The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition Guide

Next Gen Graphics For SKYRIM SE 2021 for The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition

Next Gen Graphics For SKYRIM SE 2021

Overview

Welcome to my guide to the best graphics for Skyrim SE in 2021!First, a little disclaimer: As always when it comes to visuals, this mod list is somewhat subjective and based on my own opinion. Yet, it focusses on providing at least 2K textures for about everything possible whilst reserving multiple options for customization without losing any quality. Also, it needs to be mentioned that you won’t be able to run all these mods with lower end PCs, so please do not just install everything regardless of your hardware. I highly recommend to install the mods step-by-step in this particular order, checking your ingame performance each time you have installed a couple of mods, depending on your specific hardware.After all mods have been installed, I strictly recommend to run LOOT[www.nexusmods.com] to make sure your game runs smoothly and see if there are any potential conflicts between seperate mods, or patches missing. For those who are new to modding entirely, you will have the option to use one of two mod managers to, well, manage your mods. The first one is Vortex[www.nexusmods.com] which is generally considered to be the more newcomer-friendly mod manager as it has an easy to overview interface. However, when you start to to install a large portion (say 100+) of mods at once, you may find yourself struggling with Vortex as, for example, you won’t be able to freely adjust the load order of your mods without working on a new set of rules. However, when you fear accidentally screwing up load orders yourself, this is the “accident-proof” option.Your other option, and the one I personally prefer, is Mod Organizer 2[www.nexusmods.com]. At first, it may look a bit confusing to you as a complete newcomer but after just two or three minutes it should be fairly easy to overview. It also has a set of different styles for the interface (Settings -> General -> Styles) in case you’re not content with the standard one. The advantage of MO2 is that it simply allows for more control over your mods which will come in handy when you aim to install multiple hundreds of mods and especially when you find yourself adjusting the mod list here and there.If you haven’t tried either of the mod managers, please take a few minutes to try out both options and pick the one that appeals the most to you – there is no right or wrong.This list is a result of multiple demands as response to my screenshots and artworks, and has taken me quite a few hours to create as a guide here on Steam. All links (with one exception) conveniently lead you to the downloadable files section on Nexusmods. So please do not forget to endorse and leave a comment down below!

Optimized Vanilla Textures

This mod greatly optimizes all default textures for performance without quality loss: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Static Mesh Improvement Mod – SMIM

A massive project aiming to greatly improve the appearance of countless static 3D models such as architecture, clutter, furniture and landscapeing in Skyrim: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Skyrim Particle Patch for ENB

Skyrim has quite a few object meshes that have their shaders or blending properties set incorrectly. As a result, when using ENB many of these objects look buggy or react to an incorrect category in enbseries.ini. The aim of this little patch is to fix at least the more obvious ones of these inconsistencies so that the affected objects react to a correct category, whenever possible: Download[enbseries.enbdev.com]

Enhanced Lights and FX

Enhanced Lights and FX has the goal to create a more dramatic and realistic mood to the Skyrim lights by adding lights to all light sources and removing any light without a source, as well as the addition of many more effects like smoke, volumic lights, driples, etc.: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Noble Skyrim Mod HD – 2K

The aim of this mod is to give all of Skyrim’s architecture a completely new look by changing its textures to custom ones. Beside the architecture, several other things, such as landscape, dungeons (ruins, mines, caves etc.), clutter stuff etc. have been re-textured as well, to match the rest of the mod: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Majestic Mountains with LOD

This mod completely overhauls the way lighting impacts mountain surfaces in order to fit both the dynamic day night cycles and the weather system of Skyrim, thus creating a very natural geological look: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Immersive Roads

A complete re-texture of Skyrim’s roads. Many roads to choose ranging from dark, normal, white, with green moss, with orange moss, with dust and snow variants: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

RUSTIC Series

The RUSTIC mods are a series of mods vastly improving a huge variety of objects:

Rudy HQ – More Lights for ENB

The Rudy HQ – More Lights for ENB mods are a series adding light sources to various animals, plants and objects:

Frankly HD Dawnguard Armor and Weapons

This mod provides a high resolution (4k and 2k available) retexture of Dawnguard’s armor and weapons. Includes all variants of the armor and shield; weapons including crossbow, steel bolts and the unique rune items: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

HD Dark Elf Urns

4K Retexture for more realistic Dark Elf urns which are optimized for quality and performance: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Marvelous Gates and Doors

This series retextures various gates and doors for some of the major cities to have very unique appearances:

CC’s HQ Mines Redone

This mod retextures all mines in Skyrim, giving them a more natural look rather than appearing to be made out of mud: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Gecko’s Dwarven Ruins Textures

This mod provides a completely vanilla friendly 2K retexture of the Dwarven/Dwemer Ruins tileset. Markarth-specific textures are not affected. Solstheim-specific marble variants are also not affected: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Rudy HQ – Hay

This mod provides new hay and chicken nest textures (three variants to choose from) and tweaked hay meshes (no seam if you use ENB): Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Less Ugly Tundragrass

This is a simple 2K retexture for tundragrass: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

A Quality World Map

This mod greatly improves the quality of the world map, including accurate hand-drawn roads. Choose between having all roads, or just the main roads: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

PELTAPALOOZA

This mod expands from the 3 default pelt used in farmhouses and inns to have as many as 9 different pelts in the game at one time. There are different sets for the floors, walls, and beds: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Lockpicking UI

So this is one of those mods which you most likely never thought you’d actually need. However, once you install this, you don’t ever wanna play (or rather pick a lock) without it. It dramatically re-designs the lockpicking interface and comes in a 4K resolution: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Embers HD

This is a small mod that makes embers found in various fire sources around the game world more aesthetically pleasing: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Ultimate HD Fire Effects

