That Stupid Club

I’ve been a fan of the Elder Scrolls series since the Arena days and apart from the action adven­ture Red­guard I’ve played them all (never did fin­ish Arena or Dag­ger­fall though, pesky bugs…).

The series really took off with Mor­rowind. While the main quest was OK, if a bit for­mu­laic, the excel­lent plu­g­ins fea­ture and the Con­struc­tion Set were what really made the game shine, and almost instantly a huge com­mu­nity sprung up around Mor­rowind modding.

Obliv­ion con­tin­ued the fine tra­di­tion of exten­si­bil­ity. I started play­ing it ear­lier this year, as I did not have a PC capa­ble of run­ning it. I did not even bother to fin­ish the main quest as I did with Mor­rowind before down­load­ing and using user cre­ated mods.

I’ll be writ­ing about a series of posts about the Obliv­ion mods I’m using mostly for my own future ref­er­ence, but I’m hop­ing some­body else will find them use­ful too.

And remem­ber, what­ever you want to change in-game, somebody’s prob­a­bly already done it.

In this first post, I’ll be doing through files that I con­sider musts for every Obliv­ion on PC player (Xbox 360 and PS3 Obliv­ion can’t use user cre­ated con­tent, sorry).

Before every­thing else, make sure you have the last offi­cial patch (v1.2.0416 at the time of writ­ing). You should ide­ally get the Shiv­er­ing Isles expan­sion as it adds a few script­ing func­tions. Well you should get it any­way, as the quest is actu­ally more inter­est­ing than the Main Quest.

First up, you want, nay, need Timeslip’s Obliv­ion Mod Man­ager. As its name imples, it man­ages your mods. But more than that, it han­dles OMOD files which are spe­cially packed mods. This util­ity can eas­ily add or remove mods, warn of file con­flicts and most impor­tantly, mod authors can pro­vide an instal­la­tion script which allows one to, say, install optional parts of the mod. Always pre­fer OMOD if that option is avail­able from the author or per­haps a third party, and its usu­ally worth it to make your own OMOD if not. And for the mod authors who are not yet pro­vid­ing OMODs offi­cially, what are you wait­ing for? Get to it. Fol­low the instructions!

Even fully patched up, Obliv­ion has bugs. Mod­ders to the res­cue though. Grab the Unof­fi­cial Obliv­ion Patch. You will want the Shiv­er­ing Isles and Offi­cial Mods patches too if you have them. Beth­soft should be pay­ing these guys for what they do. OMODs are available.

You will want one of the UI mods too Out of the box Obliv­ion looks like a con­sole game. Everything’s just so…big. And clumsy. Mod­ders to the res­cue, again. BTmod was the gold stan­dard for a long time, but its been super­seded by the excel­lent DarNi­fied UI. Its what Obliv­ion PC should have been. Per­son­ally I’m using DarkUI’d DarN. Both DarN UIs comes in delec­table OMODs.

Now grab the Bet­ter Obliv­ion Sort­ing Soft­ware, fomerly known as the FCOMhelper. Offi­cial descrip­tion: ‘A sim­ple pro­gram for mod users to quickly opti­mise load order­ing of ESP/ESM files in their Obliv­ion load-order.’ MS Visual C++ Run­time 2008 is a requirement.

With these mods you will still be get­ting the Vanilla Obliv­ion expe­ri­ence. Next up, foundations.