Oblivion Mods

Red, here is the UI mod link on the TES forum. It contains good info on it too:
http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/i...

lethial wrote:

Red, here is the UI mod link on the TES forum. It contains good info on it too:
http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/i...

Thanks Machine. I'll check that out when I get home, getting the dreaded ACCESS DENIED while I'm at work.
and by the way you better not get your Tag before me, I've got to be really close at this point but your gaining on me rapidly.

Redhwk wrote:

Thanks Machine. I'll check that out when I get home, getting the dreaded ACCESS DENIED while I'm at work.
and by the way you better not get your Tag before me, I've got to be really close at this point but your gaining on me rapidly.

haha no worries, in the coming weeks I will be working in a lab with no internet access, and when I get home I will most likely play OB or just crash on my bed. Besides, I am far away from getting a tag. (Random thought, really though if one can truly be a machine it must be pretty awesome, I mean no need to sleep anymore )

Back on topic:

Just want to point this mod out since I know some of us has asked about skipping the intro dungeon before.

End of Sewers Savegame

Edwin wrote:
lethial wrote:
Edwin wrote:
lethial wrote:

What resolution are you playing in Edwin? That mod doesn't work well for higher res. Also, I wish there is a mod that could make things lighter... My char cannot carry anything it seems :(

1200 x 750 (16:10)

thanks, that is a interesting res.

zero: while +50 to capacity is good, but most hammers weigh as much as 40 (lbs?) so a lot of things still have to be left unlooted

I had to dial down the res for performance. 1440 x 900 wasnt cutting it.

Edwin, did it give you these options for setting your resolution. The only 16:10 option Oblivion gives me is the 1650 x 1080 and I don't see how I can change it to any 16:10 resolution other than that.

Copingsaw wrote:
Edwin wrote:
lethial wrote:
Edwin wrote:
lethial wrote:

What resolution are you playing in Edwin? That mod doesn't work well for higher res. Also, I wish there is a mod that could make things lighter... My char cannot carry anything it seems :(

1200 x 750 (16:10)

thanks, that is a interesting res.

zero: while +50 to capacity is good, but most hammers weigh as much as 40 (lbs?) so a lot of things still have to be left unlooted

I had to dial down the res for performance. 1440 x 900 wasnt cutting it.

Edwin, did it give you these options for setting your resolution. The only 16:10 option Oblivion gives me is the 1650 x 1080 and I don't see how I can change it to any 16:10 resolution other than that.

http://www.gamerswithjobs.com/node/2...

Er ... thanks Edwin ... you are so on top of it. I just saw that thread and was about to edit my post saying I found the answer but you beat me to it.

The things boredom does to you.

I've checked the places I know of but figured I'd ask here incase anyone has seen or come across. I've been looking for a blood mod. I hate the way blood fades away after like 5 seconds. I was hoping to be able to adjust it somewhere to make it stay for like 5 minutes.. or 2 minutes.. or even 60 seconds if having so many textures drags the FPS down. After a big battle, I want to know that a big battle just happened and not just see a bunch of "clean" bodies laying all around.

Vega wrote:

I've checked the places I know of but figured I'd ask here incase anyone has seen or come across. I've been looking for a blood mod. I hate the way blood fades away after like 5 seconds. I was hoping to be able to adjust it somewhere to make it stay for like 5 minutes.. or 2 minutes.. or even 60 seconds if having so many textures drags the FPS down. After a big battle, I want to know that a big battle just happened and not just see a bunch of "clean" bodies laying all around.

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/i...

Woo.. thanks Edwin!

I just had some fantastic dungeon crawling experience with these two mods:

generic dungeon drone makes the music in dungeons much spookier
darker dungeon makes dungeons even more spookier

really give these a try, I was on the edge of my seat the whole time last night while dungeon crawling, with the help of these two mods.

I switched the grab button and the sneak button on the 360 version of Oblivion, does that count?

Seriously, I did it because I was tired of accidentally slowing to a crawl in the middle of combat because I mashed down on the thumbstick too hard. That being said, it's become kind of a moot point, because my character is now so sneaky that I can fire multiple arrows at someone ten feet away and they never find me.

I just found a great mod...

"Unicorn No Longer A Bastard"

I have been meaning to do this, but darn work and Oblivion just keeps on gettting in the way of things Thanks to this rather slow Friday morning (apparently, a lot of people took the day off today because the weather today is unseasonably nice for the area and extremely rare for this time of the month.)

I have been playing Oblivion as much as I can, but increasingly I find myself spending more and more time checking out mods (which is infuriating because that cuts my 2 or 3 hours of playing time to half or less )
Much of the time is spent trying to find useful information on the Official OB forum. So I figure I will try to lessen the pain for those who want to try different mods by giving an overview of what I use, and my thoughts on them.

