Skyrim is by far Bethesda’s most successful game and one of the most beloved by modders. On Nexus Mods, a large website dedicated to mods, Skyrim has both first and second place as the most modded game. The second place is taken by the original version of Skyrim, while the game’s Special Edition occupies the first place.
Together, Skyrim and Skyrim Special Edition gathered more mods than the entirety of the Fallout series and the rest of The Elder Scrolls series summed up. Thanks to this popularity, Skyrim found itself the originator of many classic Bethesda mods like Live Another Life, mods who later found their way into other games of the same studio.
10 Alternate Start - Live Another Life
As anyone who’s lived through the Skyrim craze of the 2010s knows, the best-selling RPG begins with a slow procession that ends with the protagonist being sentenced to death. That procedure is interrupted by a dragon attack, a legendary event that spirals the country into panic and signals the start of the player’s adventure.
Eventually, players got bored with starting their new life in Tamriel the same way, every time. That might be why Live Another Life is such a popular mod, with offshoots in most other The Elder Scrolls and Fallout games. With 2.3 million downloads ranked in, this is one of the most popular mods for the iconic Bethesda series.
9 A Quality World Map
The world map in Vanilla Skyrim is fine, but it’s just fine. It’s also a bit hard to read in places, especially the central section that is so full of clouds. A Quality World Map offers two solutions to this problem, one extreme but beautiful and another that is pure function.
A Quality World Map switches the game’s base map for either a clear, crispy version of the original or a simplified, pen-and-paper version of it. Both are fully functional, working both as an aid to navigation and as the input for fast travel.
8 Ordinator
Ordinator is one of those mods that are extremely lightweight but can completely change a game. One way to look at this mod is as a simple rebalancing of perks, the game’s main level-up system, but in truth, this is a complete overhaul of all the main character’s skills and abilities.
With over 450 new perks and many more remodeled, Ordinator changes too much to explain in detail. The most noticeable rebalancing act has to do with Alchemy, which is now actually worth investing in. Another skill tree completely revolutionized is Archery, with magic-like effects added to special arrows in the higher tiers.
7 SSE Engine Fixes
Skyrim Special Edition is very convenient for mod enthusiasts, an all-included package that doesn’t require downloading separate mods for each DLC also installed. It can also be quite beautiful, though that’s a matter of taste, of course. But it is also quite buggy, and that’s where SSE Engine Fixes come into play.
Two of the ten most downloaded mods for Skyrim Special Edition are fan patches and bug fixes. Normally, Bethesda-published open worlds only have one extremely popular, near-essential community patch. Of those two, SSE is dedicated to fixing the many issues with the new engine used by the special edition of Skyrim.
6 Static Mesh Improvement Mod – SMIM
Static Mesh Improvement Mod, or SMIM for short, is a massive mod that switches many in-game objects for a much nicer alternative. Those new models also fit nicely with the rest of the game, as they don’t try to change the style of vanilla Skyrim.
Brumbek, the author of the mod, identifies the “worst offenders” 3D meshes as the low-poly assets hiding in the architecture, furniture, and good old clutter. These objects might have been seen by the developers as less important, but the difference that SMIM makes is clear for everyone to see.
5 RaceMenu
RaceMenu doesn’t have a lot to do with the fantasy races of Skyrim. Rather, it is an extremely in-depth expansion of the vanilla character creator offered by the game. The strength of this mod is certainly its ability to let every player sculpt the Dovahkiin of their dreams without any modding knowledge.
Another function that made RaceMenu so popular (over 2.5 million unique downloads) is the preset save/load function. This allows players to put their character creations online for anyone to try. It also lets them try different looks and compare them to one another before committing and starting the game.
4 SkyUI
SkyUI is one of those mods that make the game feel ten years younger. This mod is extremely lightweight and looks super slick. It also lands its main objective with elegance, making the various menus in Skyrim much easier to read and navigate, with more categories, icons, and an ever-present search bar.
SkyUI is especially useful to the most dedicated PC players since every menu in vanilla Skyrim feels designed against mouse and keyboard users. One of the best features in the mod is certainly the search bar attached to every menu, but it’s a touch of genius to also add it to the map.
3 Fores New Idles In Skyrim SE
Fores New Idles in Skyrim SE isn’t a mod that most users are going to enjoy by itself. Yet, if its 12 million downloads are anything to go by, the player base definitely found some use for it. The trick is that New Idles is a requirement for many mods containing custom animations.
Fores New Idles in Skyrim SE allows Skyrim to play custom animations, but those have to be found elsewhere. Some of the most appreciated animation mods are True Spear Combat, which adds a new weapon type to Skyrim, and the similar but much larger Animated Armoury.
2 Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch
Even with the release of its Special Edition, after years of fixes and patches, Skyrim is still a buggy game. That’s when Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch comes in: with thousands of little changes, from item placement to quest completion, this is the one-stop solution for every bug in Skyrim. Besides the engine-related ones, that is.
Unofficial patches are available for each of Bethesda’s open-world games, from Morrowind to Fallout 4. It should be noted that Skyrim Special Edition is the only one to have two that are considered essential by the community, as well as hosting the most downloaded mod patch on the Nexus Mods website.
1 Skyrim 202X by Pfuscher
With more than 2000 items revised, Skyrim 202X is the most ambitious high-definition texture swap in the long history of Skyrim mods. Of course, a mod like this requires a decent machine and plenty of space to host so many of the game’s textures in 8K resolution. Even then, those textures can’t be too hard to run if a whole 1.5 million players downloaded and used the patch at least once.
If Skyrim 202X is too heavy for some computers, Skyrim 202X Downscale might still work on most machines. The downscaled but updated textures are still much cleaner than those found in vanilla Skyrim, and for many are worth running a handful of frames per second below 60.
Skyrim is currently available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and Switch.