The Skyrim Mod Forge – Episode 9 – Armor, Soul Gems and More Swords from LOTR

Giuseppe Nelva January 26, 2012 1:00 PM EST

The Skyrim Mod Forge is back, bringing you some of the best mods produced by the modding community dedicated to improving The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. Today marks a small change for this column, as from now on it will appear every Thursday and not every Wednesday as it did before.

We’re already in sight of the end of January, and we’re all still waiting to see if Bethesda will really keep its promise of releasing the Creation Kit (that will increase the modding potential of the game exponentially) this month as they promised in their latest blog post. In the meanwhile the community is still using whatever it can to improve the game over the original. There already are nearly 7500 mods available for download, and that’s just counting the ones that I could personally find.

The purpose of this column is to help those that may be a little disoriented with the size and scope of what the Skyrim modding community offers. You’ll find here on DualShockers every Thursday.

But, as every week, it’s time to let the mods do the talking, so without further ado, head past the cut for this week’s highlights.

Black and Gold Elven Equipment with Masked Helmet

In last week’s episode I expressed my displeasure with the yellow default elven armor, and introduced an alternative that happened to fit my taste. A couple readers told me over twitter that, while the yellow armor is awful, changing it with something even brighter might not be the most appropriate way to solve the issue, at least not for everyone. Can’t argue with that, so here’s a second alternative by Shodan44 that not only looks much better than the original, but it’s also lore-appropriate, as it follows the black and golden color scheme of the Thalmor robes.

It looks great and quite imposing, especially due to the addition of a rather handy facemask. You can check it out here.

Hvergelmir’s Armor Retexture – HAR

Normally I don’t cover mods that aren’t in a quite advanced state, but this one by Hvergelmir is just too good to pass. At the moment it includes just an extremely well done retexture of the iron armor and the banded iron armor (shields included) , but the plan is to cover every armor in the game with time. The level of detail is simply amazing, so I definitely encourage you to give it a try, especially if you’re one of those players that love walking around wearing low level armor to increase the challenge. In addition to that the Nexus Mod Manager will keep you updated when the author will upload new versions.

You can download it here, and a separate version with just the shields here.

Witchplate

This mod by Telthalion is rather simple, but it’s evidence that it doesn’t take a degree in Moddology (yes, I just made the word up) to create your own mods. The author simply took the models of some pieces of armor included in the game, modified them a bit, added some decorative runes in a very tasteful way, and there you have a new set of armor that works very well for the spellsword types among us.

You can check it out here, and maybe be inspired to do your own mods as well.