How to Modify Skyrim

Ah, Squandarlo Bumpito. I mean Skyrim.

Yes. Exactly.

It's a pretty satisfying game, but some of the graphics and sometimes the game itself is lacking. There's obviously a solution! It's called modding the game.

What is modding? Modding or modifying the game, is the act of changing or adding different textures, data, material into a piece of software, in order to improve the game, or worsen it, depends on who you ask, really.

Modifying Skyrim could be as easy as 1-2-3 or it could be easier to just dodge rain in a thunderstorm.

Not even kidding, some mods will overwrite other mods, thus making the game crash, or even destroy the game completely which will require a full recovery of the game from its installer.

There are plenty of different mods to choose from, it's counting from hundreds to thousands, could be even millions.

THIS ISN'T EVEN ALL OF THEM

The mods in Skyrim can add more NPCs, or non-player characters, add new spells, armor, fix bugs Bethesda forgot about, add new sounds, and much, much more.

PFFT. GRAVITY IS FOR MILK DRINKERS.

One example of the modifications for Skyrim:

Maybe an image this time:

Exactly.

Now that the introductions are done, let's get to modding.

First of all the user has to check if their computer can actually run all these mods or else they'll look like this:

Nasty.

How do you check? A good sign is if the game can run on SMOOTHLY on these settings:

And this is just a minimum.

Of course, this would only truly matter if you were using mods to improve your game's graphics, and not just add weapons, armor, quests and what not, but then that wouldn't be too fun now, would it.

After knowing that your game would be able to handle Skyrim, go to this website:

http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/

This website is a compendium of all the mods, and it also has a downloadable program so you can easily install and uninstall mods.

After downloading the program, which should be called Nexus Mod Manager, or NMM, install it and open it up, let it find where you installed Skyrim and you should be greeted by this window:

Except yours will be nearly empty.

This window shows what kind of data has been added, it does not show if textures have been modified or not, which is what most mods do to Skyrim. Looking at the image again, there is a tab called "Mods".

Clicking on it will show:

These will show what the mods will modify, and how many mods do you have of that nature. If the mod has a red cross, it means it is not installed, if it has a green check, it is installed.

Now for installing new mods:

1. Go to the website Nexus Mods, again.
2. Find a mod you want.
3. Go to the mod page which should look like this:

Then you simply click "Download (NMM)" and it will automatically download and put itself in the proper folder.

After downloading it should be in NMM and simply find it there and double click it, follow the windows it may pop up and it should be installed.

Be careful, double clicking again will make it uninstall itself!

Have fun modding Squandarlo Bumpito.