I have never been the kind of guy to overmod a game. I don't like overhauls and I don't like having a gazillion mods installed. I do not understand the hype around SkyRe or the unofficial patches. I like a relatively near vanilla feel. I sometimes try new mods out though but I mostly just end up uninstalling them.

I also do not like user-voiced mods. Quite honestly, they all svck. The ones I've tried. I had a companion called Vilja once and the voice acting made me cringe. I also watched a few Youtube vids of Falskaar, and while it looked nice and all, the voice acting made me cringe.

The mods I have installed, in no specific order (besides all DLC's)

Better Females by Bella - CORE files

Better Females by Bella - Less Makeup

Better Dynamic Snow

SMIM

Enhanced Distant Terrain

HQ Plants and Herbs

HQ Snow

Skyforge Complete

Moss Rocks

Vibrant Auroras

Race Menu + Mimic and Overlays plugins

SkyUI (this is an important mod for me as the default menus are horrid for a PC gamer)

The Paarthurnax Dilemma

Lush Grass and Trees

Midas Spells (disabled)

Lock Pick Sweet Spot (after a 1000+ hours, picking a lock is the least of my concerns)

Reduced Distant NPC Greetings (Yes, Nazeem, I HAVE been to the Cloud DIstrict, now stop asking me if I have)

Alternate Start - Live Another Life

Xenius Character Enhancement (disabled, intereferes too much with Better Females)

Realistic Ragdolls and Force

Water Enhancement mod (Don't remember the name, but it makes water look a LOT better)

Wearable Greybeard Robes (Not only can I wear them without using console commands, they also identify as clothes now. The missed keywords for that. I made this one as well)

Dead Thralls Fix (another mod I made that enables the dead thrall spell to work on everything, not just NPC's. Also cloak spells will not dispel thralls. Thanks to Hevnoorak)

Dwemer Automatons 33% Frost Weakness (Because why should they be immune? If anything, they should have a weakness to it. Thanks to Hevnoorak)

Most of these are subscribed on Steam Workshop and some are from Skyrim Nexus and some are self made.

Well, the unofficial patches keep things vanilla, they ust fix an immense assload of leftover bugs and oversights. Things that could cause glitching quests and many other things.

I seriously don't see any reason not to use them.

I'm with you. Be that Morrowind, Oblivion or Skyrim, I really only mod the game lightly. Most of the mods I install only improve character appearance and give them some extra clothing options. World texture changes or anything that heavily affects gameplay are very unnecessary in my book. Relatively near vanilla is what I enjoy as well.

EDIT: I don't use SkyRe but unofficial patches are must IMO. And you hardly notice any difference anyway so it definitely doesn't take away the vanilla taste.

It's unwise not to use the unofficial patches. There is no hype around them. Only truth.

Are these bugs annoying you? Are you even aware of them or do you just base that on reading changelogs? I have no annoying bugs so I don't need the unofficial patches in any way. Big mods be it overhauls, unofficial patches and the like tend to only cause more problems than they fix.

Emma's voice acting takes some getting used to, I agree, but I think it's actually really nice and fits perfectly into the game when you think about where she's from.

You base that on what?

Takes some getting used to? I feel like tearing my ears off.

I know most of us Swedes svck at speaking English, though, but she could have at least tried a bit better.

The only mods i have are:

CBBE ( i hate the fact that everyone wears some ugly looking underwear.)

Crimson Tide. (because blood decals in Skyrim svck)

Auto Unequip Arrow. (a major issue with bows and arrows)

Killable Children.

My home is your home.

And thats its, i've tried some other mods like the dance of death or AFT, but never stuck with them. other than those i have small ones that i made. i hate anything that is related to ENB or overhaul. bleh..

Also Unofficial patches svck, they sometimes fix things that are not broken, for example they've changed the dagger/sheathe unsheathe sound for no reason. some changes doesnt make sense logically.

Now that's a load of BS.

never thought about it but then again I run around clothed.

Yeah, the uops are worthwhile for the most part although they're getting pretty big now and maybe just a bit intrusive. I hope the uop doesn't go the way of the Morrowind patch which eventually made some subjective changes in the name of bug fixing.

