I’m sure a lot of people are really excited to get their paws on the new Skyrim Creation Kit, which should make modding much more easily accessible to the Skyrim community. But I’m much less of a modder and more of a…moddee. A mod connoisseur, if you will. So what I’m more concerned about is how am I going to get all these new mods? It looks like Steam has us covered.

From what I found its pretty easy to install mods now. In Steam Workshop you “subscribe” to a mod, which I assume means that you will not only install the mod, but also get any subsequent updates automatically. To get to the workshop click on the “Browse the workshop” button from Skyrim in the Steam library.

You’ll be taken to a page that shows new and popular mods and what looks like a huge amount of sorting and search tools, although I didn’t quite explore these yet. (Update: This was just a first-glance impression, at closer inspection all I see for sorting is “tags” on the right, but there’s no search feature, not sure why) I really like the highlights that come up on the front page and I hope this means the better mods get more attention.

I decided to try out the page for one of the better mods I’ve encountered in the past: Arrowsmith. Now rather than copying several directories into steam folders, all I need to do is click on the “subscribe” button. I didn’t like that they called it “Subscribe”. Really confusing language, I thought for awhile this meant I was subscribing to their news feed or something.

In any case, this tells the Skyrim launcher to now download and install the mod package. You’ll see some command-line stuff come up at the bottom of the Skyrim launcher after you subscribe to a mod.

And that’s it! The mod is now installed and ready to play. Amazing how much more simple that is than even the easiest-to-install mod from before.

As mods basically kept Oblivion alive for years, I think little fan-service things like this can keep Skyrim alive for very long. Now I want to see less spider-man mods and more huge mod quests!