Medic’s Dragon Mod Recommendations for Skyrim
I love dragons. I want to be a dragon. But the closest I’ll ever get to that is my strange mod setup for Skyrim, involving the Play As A Dragon Mod and Open Cities Skyrim. Still, those two mods on their own aren’t that great. Even if you don’t want to be a dragon, the vanilla dragons in Skyrim can be a bit boring, so you might need some other dragon mods as well. Here are a bunch of recommendations of dragon mods that I think you should at least try.
These are all for Legendary Edition (which is what I use) but some of these have Special Edition versions too.
Splendor – Dragon Variants
This mod, by the amazing opusGlass, is probably the first mod you should get when it comes to dragons, simply because it randomizes all the vanilla dragons in the game. Basically, it takes the features of the 14 base dragons – their skins and their models – and combines them together to create 56 variants. Because Splendor only uses the base game stuff, it means Splendor works alongside pretty much every other dragon mod. Including ones that change the textures of vanilla dragons.
Chaos Dragons
Chaos Dragons was probably the first dragon mod I installed, simply because it has so many new and cool dragons. When I originally installed it, the mod only ever added new dragons, but newer versions also give unique models to ALL the named dragons in the game, which really adds something special to the supposedly more important fights. I mean, the first dragon you fight is Mirmulnir, but in vanilla gameplay he’ll just be whatever dragon matches your current level. With Chaos Dragons, he’s actually unique. Sure, some of the dragons are somewhat questionable when it comes to quality, but these dragons are mostly great. The only issue is that it doesn’t work well with Deadly Dragons or other similar AI-changing dragon mods.
Diverse Dragons Collection 3
Another great mod by opusGlass, Diverse Dragons Collection is like Chaos Dragons, but with less dragons overall and more variants of its dragons that scale up as you do. Diverse Dragons Collection 3 though gives you a lot of control over what dragons you can fight. If you don’t like some of them, you can disable them. If they’re too strong, you can make them weaker. Diverse Dragons Collection 3 in particular has superb compatibility with other dragon mods as well and integrates really nicely with whatever playthrough you are doing.
Colorful Dragons 3 HD
This mod is nothing special, it’s a retexture of the vanilla dragons, but I really like these skins as they are pretty damn colourful, as the name suggests. In fact, this mod is the source of the texture I use on my Frost Dragons over pretty much every other texture mod. I don’t know why but it really makes Frost Dragons look less bland. And, because this is just a texture mod, it works with both the aforementioned Splendor and doesn’t need any real work to get it on Special Edition.
Dragon Remains
Dragon Remains is a pretty basic mod. Instead of dragons melting away into skeletons when you kill them, they just don’t. They remain as whole dragons. Why am I recommending this mod? Because I can’t find a mod that gives dragons unique skeletons. I mean, it makes no sense that a Serpentine Dragon and an Ancient Dragon and a Blood Dragon, all of which have different amounts of spikes and horns, all leave the same damn skeleton. The easiest solution for now is to just not have dragons dissolve.
“But Medic, those are all pretty cosmetic mods! Why not mention something like Deadly Dragons or whatever?” Because those are all up to personal taste. Sure, improving dragon AI is cool but some mods go too far, some make dragons into massive winged tanks and… it’s just not for everyone. Dragon combat mods need to be tweaked to the individual.
But more importantly, these mods are all very stable and unlikely to actually crash your game.
So there you go, a bunch of dragon mods I recommend.