No, I don´t want to discuss the moderators

I have a few that I think should have been worked into the game from the start.

SubRosa´s Forest Friend, Ferryboats and Witchcraft mods I really like. I also have FG Porter not Follow, Spell Delete (a necessity!!), Borderless Cyrodiil, Mystic Emporium Recharge, a timescale mod set to 10, Expanded Greetings, No Obsolete enemies and loot and a couple of tent mods that I don´t use so much as they don´t tickle me the right way.

What are your favorite mods?

TQP - Toggleable Quantity Prompt - lets you sell one or all of a stack of items with one keystroke. If you've ever sold 1,000 arrows one at a time, you need this one desperately!

UOP series, but I'm not sure I consider them to be "mods" as they're implementing what the original developers intended.

I also use a whole bunch of add-on outfits, and a weapon or two. Usually for HGEC female and Roberts male figures, which are also mods.

Oh, don´t remind me *facepalm*

I respect Buffy's privacy when it comes to things like her age, measurements/'build' and cosmetic considerations. Same with her specific voice set and custom bow/arrows. After all, a girl's gotta maintain a modicum of mystery.

The highly tweaked blend of half a dozen mods that produce the magic of Superian is simply too complex to share.

Now. . . that leaves a bunch of other fun stuff. A few faves in no particular order:

Kvatch Rebuilt (an important part of Buffy's world)
DarN Dark User Interface (elegant and very flexible)
Wrye Bash (10 seconds to fix an A bomb!)
Portable campsite.
OSR poses. (Sitting on the ground by a campfire is reason enough)
QTP3 Redimized (big, beautiful, simple graphics package)
Extra hot keys (most of these mods include the ability to delete spells)
A few clothing mods. . . .
Spells Be Effective (So wearing a silly pair of buckskin boots doesn't drop spell casting effectiveness)
Bag of holding.
Elsweyr, the Deserts of Anequina.

I have so many it is hard to mention only a few. My own Witchcraft mod of course, and Ferryboats. Corean and Ren's Hair, Natural Faces, Keychain, Quest Award Leveling, Quest Message Popup Remover, QTP3, and the two Nae Rae Pose mods...



Wouldn't that max out your Mercantile skill though? Talk about grinding up your biz tank!

Well, yes that was exactly what Blossom needed to do. The intent was to take a female Orc - who have the lowest starting stat in the game - 25 for personality - and max her out on it. So she needed Mercantile, Speechcraft, and Illusion raised as much as possible. Sell every arrow, cast a light spell instead of using a torch, chat up all the guards, and anything else that worked.

Downloaded ImpeREAL Sutch mod which I know Acadian is interested to hear about. We´ll see if I install it later but I think I will. It says it´s easy to deal with so why not? Anyone already tried that mod btw and have some pointers?

I play in 3rd person exclusively so I absolutely cannot play even one second of Oblivion without my precious Chase Camera Mod. Without this mod I would have stopped playing Oblivion back in 2006.

I can't stand Oblivion's near-infinite view distance so my Morrowind Fog mod is an essential part of all of my games.

Those are the only two mods I cannot, under any circumstances, even think of playing Oblivion without.

Which mod group made it? I tried one of the variations of the Stuch mods and it was... pretty bad. I seem to remember their name having to do with dragons.

Oh and my favorite Oblivion mod had to be Realistic Fatigue.

It´s this one. I did see the mod that has dragons but I´m not getting that

I can confirm that is not the crappy one I tried.

What made the other one bad exactly?

They had some custom assets that were poorly made and textured. There was a rug sitting on the floor in the castle that you had to jump to walk over. The overall quality of the town (items, building placement, ect.) was lower than the rest of the towns and did not feel like it was apart of the world. It just kind of looked like some crap plopped in the middle of the wilderness.

I played a couple of the quests and they were pretty bad too. First quest, you walk through the middle of the town and talk to the count. He says some stuff that you can't read because they didn't include any silent voice files. Then you turn around and lounging in the middle of the town (that was clear just a few minutes ago) is a bunch of ogres. Apparently you have to kill them, but they aren't really doing anything.

