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Since Skyrim is well over 10 years old, it has seen thousands of mods arrive on the internet. While many players think the game is a masterpiece as it is, others feel like there are a plethora of bugs, issues, or portions of the game that simply do not work. That’s where modders come in - they make games work the way they were intended to in the first place, or even create new adventures within the game that the developers released.
Few games have had as many mods as Skyrim has. You can change virtually everything about the game, but today, we’re going to focus on some that will make the overall gaming experience better. There are too many graphical overhaul mods to list, but rest assured, you can make the game as smooth as you want it to be.
Whether it’s fixing bugs or giving players new options, these Skyrim mods are sure to help you on your journey. It’s far from an exhaustive list, but it’s a few of my personal favorites. Before I get started, I wanted to give an honorable mention to a mod that’s still in its beta testing phase, Skyrim Together Reborn. Who wouldn’t want to play the open-world RPG with their friends?
What are the best Skyrim mods to run in 2022?
1) Apocalypse - Magic of Skyrim
While Skyrim’s magic system is okay, quite frankly, it’s not nearly as robust as it should be. The magic is mediocre, but Apocalypse - Magic of Skyrim is here to change all of that. It’s easily the most popular spell pack for the game, and it offers 155 new spells. They are balanced, fit in the world, and have amazing visuals on top of that.
These spells can also be purchased like vanilla spells and are balanced against the other spells that were already in the game. I never really felt like magic felt powerful in the vanilla game, and Apocalypse made my casters feel powerful, without being overpowering.
2) SkyUI
If there’s anything that Bethesda excels at, it is creating a cluttered, hard-to-use UI. I don’t know why Skyrim’s UI was designed this way, but it’s far from being useful. SkyUI changes the game’s entire UI, and offers easy-to-use interfaces for crafting, smithing, has useful gamepad support and so much more.
It’s arguably the best UI modifier in the game's history and is a great way to access your items without feeling lost or confused in a cluttered system. Instead of having to open the magic menu, you can also see your active effects on-screen, making you rely less on pausing the game to check for important things.
Perhaps best of all, it adds a function that lets you adjust your mods in-game, via the pause screen. That is, and of itself, worth installing this particular mod for.
3) Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch
Another thing Bethesda is great at is leaving tons of bugs in their games, and Skyrim is no exception to that. An incredibly buggy game, despite being a classic, there have been tons of bug-fix mods over the years. The Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition patch is a comprehensive bug fix update that fixes almost every bug the entire game can throw at you.
Not every single bug is fixed but it’s an incredible number of them, and you only need to have one mod installed to make that happen. None of these changes are unsafe, and there were hundreds of changes all in one place.
4) Alternate Start - Live Another Life
If you’re like me, and you’ve started a new file, dozens or hundreds of times, it’s really boring and predictable by that point. You always start off in the cart, get attacked by a dragon, and escape down into the catacombs. Alternate Start - Live Another Life is one of my favorite mods of all time for Skyrim.
You create a background for your character, and you don’t necessarily have to be a prisoner. It’s so much fun to pick a race and a background, and start from a different point in the game. Are you tired of always starting at Helgen? Then Alternate Start is going to be a must-use for you.
5) Faster Leveling
One of the older mods in Skyrim, this one sort of speaks for itself. It can be incredibly tedious to level up your various skills while playing the game. The more power you seek, the harder it’s going to be to unlock it. However, the Faster Leveling mod increases the speed of leveling skills in the game.
This ranges from 2x to 6x speed, to make the game feel more fluid and natural. You don’t have to feel like you’re grinding helplessly just to increase your skills in your character, and it’s honestly one of my favorites in the game’s history. I want my character to feel like they’re improving at a steady pace, and not doing ridiculous nonsense just to grow stronger.
I could easily list hundreds of mods on this list - the original list had around 25 or 30 that I found to be incredibly useful. These ranged from gameplay, visuals, and complete reworks of the world itself.
No matter what you want to do, this is one malleable game. There’s a mod for virtually everything, from changing dragons into the Macho Man, to giving every region on the map a gorgeous capital city.
