That Stupid Club

I don’t know about you, but I really want that Mud Crab DLC.

In all seri­ous­ness though, some of the stuff should have been in the game at release. Like mounted com­bat? Prob­a­bly one of the top items on Obliv­ion vet­er­ans’ wish­lists. Spears, miss­ing since Mor­rowind. That improved water shader.

That said though, just pack­age the best of that shit up as a DLC and I’ll be first in line, like the hope­less Elder Scrolls fan­boi I am.

It’s almost the end of Jan­u­ary and still no sign of the Cre­ation Kit (maybe the 31st). For users who must start mod­ding, the unof­fi­cial alter­na­tive SkyEdit is your answer. Still in the early devel­op­ment stages, but 0.05 has been pretty sta­ble for me.

Looks like it’ll be ready soon accord­ing to a new blog post.

Actu­ally, what’s more excit­ing is the 1.4 update. Two things jump out:

• Improved com­piler opti­miza­tion set­tings (PC)
• Long term play opti­miza­tions for mem­ory and per­for­mance (PS3)

Can it be? Will TESVAL and Sky­Boost be made obso­lete? I cer­tainly hope so! And credit to Beth­Soft for pay­ing atten­tion to the mod­ding com­mu­nity and cor­rect­ing (thus implic­itly admit­ting to) their mistakes.

As for the PS3 fix, well, good for my long suf­fer­ing PS3 Skyrim brethren, but it should never have been a prob­lem in the first place in that there’s only One True Way™ to play the game: on a PC, mod­ded out.

Also, quest fixes, finally.

The Elder Scrolls games are the most user modd­a­ble PC games series since the release of Mor­rowind largely thanks to the excel­lent edi­tors as well as the by now well doc­u­mented file for­mats. Admit­tedly, they usu­ally need to be since there are bugs as well as other game play issues even after the final patches.

Even though the Skyrim edi­tor (Cre­ation Kit) has not been released pub­licly, there are already numer­ous mods avail­able. Most of them are tex­ture mods which do not require the Cre­ation Kit, but there is already a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of mod­ders using third party tools to pro­duce mod files.

With the immi­nent release of the Cre­ation Kit (some time in Jan­u­ary 2012), I thought I’d just list some of the mods I have been using.

First off, you’ll prob­a­bly want the main stays of any seri­ous PC Elder Scrolls player, Nexus Mod  Man­ager (NMM), Wrye Bash and BOSS. NMM is meant to be the suc­ces­sor of OBMM, is closely inte­grated with the Nexus Net­work and can man­age Obiv­ion, Skyrim, Fall­out 3 and Fall­out: New Vegas. I pre­fer the UI of OBMM, but the inte­gra­tion with the Nexus Net­work is excel­lent. Wrye Bash is a com­plex tool, but is well worth learn­ing and will be essen­tial when jug­gling any sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of mods. BOSS man­ages your load order automatically.

Script Exten­ders

You’ll want SKSE. As of now it is used by very few mods, but I wouldn’t bet against it being as essen­tial for Skyrim as OBSE was for Oblivion.

There’s a “com­peti­tor” to SKSE in the form of Script Dragon. Per­son­ally I’m not using any mods that requires Script Dragon yet, but from all accounts SKSE and Script Dragon co-exists fine.

Per­for­mance

Basi­cally, mod­der Arisu dis­cov­ered that the Skyrim exe­cutable is com­piled with­out cer­tain opti­mi­sa­tion flags set. He then cre­ated a SKSE plu­gin proof of con­cept that replaces some of the inef­fi­cient code with hand­crafted SSE2 calls. It has been released as the TESV Accel­er­a­tion Layer. Alexan­der Blade (author of Script Dragon) took the con­cept and expanded upon it, releas­ing the result as Sky­Boost (doesn’t require SKSE).

Per­son­ally I’m using Sky­Boost as I’m get­ting just that bit more FPS out of it, but some have reported that the TESVAL runs at a lower FPS but smoother. Prob­a­bly a good idea to try both to see which works for you. It’ll prob­a­bly be most use­ful to users who have beefy GPUs and decent CPUs. If your GPU sits on the lower end, these prob­a­bly won’t be that use­ful to you as you’ll prob­a­bly not be CPU bound.

On a side note, what the hell Bethesda? Accord­ing to Alexan­der, “Beth have no inter­est in boost­ing pc ver­sion of Skyrim”. For fuck’s sake, what’s up with that?

Edit (Jan­u­ary 21, 2012): Seems Bethesda will be using proper com­piler set­tings for patch 1.4. Hope­fully that will obso­lete TESVAL and SkyBoost.

UI

You’ll want SkyUI. Goes some way to de-nerf that ter­ri­ble con­soli­tis inter­face. This mod shouldn’t even be nec­es­sary (did the play testers spend any time on the game with key­board and mouse?) but the SkyUI team is doing some great stuff so far.

Tex­tures

Tex­ture replacer mods were the first type of mods to arrive in force as they did not require the Cre­ation Kit. Some of the ones I use:

• Bellyache’s Ani­mal and Crea­ture Pack
• Enhanced Blood Textures
• Enhanced Night Skyrim
• Improved NPC Clothing
• Real­is­tic Smoke and Embers
• Real­is­tic Water Textures
• Weapon Retex­ture Project
• Xenius Char­ac­ter Enhancement

The 4GB Skyrim tool used to be essen­tial for tex­ture mods but since Beth­Soft enabled LAA by default it has been redun­dant. In any case, for opti­mal expe­ri­ence you should have more than 4 GB of RAM, and run­ning a 64 bit OS.

New Weapons

One of my pri­or­i­ties when select­ing mods is lore friend­li­ness (no Buster Swords in my Elder Scrolls!). Two lore friendly but very high qual­ity weapons mods are Jay­SuS Swords and Weapons of the Third Era. Both are highly recommended.

Trin­kets, odds and ends, that sort of thing

Stuff that don’t fit in any­where else:

A Qual­ity World Map — With Roads

Midas Magic — Spells in Skyrim

Morokei Mask Enchant­ment Fix

Talos Shrine Fix

Bet­ter Sort­ing OR Valdacil’s Item Sorting