Anyway, I am using fewer mods on Skyrim than I have on MW and OB for two reasons: first, I don't think Skyrim needs mods as much as the earlier games and second, unfortunately Skyrim is more sensitive to removing mods.

Each new game has fewer and fewer mods for me and now I'm pretty much down to just lighting and texture mods. Nothing with scripts except the uop.

Overhauls is one thing but there is no reason to not use the unoffical patches.

No reason not to?

1. I don't experience annoying bugs

2. I have no idea what it patches and if I consider that a bug

I don't need them or want them.

Sometimes you may encounter a bug without even realizing it was a bug.

If it didn't make me realize it was a bug, why should I care? And if it DID make me realize it, I'd have to ask myself if it bothered me. If it didn't, well...

Take the occasional falling mammoth/dragon. I actually chuckle mildly when that happens.

I have yet to come across a bug that bothers me so much I'd look into unofficial patches for it. Most tiny annoyances I overcome with console commands.

Because there are legitimate quest breaker bugs left in the game and the USKP fixes those. You may not know about those bugs NOW but waiting until you DO encounter them may be too late. Some things cannot be fixed ones you've triggered the problem.

*ahem* Actually those changes were made for a reason. Daggers (the ones you're talking about anyway) were assigned the wrong sounds for their weapon type. They were fixed. It wasn't just some random arbitrary decision.

Just because one does not understand the reason doesn't mean it wasn't logical.

First, not to be a nitpicker, but "UOP" is for Oblivion

Second, I occasionally monitor the situation with the Morrowind patches and I will say this much. I hope the UOP and/or the USKP never gets to a point where 15 different groups of people are all redoing the same work that's been done from years ago because someone doesn't like one or two changes that were made. Yes, I have read the threads, that's how it comes across to most people I know who look.

There will ALWAYS be fixes some people will insist are not actual fixes. Not everything that's done is as clear cut as a rock floating 6 feet off the ground. We're no stranger to the controversy as it is, but it's ALWAYS because the people arguing either don't understand the reason for a fix or because they were routinely making use of an exploit which was later fixed - either intentionally or as a side effect of other fixes.

In short, the lack of unification has turned the entire situation into total chaos and someone looking in from the outside will have no idea which patch is the one they should be using.

Now, with that said........

As far as overhauls go, I don't use any for Skyrim. I honestly don't think the game needs one. At least not one that's all encompassing that touches on every aspect of gameplay. so for me, SkyRe is out automatically even though it has certain modular components to it. People say Skyrim isn't hard enough. I happen to think the balance is just right. I die enough. I don't need to die more

So for me it's all about more targeted things. Precision gameplay alterations etc, and I don't even have a whole lot of that sort of thing either.

Many bugs are not very noticeable since they don't cause CTDs. some examples are the ones that can cause save bloating, just to name a few:

-The Companions radiant quests were capable of generating save game bloat due to improperly handling the recycling of the quests whenever the player visited Whiterun. In a long enough game, it would have been possible to generate substantial amounts of dynamically created objects and NPCs which were never properly cleaned up. Quests CR06, CR07, CR10, and CR11 were responsible for generating these potential bloat bombs. In order to correct this, ALL of the CRxx quests now have an added stage 255 and the 4 capable of generating bloat now have code to manually clean up their messes. The new stage 255 will be called by CycleRadiantQuests() in the Companions housekeeping script. (Bug #13958)

-MGCollegeLecturesQuestScript and QF_MGCollegeLectures_000E0C67, which control the College lecture system, were a source of Papyrus stack overload due to indiscriminately polling the system every 30 seconds and registering numerous game time updates that are never resolved. This could eventually lead to save game bloat, but manifests first as the lecture scenes failing to play anymore. (Bug #8708)

-Vex's burglary jobs were not being cleaned up properly when the quests failed, which created save bloat from abandoned references. (Bug #12748)

-DLC1nVampireNecklaceGargoyleSCRIPT does not delete the gargoyle ref that was generated with a PlaceAtMe call, leading to minor save bloat. The script also does not check to make sure the spawned gargoyle exists before attempting to disable it in the OnUnload block - which ALSO does not delete the placed ref. (Bug #14320)

