Maybe you've gotten sick of textures being really blurry when you smoosh your telescopically enhanced eyeballs against your computer monitor. Maybe you think that there's not enough bloom and god rays for that “cinematic feel” you want. Maybe you think that what a small city out on the open plains really needs is more trees. Maybe Skyrim's women just don't look enough like Barbie Dolls or that one crackwhore you fapped to on Xhamster a week ago. Whatever the case, you want graphics mods! Well we've piled through the piles of alleged 2k textures (which is, honestly, just somebody resizing the existing textures in GIMP and using a sharpen filter), found the least-bad ones, and put them all here for you to peruse, choose, and relentlessly abuse. Most texture mods still work on Special Edition, mesh mods need to be updated, check this guide to see how to update meshes to work with Special Edition. The same program used to update mesh files also has a function that tells you if texture will have any problems.

This is not the BEST guide to having the BEST looking game. This is just a LIST of mods that will make your game look better and not a step by step modding process. The guide can be confusing for beginners because of all of the textures, meshes, and in which order you install them. We recommend you fiddle around with some of these mods first to understand the basics.

These mods are MASSIVE texture packs that hold many refurbished, redone, and even reimagined textures. They can range from the smallest of things like a cup to the largest of landscapes like a castle wall! Here we have listed the best overhauls to start off with. You can customize and switch between textures to find the best looking one's that fit your taste. Don't forget that these are just general texture packs. There are smaller one's that sometimes look better than the overhaul's but don't have a lot included since the packs are only for a specific item or area. This means that these overhauls are mearly bases to cover most of the game's textures while the other smaller mods focus on improving smaller or more random objects such as only ingrediants or even just certain pieces of furniture. If you want the BEST results don't use the official 2k textures by Bethesda.

How your game's scenary looks is key to making the rest of your game. Sure you can have the best looking 8k textured armor, but it will look awful while your character is in an ugly looking forest. It's all about balance so that nothing sticks out too much.

—-

Lighting is a very important part of making anything look good. Here are the two most popular ways to overhauling interior and exterior lighting in Skyrim. If you want the TL;DR use ENB for screenarchery and Community Shaders for gameplay.

(Note: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/111475 Lightened Skyrim|Increases FPS with no visual difference. Also it works with both these mods.)

In the past a lighting overhaul was needed to fix how the game looked but modern advancements in ENB and CS have made the concept mostly placebo. That being said the popular ones are ELFX and Lux so give those a look if you don't believe me.

Because everyone knows that every piece of random junk in this game needs to look like a masterpiece!

What do these two things have in common? Nothing really, I just didn't know where to put them.

And rocks I guess. I couldn't fit the rest in the title.

• Essentials
• Gameplay
• Creatures, NPCs and Players
• Immersion
• Quests and Lands
• Graphics
• Armor
• Armor Graphics
• Weapons
• Weapon Graphics
• Animations
• Fun Mods
• Unrecommended Mods
• Paid Mods