In a proper answer to last week's new cinematic trailer for Skyblivion (the big modding project porting Oblivion to Skyrim's engine), we've now got a full 11 minute gameplay video for sibling mod project Skywind, which is, yes, Morrowind recreated in Skyrim. The video shows off a few key features that Morrowind fans have asked the TESRenewal team about in the past.

The video begins in Balmora where the Nerevarine, Morrowind's protagonist, accepts a writ for the assassination of a Dunmer named Sarayn Sadus. Like almost every other part of Skywind will be, it's a recreation of an actual quest from Morrowind. 

The upgrade to Skyrim's engine does the riverside Dunmer town plenty of favors, updating it from its sparse Morrowind look to a golden, hazy hub closer resembling its appearance in The Elder Scrolls: Online. It feels like a realization of an imperfect, rosy memory of a place—that is, it looks like what I might think Balmora looked like in Morrowind if I were reminiscing, which isn't what I'd see if I booted up the original game from 2002. 

Even the dialogue system, formatted like Skyrim's instead of the oppressively large text boxes from Morrowind, keeps a touch of 2002 with its blue and gold color scheme. 

One big takeaway is how the video shows off using the map during the quest to kill Sarayn Sadus. Morrowind, unlike later Elder Scrolls games, had no fast travel and no quest markers. Instead, quest givers verbally give directions to important locations. In the FAQ section of Skywind's website, it does address its plans for both, saying:

"You will be able to use fast-travel and quest markers because they come with the Skyrim engine. However it will still be quite possible to play through the entire game without them." 

As it also points out, Skywind's quests are built with this in mind, providing the same context in dialogue that the original Morrowind did. 

Instead of fast traveling, the video shows a player mousing over locations mentioned by the quest giver before setting a custom marker on the map to navigate by. Skywind's site also mentions that it plans for this aspect to be configurable, so perhaps it's already possible to play without quest markers appearing uninvited.

Poking enemies with a two-handed polearm is another feature that differentiates Morrowind from its younger siblings. Here, the player goes through the entire quest jabbing enemies to death, only briefly swapping to a bow to shoot at a their sleeping assassination target from above. 

There's just one major discrepancy in the gameplay we've seen so far for Skywind. If this were truly a Morrowind recreation, the player should have bunny-hopped the entire way to and from Balmora to increase their acrobatics skill. Perhaps we'll see that fundamental Morrowind feature in Skywind's next video.

Skyrim Special Edition's Creation Club is having a sale, and as part of that sale you can get your own pet Nix-Hound for free. It'll cost your in-game character 400 gold and a trip to Solstheim, but you the player won't need to spend any real money on Creation Club points to get it.

The Nix-Hound is a bug-eyed dog creature you might remember from Morrowind. This add-on not only lets you pick up one of the wall-eyed beasts as a pet (with its own inventory to carry your burdens), but also adds them as roaming monsters across the isle of Solstheim, which could use the variety.

You'll have to access the Creation Club via the main menu to find the Nix-Hound add-on. If you're after free mods then here's our list of the best mods for Skyrim Special Edition, and for vanilla Skyrim.

If you have fond memories of the intro cinematic for The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the new trailer for fan-made Skyblivion will probably give you goose bumps. The project to recreate Oblivion (yes, the whole game) as a Skyrim: Special Edition mod has been ongoing for years and every new look at it is more impressive than the last. 

This new trailer, featuring voice acting by Daniel Hodge, is a whole proper game trailer of its own, teasing Oblivion's plot while showing off its enemies and scenery. I can't help but recall the fly-by shot of the Imperial City in Oblivion's opening moments set to horns and strings. It was an impressive shot of a massive city and Skyblivion's new trailer captures that feeling without attempting to go shot-for-shot or word-for-word with the original. 

Previously, the Skyblivion modding team released a video showing off some of its environments, giving a look at a number of cities and locales faithfully recreated from Oblivion.

Skyblivion doesn't have a confirmed release date yet, a statement that reminds me yet again how professional a project it looks to be despite being created by modders and not a fully-funded studio. We do know that Skyblivion will be free, provided you own Skyrim and Oblivion including the DLCs, which Skyblivion's installer will check for. 

While we wait for this impressive recreation, you can still install some pretty great Oblivion mods to update the game's visuals and gameplay.

