Lately I’ve been playing a fair bit of oblivion, and cannot do without mods.
I’m wondering what mods the other oblivion players use, as perhaps I have overlooked a few.
For the most part, the mods I am currently using are:
Also the two official expansions.
Are there any more I should include? I’m considering installing the Scarlet Monastery mod again, but I can’t quite remember if it is compatible with unique landscapes.
Quarls texture pack is quite nice, will slow the game down quite a bit so it’s best to make sure you can play the game around 60 fps on full settings normally.
It crashes maybe once every 5+ hours, and every time I exit the game.
Quite tolerable, and the “saveini” command resolves the issue of it not saving configurations on exit.
Unique Landscapes, Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul, and DarNified UI are absolutely essential to playing
I’ve been having some problems with the oblivion overhaul recently, it seems some npc characters had big yellow and white exclamation points instead of the npc model. after disabling it it worked fine, what improvements does it make anyway?
also, are there any other graphical mods anyone can recommend?
15? hah. I was running like 30 before I reformatted my hard drive. I saved my Data file (which is 29 gigs), I’ll take a pic whenever I get around to reinstalling it.
The “big yellow and white exclamation points” are caused by missing meshes. This indicates a bad installation. You should install it using the Oblivion Mod Manager, that should fix your problems.
OT: I would recommend FCOM Converge, a sort of
compability patch between Oscuro’s Oblivion Mod, Francesco’s leveled creatures & items mod, Mart’s monster mod, Oblivion Warcry, Bob’s Armory and a bunch of other stuff.
Combined, the mod adds thousands of new items and enemies into the game. Also, bugs.
The reason I’m not recommending it is because it’s a bitch to install and the game has a tendency to break down completely.
My favorite mods:
Qarl’s Harvest- adds fruit to fruit trees
Real lights- the torches and light sources in the game actually become light sources instead of just textures
Badderfire/frost/shock- better looking spells for each of those
Bedrolesanyone- add bedroles to the game
Cliff_betterletters- more variation in the letters found in the game
CM_Better wine- drasticlly better textures for the wine
diversegrasses- more types of grasses
doofdillas_potions_recolored_sorted_v0_3_1- better potion textures
Enhanced Water v2.0 HD- better water
Dungeon Actors Have Torches 1.6 DT- self explanetory
Exterior Actors Have Torches 1.3 DT
Get Wet- in rain, characters will have water streaming down them. this one is only ok
ImprovedSigns
IWR-Lights/shutters/windows- better textures
Leviathan Soulgems-really cool soulgems
Oblivion Cats v0.22b-cats
P1DkeyChain-really nice, condenses your key chain
spelliconreplace-optional
Symphony of Violence-much better sounds for everything
Unofficial Oblivion Patch-this is required, there is also one for shivering isles if u have that
VA_BetterGold-much nicer money
Visually Realistic Deadly Lava
qarl’s texture pack- much better textures for a lot of things, dont remember them all
There are also some mods that make things look better when they are far away, i dont remember what they are called. google Oblivion LOD to find them.
All of the things above are just mods to make Oblivion more visually appealing, they don’t affect gameplay, since IMO the game is really really good the way it is. I also have the modular beautiful people mods installed as well as xeorace which adds a TON of new races, but everything is more animeish. You should def play it vanilla before adding things like that.
Thanks for taking the time to make that post, extremely useful
Yeah I agree, i’m only after mods to make the vanilla experience more pleasant, I don’t want to change the game too much. maybe on the second playthrough I’ll experiment with some game changing mods and such.
These are the mods i currently have installed
Quarls Texture pack
Natural environments
Atmospheric oblivion (just adds ambient sounds)
Better main menu
Loading screens.
The loading screens is really nice, adds a load of new screens, and links them to all the random quotes and messages during a loading screen so they have some sort of relevance.
and the main menu re-placer just adds a more interesting video loop in the main menu. but still a nice subtle touch.
Also, has anyone had any experience with the oblivion graphics extender? I used MGE for Morrowind, and it worked very well. but was a Huge performance hit. obviously it would have taken some performance away, but it was pretty hungry for it.
MGE is fancy, the ambient occlusion is pretty cool except for a few issues such as seeing the shading through grass. I’m not using it atm, one day though. Oh and it annoyed my how the DoF settings affected the HUD.
If you absolutely don’t want to try OOO and UL (as I previously mentioned), at least get DarNified UI to fix the menus and Enhanced Hotkeys to give you more than 8 of them.
I’m currently looking for a minimap mod… recommendations?
One thing a lot of mods require are the script extender, which allows for bigger mods, and the mod manager, which lets you reorder the load order of the mods which is required to make some work correctly together. There is also something called the BOSS, don’t remember what it stands for, which automatically organizes all of your mods in the best order. I highly recommend it.
I only use the oblivion color map mod, but a lot of these sound very interesting. Thank you so much for the list, I will be checking some of those out. Especially the keychain…the in game inventory is such a mess!!!
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