Before I start, all the mods can be found on OB mod wiki, and tessource

Below are all the mods that I have tried, and they are far far from being exhuasive, the modding community is simply amazing.

mods that I think everyone should at least try once
These mods don't really unbalance the game and really enhances the game play experience. Listed in the order that the mods that has zero or no game balance changes comes first

BTmodGreatly enhance the usability of the inventory, spell, etc. screens.
Map coloring world map never looked sexier
Mod manager very handy tool to keep the mods you use organized.
TF time modfor new game only. For your current game use console command "set timescale=##" default ## is 30 which means 1 min real time = 30 min OB time
More spectators in arena lite be sure to grab the lite version that author linked so that you don't take that much of a framerate hit in arena
Sexier looking water
Faster turning horses horses turn faster now
creepier dungeon music
movable bodies bodies are more movable
Shorter Grass
Smaller crosshair, and sneak eye mover
Lighter ingredients vital for the flower picker in you
Skingrad Home Bookshelves and expansion
Anything that makes your house better is good right?
Oblivion Enahnced-Race Edition combo mod of various mods related to character creation.
turn off lights a bit glitchy but still good
Faster arrows depending on the quality of the arrow OR lighter arrows these two mods are not compatible for now
Faster projectile spell travel time
wilderness creature list creatures in the wild, now can come in packs, and more level and type variations are introduced. If you are "lucky" you might even get some uber tough creatures that you will have to run from...
Saddle Bags

Mods that can be viewed as making the game easier, aka cheating, but are still very good:
longer summons summons now last longer
weapons and armors are more durable
call steedlets you summon your horse next to you, and put it on auto follow mode
dimensional packet (think BG2) teleports you to your own storage area
Detect hostility spells targetted spell that gives enemy, friends different color of aura that you can visibly see. No more killing someone who is not aggresive.
Deadlier sneaking better multiplier at higher ranks of sneaking
imperial City hideout very well made underground hide out in imperial city
poison food crafting a machine is added to the Darkbrotherhood
ownable dark unicorn
subterranean Alchemy lab this is a nicely designed dungeon/alchemy lab

Mods that does make the game easier.
Fingerprint polishing cloth you use this on a container that is owned by someone, and if you succeed the contents of the container will become "clean" so they don't appear as stolen.
No psychic guards the guards detection radius is reduced
summon up to 10 cretures you can summon up to 10 different types of creatures
Carry a lot more stuff 5 times more!

Mods that makes the game harder and more interesting.
Darker nights
Darker dungeons
Note that as far as I can tell, by making an area darker does effect how well both you and your enemy can detect you.
deadlier traps
slew of no quest icon and no fast travel mods

Cool mods that I am not installing yet, but keeping my eyes on it for now. Most of them I am waiting on the kinks to be worked out.
No load message removes the loading area message, I actually find the message helpful in helping me distinquish whether or not the sudden reduction of FPS is caused by something unexpected
Potion sorter
Reznod's Mannequins
Rideable wild horses
Various npc companions, mercenary mods.
Leveling rebalance mods, there are so many different versions, so I will wait to see a more unified one released
monster level mods, none of the ones that are out now are quite "right" in my opinion, so I will wait
quick start mods (skiping the intro dungeon); I am not starting a new game anytime soon...
portable bedroll, portable tents and campfire I am waiting on better models to be used for these
harvest mod The harvested herbs disappears until the next time they respawn

Wow this is getting long, I was going to do a more detailed review of the mods... But I don't want to clutter up this space. Few free to comment, and if you want to know more personal opinions in the list of mods that I listed let me know. I will put up a mini comment/review of sort on it ASAP. Also please let us know about how you feel about a particular mod that you use too. thanks!

I will try to keep the list up to date.

Very quick review of one of the mods that I cannot live w/o
BTmod:
What it does: it make it so that the status screens will display more items, so you can see more things at once. And the later versions gave user much more room to customize their inventory screens to their liking
Does it deliver? Heck yeah, with this mod, the amount of scrolling is minimized so much, I cannot even imagine going back to the 6 line listing of the default interface.
caveats: the only thing that I can say that is bad about this mod is that version 2.1 causes series lag every time you open up a container. V2.11 has the hot fix, but the load time of container screens is still as fast as that of the vanilla screens.

Before I forget, warning about the time scaling console command that I posted above:
You have to save and restart your game for it take effect. Also, the side effect of changing the scale is that fast travel time is also greatly reduced.

Also, warning about the skingrad home upgrade mods, the author cautioned to use the mods only after you get the house there.

Finally, I am by no means expert at testing these thoroughly, if any of you see any problems with what I posted (be it the link doesn't work, or the mod is incompatible to something) let me know.

thanks

Fedaykin98 wrote:

I switched the grab button and the sneak button on the 360 version of Oblivion, does that count?

Seriously, I did it because I was tired of accidentally slowing to a crawl in the middle of combat because I mashed down on the thumbstick too hard. That being said, it's become kind of a moot point, because my character is now so sneaky that I can fire multiple arrows at someone ten feet away and they never find me.

I did the same and find myself to be getting my arse whipped much less frequently now because I can actually string together a combo of melee attacks as opposed to the one swing at a time approach forced upon you when in sneak mode.