It's about time book burning came to Skyrim Special Edition. A Tragedy in Black? Boethiah's Proving? Pah! Those are not fine works of literature. They're heretical garbage, and should be treated as such: First ripped to pieces and then burned to a crisp. And really, how many copies of Argonian Account does any one person need? Enter Project Illiteracy, which promises to let you put your books to good use as fuel against the harsh winter nights.

The Skyrim Special Edition mod gives you a new ability, which is named "Destroy Books." No messing around here. "Picture your manly Nord barbarian just taking that book and ripping it apart," the description reads. "Yeah. Just really shredding that thing. So manly." The mod was originally released for vanilla Skyrim back in 2017, but a new version released this week supports the updated Special Edition.

A surprising amount of thought went into Project Illiteracy despite the jokey name: the longer the book, the more paper it will generate for you. The most practical application of that paper is in making scrolls, but burning is also an option. Other than the general glee of pyromania, that could be pretty useful if you're playing with a survival mod that requires you to keep warm.

Modder Epic Crab thought ahead and made Project Illiteracy compatible with the bajillion other mods that add books to Skyrim, to ensure you can, if you so choose, destroy them all. The cherry on top is compatibility with the Campfire mod:

"If you're running Campfire, the xEdit script will automatically detect that and generate recipes for burning books for fuel and replenishing your fires. Campfire is a soft dependency in the script, so if you aren't using Campfire, the script will still work."

There's a caveat to this mod crossover, which is that if you douse the campfire, it may return some of your books to you destroyed. "I think that's fair though, setting them on fire pretty much ruins books," the mod description says. Can't argue that one.

If you needed it, this is your warning that images and links in this feature are entirely not safe for work.

There are mods to make the characters in just about any game you play naked. The virtual humans of Stardew Valley, Fallout, Fallout Shelter, even, and Hearthstone are all subjected to the whims of diligent modders. Every time I set out to grab mods for a new playthrough of Skyrim or Fallout 4 (the two most-modded games on Nexus Mods), I'm overwhelmed by the number of gravity-defying breast enhancements available. And yet the number of dicks on display? Dismal.

Where are all the penis mods? One simple answer is that PC gaming, ground zero for modding, still suffers under the misconception that men (specifically cisgender, heterosexual ones) are the majority, when studies have shown that women actually make up half the audience. Game development still fights to retain people of marginalized genders, an effect mirrored in the modding community which requires many of the same skills. The mods they create reflect the interests of the creators and assumptions about the people playing them—but as I learned, that's not the only reason they're so pitifully rare.

After talking with modders and developers, it turns out that tacking-on the ol' wedding tackle is just plain difficult.

An unfortunate dearth of dongs 

When I went digging for more dick mods and the reasons why they're so rare, I discovered that for a few modders, scarcity is exactly why they want to create these mods. "All over the place there are nude female body replacers and [almost] nothing like that for men, and that's exactly the gap that I intended to fill with this mod" writes modder Ratrace, in the description for Better Males for Skyrim Special Edition. 

As Ratrace says on the mod's page, the dongs of Better Males are quite rigid, and not in the sexy way. They don't animate. It's as if you'd taped a banana to your character's crotch and called it a day (though for variety you can choose upward banana or downward banana, whichever suits your fancy). "Animating genitals [...] is something that is way over my head," Ratrace says. "A topic for the pros among the modders." Better Males isn't the premier expression of modded penis glory, but for many modders even that level of detail is unattainable, both because of the skills required and how games are built in the first place.

I first noticed this sexy mod dick-screpancy four years ago (yes, I have been stewing on it that long), when there were even fewer options. Today, there are a few more choices, with examples from Skyrim, Fallout 4, Resident Evil 2, and even Soul Calibur 6. Still, I expected more progress since 2015. I didn't intend to spend my work days looking for penis mods specifically, but here I am again absolutely livid that there aren't more of them. 

Ratrace tells me about some other notable contributions to the naked modding community for Skyrim, the well-known Schlongs of Skyrim and Bodyslide. But when I investigate, I find Schlongs of Skyrim is no longer supported by its original creator, gone from Nexus and available only on the adult modding site Lover's Lab. By comparison, boob mods are easy to find on Nexus for tons of games. Bodyslide, a body preset generating tool, supports penises, but I really have to know what I'm looking for to find them. Searching "bodyslide" alone yields pages and pages of fantastical boobs but very few penis presets. As one of the most-modded PC games today, Skyrim's few hard-to-find dick mods don't bode well for games with smaller modding communities. 

