Blood’s Honor

Blood’s Honor is the first ‘add-on’ to Dragon Rising. It is designed to seamlessly fit in with a full Dragon Rising install – simply add the new mods to your list in the relevant sections, recreate your Bashed Patch, and go. My intention is to create a series of add-ons to effectively create a modular mod guide – install the base, then add ‘packs’ based on the kind of playthrough you’re intending to do.

Blood’s Honor is named after a quest in the Companions’ storyline, which should tell you everything you need to know about it. This pack is all about combat. My intention is not to overhaul Skyrim’s combat completely – however hard people try, you just can’t recreate a system like Dark Souls or The Witcher 3 in Skyrim’s engine. So, as with Dragon Rising, the idea behind Blood’s Honor is to enhance what’s already there, not try to change or replace it.

With these mods installed, combat will be quicker, more dynamic, more rewarding of both skilled play and prior preparation, and a lot more lethal. You’ll deal and take more damage, but you’ll have tools to deal with that – timed blocking, the ability to actually get out of the way of a big power attack, being able to block while dual wielding, and the possibility of limited, cost-free training to get you going. But you will still have to think about your opponent. Draugr, undead, and dragons are now the feared creatures they always should have been, and you won’t want to venture into one of Skyrim’s many Nordic tombs without the right equipment, or at least some magical knowledge.

In addition, Blood’s Honor contains a two entirely optional sections. The first is my recommendations for the best weapons and armor mods, giving you more things to kill your enemies with, and more ways to look cool doing it. The second is a small collection of mods to enhance your experience with the Companions in-game – because if you’ve installed Blood’s Honor, you might well find yourself taking up residence in the halls of Jorrvaskr.

So pick up your weapon of choice, Dragonborn. Can you live up the legends of Ysgramor?

Note: Blood’s Honor assumes that the user has already followed the Dragon Rising guide. Of course, you can simply look at the below mods and install them onto any load order, but they have been selected with Dragon Rising in mind. If you have not already done so, please consider reading and completing a Dragon Rising install.

Last Update: December 10th, 2017 (History)

Hitting The Books

Post-install instructions for completing a mod list.

In order to prevent every mod guide presented on this site from becoming too long, this is the catch-all post to cover everything you should do after downloading the final mod and running LOOT one more time. So far, it only includes instructions for using Wyre Bash to create a Bashed Patch, but as more complex mod guides are posted, Hitting The Books will start to cover more complex post-install processes, including DynDOLOD and Merge Plugins.

Dragon Rising

The ethos of Dragon Rising is simple – to fix bugs, improve the UI, and enhance the visuals of Skyrim in a performance-friendly way. Additional gameplay and AI mods do a lot of work to improve the experience of playing vanilla Skyrim, without moving far away from the game Bethesda created. You won’t find new quests, new lands, new creatures, or new mechanics here. Think of it as Skyrim Plus. Everything that’s great about the game, enhanced or tweaked for maximum enjoyment for the player.

My ethos for mod guides in general is to keep it simple. All of these mods can be downloaded with a single click from the Skyrim Special Edition Nexus, and while Mod Organizer is not fully featured for Skyrim Special Edition yet, it works well enough that I am comfortable using it for this guide, and all that will follow.

Another important aspect to me is keeping it performance friendly. Dragon Rising has 100 .esp files, and I’m able to run it on 1080p with high settings (shadows dropped to 1k) at between 30-40 fps. That might not sound like much, but my system specs are as follows:

• Intel i5-4210M 2.6GHZ
• Nvidia Geforce GTX 850M
• 8GB Ram

So this mod list will run on damn near anything. If you can run the vanilla game, you can run Dragon Rising. So why don’t we get started?

Note: Dragon Rising assumes that the user has set up a stable base for modding, either through the Before The Storm guide or their own initiative. If you have not done so, please consider reading and completing Before The Storm.

Last update: December 31st 2017 (History)

Before The Storm

Setting up a modded base for Skyrim: Special Edition.

This is a simple guide to the various steps that one should take before beginning to mod Skyrim. It assumes basic computer literacy, but not necessarily huge amounts of modding experience. The hope for this guide, like every other guide on this site, is that anyone can use it, regardless of previous experience with modding in Elder Scrolls games. All the mod guides that can be found on this site assume that these steps have been completed, and they won’t be repeated elsewhere. Note that Before The Storm does not contain any mods – it simply gives you the tools to begin. It is also not designed to be a ‘definitive guide’. I couldn’t give you all the information you might need, even if I set out to. But this is the set-up that works for me.

So, if you’re interested in exploring the world of Skyrim Special Edition modding, please continue. It’s good to have you here.