Mods I'm using in Skyrim

Mostly, I'm playing Skyrim on PC because I just built a new box and I haven't had a real gaming computer for years. But an awesome side-effect is the customizability this opens up. I'm not a big fan of the cheaty mods or total conversions unless I've thoroughly orked through all the content of the game proper. However, I've found reason to run some mods fairly early in my adventure. I thought I might document what mods I'm using right now and why. These are not in any particular order.


Nexus Mod Manager

Not technically a mod, but it's an awesome tool for installing mods and helping to keep them up-to-date. I've used something similar for WoW addons (Curse's client), and this is almost as good. Curse also supports Skyrim mods, but the community really isn't there.


SkyUI

I'm playing this game on a PC, but my GOD was the interface obviously designed for a controller. This was the first mod I installed and was exactly what I was hoping to find when I went looking. It updates various lists of items in the game (initially just the inventory, but recently expanded to the store and Magic interfaces) witha much more PC-friendly interface, making the fonts smaller and adding columns of data. Honestly, the columns should have been there for console as well. No more scrolling through every item just to see which arrow has more damage or which of your items are marked as stolen.

It claims the Skyrim Script Extender is required, but I ran the mod without it for a while and the only thing I found broken was that the search/filter system didn't work.

Glowing Ore Veins 300

This is a simple convenience mod. It makes the chunks of rock that your can mine for ore far more obvious. I'm not even playing as a smith and I installed it. People prefer emphasizing realism and immersion, but when it comes to games, I prefer removing annoyances that don't add anything to the game. Missing out on a feature because one chunk of rock looks to much like every other chunk of rock just doesn't appeal to me.

Categorized Favorites Menu

This is one that I just stumbled across and made me realize it was something I needed. The built-in "favorite" system feels bolted on as a way to manage the unwieldy inventory menu, but it's otherwise useful... until you try to put more than 8 or so spells / weapons / powers into it, at which point it becomes an even more clumsy inventory system. This addon expands the size of the "favorites" menu and helpfully categorizes everything for you, making it far more useful. The limitations of this addon stem from the limited amount of information the game provides to the menu itself, which further implies to me that this feature was something of an afterthought originally.

Valdacil's Item Sorting

Created as an alternative to Better Sorting by Headbomb, both of these mods aim to solve another annoyance through the magic of alphabetical order. Both mods rename most of the items in the game in order to group similar items in the menus. Instead of "Iron Ore" and "Gold Ore" you have "Ore: Iron" and "Ore: Gold". The result, hopefully, groups items together intelligently. There's no single right way to do this, and both mods represent different approaches. Ultimately I chose Valdacil's version because it retained the original names of things as much as possible, simply prefixing the original name with the sorting information while Headbomb renamed all spells and added a "level" to them to keep them sorted, e.g. Fire Bot I, Fire Bolt II, etc. Having the original names means I know what spell/item I'm looking at when reading other information online.

The only real downside of this is now I have entries in my quest log that read like "Bring the Quest: Book of Whatchamacallit to Fanny Stinkerson in Beetleburg"

Weapons and Armor fixes

Another mod by Headbomb, this one goes in the "bugfix" category. There's apparently many boneheaded "oops" problems with the statistics or names on the included equipment, such as weapons of certain types being treated as if they were made from the incorrect materials, or some weapons using the wrong skill for adjusting their strength. This mod attempts to fix things to work as intended. I have no idea how much real impact this might have, but if the game thinks an "Ebony Axe" is made from Steel, there's something wrong. It also helps break monotony by renaming the 12 different variety of "clothes" to be a bit more descriptive so you can tell them apart by name.

A Quality World Map - With Roads

This one simply updates the in-game map to include the major roads and possibly the borders of the various Holds. Being able to see the roads helps quite a bit in pathfinding, but it's another "convenience over immersion" choice.