The creator of the Nude Greece mod for Assassin's Creed Odyssey (which originated as only Nude Alexios) explained to me that penises are at a distinct disadvantage right out of the gate. Characters in 3D games very rarely have them, and building a dong from scratch is a difficult anatomical proposition. He blames what he feels is a lingering taboo across all forms of media on naked nads. "In games that means Ken doll models that are hard to work with," he says. 

Feminine models, by contrast, already have the proper silhouettes right out of the box. Their bodies may not be highly detailed in the places that nude modders care about, but they at least have all the necessary geometry to begin tinkering with. 

"No studio would release a title with entirely flat-chested females," Nude Greece's modder says. He's right. Unless by specific stylistic choice, realistic-looking 3D games will always have women character models with some kind of breast shape. "So while female models are easy to strip, males need some level of editing or they'll look completely fake. The tools need to be available for mesh modding to even get one started."

Aspiring modders may not have all the requisite skills for enlarging or physics-ifying breasts, but they can start by learning to retexture the ones already there. When it comes to dongs, the barrier to entry is much, much higher. As Nude Greece's modder says, that means a lot more work up front for penis modders. 

Ratrace describes just part of the technical work required to slap a sack and shaft on a character. The mesh, which I think of like the chocolate skin of a hollow chocolate bunny, has to hold together in all the proper places. When a character moves around, the mesh has to accommodate that movement without just snapping back and giving you a view into the hollow inside of, say, an arm. Or a penis. Ratrace says that "painting" the proper influence or "weight" that vertices of the model have is tough enough for commonly-used areas like the line between neck and body, let alone the unexplored territory of penis to body. 

Nude Greece's modder encountered issues with his original Nude Alexios mod, where all of the crotches just looked a bit flat. "The first version got a good response despite having a pretty flat-looking crotch," he said. "Hopefully my next release will have more detail in the places that need it." He's learning the skills and tools for modding as he goes, meaning that progress involves spending more time modding games than playing them. Nude Greece's modder and I get to spend a few minutes bonding over our shared hope for penis-filled games in the future. We settle on Dragon Age as a good penis prospect—Inquisition being his first attempt at penis modding, and a natural fit given the softcore sex scenes.

Since we've spoken, Nude Greece released an update for his Assassins Creed Odyssey mod that suggests his skills are improving: "Adds depth to the v2 penis so it looks less flattened." Important progress.

The professional penis scene 

Even though we know designing after-market dicks is a chore, the discrepancy is there at the source in professional game development, too. Only a few pioneering games have launched with their own packages packed-in. One that we got a particular amount of pleasure from was Conan Exiles' "endowment" slider.

Joel Bylos, creative director for Conan Exiles, explained to me by email how his game's disco sticks came to be. "I was more interested in nudity for the adherence to the setting," he says. "The Conan stories feature plenty of it and nobody in the stories bats an eyelid at it. I wanted to try and normalize it in the same way in the game, both for men and women." Bylos also points out the generally mature nature of Conan's universe. Given that the game would feature plenty of violence, it would already fall on the mature end of ratings scales before considering nudity.

This was heartening to hear, as multiple modders expressed frustration that so many games give violence a pass but turn their noses up at nudity. "In Skyrim people get decapitated, burnt to death, electrocuted, bludgeoned to death, torn to pieces by dragons etc.," Ratrace says. "But the sight of a naked body is a no-go."

Bylos says that Funcom's experience with digital dongs was far less hassle than what modders experience. "I don’t think the penises caused us too much drama," he says. "If I recall correctly we used the same physics system for simulating cloth that we used for our wedding tackle physics." That too is an imperfect simulation, of course—I've never seen a penis as unanimated as that of Ratrace's Better Males, but I haven't seen one flap like a flag like Conan Exlies' do, either. Even with professionals working on Conan's willies rather than vigilante riggers hacking together body parts in their spare time, not all Wilhelms are well-behaved.