There was some other stuff too, but this is what I remember.

Dragon Captions is the name you're looking for, I believe, King Coin. Giskgard, DC founder, was known for making hundreds if not thousands of unnecessary edits to cells all over the game world that made his mods incompatible with just about every mod but his own. And then for getting into verbal food fights on the Oblivion Mods forum over it.

I´m really glad Oblivion is mod friendly. VtM:B is not and it´s too bad, but that isn´t of any concern to me anymore anyway

Actually, one of the few games I really like that can be played without any mod whatsoever is Deus Ex. It doesn´t even need graphic enhancers for crying out loud!

Hmm well, for obvious reasons I would never refer to Niamh as such but let's just say that the atomic ingredients of her DNA are clearly my very favourites.

For others, well off the top of my head, Duke Patricks Archery, Kuertees Gold as an Item, Lush and Gaudy, OBGE, SweetFX, RTNM, DLL, Gods! There's just too many of them.
Despite how it may appear I'm actually quite choosy so although I have many, I would not have them if I did not like them, so I dont really have any dead wood as I tend to adopt a zero tolerance approach!

A special mention must however go to Niamh's Nighteye Hood. My very own custom special mod for her ladyship.

Where mods fail there´s always the console. Thanks to that I can walk across borders and don´t have to deal with huge buildings popping up in my face but rather be seen from far away

The nude mod. For the sake of, eh, realism?

Realism? Do people walk around naked where you live??

No, they don't. But some of like to roleplay characters who do not bathe in their underwear.

Lothran uses swim shorts

I brought some mods on vacation with me last week. Most didn’t last long enough to want to save. Here are some early favorites.

Chase Camera Mod. Thank you, everyone who mentioned this one! Now I don’t feel sick after three minutes.

Active Inventory Spell. Abiene went shopping in Cheydinhal and gave a few of her guild mates there new robes. (Extra Robe Pack.) Much better!

Companion Share and Recruit. Jerric already got shut down by Rhano, so he has some work to do before they can go adventuring. Next time Abiene goes to the IC she is going to travel with a bodyguard. (Not sure who yet.) Lildereth is going to be disappointed. She wants to ask Merandil out, but little does she know that Kvatch is still on fire in her game. I doubt he’ll abandon his post to take her out to dinner.

Denock Arrow. Didn’t know how annoying that was until it wasn’t.

Portable Campsite. No more standing up and Waiting instead of making camp.

See You Sleep. It’s great to stay in third person. Another small thing that makes a big difference.

Slof’s Horses!

Snowy Road to Bruma. More snow! Yay.

I have very vanilla taste in clothing and so do my characters, so we’ve only added a little bit. Brocade Clothes, Capes and Cloaks, Lil’s Rogue outfit, some colored tops and a couple of dresses. If we didn’t love them they wouldn’t get to stay. I can’t wait to dress Darnand up with Extra Robe Pack, but he won’t go in the shops.

Lil has a new bow (Robin of Locksley bow). It looks very much the way we imagine her gin-jiru bow. Jerric likes his old gear too much to want to change, but hopefully someday I’ll find him a sword and Darnand a staff that are as perfect for them as Lildereth’s new bow.

The Wobbly Goblet! Three of my characters have even decided to live there. That’s the one that got this whole learning process started.

Congrats, Grits! With the exceptions of differing bows and outfits, I have every mod that you mentioned and am so glad you are enjoying them.

Acadian, you have been the invisible advisor as I’ve worked through this process. I’ve found your advice several times through various unrelated searches. I even figured out how to let Abiene join the Chapel of Stendarr by reading your forum post to someone who wanted not to be chased by wolves!

I absolutely cannot play Oblivion without this mod. Seriously, if it was between using this mod and not playing Oblivion ever again I would not play Oblivion ever again. I too am made nauseous by Oblivion's camera. Oblivion is the only game I have ever played that makes me physically ill.

I also always use See You Sleep. Most of my characters change into "sleepwear" before getting into bed. Some of them, though, sleep naked. I probably scandalized Mirocu with that sentence.

