every character. I'm not at home currently, so I can't check the list, but some essential that first come to my mind are:

Character Creation Overhaul - I couldn't play Skyrim without this mod.

Live Another Life - I rarely use a custom start but this mod allows me to create my character before starting the carriage trip to Helgen. I want to know how my characters look like while being on a carriage.

Xenius Character Enhancement - it's a perfect mod for making NPCs look better (not necessarily prettier) while still keeping the feel of vanilla game, almost every other mod that alters appearances, makes character too modern and not fitting for Skyrim, IMO.

Face to Face Conversations - I couldn't play Skyrim without this mod either, now I finally know how NPCs look like and NPCs feel less like robots, because you can actually see their facial animations from up close.

Guard Dialogue Overhaul - makes guards correctly recognize our titles and random achievements.

I will add other mods tomorrow when I return home, there are many more which I consider essential. As much as I don't like to say this, Skyrim would be completely unplayable for me without mods.

EDIT: I remembered a few more:

Timing is everything - allows you to adjust random dragon & vampire attacks, start of the Dragonborn and many other things.

Mercy - makes yielding enemies in fact yield.

This post has been edited by Lopov: Dec 14 2013, 09:41 PM

[Grits]

Thanks to SubRosa I’ve been using Thieves Guild Requirements – No Auto Quest Start to prevent Brynjolf from attempting to recruit every priestess, healer, and paladin that I send through Riften. It works great. Now there’s an update that has made me love the Thieves Guild the way I always thought I should be able to.

In the MCM you can customize more requirements, like how many radiant jobs you need to get the city’s special job. The best part I think is now I can add requirements for the Guild main quests, so my newbie thief won’t get tasked with major responsibility until his skills reach a point that I set. So even though he’s a reluctant pickpocket he’s going to have to get out there and work the streets in order to impress his boss. Also I can set the number of radiant quests required to advance to the next TG quest, so there’s no sense of rushing through it with the new guy. Even after Marius has restored the guild through radiant city quests he’s going to have to pull more Delvin and Vex jobs to move the TG main quest along.

There’s another mod called Localized Thieves Guild Jobs. TG Requirements has a patch so they work together. You can ask Delvin and Vex for radiant jobs in specific cities through their dialog choices. Now they no longer seem like a pair of morons who send you all over the map for no reason. Also in their dialog you can tell them you need a certain number of days for the job, and if you make it back in time there’s a big cash bonus. Marius is using iNeed for eat/drink/sleep, so he has to decide if he’s going to rest up and be safe on the road (penalties for being tired from iNeed) or push himself past exhaustion to get the money. Plus a lot of shortcuts are dangerous. I don’t know how fast travel works with this, because that would defeat the purpose.

I’ve seen Thieves Guild follower mods but I don’t use one because I made Rune into a follower. Of course so far when dragons, trolls, vampires, and assassins have attacked Marius on the road, his ‘brother in crime’ Rune has been nowhere to be found. Anyway with some backup a thief might actually survive some of the TG quests. We’ll see how many.

[King Coin]

Those sound like excellent mods. Now only if there was something for the Companions...

[Grits]

I looked around the Nexus and found Enhanced Skyrim Factions – The Companions Guild. It looks pretty awesome. I’ll probably use the requirements-only version the next time a new character gets off the wagon and picks up a weapon. I absolutely love that it will take many more hours and levels to move through the guild quests. It seems much more like living a life than progressing in a game.

Now, the College of Winterhold..?

[Grits]

Two more I like are Common Clothes and Unique Border Gates.

Common Clothes is kind of a pain with impossible descriptions and a messy crafting menu, but I love the clothes it adds, especially the number of pants outfits for women. I've eliminated several other clothing mods in favor of the ones from this mod.

[Grits]

OK, so I haven’t used this one long enough to say it for sure doesn’t cause problems and it will forever be in all of my games, but I love it so far. Remember in Oblivion NPCs would just talk? Some people hated that but in Skyrim I really miss it. I just can’t ever hear enough about mudcrabs.

So this mod Follower Commentary Overhaul makes followers run their mouths a lot. So far I’ve only heard them talk to themselves and the player. This morning while I was fooling around with Ninette’s game instead of doing what I’m supposed to be doing, I heard this:

Onmund: So, do you get that weird taste in your mouth before battle, too? What is that?

Jerric: *laughs*

They were in the common room of the Hall of Attainment. Ninette was by herself. They were talking to each other!!

[Grits]

You know those floating bits of white fluff? Here’s a mod that makes them recognizable as dandelion seeds. I’m using one of the small textures. Sometimes it’s the little things.

[SubRosa]

Neat! Persephone was walking by them just last night west of Falkreath. I was guessing that is what they were. But I was wondering why they were in the air in October!

[Grits]

So I think I discovered why the drifting seeds look like fluff in the vanilla game. In some snowy places like Dawnstar they use the fluff to look like snowflakes floating in the air. The dandelion seeds look very odd in those situations!

[SubRosa]

D'oh! Maybe I will take that one out of the rotation then...

[Acadian]

That's so funny! I was between Morthal and Dawnstar and saw some of those floaties in the air and thought to myself, 'I'm glad they don't look like dandelion seed puffs up here.'

[haute ecole rider]

Now that I've been playing vanilla Skyrim with my jack-of-all-trades Oblivion character and discovered that this is her "home," I've restarted the game with the same character but with mods. I'm building a mod set that has now just hit the 62 number. It's close to what I had for Oblivion (something like around 80 mods), and I've played most of them long enough to know what I like the best.

