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Bandits are the most common humanoid enemy a player faces in Skyrim. The lowest of their ranks are clad in the most basic light armor. These make for just the right enemy type to pit against the Dragonborn in their earliest dungeon raids, such as Embershard Mine, located right next to the Guardian Stones of Falkreath.
However, over multiple playthroughs, the vanilla variety and faint progression curve of the northern bandits can get somewhat dull. Here are five mods that work in tandem to bring out the best of diverse and memorable bandit encounters.
Top 5 Skyrim mods that create diverse bandit factions
1) OBIS - Organized Bandits in Skyrim
Judging from much of the hold guards' dialog, bandits are supposed to be a menace in Skyrim. They are not as fearsome as the less generic factions like the forsworn, but bandit raids are still significant enough to disrupt the natural flow of Skyrim travel routes and the guards' sleep cycle.
The ludonarrative dissonance here is that bandits are a low-level early-game faction by design. They do not level past 35 and only get gear upgrades to compensate. OBIS addresses this issue by not only buffing up the bandits but re-organizing them into several distinct bandit clans.
The 2500 new bandits it adds are distributed across the forts, hideouts, and custom patrol routes in the overworld. These include 'addled' bandits to go on skooma-fuelled rampages, 'unloyal' packs of army deserters, and the 'vermin' clan of rogue necromancers aided by swathes of spectral skeevers, to name a few.
2) Modpocalypse NPCs - OBIS
OBIS gives the bandits good visual and functional variety through the implementation of clans. For modders who like to go the extra mile in replacing all things vanilla, a cosmetic overhaul may go a long way into further differentiating the generic bandit faces, which are all too familiar after the second playthrough.
Modpocalypse NPCs - OBIS gives the new bandit spawns added via OBIS a facelift in terms of high-poly geometry and high-definition face tint. The modular options vary between the disheveled vanilla look or a more fantasy-oriented design with new KS Hairdo hairstyles.
3) Bandit Lines Expansion
As iconic as 'Never should have come here' and other vanilla combat taunts are to the identity of Skyrim's bandits, mods can also cover this department to give it a far more varied range.
Bandit Lines Expansion adds 500 new lines for different voice types based on bandit race and gender. These include combat taunts and battle cries hurled at the player that depends on player-related variables like race, gear, and class. There is also all-new idle chatter and monologues in bandit camps that add greater immersion for stealthy players.
4) Banditkiin - Bandit Children of Skyrim
For even greater variety on top of OBIS, Banditkiin adds teen bandits to their ranks. Children were completely absent from The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and in Skyrim, their newfound presence is limited within the city walls only. Bethesda also made it so that children cannot be killed or harmed by default to appease the rating board's standards.
Banditkiin does not reverse these vanilla records but adds its own race to implement 50 new classes of child bandits, including pickpockets, archers, and mages, in both hand-placed spawn points and the leveled lists. The frequency at which these teen bandits will be encountered can be tweaked by picking one of the many interchangeable versions of the mod.
5) Bandit Economy
While mods like Immersive Armor add a lot of new variegated gear to the bandit armory, these will also cause feature bloat elsewhere without sticking to the original intention of this mod listicle.
With Bandit Economy, the Dovahkiin gets a taste of their own medicine. Part of the 'Faction Economy Complete' mod series by TwinCrows, Bandit Economy makes it so that the general merchants can peddle gears sold away by the player to the bandit faction.
This means that once a player sells a relatively good enchanted item to general merchants, they have roughly a 50% chance to show up as an opponent bandit's armament of choice.