Don´t worry, I´m tough

I would like to use Snowy Road to Bruma, but as it adds more than just the snow (WHY DO THEY ALWAYS DO THAT!!???), I don´t want it. I don´t want more lamp posts and from what it looks, different snow texture when it´s snowing.

It´s like this other mod I tried a couple of years back. It added more snow like I wanted, and different animals which was ok. And bigger stables, which I guess I was fine with. But what made me drop it was the mod also changed the houses in Bruma! Suddenly there was stone wall when before it was timber! And all I wanted goddammit was more snow! Why couldn´t they have left it with that!???



..sorry...

And that's why I end up making my own mods. I run a lot more self-built mods than I release for others, and the ones I do publish make as little change to the world as I can manage.

And it's probably why my favorite mods are the "fix one detail" type, like Toggleable Quantity Prompt, or else ones that can be customised, like Map Marker Overhaul and Dynamic maps.

I am exactly the same way. I hate big compilation mods because there is usually only one thing in them I want, and twenty things I do not. That is what lead me to start modding in the first place. Usually the only ones I download from other people are the ones that add one thing.

In a recent post to my Skyrim fan fic, I had a screenshot of Valrimor drinking from a mug. mALX had asked me if it was a pose mod I had used to get that shot. It is not, but rather it is an animation that comes with a realism/immersion mod that I use called Realistic Needs and Diseases. If you enjoy a realistic, immersive play style, I cannot recommend this mod strongly enough. There is a YouTube video that explains the mod (and two others that are unrelated) better than I could. In short, it adds the need to eat, drink, and sleep. It provides camping gear of various levels of complexity, from simple bedroll to full blown campsite. It allows for inebreation from alcoholic beverages. It also causes diseases to get progressively worse if left untreated. In is fully customizable through MCM.

Link to YouTube video.

Link to mod at Nexus.

If you are into immersion, get it and emjoy!

The disease part appeals to me, but the rest does not.

I use Frostfall which makes the weather deadly. No more running around in a blizzard or swimming in the arctic sea.

I think I am going to add that mod as well. I found Realistic Needs and Diseases while searching for a camping mod. It had that and more, but I guess it's not for everyone.

I second ThatSkyrimGuy's suggestion of Realistic Needs and Diseases. I think it truly is a wonderful mod. I use it in conjunction with Drinking Fountains of Skyrim. I never used one of these 'needs' type mods in Morrowind or Oblivion. I preferred to handle this stuff myself. But I gave this mod a shot, on a whim, and discovered that I really liked it.

I'm the opposite of King Coin here: eating, drinking and sleeping appeals to me but not the diseases. Fortunately - like Frostfall - this stuff is easily configured in the MCM menu. (Gods, how I love MCM!) I adore seeing my character go through the eating and drinking animations, just like I adore seeing my characters warm their hands in from of a fire in Frostfall. For me these little touches make my character feel more 'alive' to me.

One of the mod's neat features, I think, is inebriation. Over the years some of my characters in Morrowind and Oblivion have been hard drinkers. And getting drunk is is one area where using my imagination just felt a little...underwhelming to me. RND adds multi-step inebriation (from a bit tipsy to blackout). It's gets realistically hard to walk if a character drinks too much. One of them actually stumbled and fell right off a bridge into the water after a night of heavy drinking at The Bannered Mare. I fell totally in love with the mod when I saw that.

Well, if I can turn parts of that mod on and off with MCM then I may install it. For me, eating and drinking is something that I just pretends happens in the background, just like... uh... nature calls.

Diseases in Skyrim weren't very threatening and I've had characters run around on adventures for a long time without even knowing that they had a disease.

Getting drunk sounds entertaining as well.

With this mod, diseases can kill if left untreated.

I think Pseron is talking about taking baths (as opposed to swimming). I agree, I use a nude base and can put underpants and bra/bathing suit on; but for realism I don't like to see her get into a bathtub in them, so hence the nude base.

I've been playing Oblivion again since finishing school. There are a few mods I've been playing with that I like very much, and am now trying out a few others.

I love SubRosa's Witchcraft mod and Forest Friends mod - my character (who has no weapons skills - the complete opposite of Julian of Anvil) loves her summoned Bear.

