Make Skyrim Special Edition slightly more special—and then stop.
Sometimes I like to spend an afternoon messing up Skyrim with a Korean mod that drops an entire modern-day city into it, complete with motorbikes that replace the horses but still neigh disconcertingly when you ride them. Maybe I’ll try out that banned mod that turns Skyrim into World War 2 next.
But when I go back for a longer playthrough, my tastes get much more plain. I don’t want dragons that look like «Macho Man» Randy Savage. I want dragons that look like dragons, and a Skyrim that feels like Skyrim—just tweaked to seem a bit fresher.
«Vanilla Plus» is what Skyrim modders call the school of thought where you find mods that embrace the original game’s better qualities, rather than trying to bend it into something completely different. We won’t be replacing all the NPCs with botox perfection today, nor will we be turning the combat into a soulslike. Sadly, there is no place for Thomas the Tank Engine in a Vanilla Plus loadout.
The first step is graphical, but rather than the kind of ENB reshade that makes every outdoor scene an Instagram sunset, I go with Community Shaders. First uploaded in 2023, the work of the Community Shaders Team provides a foundation for graphical improvements without a performance hit—though you’ll need to let the shaders compile on your first load after installing them.
There’s a heap of add-ons linked from the mod’s description page, and I go with Subsurface Scattering to give everyone more realistic skin, Dynamic Cubemaps for reflections and water, the Light Limit Fix to bypass the hard limit of four dynamic lights Skyrim normally has, Screen-Space Shadows to get hair that casts shadows on faces, and Grass Lighting because it makes the fields look nice.