If you check the logs there are a lot more. It also makes sure that scripts don't get stuck in loops like:

-dunSerpentsBluffPressurePlate will become stuck in its while loop due to insufficient safeguards against the object being unloaded from memory. [NR]

There's a ton of things that the unofficial patches fix that doesn't seem like bugs since they don't cause noticeable problems like CTDs. And since the files are in a bsa any mods making changes to the same object, quest, etc. will be overriden so there really shouldn't be any conflict. The unofficial patches are definitely essential.

Up until now, I've managed to overcome every single larger bug I've ever faced by using console commands. The console is right there, and should I face a bug that bothers me, I overcome it.

I don't need an unofficial patch for that.

I've stated before how I'm not as deeply into Skyrim as most of you. I don't have a 500+ hour character. I only have one that I recently started (a mage..) and I've currently only had to start over because of bugs ONCE and that was some 200-300 hours ago.

You shouldn't have to hack (in this case use the console) a game just to play through the quests... it's kinda the whole point of patches and fixes.

With USKP you wouldn't need to use the command console this fix the bug in the first place.

There's no logic in your method. Why do things the hard way?

skyre is all about the Perks. There is only 2 other decent perk mods out there.

did you say the voice acting of falskaar svcks??? what!?

I got completely fooled by the start of that mod when dude came up to me in riften iirc. I actually got stuck in falskaar and had to reload a save game b/c i didn't want to play it yet. Skyrim has killed it with the voice overs compared to Oblivion.

Especially interesting NPC's. its a lot better than no voices at all, and some of them are really high quality.

you're just being a negative nancy, but you should check out Automatic variants to liven up the experience.

Honestly, millions of people play Skyrim on consoles without much problem. There are always going to be bugs and whatnot, but a majority of them can be overlooked or ignored by most people. If that weren't the case, Skyrim would have bombed and Bethesda would have been sued for releasing an unplayable game (similar to EA and BF4).

I like vanilla Skyrim, but it doesn't have as much replay value as the older games did. There are a lot of plugins that help remedy that, but I've been finding that most of the good ones have deal breakers in the form of additional content that the plugin author decided to add, even if it's completely unrelated to the purpose of the plugin itself (though you can't fault them for such a thing -- it is their plugin, after all). An example would be the Oblivion Gates attached to the Open Cities plugin -- completely unrelated content the author saw fit to add simply because he wanted to add it, despite the plugin being called "Open Cities," not "Open Cities w/ Oblivion Gates." Of course, that's something that really isn't so bad (and the author did add the ability for the gates to be disabled through SkyUI's MCM), but there plenty of other plugins out that there go a lot further.

Then there are plugins that are semi-lore friendly, but also not. I really love those that add more NPCs to the game, but small things like Nord mages being in every Stormcloak patrol despite most Nords not trusting magic is something that bothers me.

If I weren't so picky, I'd probably be playing with a ton of plugins and an overhaul or two.

I use the console so much anyway that I don't mind typing in a few extra commands, lol.

But I use console commands quite heavily already so what difference does it make having to type in a few more?

I don't need to alter the perks, they're just fine in my opinion.

Yes, it's called an opinion. You've heard of those, have you not?

Yeah, searching the internets for solution for problems that don't need to be there in the first place is extremely entertaining and in no way immersion breaking. Natural player does not even know what a console is, should be reserved for modders only.

I respect the low number of mod arguments, but playing completely without it? Without mods I'd have played the game from the inside out already multiple times and probably moved on to the next game. Modding and tinkering keeps me entertained. In a year or so I will have Skyrim completely as I want it, finally playing another playthrough...you don't know what you're missing...you just don't know...

I'm only bummed by the mod slamming you did in the first post.

Other than that, I tend to mod my game lightly but sometimes it's hard not to. So many great mods out there.

As for the USKP, I've been using it since the Unofficial Oblivion Patch. The ones overseeing it, are people who's word I trust, and following their advice has kept my gameplay steady.