Mods to To Go Alongside Burning Skies
So, you’ve found a way to be a dragon in Skyrim, potentially by reading yesterday’s article. Now you want to enhance the experience a bit. You want a couple of mods to tie everything together and really make Skyrim a place to fear your dragony self. Here’s a bunch of mods that will help you with that.
This mod, I love it so much. There’s nothing cooler than riding your horse into the middle of Solitude/Windhelm and killing all those Imperial/Stormcloak scum, then riding off into the sunset. Alternatively, with whatever mod you’re using to be (or ride) a dragon, you can fly over the walls of said cities and burn everyone to a crisp. Seriously, even if you’re not trying to be a dragon like me, Open Cities improves Skyrim in ways that many mods can’t. It’s funny how the removal of a loading screen can do so much for a game.
Dragonfire – Tactically Enhanced Breath Shouts
The default fire and frost breath spells in Skyrim are fucking awful. It’s genuinely better to use one word of Fire Breath than it is to use the whole shout. Dragonfire basically makes it so,once you’ve got all three words of the two breath shouts, you breathe elemental death just like a dragon. It also buffs the normal attacks as well
Make Inferno – Enhanced and More Realistic Fire
If you don’t want to buff shouts but still want to set things on fire, then you want Make Inferno. Admittedly, t’s not the most realistic thing in he world, but Make Inferno makes it so that casting fire spells leaves patches of fire on the ground. This applies to most fire effects, from Fire Breath to the various fire spells to fire effects from traps and NPCs. These fire patches do the logical thing and damage anything that walks through them. But more importantly, it makes the Fire Breath shout far easier to aim.
I would recommend using the Fire and Ice mod by Apollodown, but his mods have mostly disappeared. Why? It’s… a weird reason and honestly not worth bringing up because of how weird it is. Shame, really, his mods were always great. Make Inferno at least does the job in the mean time!
Despite the name, this mod doesn’t actually do anything scary. You see, there are a TON of mods out there, the Populated series, that add more NPCs all over the place. Populated Skyrim simply merges them all into one lovely file which is easier to install. The downside is, if you have a weaker computer, you might not want so many NPCs. So instead you could just get Populated Roads and Paths Reborn, so there are more NPCs on roads for you to fly over and kill. There are various mods that also add more NPCs to cities, but you’ll probably need patches for them to work if you’re using Open Cities.
opusGlass’s dragon mods are always amazing, but Splendor is probably my favourite, simply because it makes vanilla dragons all different. Basically, rather than just seeing normal dragons at level 10 and only ever seeing legendary dragons at level 100, Splendor mixes and matches various dragon parts and randomizes them, meaning you get a nice combination of random dragons attacking you. So instead of getting like 14 dragons (some of which are super ugly, looking at you Serpentine and Legendary dragons!), you get 784 (according to opusGlass) random dragons to fight. Isn’t that awesome?
ORP – The Odahviing Retexture Project
This mod is basically a collection of files that retexture Odahviing. Why is this useful? Because if you’re using Playable Dragons Alpha, you don’t choose what dragon you are, you turn into Odahviing by default. And ORP is an easy way to change the look of Odahviing into a colour you prefer, or just improve his base texture. Alternatively, you can use Snow Hunter Odahviing, which looks absolutely beautiful… if you’re using high quality textures and ENBs and stuff already. There is also Armoured Odahviing, which gives you and Odahviing some lovely Daedric armour. It’s not my cup of tea, but I’m sure some people like it. Plus it makes the dragon you can literally summon way cooler.
As a dragon, you can’t really use normal, hand-based magic. That’s where Spells as Lesser Powers comes in. Basically, it adds a bunch of spell tomes so you can learn various spells as separate lesser powers, that can be used via the Powers/Shout key. This means you have more variation in your magic-based combat as a dragon. It’s also particularly useful for mages, since it means you now have three ways to use magic instead of one.
Dragons don’t have to wait 3 minutes to shout the name of another dragon, so why should you? Shout-Tastic buffs various shouts too. Yes, it’s overpowered. No, I don’t care. I’m a fucking dragon. Roar.
Those mods should cover all your bases. There are plenty of other mods out there too, such as the amazing Diverse Dragons Collection which adds loads of new dragon types, Summon Sindragosa and various other dragons, Legendary Cities – TES Arena (which adds more cities for you to destroy), and DYNDOLOD, which improves LODs and distant terrain. You could also use Electric Breath, a mod I made, if you’re looking for, well, a lightning version of the fire and frost breaths.
Just make sure you read mods carefully before you install them, and always check their requirements, alright?