Frostfall? I absolutely love this mod for the immersion. Skyrim is a cold country, and I always felt strange swimming across the inlet at Solitude without any penalty of any kind. This is exactly the kind of immersion experience that a game like Skyrim is crying out for. I love that the camping gear that is included in this can be set up anywhere. The first time I used this, it was on a tiny piece of flat ground right next to the river just north of Riverwood. Quite a bit off the beaten path, but quite safe once I removed those two wolves that like to hang out there.

A Quality World Map with Roads? One thing I hated about the default Skyrim map was that it had no roads, so I couldn't figure out the best way to get to some remote objective that would be 'marked' by some NPC. Maps are no good if they don't have roads, at least in a lore-friendly setting. So now both Alise and I are absolutely delighted with this mod.

Skyrim Horses Renewal? animation only files. When we first played through, the vanilla horses moved so badly that Alise absolutely refused to get on them. (As an aside, Julian took one look at them and turned right around and headed back to her beloved Gold Coast.) So I did some digging around because I figured if I found at least a packhorse mod, Alise would find the horse useful for carting around her survival gear and her loot. I initially skipped this mod because the new meshes still rubbed me the wrong way, especially the hindquarters. As a veterinarian who spent the past 20-plus years looking at lameness and breakdowns due to poor conformation, I just couldn't stomach these horses. But I loved the animations I saw in the videos and wished I could have at least just that for the vanilla horses. Quelle surprise! but the modder did exactly that when I looked at the files page. So now Alise has a nice, sturdy grey Riften horse that goes almost everywhere with her and lugs all the heavy stuff without complaint.

Live Another Life? Once was enough for me to tolerate the vanilla introductory ride to Helgen. I started looking for other ways to start this game that did not require storytelling gymnastics to explain why Alise ended up on that cart. I also wanted a way to hold off the MQ. I'm glad to say that Alise and I have been playing this game now for a couple of weeks and she is at Level 14 and we still haven't started the MQ! It's nice not to have to worry about the dragons, or to be called the Dragonborn by one guard and warned "Hands to yourself, sneak thief" by the next. Alise is still being told off, but at least the guards' comments are more consistent!

I've got other mods that have already been mentioned here on this thread, but I'll stop for now. I'm off to test drive yet another mod!

[SubRosa]

You can also ditch Live Another Life and create your own alternate start mod. I created a topic about it here. It is not really a mod at all. Just an .ini tweak and a few other things you can do through the command line or with a batch file.

I started doing this after being disappointed with Live Another Life. Now I start my characters with exactly the gear, spells, birthsign, etc.. I want them to have. I even have them start at exactly the spot I want. For example, Persephone's game started in the depths of Fellglow Keep, where she had to defeat the necromancers who had disturbed her 4,000 year old resting place. Le Chevalier D'eon started at the docks of Solitude, having just arrived by ship. Tuonetar started at the border of Riften and Morrowind, at the end of that canyon east of Dayspring Canyon. It really helps with the roleplaying

[haute ecole rider]

I'm not yet really comfortable with all the modding that you do, so for now, LAL is adequate for me.

Alise and I are actually planning to start the MQ at some point. She just wants to get some things squared away first. Like establishing a home base (thanks to the HF DLC!). Maybe getting a housecarl to tag along with (we liked Argis from Markarth the best, though Valdimar of Morthal and Gregor from Dawnstar were very useful too). We also want to be able to summon more powerful creatures (hello, spriggan? Where are you?) before we start taking on the big beasties.

So for our present purposes LAL is good enough. I'm sure at some point I'm going to want to start looking into creating my own mods/bat files for my own purposes, but for now I'm going to enjoy others' hard work!

[ghastley]

This one doesn't yet exist, but I may have to make it. Vigilant Tyranus accosts the player every time you try and walk past the abandoned house in Markarth. Every time! Even if you told him you know nothing last you walked by, five minutes ago. I need to make that conversation once-only.

Since buying Vlindrel Hall, it's a question of talking to him, again, every time on the way from the main gate to the house, or else going the long way around the temple.

[Acadian]

...
A Quality World Map with Roads? One thing I hated about the default Skyrim map was that it had no roads, so I couldn't figure out the best way to get to some remote objective that would be 'marked' by some NPC. Maps are no good if they don't have roads, at least in a lore-friendly setting. So now both Alise and I are absolutely delighted with this mod.
...

Thank you so much for this endorsement. I've been tracking that very mod for some time but had not installed it - until now, thanks to your recommendation. It works fine and is indeed a big help.

When it was just Buffy and Superian, she didn't worry about the map too much because Superian the mountain goat heavy horse could darn near climb up or down a sheer cliff. Going from A to B was basically a straight line, knowing the horse could negotiate almost any obstacle. However. . . Buffy has quite gotten into having a small posse of critters and mounted follower(s) - all of whom are quite stymied by anything from fallen logs to medium boulders. As a result, Buffy has adapted by becoming quite the pathfinder - a role that she initially found irritating and restrictive, but has grown to quite relish. Getting somewhere is now a bit more of a challenge. The missing piece of support for her more detailed and careful navigation has been a quality map. This mod certainly helps.

Thanks again!

[SubRosa]

A Quality Worldmap with Roads teams up very nicely with A Clear World Map. It removes the clouds over Skyrim so you can see where you are, but keeps them around the other provinces at the map edges.

[haute ecole rider]

Ditto on Clear World Map. I've been annoyed by the cloud cover on the vanilla map. How unimmersive!

[Grits]

OK, books.

Book Covers Skyrim and Book Covers Skyrim - Lost Library. Now my bookshelves look like this.

Darnand is going to be so pleased.

[haute ecole rider]

I keep looking at those mods! However I'm super-careful about what mods I load up in my game, as I only have 512 MB VRAM and so avoid super-high res textures. I now have exactly 100 mods in my lineup, and so far *knockwood* I have yet to have a CTD. I'm really impressed with how stable Skyrim has been on my rig, compared to Oblivion.