Nice list lethial!

Hey, anyone know where they keep the damn DDS and NIF files? I can't seem to find any of the original art when I go to give my items appearances.

Quick update, BTmod just got very interesting, we can now have limited binding of keys to menu buttons!
http://www.beider.org/btmod/#links

• Added percentage display to HP/MP/FA display " 
• Added Durability status under the Weapon Icon on the Main Hud " 
• Enabled and cleaned up Spell Effect durtation timers " 
• During Custom Class Creation, increased the size of the enterable name
• Mapped Arrow Keys to various Menu buttons "¡

* The amount of items able to fit on screen could depend on setup of alternate fonts
"  These items can be toggled on and off with the Config Files
"¡ Keys OTHER THAN the Arrow Keys ARE NOT AVAILABLE TO BE MAPPED

Also I forgot to mention another really nice UI mode called Dark UI basically it turns the UI darker, and it looks pretty nice. The funny thing is, the original instruction had an error so that if you followed it you wouldn't put the background texture in the right place. As a result you get a transparent menu screen!

Awesome list lethial, thanks!

Haven't tried it yet, but I remember someone in one of the threads complaining about not having the mark and recall ability.

Here are some that don't seem like cheating to me. (I haven't installed them yet, but will soon)
Max Arrow Increase
* Changed the time arrows stay in the game world to 6 minutes
* Changed the amount of arrows that can be in the game world from 15 to 120

Horse Names
This mod changes the bland default horse names, "My X Horse," to unique names for each horse.

* Bay horse (Bravil) = Whiskey
* Bay horse (Skingrad) = Sid
* Black horse (Cheydinhal) = Iago
* Chestnut horse (Chorrol) = Uriel
* Paint horse (Bruma) = Buckeye
* Paint horse (Leyawiin) = Maliki
* White Horse (Anvil) = Ash

Blood Vials
This mod adds vials of Blood to the game. With these vials you will be able to quench your thirst as a vampire, without having to bit peoples necks. It is still possible to bit necks, but not completely necessary. Many alchemy merchants sell these vials, and many vampire and necromancer mobs drop them. But, if you want a quick fix you can grab a couple in the abandon house in Anvil. In future releases you will, hopefully, be able to create these vials from ingredients.

Thanks for the comments.

KrazyT, how many mods are you using currently? Thanks for adding to the list, I cannot believe I missed that arrows mod and the blood vials.

Can you not drink the bottles of human blood when you're a vampire? I assumed that was what they were for.

I will keep this one short, but few mods that just came out looks really good and I think all of us should try:
Higher res terrain textures, follow the link to the tessource site and you will see some screenshots of before and after the mod. In short they look great. An added benefit is that we can now turn down the value for the number of grids being drawn (which causes some water reflection problem) and the terrain will still look good, which means more FPS for us!

I know there was some complaints about NPC saying the same thing over and over again too much. This mod will help shut them up.
Quieter NPC they should still say the important stuff that could initiate a quest

For those of you that want smarter AI to fight against, here is a very very good mod that addresses just that:

Finally this mod adds more weather type to the game, More weather types very nice looking. Only wish is that the weather types are not randomly assigned. But the author is working on that.

PS. lobster, since you seem to have so many goodies, here is a mod just for you:
Show off your trophies this mod adds 3 rooms full of those display cases for the basement of the Skingrad home that you can get.

lethial aka The Machine wrote:

Higher res terrain textures, follow the link to the tessource site and you will see some screenshots of before and after the mod. In short they look great. An added benefit is that we can now turn down the value for the number of grids being drawn (which causes some water reflection problem) and the terrain will still look good, which means more FPS for us!

Installing this one as I type this.

lethial wrote:

PS. lobster, since you seem to have so many goodies, here is a mod just for you:
Show off your trophies this mod adds 3 rooms full of those display cases for the basement of the Skingrad home that you can get.

Nah, the mod that was just for me was "Unicorn No Longer A Bastard."

lethial wrote:

Thanks for the comments.

KrazyT, how many mods are you using currently? Thanks for adding to the list, I cannot believe I missed that arrows mod and the blood vials.

I'm running 15 mods right now.

Thanks for the link to the Max Arrow Increase Mod. Too cool for school.

Danjo Olivaw wrote:

Can you not drink the bottles of human blood when you're a vampire? I assumed that was what they were for.

I found one in the game after installing the mod and if I remember correctly it had several negative attributes so I am assuming I could have drank it.

I have like 20+ mods enabled right now, and that is always changing... I just cannot resist.

Danjo, becareful with the mods that modify arrow properties, they generally don't play well with each other.

Thief fans should keep an eye on this mod: turn of lights and water arrows!. I really hope more modellers will help create more "off state" models for different lights so that they can all be turned off gracifully.

Edit: To go with the LOD texture replacement, here is the normal map replacement big downloads, but the differences is huge in my opinion. This is another must get mod