"For a period of time, every todger in the game decided to stretch across the map," Bylos says. "This was due to a cloth physics bug, but it manifested as every character in the game having a wang that stretched from crotch to the far horizon. We had curious developers 'following the stretchy dick road,' in order to figure out where the wayward members had buried themselves. As it turns out, they went to coordinates 0,0,0 and nobody found any treasure at the end of the journey. Shame, really."

After everything I've heard about keeping peckers in line, I ask Bylos if the work of sorting out all the various boner bugs was worth it. "For the amount of work involved, it would have been worth multiple times the amount of time spent on it," he says.

So perhaps we'll see more games following Conan's lead? "Sadly, but understandably no," in Bylos's opinion. "There have been a few (SCUM, for example) but I think that most developers don’t want to deal with the uncertainty (whether it involves the process of modeling characters or dealing with ratings)." 

It is a shame that Skyrim and Assassin's Creed Odyssey and Dragon Age: Inquisition, all of which could benefit from some dongs to better serve their realism or sex scenes, haven't included them as Conan Exiles has. All three have ratings from the ESRB, PEGI, and Australia's rating system permit intense violence and nudity or sexual content. It seems that where bodies are concerned, breasts are deemed a necessity but penises are still a luxury.

By and large, dong development will likely continue to fall on our noble friends in the modding community. As Ratrace says, there's a gap to fill with fully-featured dong mods. Although the audience and talent pools may both be smaller than those for big-busted characters, both are growing. The original Better Males for Skyrim has a download total of 7.8 million on Nexus Mods alone, while Ratrace's version for Skyrim Special Edition is on its way up at over half a million. I don't have the skills to model and mod willies myself (though like Nude Greece I suppose I could learn). But I have, inadvertently, become a devoted lobbyist.

"I get angry too at all the bias against dicks. But that's how change starts," Nude Greece says.  "More dicks for everyone!" Modding penises may be hard, but we wouldn't have them any other way.

Here's how it works. You travel to Riverwood's Sleeping Giant Inn, preferably with a brand new character who has skipped past the tutorial thanks to Alternate Start—Live Another Life or your preferred alternative. You track down the ghost lady in the corner of the bar and talk to her, and then you get whisked away to Transylvania, as interpreted by Castlevania 2: Simon's Quest and now recreated as a Skyrim mod.

Yes, you get a chain whip. The vampire killer weapon will be your best friend as you whip through the various skeletons, werewolves, and mermen that you meet on this questline (and who all drop hearts when they die, which you collect with a glorious beeping noise). 

It's pretty straightforward. In towns you talk to people and visit the church, hoping to find someone who will let you trade hearts for an upgrade. Then you march out into the spooky wilderness again, preferably in daylight, to whip your way through monsters on your way to the next town and the next objective in your quest to return Dracula to the grave.

Though of course it's not a 2D platformer, the CV2 mod does remain faithful to its inspiration in a lot of ways. Skyrim's regular levelling system is gone, and instead you trade hearts to priests for level-ups. They'll also heal you as well, which is nice because the regeneration over time that's normally part of Skyrim is also gone here. 

Another part of the original game preserved in this mod is your inability to swim. Touch the water in Transylvania and you'll die instantly. That makes the section where you have to cross a broken bridge while being shot at by mermen particularly annoying. First-person platforming is the worst, and in Skyrim's third-person mode it's only slightly better. I've drowned a lot more than I've been killed by werewolves.

The CV2 mod's an impressive thing overall, featuring a whole bunch of new music too including remixes of Castlevania tunes. You can download it for Skyrim Special Edition here.

Since the last time we updated our list of the best Skyrim Special Edition mods the Skyrim Script Extender has been made compatible with it. You can download it here (it'll be labelled "Current SE build"). Turn off automatic updates for Skyrim Special Edition once it's installed, as the creation club still receives patches which routinely break the Script Extender until modders update it.

With the Script Extender modders can now alter this version of Bethesda's RPG as drastically as Oldrim. Near-essentials like SkyUI are now available in this slightly prettier (it does have nicer shadows), and more stable (you can alt-tab as much as you like) version of Skyrim. To be fair, there were other changes as well, like these. 

If you're playing the Skyrim Special Edition and looking for the best mods available, look no further. Some of these Skyrim Special Edition mods can be found on Bethesda's site and downloaded while in-game, but the links we'll post all point to the repository at Nexus Mods. Mods added in the latest update of this list have been marked with a ⭐. And if you're looking to have even more fun in Skyrim, check out our list of Skyrim console commands.