Another mod that surprised me (by how much I enjoy it, even when I'm not paying attention to it) is Sounds of Cyrodiil. SoC adds ambient sounds to environments both indoors and outdoors. Towns and the IC are more alive with background noises - music and arguments when you walk past a tavern, barking dogs, the sound of a hammer on an anvil when you pass a smith's, dripping water in caves, wind blowing through deserted hallways inside Ayleid ruins (which makes them even spookier than they already are), wind in the branches. I'm sure there are more I can't hear (because they are outside my range of hearing), but I've seen the files for them. Each of Cyrodiil's taverns has its own sound set - the lively tunes at Olav's Tap and Tack is far different from the genteel tunes playing at the Cheydinhal Bridge Inn. Mages Guild Chapterhouses has odd noises in the basements which I imagine are spells cooking off; also in various basements you can hear footsteps walking across the floorboards above.

I'm working my way through Kvatch Rebuilt and am liking it so far. I have Reclaiming Sancre Tor on standby (it activates when you pick up the Champion's armor, and I haven't done so yet).

I have the CM Basic mod - I am discovering how much help companions can be when working my way through scary places. They get right into the thick of things and give my character a chance to gather her wits when ambushed. At this point I'm not keeping any one of them - rather I'm "auditioning" them to decide which one I like the best.

Of course, I have Slof's Horses.

I just installed three new mods yesterday and am trying them out:
Better Dungeons - I've been in Boreal Stone Cave so far and it's very different - I rather like it! I will have a better opinion after I've tried out a few more dungeons.
Trails of Cyrodiil - I love the idea of hidden trails that are hard to see and difficult to follow - it's much more realistic. So far I found the entrances to a couple of them, but haven't yet followed them.
Almost All Oblivion Vanilla Textures Replacer - a new mod that incorporates several other mods. Yes, it's a compilation mod (and I'm not too crazy about them), but I thought I'd give it a whirl and see how things look. So far it's okay - at first it made my eyes hurt because it felt like I was wearing glasses several grades too strong for my eyes! But I'm liking the detailing in the clothing and the tapestries and the rugs, so I'll give it a little more time.

For Oblivion: I’ve been using Immersive Interface for a while and I love it. The first time through I forgot to remove the compass. Fixed that today. Even the sneak icon is out of the way at the bottom now. And my favorite part: disappearing status bars.

It's been about a month and I can proudly say I have a list. I am going to try to list these from most useful to less useful.

Fundament -- Ability to individually set all sorts of things. I use this mod to change how fast skills level upwards as they're used. Mostly I dumb this upward movement down, especially for typical fast-moving skills like Sneak, Alchemy, and all the magic except Destruction and Restoration. Makes it feel much more rewarding when the character finally goes from (let's say) Novice to Apprentice because he/she has spent a lot of time working at it.

No POI Compass: dumbs the compass's functionality down. Directions are shown, and quest markers can optionally be shown, but this mod kills all the 'auto-locating devices' found in the vanilla compass. :tongue:

Basic Primary Needs -- Food, drink, sleep (and other things) matter. For my very first PC game (Snaat Rayag the skooma dealer), I've going to use Natural Hunger (only food matters) instead of BPN because NH just feels right for his game.

MMM -- been wanting new / additional creatures and NPCs for years now. MMM has lots of options, so anything I don't want (spiders, for instance) can be toggled on or off. And the way this mod adds its content to the game is tasteful.

Simple Saddlebags -- FINALLY I can put some of my character's stuff in bags carried by horses!

Storms & Sounds -- adds some new storm behaviors, and new sounds from storms to the game. It also adds real lightning strikes! .. Storms & wind can often be heard indoors too, if there are any windows or if the structure is made out of wood

All Natural -- Adds a variety of new weathers, and changes light radiances indoors. If it's daytime outside, the room you're in will be brighter than if it's night, for instance.

Get Wet -- A mod which subtly puts dripping water on characters & NPCs, and the clothes they wear.

