User:RobinHood70/Oblivion Mods

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At this time, I'm only playing Oblivion a little bit, focussing primarily on other projects. I will undoubtedly come back to it more fully at some point—perhaps while the rest of you are playing TESV. As a result, the mods listed below may be out of date.

Mods with no likes or drawbacks are new and still under evaluation.

Patches

The official and unofficial patches, plain and simple.

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
Official Oblivion/SI Patch	1.2.0416		Relies on the community to fix the bugs that Bethesda didn't feel like fixing.
The Unofficial Oblivion Patch	3.4.2	Fixes the bugs Bethesda doesn't feel like shelling out to pay their programmers to do. I'm convinced it's part of their business model.
The Unofficial Shivering Isles Patch	1.5.1
The Unofficial Official Mods Patch	17
Rob's Fixes	ϐ	Many of my fixes made it into the UOPS 3.2.5 and above, some didn't, were too personalized, or are fixes that I've made since then.	What remains is not released, not widely tested, and a bit of a mess from my own testing of things (as well as retaining some overlap with UOPS until such time as I can go through and remove them all).

Visual Enhancement Mods

Mods that in some way alter textures, images, light, etc., without altering actual gameplay in any way.

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
Alluring Potion Bottles	3	Makes potion bottles look more distinctive and visually appealing.
Book Jackets: Oblivion (High-Res)	1.0	Like the potions, this makes books more distinctive and visually appealing.	The name of the file is misleading, since the "Standard Res" version has downloads for both standard- and high-res.
CaptNKILLs NonTiling Texture Mod	1.0	Removes tiled effect from grass and such. (Especially noticeable if you move the Grass Slider all the way to the left so that items on the ground are more visible.)
Cyrodiil Terrain Map	2.5	Makes it much easier to tell what kind of terrain you're fast-travelling into, and is just generally more immersive.
Enhanced Water	2.0	Makes water much more realistic.
Enhanced Water - SI Addon	0.2
GW71 Life Detect	1.0	Gets rid of the "purple people eaters" and replaces them with a much nicer red colour.
Hammerfist Shiny Gold	1.1	Makes gold shinier and therefore easier to see. Debatably more realistic as well, at least if you accept that everyone polishes their coins on a regular basis. <LOL>
Improved Fruits, Vegetables and Meats	1.1	Makes foods in the game look much more realistic.
Koldorn's Ayleid Ruins Textures	1.0	Another mod that adds more realism. Ayleid ruins are much more detailed and decrepit with this mod.
Koldorn's LOD Noise Replacer	1.3	Distant land should not look speckled, simple as that.
Landscape LOD NormalMap Fix	1.0	Gets rid of the "blotchies".
Landscape LOD Normalmap Fix MipMap Fix	1.1	Supposed to help with stuttering caused by the above mod.
Landscape LOD Texture Replacement	1.1b	Higher quality textures.
Landscape LOD Texture Replacement (Border Regions)	1.1b	Higher quality textures.
Leviathan Soul Gems	1.1	Makes soul gems look much nicer.
Natural Faces	0.95	Tweaks the faces of NPCs to look more natural and less blotchy.
Realistic Horse Eyes	1.3	If you're not using this, go look at your horse's eye. You will then understand why I use this.

Light-Altering Mods

Divided out for easy access, these mods simply alter the amount or colour of light across various aspects of the game.

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
Darker Dungeons	1.1	Makes dungeons far more realistic.
Light Spell Recolor	1.03	Whoever thought "nuclear radiation green" would be a good colour for a light spell should be shot!
Illumination Within Revived Optimised	1.1	Makes cities look very nice when combined with Original Color Darker Nights mod.
Original Color Darker Nights	1.01	Makes all outdoor cells more realistic at night time.
Skingrad Bridge Lights	1.0	Fixes the Skingrad bridge lights so that they actually shed light!	I've never really looked at it, but I've heard that the light radii overlap, which can slow down lower-end systems.

Audio Enhancement Mods

Mods that in some way alter sounds without altering actual gameplay in any way.

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
Atmospheric Oblivion	1.0	Adds a lot of really nice atmosphere to the game.	Sounds are sometimes a little too frequent/repetitive.
Oblivion Stereo Sound Overhaul	0.9	There are some amazing sounds in this package!

