Bethesda released its much anticipated FPS Role Playing Game "The Elders Scroll V: Skyrim" on 11.11.11. The game gained many great and positive reviews from various gaming sites and a score of 94/100 on Metacritic.
Not only this but within hours of its launch, The Elders Scroll V: Skyrim became the top played game on Steam besting Activison's newly released Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 which is a huge achievement.
It hasn't even been a month since the game was released and the PC Modding Community is doing what they do best, Churning out tons of Visual and Graphical Mods/Tweaks for the game. The Mods won't only enhance the visuals of your game but also enhance the gameplay by increasing frames, adding new UI's and overlays to the game through applying tweaks.
Following is a list of Mods and Tweaks i found best to use with Elders Scroll V: Skyrim:
Note: Some of these mods are pretty visually intense and a GPU with larger VRAM (1GB or More) is required to optimally run them.
Visual Mods:
1- FXAA Post Process Injector
The FXAA Post Process Injector App enhances your graphics with a variety of post processing effects, including bloom, sharpen, technicolor, sepia, tonemap, vignette, and more. This is a must have mod and i recommend you to download this first.
2- Landscape Texture Pack WIP
This is a HD Re-Texture mod and increase the landscape textures to 1024 or 2048 (depending on your rig specs). Almost 90% of the texture's have been re done in High Res which gives them a more clearer look.
3- Vurts Skyrim Flora Overhaul
The continent of Skyrim is scattered with trees, From the Snowy Pine trees high up mountains to the Aspen and Green Pines ranging in the Tundra Plains. Trees are everywhere, To give them a complete HD Overhaul this mod is a must.
It enhances every bit of details from Branches to Barks and Leaves. The textures comes with recolored LOD textures. There are a total of 6 different Bark and 3 different Tree types to choose from.
4- Enhanced Night Skyrim and Custom Moons.
Another must have mod, The Enhanced Nigh Skyrim allows you to replace the original star and galaxy textures with an HD and Higher Density Star Field and a Custom made Nebula which is available in a colorful or icy blue variant.
Coming to the moon mods, Skyrim's moon can also be replaced with several Hi-Res custom made moons which include a Earth model of the Moon, The block Minecraft moon and The Rock of Ages Re-Texture:
The one im using is part of this mod, It includes 4 Hi-Res models.
Earth Moon. Download Link.
Minecraft Moon. Download Link.
Star Wars Death Star Moon. Download Link.
Dragon Moon. Download Link .
5- Xenius Character Enhancement
Xenius creator of the Character Enchantment Mod has put in a pretty good effort to provide highly detailed Character Models. The Mod is available in different packs, When each is applied the mod will give a complete overhaul to your character and NPC's. Do check out the download links below:
- Detailed Bodies
- Detailed Faces
- No More Blocky Faces
- High Quality Eyes
- Detailed Lips
- Better Beast Races
- Improved Teeth
6- Skyrim Sunglare V2
Of all the Sunglare's listed on Skyrim Nexus, I found this one to be the most appealing. This is a nice and "cinematic" sunglare for Skyrim and the Sun also has an additional outer ring which makes the scenery looks beautiful during sunset.
7- Realistic Water Textures
Skyrim is filled with many lakes, rivers and tributaries which run across the whole continent. The Stock textures of the water doesn't does any justice with the game, This mod allows you to replace the water with an HD 1024 - 2048 Res Textures which gives the rivers a totally new feel.
8- HD Snowflakes and Rain Ripple Effects
Different weather effects in Skyrim include Snowy Weather high up in the mountainous regions and Rainy season in the Tundra. To give the Rain and Snow Particle effects an HD look, Download the following mods:
9- Snow HQ Texture
The Landscape mod already does a great job in replacing the stock Snow textures to HD but to give it an even better look, I recommend this mod. You can see the result for your self in the following pic:
10- Enhanced Horse Skins
A horse is an adventurer's best friend in Skyrim for travelling almost everywhere in the region. The stock skins make the horse looks a bit dull and more like ponies. To give them a detailed look, Download the Enhanced Horse Skins:
11- Improved rock and mountain textures
This mod increases the resolution of the rock/mountain textures from 1024 to 4096 in both directions and adds more detail to them. The mod is pretty heavy and only download if you have a powerful PC.
12- Improved Dragon Textures
Later in the game as you progress, You'd encounter an countless amount of dragons. To give these huge beasts a more detailed look, Download the improved texture pack given below:
13- Realistic Smoke and Embers
Whether you're fighting a dragon or using a blacksmith, You'll find Smoke and Ember everywhere. This mod allows for Transparent fire, Increased ember detail and No more cotton wisps of smoke with Higher Resolution textures.
14- HD Furniture and barrels
This texture changes more than a half of wooden interior which includes beds, chairs, tables, shelves, boxes, wardrobe and even more.
15- 4GB Skyrim Large Address Aware Tweak
This is a tweak for those who're getting random crashes with/without installing the mods. All you gotta do is extract the zip file into a random folder and run Skyrim 4GB.exe.
If you still haven't got Skyrim and would like to Purchase it, Head over to the Steam link here.
About the author: A Software Engineer by training and a PC enthusiast by passion, Hassan Mujtaba serves as Wccftech's Senior Editor for hardware section. With years of experience in the industry, he specializes in deep-dive technical analysis of next-generation CPU and GPU architectures, motherboards, and cooling solutions. His work involves not only breaking news on upcoming technologies but also extensive hands-on reviews and benchmarking.
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