See You Sleep -- Everybody knows about SYS, I think. I sometimes disable this one because I like having my characters level up after they sleep, and SYS cancels this. But if they're not leveling up, SYS is on.

Alternate Start -- I'll use this one occasionally. Starts the character in a room with Imperial guards instead of in jail. The char needs to fill in some 'immigration forms', and this is how we choose Class, Race, Name, Country of Origin, etc. If the player wants to not have the Amulet of Kings given at the beginning of the game, this can happen, too.

Darker Dungeons: I've also tried Cava Obscura, but CO makes the lairs too dark. DD allows mist & natural light sources to carry more luminescence than CO.

Forest Friend -- Love this one for Saga's game.

Better Cities -- Everybody knows about BC. I love this mod but also have mixed feelings about certain portions of it.

Animated Window Lighting System: Windows glow with light at night, and chimneys also smoke.

Clothes Get Wet -- If the PC or an NPC goes swimming, this mod slows movement afterwards for an hour. This one's a bit over-the-top TBH, but I have it installed for now.

Highwayman: Only one of my character's games has this installed. This allows the PC to play the part of a highwayman bandit. It adds dialog options to rob or threaten NPCs if they don't "pay up". This one does some weird things to NPCs unfortunately. Something's not right with it.


That's it for now! .

Nice little mod list, Renee. As much as I probably would like quite a few of them I still want Lothran´s game as close to vanilla as possible

I just started using Robert's Female Body, Robert's Male Body, and an texture upgrade mod for both. The new face textures that come with the latter are a big improvement over Natural Faces.

I love Robert's for both male and female body replacers. I really liked the BAB body for Julian's game, but I think Robert's fits Tallei better.

I only wish there were more stuff for the Robert's Female!

I have not seen the BAB body in a while. What is the difference between the two? I suppose I could just download it and see. I have the TGND body laying around too. I didn't like the scars it adds though.

The BAB body is, to my eye, thinner and more slender through the hips than vanilla. Suitable for someone with Julian's background as a former Legion soldier and recovering addict.

The Robert's Female body is a little bit more curvy than vanilla, but not too much so. I looked at HGEC for the A- and B-cup upper bodies, but couldn't find enough clothing mods that fit something more slender than the double melons that seem to be so popular in the modding community. I seriously considered going back to the vanilla body and putting up with its textures until I checked out Robert's. For Tallei I thought it was perfect (still do), and there are more clothing mods for this one.

I think the TGND is fine, except I find the upper and lower bodies to be somewhat unbalanced and the upper body just a little too immature for my taste. That's just my personal preference.

I do wish I could find a mod that adds scars and tats in a modular fashion - I get to pick and choose what I want on my PC's. But no luck there. I'd love to customize Julian's body with that Red Dragon tat on her shield arm. And Tallei can have a small scar or two on her hands (from picking all kinds of plants, and getting nipped by pissed off mud crabs every time she takes a nirnroot).

I used TGND to take the semi-nude pics of Teresa for her fic, when she did the Through a Nightmare Darkly quest. I would like to have scars like Skyrim that you can pick from too. But I don't like everyone in the world having the exact same ones. That is just a problem with how Oblivion is built. It was not until FO3 that Bethesda made it possible to use different bodies for different races.

I think I will give BAB a whirl too, just to see for myself how it looks compared to Roberts. I really like face textures that came with the third mod for Robert's, so I will probably keep those even if I use BAB.

BAB. Buffy 1.0 was a Bosmer using BAB. BAB is nice in that it is elven petite. Notably, the hands and feet are delicately done and one of my favorite features of that mod. It is not particularly well supported for outfits however.


HGEC. As things advanced, I became unsatisfied with what I could do with vanilla race face textures and got quite tired of avoiding close-ups and taking great care with lighting to avoid blotchiness for screenshots. I found a fabulous custom race – but it required HGEC. So Buffy 2.0 was born with her own custom race and body by HGEC. Naturally, for Buffy I chose the smaller cup and hips sizes. Her height of .88 also helped give her a smaller and more delicate look - but I still found her a bit ‘chunky’ compared to what I had hoped for. When I set her race’s weight to 80% of an Imperial woman, magic happened and we had the wonderfully elven petite body that I wanted again.