Content-Altering Mods

These mods all alter gameplay, add quests, or add content, so have been separated out from those that don't. Most of these are fairly minor alterations, but some are larger.

Major Alterations

These mods add significant new content to the game.

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
AFK Weye	2.32
Kvatch Rebuilt	2.1.2
Stirk	1.3
Thievery in the Imperial City	1.2

Minor Alterations

These mods add or change minor content that does not alter gameplay beyond the scope of the relevant item(s).

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
Clocks of Cyrodiil	1.0	Mostly because I thought it sounded like an interesting idea and was curious to actually watch time pass within the game, rather than having to hit F4 all the time.
Direnni's Alchemy Apparatus	1.1	Convenient to avoid having to search for randomly-placed Master-level equipment.	Potions still detect as Master level, so an otherwise identical potion with the same name made with Master-level equipment then later made with Direnni's equipment will be downgraded. (Solution: rename your potions or never use Master-level equipment.)
Haldur's Alternate Skeleton Key	1.02	Makes the Skill bonus toggleable allowing you to advance the skill normally or boost your skill level if you need it.
Pitcher Plant Harvestable	1.1	Adds alchemy ingredients to the otherwise broken Pitcher Plant.	Need to be careful of load order, as some mods will interfere with this.
Undread Zombies	1.0	To put it simply, I was maybe a little over-levelled and these things finally pissed me off enough that I decided to do something about them. All this mod does is remove their regeneration so that hit & run tactics are actually feasible.

Convenience Mods

These are mods that I thought significantly improved some irritating aspect of the game, but they alter gameplay on a broader scale than those above and could be considered cheats.

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
AddMapMarkers	1.0	Shows map markers for everything and adds a few markers for places that don't normally have them. I mostly used this towards the end of my "do everything" game to make sure I'd been everywhere. Have left it activated to see what game play's like with it turned on now that I'm on a new character.	One or two locations were missed, and of course, you still need to find locations for added content. It takes the fun out of finding locations on your own, though that's probably not really that big of a deal for re-plays.
All-In-One Basement	7.0	What good is having a house in each city? You end up leaving stuff all in one house, typically, and never use any of the others...or at least that's how I end up. This mod gives each house a communal basement, which is very handy.	It also has the option of letting you instant-travel between houses, which is nice in its own way, but I consider it more of a cheat. I'm leaving this option disabled now for increased realism. (And if anybody complains about the realism of a communal basement being okay vs. the realism of not teleporting from one house to the other, well...my game, my rules. <grin>)
Even Oddities - SI	1.0	Ensures that you will be able to find at least one of each oddity from the museum of oddities without relying on random chance. Plus, I made it. :)	Some people find it breaks realism, but I think it does quite the opposite. After all, what's realistic about searching the same places you've already been every three days in the hopes that something new will have shown up...something you probably don't know even exists, in-character?!?
Harvest Flora	3.0.1	Makes it so much easier to know what you've harvested and what you haven't. Excellent for farms and some clustered ingredients like Wisp Stalks.	Completely disables Pitcher Plants, so you need to watch load order of Pitcher Plant mods.
Oblivion Gate Markers	1.22	Makes it easy to track down all those annoying Oblivion Gates and shut them once and for all. Also, of course, I use it cuz I made it!

UI Mods

Self-explanatory — mods that alter the User Interface.

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
Enhanced Hotkeys	2.1.1	Eight hotkeys for spells and equipment combined...seriously?!? This mod ups that to 40 and enables what it calls "wheels", effectively expanding it to 160 hotkeys.	A little unobvious in terms of interface, but debatably better than at least v1.0 of Expanded Hot Keys and Spell Delete.
Keychain	5.00	When playing intelligently, I never scroll through the keys with the mousewheel, but sometimes I'm not so with it...this avoids that problem altogether. (Note: this could be considered not to be a UI mod, but since its primary effect is to alter how you interact with keys, I thought it made sense to put it here.)	Causes minor glitches at times, the most notable being that you have to click on the Dark Brotherhood well twice to get in.
Major Jim's UI	1.12	Overall, this just lets a lot more information fit into the same space on your screen. What I like most about it is that when you're mixing potions, you actually get to see the weight of the ingredients on-screen! Why Bethesda didn't think of that is beyond me.	Causes a couple of minor glitches with the map display, in particular causing you to not be able to click on southerly locations to fast-travel to them (more problematic with Shivering Isles, but also a minor inconvenience with Deepscorn Hollow).
No More Annoying Messages (Fixed)	1.3	The name says it all, really. Removes some of the more annoying messages that continually appear throughout the game.
No More How Many Prompts	1.0	Makes it much easier and faster to sell stacks of items one-by-one in order to increase your Mercantile skill faster.	Not switchable in-game like some other mods, but can easily be switched out-of-game, which is good enough for me.

