Hold on, let me give you my list of mods I recommend. Edits in a moment! The Sounds of Skyrim series all 3... Wilds, Ciilization, and Dungeons. They add so much atmosphere to the game Better Dynamic Snow seriously Finally... Because he's really an awesome follower. Like I said, I have a lot more installed, but these are the ones I include with each installation. A lot of people love ENB, but I personally hate it and use Realistic Colors and Realistic Nights RCRN. For me, RCRN has a better overall look without destroying the art direction of the game, and doesn't have useless, annoying effects like ridiculous depth of field and super high contrast bloom lighting. Of course, you may like ENB... There are a few that are only available there such as A Tale of Tongues, which is a very good shout improvement mod , but unless you're forced to get a mod from there, don't. Use the Skyrim Nexus instead. I would also suggest downloading and using a mod manager like the Nexus Mod Manager makes it very easy to download mods from that site and will install them automatically , and then download a mod organizer like LOOT, which will modify your load orders for you, which should make it easier to manage your mods and avoid common load order errors. I actually wrote a rather embarrassing guide to modding last week for some of my friends, enjoy the ridiculous English I used: I've made some changes to my mod choices though and I haven't really updated it yet so it might not be exactly as I want it. Is there an easier 'quick and dirty' way to learn how to mod? Check out Gopher's videos if you're a complete beginner to modding, he has some nice tutorials: This x1000!!! Followed his videos and it was so easy to mod. Still didn't quite look real enough. Then I added this ENB and BOOM!!! Just be careful - If you have a fairly high-end system i5 or FX-8320+ at least 8GB ram and a mid-high-end GPU then you should be ok. Some of these mods can really take a performance hit on your machine. I still get 60fps+ at 1080p ultra with a mountain of mods, but depending on where I am and what's going on, I have seen it dip into the 40's. You'll also most likely run into the ram-glitch. Once the game hits a little over 3GB of ram usage, it'll CTD. It's nothing unusual and it will happen on occasion - more so if you have a lot of mods. Just get used to it and save your game frequently. The ENBs made by Kyokushinoyama are probably the most graphically intensive around, drops me right down to 30 FPS. He had taken down the mod page for quite a while, but they have recently returned here: Wow! That is one impressive ENB! God I wish I had a GPU to use it. That is one impressive ENB! God I wish I had a GPU to use it. And those screenshots look very professional What's your setup like? You can customize your ENB pretty easily, take out or turn down effects you don't care about, or substitute some of the using the graphics card options, game options, or SweetFX What's your setup like? I ended up making the impact on my performance even worse. I'm not exactly sure what options being edited would be beneficial for me. Also, I never heard of SweetFX. Holy crap, can you install all that at the same time? How long does it take to install those. I haven't modded an ES game since Morrowind and that was a bitch with mod compatibility, is there still conflicting mods? Damn, I just got Skyrim on Steam purely for modding, since I already 100%:ed it on the Xbox360 when it came out. Some of them I cannot install, like the ENBs except Skatado's ENB and some of the female mods because I already have some I gave more for options but yes, I have everything in that list installed but the Khajiit mods at the moment. I also have Fores New Idles mod and some animation mods I didn't include in it. I'm a mod fanatic. I would have way more mods and at their highest quality if I had some more power! I couldn't get them to work on my fresh install of Skyrim. Been meaning to fix it... I ended up making the impact on my performance even worse. I'm not exactly sure what options being edited would be beneficial for me. Also, I never heard of SweetFX. Some of them I cannot install, like the ENBs except Skatado's ENB and some of the female mods because I already have some I gave more for options but yes, I have everything in that list installed but the Khajiit mods at the moment. I also have Fores New Idles mod and some animation mods I didn't include in it. I'm a mod fanatic. I would have way more mods and at their highest quality if I had some more power! I couldn't get them to work on my fresh install of Skyrim. Been meaning to fix it... But I suggest looking up the ENB series guide, which will help you tweak it and I can make a post about optimizing Skyrim for your specific load order. I'm working on 2 small mod projects that I had to put on hold because of time and hardware problems, so I can't give you super detailed tweaks, but I can give you a basic template that you can tweak from there. Without a dedicated graphics card though it's goign to be tricky and you should first look into all the performance mods out there, and be sure to look at vanilla benchmarks. Wow, you'd help me optimize my Skyrim on iGPU? That's so kind of you! Well, if you have the time: I think I pretty much have all the mods I want some weapon mods etc might come out that I might add and I currently do no have any incompatible issues, CTDs or the like so I believe everything is installed correctly. Plus, I don't know how to. That's so kind of you! Well, if you have the time: I think I pretty much have all the mods I want some weapon mods etc might come out that I might add and I currently do no have any incompatible issues, CTDs or the like so I believe everything is installed correctly. Plus, I don't know how to. If you're going to get a new GPU soon, I would just hold off if I were you then you need an ENTIRE new set of tweaks and might even want to ditch some mods and features which may or may not mess up your game. But otherwise look around for optimization mods, then tell me which one's you have and I'll tell you witch ones that I can remember that you may still need to get before you even consider running effects on eNB, A good example of how ENB can be better than the vanilla settings is the shadows. It produces much better shadows than the vanilla game, I used to turn them super super low and just crank the shadows up on the ENB slightly and I got much better performance with amazing shadows. This is a game where overclocking your CPU can make a huge diffrence, you'll see some pretty big gains at least if you're using a lot of script mods or something like that. I've seen increases of anywhere from 10-20 fps just by going from stock clocks to overclocks with less dips. But keep in mind, every modded skyrim is different though. What you can do right now is post your load order, and list any Root Folder such as SKSE or plugins that I can't see in your load order. That way if I can't get to them all, or if I don't know it off the top of my head, or just run out of time, maybe someone else will.