Vortex ⭐

Download link

For downloading, installing, and managing these Skyrim Special Edition mods and others, we recommend Vortex. It's an extremely useful utility, and it works with a number of other games like Fallout 3 and 4, The Witcher series, the Darks Souls games, XCOM 2, and lots more.

SkyUI ⭐ 

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The heavens parted, golden saints sang, and SkyUI was finally supported by Skyrim Special Edition. This interface replacer makes Skyrim feel like it was designed for mouse controls, and lets you filter and sort inventory based on weight, value, damage and the like. Also adds an in-game mod configuration menu several other mods rely on.

A Quality World Map ⭐ 

Download link

Skyrim's map is functional but boring. A Quality World Map offers multiple ways to fix it. It can replace the map with a much more detailed world texture, with colors that help delineate the separate areas much more obviously, but there's also an option to have a paper map, with a more Oblivion look, if that's your thing. 

Legacy of the Dragonborn ⭐ 

Download link

Adds a gallery you can fill with unique items, a museum to your achievements that is also a library, a storage facility, a questline of its own, and a place to learn archaeology complete with its own perks. While there is a version of Legacy of the Dragonborn for Oldrim, the v5 update specifically for Special Edition remaps the building to make it larger and more like a real museum.

The Asteria Dwemer Airship ⭐ 

Download link

There are player home mods to suit all tastes, but the Asteria is a particularly nice one—a flying ship with all mod cons, by which I mean storage space and crafting tables. It's permanently docked, however, and can't be moved around, though it does have a teleporter for a more immersive alternative to fast-travel. Flyable skyship mods still haven't made the jump over from vanilla Skyrim, unfortunately.

Inigo ⭐

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Maybe you don't think a blue Khajiit who follows you around commenting on everything and being sarcastic about Lydia is what Skyrim needs, but trust us on this. Inigo is a follower with tons of dialogue, some tied to his own questline and more that crops up at appropriate times depending on the location you're at. He can be told where to go and what to do by whistling, and will follow you even if you've got an existing companion, chatting away with them thanks to skilfully repurposed voice lines.

Unofficial Skyrim Patch

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This mod is a compendium of hundreds of fixes for bugs, text, objects, items, quests, and gameplay elements assembled by prolific modder Arthmoor. The patch is designed to be as compatible as possible with other mods. If you've got a few hours, you can read through the patch notes.

Opening Scene Overhaul

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This mod, by elderscrolliangamer, changes and enhances Skyrim's opening sequence by restoring dialogue that Bethesda chose to cut, but which is still present in the game files. With that content restored, you'll learn more about the world you're preparing to inhabit by listening in on additional conversations and seeing full sequences that were snipped before release. Best of all, if you choose to side with the Stormcloaks, you'll actually be able to escape Helgen with Ulfric himself at your side.

Open Cities

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It's more than a little immersion-breaking in Skyrim to enter a city through a gate and encounter a loading screen. Open Cities, by Arthmoor, aims for more of a Morrowind feel: the cities aren't instances, they're part of the larger world. Stroll right in—or ride in on horseback—without a break in your experience, and these cities will feel more like real places than loaded-in maps.

Phenderix Magic World

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This impressively robust magic mod adds new locations like The School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, the magical town of Manantis, and even a new magical dimension to explore. It also adds hundreds of new spells from all schools of magic, plus lots of magic weapons, over a dozen new followers, and a quest to get you started.

Alternate Start—Live Another Life

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If you're playing Special Edition, you're starting from scratch whether you're a newcomer to Skyrim or a veteran. Why not start your new game as someone other than the Dragonborn? Alternate Start—again, by Arthmoor—is a roleplaying mod that gives you choices on how you'd like to begin your next playthrough. Are you a patron at in inn, a visitor arriving by boat, a prisoner in a jail cell, or the member of a guild? You can start as a soldier, an outlaw, a hunter, or even a vampire. It's a great way to re-experience Skyrim from a different perspective.

Relationship Dialogue Overhaul

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This mod by cloudedtruth adds thousands of lines of voiced dialogue for NPCs, directed at making you feel as if you have a closer and more personal relationship with followers and friends. Your spouse, if you have one, will no longer sound like a random follower, but address you in a more personal manner, and those you've angered will have a host of new insults to hurl your way.