HGEC does have a more pronounced hourglass shape than most other body mods, but when combined with the smaller hips, bust and weight I’m using, I’m quite happy with it. Her current body is a bit more blossomed or womanly than her earlier BAB body, and I chalk that up to her maturing from teenage elf into young womanhood.

Less than ideally, her hands and feet are still a bit more manish than those delicate feet and hands that BAB did so well.

We use the EVE variant of HGEC, which provides plenty of ‘sizing’ options and also converts all the vanilla outfits to your selections. This ensures all the vanilla outfits fit well. As far as modded outfits, they run the gamut. The bad news is that there are indeed tons of skimpy and/or overly voluptuous outfits to wade through. But because HGEC is hands down the most supported body mod, there are also plenty of appropriate outfits for more slender girls for those who take the time to wade through things carefully - I think Buffy's massive wardrobe is pretty good evidence of that. While I think Buffy has a delightful little figure, I don’t think she’ll ever be convicted of being busty or voluptuous.


TGND and Roberts. I’ve used neither, but certainly evaluated them from screenshots and discussions. Both seem to be geared toward a more realistic shape, rather than the somewhat waifish body of BAB/vanilla, or the rather idealized hourglass of HGEC.

I don’t think anyone has mentioned Immersive Interiors. I added Animated Window Lighting System and All Natural to welcome Jerric and friends when they return from Skyrim, and Immersive Interiors is the icing on the cake.

Also Immersive Interiors and All Natural have made Better Benirus Manor a favorite mod. It was very nice before, but now with gorgeous interior lighting and a view out the windows it’s awesome.

So far I am liking the narrower waist of the Bab body better, so I think I am going to use it. I have been looking at a lot of face texture mods, and so far the the one I found for Robert's Body looks best. It works fine without the body, since it is just the face textures. I tried Danis13, Enayla's Faces, and of course used to have Natural Faces. But none of them look as good.

I took a look at a few other face/body/hair mods, like Ren's Beauty Pack and Oblivion Character Overhaul, but they add too many other things I do not want, and pulling out just the face files look like too much work. For Ren's I would have to rename a pile of files. The other one requires Blockhead, which uses a bunch of scripts to change out files. Of course the files themselves are not usable at all on their own (they just have text on them saying Use Blockhead).

Along the way I stumbled upon a mod that adds eyelashes, which is rather neat.

I tried OCO with Room207’s Orsimer Overhaul and liked a lot of what I saw on the NPCs. The problem was that my characters looked horrendous. Otherwise I would probably be using it now.

I mean my folks looked horrible. No way! It was too much hassle to get them right in the first place. (Oh, and Roberts Female was my best pick to please a curvy little wood elf, a thin Breton, and a strapping Nord woman all with the same mod. It looks nice and pretty average so it’s not too far from any of them.)

I still use Orsimer Overhaul, though. I’d love to have a mod that makes Dunmer look Morrowindishly angular without changing every other race.

I don't like the noses in Orisimer Overhaul, otherwise I would use it. Though I do like the tusks. I use Cute Orc Head Replacer for my Orcs. (sans the .esp file, which just redoes some of the Orc's faces. I have already done that to all the NPCs myself). Sadly it does not have tusks. It would be nice to have them with the normal noses, like they are in Skyrim.

Speaking of Orcs, I found the cutest dice bag

I'm becoming quite the fan of Companion Share and Recruit. Thanks to Grits for pointing me in that direction. I had tried Talkie Toaster's CM mods, but found they added too many people to the taverns. Sometimes I just can't move around in those places! If I can figure out how to do it, I would load back the CM Basic just to get two particular companions that he adds and that I like very much. But I don't want all the others. Especially since TIE adds more adventurers and Legion individuals to the game. CSR is proving to be more flexible for me - I actually got Jeelius to follow me back to Cheydinhal and then Fort Urasek in the game. He also accepted Julian's gift of the Mythic Dawn robe from Lake Arrius Caverns, especially since as the prisoner he was stark naked. It was a little more TMI than Julian needed.