Ultimate HD Fire Effects – as you might have already guessed – greatly improves fire effects. I don’t think I need to go into detail here since the visuals totally speak for themselves: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Enhanced Blood Textures

The long-proven blood overhaul mod providing a bloodier combat experience with higher resolution and detailed textures. Includes additional features such as killmove animation spasms, blood drops when low health, damage based blood amount, blood pools, and green blood for spiders and oil for machines: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

BellyAches Animal and Creature Pack

This mod provides new and modified textures for wildlife, domesticated animals, and creatures in the game. This mod is a pack of replacers and does not add new variants to the game. You can just choose new textures to overwrite the default textures: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Wispmother, Hagraven and Troll Retextures

These three mods add simple 4K-2K retextures for the respective creatures:

Enhanced Landscapes

Enhanced Landscapes is a project which aims to improve Skyrim’s landscape by adding thousands of objects. It also aims to improve the distant appearance of mountains, cliffs and other rock formations: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Requires DynDOLOD[www.nexusmods.com] to generate proper Distant- and TreeLODs!

Enhanced Vanilla Trees

This mod – once again – does what it says, very much improving Skyrim’s trees, including various options you can choose from during the installer: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Unique Flowers and Plants

This mod adds lots of hand-placed new flowers and plants across Skyrim: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Northern Grass

Northern Grass adds unique, lush and beautiful grasses that maintain a cold aesthetic and fit greatly with the climate of Skyrim. Built from the original mod Unbelievable Grass Two for Oldrim, it adds various other immersive and cold-looking grasses for a unique and beautiful result: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

HD Photorealistic Ivy

This mod greatly improves the Ivy Textures in all exterior areas. It comes with own meshes, 2K-resolution and uncompressed normalmaps: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Ruins Clutter Improved

Ruins Clutter Improved started as a retexturing project, with the main goal to improve some of the ugliest objects in the dungeons of Skyrim. It improves the visual experience of catacombs and ruins by adding more detail to common clutter objects like pots, sconces, candles, doors and many other ingame materials: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Dust Effects

This a simple, yet very noticable replacer for all dust effect textures: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Realistic Water Two

This long-proven mod adds new water surface textures in an attempt to imitate the fluid motion of water. Lake, pond, river and ocean water are now visually and aurally distinct from each other. Various water effects have also been modified: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Not compatible with Water for ENB!

Water for ENB

Water for ENB is a great alternative (and my personal favorite after years of using Realistic Water Two) for high resolution and realistic water textures. You’ll also be able to chose between a variety of different water colors such as nordic blue or tropical green:

Download [www.nexusmods.com]
Not compatible with Realistic Water Two!

Morning Fogs

Morning Fogs adds beautiful rolling morning fogs over scenic lakes and rivers throughout Skyrim, including an MCM for further customization: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Rudy HQ – Falling Leaves and Needles

This little mod tweaks falling leaves and needles effects with new HQ textures: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Fluffy Snow

This mod greatly enhances the textures for landscape snow: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Natural and Atmospheric Tamriel – NAT

This is a complete weather, lighting and visual overhaul for Skyrim SE. It includes more than 70 life-like weathers within a customizable climate, shader FXs to customize the visuals, enhanced particle effects and lighting, subsurface scattering, cloud shadowing, wetness shaders and much more: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Rudy ENB

Finally, we need an ENB to make all the mods shine in their very best light. Rudy ENB is one of the most popular options and provides a semi-realistic preset, for all popular weather and lighting mods while all the effects are highly customizable through the GUI, making it perfectly suitable for both pure screenshot archery as well as casual walkthroughs.

Download (if you use Obsidian Weathers, NAT or Vivid Weathers)[www.nexusmods.com]
Download (if you use Cathedral Weathers)[www.nexusmods.com]

DO NOT INSTALL MORE THAN ONE ENB AT ONCE!

Picturesque ENB

Picturesque ENB provides for – guess what – a very painting-like look. However, it is not compitable with any weathers mod. Take a look at the description page for more information: Download [www.nexusmods.com] DO NOT INSTALL MORE THAN ONE ENB AT ONCE!

NOLVUS Reshade

This is a great reshade that provides optimized presets for most ENBs (except the following two). Be sure to read the installation instructions on the description page: Download [www.nexusmods.com]

Surreal ENB

Another great ENB which is a bit more vibrant than Rudy ENB’s realistic approach. It works with all major weather mods (Natural Atmospheric Tamriel – NAT, Vivid Weathers, Climates of Tamriel, Dolomite Weathers, True Storms, Rustic Weathers, Mythical Ages, Aequinoctium and Obsidian Weathers) but is not compatible with NOLVUS Reshade: Download[www.nexusmods.com]

Natural and Atmospheric Tamriel ENB 2.0

NAT ENB 2.0 is a unique visual overhaul which combines their own weather plugin with its ENB preset to create the cleanest graphics possible under any situations, like no other ENB alone can do. This is currently my favourite ENB for playthroughs. Since it uses its own weather plugin, it is not compatible with any weather mod (except Minty Lighting and Wonders of Weathers), cloud mod, fire mod and Skyrim’s Particle Patch for ENB. Be sure to check out the description page for more information on incompatibilities and installation: Download [www.nexusmods.com]

DO NOT INSTALL MORE THAN ONE ENB AT ONCE!

Meeko Reborn

Last but not least, we obviously need to pay some tribute to our favorite companion, the undaunted Meeko. Feel free to choose from one of the following appearance overhauls for the four-legged follower:

Credits

All credits for the pictures used in this mod list go to the respective modders linked aside. Credits for all the videos go to the great youtuber https://www.youtube.com/user/hodilton/featured who is still uploading regular content for Skyrim, so please feel free to check him out, too!

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