Diverse Dragons Collection

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Despite the Special Edition's visual overhaul, its dragons are still a bit ho-hum. This mod, contributed to by a large collection of modders, adds 28 new and unique dragons with different models and textures, and capable of over a dozen new breath attacks and abilities. The dragons come in different ranks as well, to ensure you have a challenge no matter what your level.

Achievements Mod Enabler

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Just because you're modding doesn't mean you're cheating (necessarily). So why does the SSE disable achievements if you've got mods running? Stick it to 'em by using this plugin from xSHADOWMANx that allows you to earn achievements even while using mods.

Static Mesh Improvements

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While the SSE adds plenty of enhanced visuals, it doesn't do a thing to improve the original game's low-poly meshes. This mod edits hundreds of 3D models placed in thousands of different locations for items like furniture, clutter, architectural elements, and landscape objects to make them look nicer and more realistic.

Total Character Makeover

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Skyrim's NPCs already looked dated when the game was first released, and they certainly haven't aged well. The SSE might improve the looks of the world, but it doesn't touch its citizens, so this mod from Scaria should be on your list. It gives everyone in the game (including your avatar) a facelift with more detailed textures that won't kneecap your framerate, and without making characters look out of place.

True 3D Sound for Headphones

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"This mod enables true 3D sound for Skyrim SE by using a so called HRTF to simulate binaural hearing using normal stereo headphones. You will hear exactly from which direction a sound is coming from." I don't know exactly what that first sentence means, but I understand the second one. Make the SSE more realistic for your ears with this mod from CptYouaredead.

You also might want to check out Immersive Sounds.

Frostfall and Campfire

Download link (Frostfall)Download link (Campfire)

Looking to turn SSE into a survival experience? Then bundle up and look no further. These mods from Chesko make the frosty world of Skyrim more dangerous yet more immersive and enjoyable with a system that makes you manage your temperature in the cold climate. Hypothermia is an issue, especially if you swim through icy water, so you'll have to dress warmly, and camping elements include craftable tents, torches, and other gear. There's even a crafting skill system.

Also, check out Wet and Cold, which adds weather-dependent visual effects and sounds.

Cutting Room Floor

Download link

Another big mod from Arthmoor restores loads of content that exists in SSE's data files but wasn't implemented in the game. Numerous locations, NPCs, dialogue, quests, and items have been brought into the light, and the game is richer for it.

The Forgotten City

Download link

Skyrim's got lots of adventure, but here's about 10 hours more courtesy of writer and developer Nick Pearce. Play detective and solve a murder mystery while exploring a massive, ancient city. It's got excellent, award-winning writing, a non-linear story, fantastic voice acting by a large cast, an enjoyable original soundtrack, and even a touch of time travel. Here's our write-up of the Forgotten City Skyrim mod.

Ars Metallica—Smithing Enhancement

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Unless you're playing as a metal-plated tank who swings an enormous two-handed sword around, there's not a lot of use for smithing. Archers, thieves, and other stealthy characters have no issues finding light armor on their adventures, so there's never been much reason to make it themselves. This mod by Arthmoor gives slippery sorts reasons to learn smithing, by letting them forge arrows, lockpicks, and guild-specific armor, as well as melt down bulkier armor they'd never actually wear into ingots.

I've crossed a desert, forded a river, fought blue lizards and green spiders, and finally made it to Elsweyr. I'm greeted by a muscular tiger, prowling around on all fours, who introduces himself with polite gravel and welcomes me to the home of the Khajiit. This is Moonpath to Elsweyr, one of the first quest mods ever made for Skyrim.

Back in 2012 when Bethesda's Creation Kit was released, the mod scene exploded. It's cute to look back on how we reported it at the time: "Not enough goats? Download the goat summoning mod. More dog eyebrows? Mod some in. Giants not big enough? Download the bigger giants mod. Skyrim is going nuts. In a very good way."

Of course people made mods even without the Creation Kit, but it brought ambitious, sweeping changes within reach of anyone willing to dig through its wiki. It was a particular boon to quest mods like Moonpath to Elsweyr, which appeared so suddenly people were convinced it had been in the works before the Creation Kit was released. But no, modder Tomas Sala, who released Moonpath under the name "muppetpuppet", was able to quickly make multiple new locations, creatures, and fully voiced questlines solely using the Creation Kit. He did have one advantage, though—over 10 years of experience as a 3D artist and developer.

