Knights of the Cardboard Castle

Hello and yes, I’m still playing Skyrim. Time played according to Steam is nearly 200 hours now. I originally intended to write a post detailing some of my thoughts about the various mods I have installed but then realized that since I never played the vanilla version, it’s kind of hard to judge which mod is doing what. From various videos I’ve watched on YouTube however, I can tell that my setup looks much better than vanilla so there’s no way I’m going back. So here’s my best attempt of dubious utility anyway:

• Most of the Core STEP stuff just makes everything look better so there’s little to say about them. There are better textures, better sound effects, better meshes etc. It also includes the usual utility mods that most people should be running anyway: SkyUI, Quality World Map (maps without roads are totally useless!), Convenient Horses (horses are useless if you can’t call them whenever you need them and followers don’t get horses of their own), Auto Unequip Ammo etc.

• I like Run For Your Lives and When Vampires Attack! which basically does the same thing, except that one is for dragons and the other is for vampires. They makes NPCs run to safety when their settlement is under attack by those threats. SM Drop Lit Torches is near essential, especially when playing with settings that create true darkness. The Core Pack also includes things like Dual Wield Parrying. Nice if you actually dual wield, unnoticeable otherwise especially since NPCs who dual wield never parry.

• The optional packs do more interesting things. The Weather and Lighting Pack makes light sources dynamic and realistic. Combined with an appropriate ENB, this gives the game a dramatic, cinematic look. The difference is huge. Without it, the graphics have a washed-out, video-gamey feel. Unfortunately there just aren’t enough light sources in the game world or else the light sources just aren’t bright enough to make it work right. If you can navigate the interior of an inn because it’s too dark despite a raging bonfire and various candles scattered here and there, then something is wrong. Needing to hold a torch or casting a light spell while inside an inn totally kills immersion. In most dungeons, I find that I pretty much need to keep a light spell on all the time to be able to see and the light from the spell tends to cause the washing out effects anyway. Bottom-line: dynamic lighting is fantastic but the game world needs more and stronger light sources!
• More interesting weather always equals more immersive gameplay. And of course the well-known Frostfall mod makes bad weather truly deadly. Actually I find myself more terrified of the weather than of monsters. The game is badly balanced enough that I’m reasonably confident of killing pretty much any enemy I encounter but bad weather is an inexorable opponent that can’t be defeated and can only be worked around. Icy cold water is even scarier. A lot of people don’t like this but I enjoy having the environment itself be an enemy. I like how spending time to find a mountain pass is time critical and I like how the mod forces me to pay attention to good camping spots and sources of heat. I’ve also been forced by the game to divert from my intended destination to seek for shelter due to weather and discovered entirely new things along the way. Emergent gameplay!

• The Immersive Survival pack also includes Realistic Needs and Diseases which notably forces you to eat, drink and sleep at regular intervals. It’s highly configurable and one option is that the food you carry will actually rot over time so you need to gather fresh supplies constantly. Personally that goes a bit too far for me so I have that option turned off. In combination, this means that staying in shelter to weather storms consumes food and water. Plus of course firewood to keep a fire going. One complaint I have on this front is that ideally if a storm hits, you can just rest in a fur tent to wait out the storm. Unfortunately, due to the game’s mechanics, this almost never works because waiting doesn’t seem to cause the weather to change. Instead, my experience indicates that changing zones tends to cause the weather to change, which doesn’t support the intended gameplay.
• The Hunterborn mod allows you to skin animals, harvest ingredients from them and gather meat from them. There’s even a skill system so the more you do these activities, the faster your character carries them out. It’s great if you want to role-play living off the land. In most normal playthroughs however, I expect that this mod has a large effect when you start out but gets less and less relevant as you become more rich and more powerful. The materials you get are just too cheap later on and even if you use light armor, once you graduate to at least elven armor you never need to bother with leather again. But it’s still fun while it lasts, especially since you need to gather a lot of leather to make the various bandoliers, bags and pouches that the Bandolier mod allows.

Anyway that’s it for a quick run-down of what the various mods are doing for me. I’ll probably have at least one more Skyrim post to write once I’m done with the game.