Other Mods

Anything that didn't really fit into one of the above categories.

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
Fast Exit	2	Works like a charm to prevent crash-on-exit issues, as well as resolving the related issue of settings not being saved.
Kobu's Character Advancement System	2.4.1	I really, really dislike the built-in character advancement system. It penalizes players who don't know how to make the most of it, and can be challenging even for experienced players to get maximum or near-maximum benefit from. I started using Kobu's within a month or two of playing Oblivion and other than trying Realistic Levelling briefly, I've never looked back.	There are a lot of advanced options that aren't well-explained and difficult to figure out even when they are. If not handled properly, they can really mess with your character, but if you stick with the basic changes, it's pretty easy to manage. Pre-dates OBSE, so levelling indicator doesn't work.
Realistic Physics and Force	1.0	Makes things generally not fly off half-way across the room from a lowly fireball spell and similar such physics problems.

Mods I Tried and Uninstalled

They may have been good, they may have been bad, but for one reason or another, I've tried these and rejected them for my personal gameplay. (Note: I know there are more that I've tried and removed over the years, but apparently I suck at maintaining this page.)

Mod Name	Version	Why I Like It	Drawbacks
Alchemy Advanced	1.2	Great for brewing up batches of the same potion and allows you to save ingredient combinations and a few other neat features.	Hugely overcomplicates potion creation. It also wasn't clear if creating batches of potions gave you the appropriate amount of skill points (I didn't test it, as I'd already decided I didn't like the mod by that point).
Chameleon-No Refraction	1	I liked how the mod made my character varying degrees of transparent...	...however, it also revealed several things that were intended to be invisible or hard to see. Ultimately, I'm neutral to this mod, as the benefits and drawbacks about balance out.
Expanded Hot Keys and Spell Delete	2.0	Eight hotkeys for spells and equipment combined...seriously?!? This mod ups that to 28 and enables equipment combos.	Shift and Alt keys cause you to stop moving; Walk key may need to be re-mapped to be useful. I gather v1.0 was obsoleted by newer versions of OBSE. While I understood the intent of v2.0's one-handed approach, it was unconfigurable and just didn't work for me.
Qarls Texture Pack 3 Redimized and Further Reduced OMOD	1.0	Excellent, highly-detailed textures.	It's freakin' huge (1.7 Gig)! More to the point, the textures were actually too detailed and sharp for me. It gave the game a surreal aspect.
Realistic Leveling	1.13	Much simpler than Kobu Character Advancement System and includes a progress meter thanks to OBSE.	Levels much too quickly for my taste, even at its slowest-levelling setting. (Roughly half-way through doing only the main quest with no side quests at all, I was already level 13.) Effectively, this mod penalizes you for advancing minor skills, since those also count towards your level. In the end, you wind up doing almost as much skills management as the standard system as you try not to level.
Unique Landscapes Compilation	1.6.1	There are some unique and interesting sets of landscapes included in this compilation.	Overall, this didn't really add that much to the game for me. The added landscapes were certainly nice, but not really enough to justify the large size. Also, I found a number of floating or otherwise misplaced items in some of the landscapes.

Mods I Want to Try

This is a list of mods that I've come across somewhere or other, but for whatever reason, have not wanted to install right away.

Mod Name	Notes
Living Economy or Enhanced Economy	The latter looks far more detailed and immersive, but will need to compare in detail next time I start a new game.
Oblivion XP	Could be interesting to have XP awarded for certain quests, but very leery about how this would alter game play.
Oblivion Character Overhaul v2	Recommended to me by Dillonn241 on Discord. Better graphics for characters, like Natural Faces, above. Try each, see which looks better.
Realistic Leveling	Possible replacement for Kobu's, which needed some massaging to get it to work, last I looked.
Oblivion DLC Delayers	Realism enhancement mention by Dillonn that looks promising. Delays DLCs so you don't get a bunch of quest notes when you exit the sewers.