"It was sort of an escape from the work-for-hire game jobs I was involved in at the time," he says, "a creative release. I actually found out that quite a few notable modders were industry veterans as well."

Still, it was his first mod and although it would be eclipsed by later ones with pro-level writing like Enderal and The Forgotten City, it's still fun to go back to. It's been updated for Skyrim Special Edition too, which is nice. I like being able to play it in a version of Skyrim that doesn't freak out when I alt-tab away from it.

Moonpath begins with a caravan trip from Falkreath, following the hidden byways of the Khajiit. The central location is a player home in the waterways of a jungle canyon, but later on you get access to a skyship captained by a Khajiit pirate complete with terrible accent who ferries you to a tropical island ruin.

Sala is very aware his mod has flaws, because he made it up as he went along. "I started off with a player home as a test, and that become a hub for a string of exotic adventures. But none of it was planned, and it was all uploaded piecemeal as soon as it was playable. Which gives the entire mod a very haphazard and linear feel." 

It became popular fast, which was good and bad. As he explains, "there was so much feedback and commenting, which can be intoxicating as well, just the general high of being in communication with your users. But it also led to me forgetting what I had done a lot, 'hmmm where did I put that overpowered katana I used for testing? Oh well, nobody will probably find it', which caused quite a few raised eyebrows amongst players."

Sala stepped away from modding during the paid mods controversy. Now he focuses on his own games, with an indie project called The Falconeer in the works. "There where people creating popular mods in their spare time whose lives would have been altered for the better if they could make this their profession," he says, "literally lift them from a struggling menial job situation. And they were being harassed, with some even claiming mods where the property of the community not their creators." 

Mooonpath has an important place in the history of Skyrim's mods. Its monsters, trees, even the airship have all been reused in other mods. It's even been incorporated into Legacy of the the Dragonborn, a mod that adds a museum dedicated to the player's victories which you slowly fill with Skyrim's unique quest items. There are entire rooms dedicated to daedric artifacts and books, and a display that unlocks when you finish Moonpath—a little shrine that makes it feel as significant as any of the game's official questlines.

Sala's modest about his achievement. "I had the most fun with the environments," he says. "I think the best description for the Moonpath is 'a holiday away from icy Skyrim'. It's more of a tour of cool locations than anything else."

Moonpath to Elsweyr is available for both the original Skyrim and Skyrim Special Edition. 

Skyblivion is a massive project that intends to port Oblivion into Skyrim's advanced engine. The modders are planning to port all environments and quests over, though in its final form you'll be able to pick and choose the parts you want. 

"This includes all enhancements developed by the team such as our Landscaping Overhaul, Interior Overhaul, City Overhaul, Weapon/Armor Overhaul and much more," reads a post on the Skyblivion site. 

The project has been in development for years. Back in February we got a look at the Imperial City at the heart of Oblivion's map. For an earlier work-in-progress view, check out one of Skyblivion's teasers from back in 2016.

The final mod will be free, and is designed to be compatible with the Skyrim Special Edition. You'll need to own Skyrim, Oblivion and their DLC packs to install the final mod. There's no release window at the moment. It's a volunteer-driven project, so progress can be irregular, but it's come a long way since Skyblivion started way back in in 2012.

For me, the best Skyrim mods transform the realm's aesthetics. Be that by way of weather overhauls, lighting ENBs, or, my newest favourite, BuzzDee84 and PhenomFazMFQ's Ultimate HD Fire Effects SSE. 

I've a particular fondness of the dark arts in high-fantasy RPGs, and the College of Winterhold is always my first stop during new playthroughs of Skyrim. As always, the best way to show off mods of this calibre is with pictures. 

Courtesy of the project's Nexus Mod page, here's a collection of before and after shots, magic spells in motion, and conjured Atronachs for your pleasure:    

Ultimate HD Fire Effects SSE is more than an update of its Oldrim counterpart, with a host of nips and tucks—including improved smoke patterns, over 20 new textures, several meshes and 4K-8K resolution support. 

Fancy that? More information on Ultimate HD Fire Effects SSE, including installation instructions, lives on its Nexus Mods page.