How the Modders Conquered Skyrim

How talented fans have extended Skyrim’s appeal far further than Bethesda ever could.

The greatest secret of the Glorious PC Master Race is that – shh - most games on PC and games on consoles are basically the same, whether you're herding it along with a keyboard or a games controller. But the PC modding communities for games like Skyrim are the exception to that rule: talented individuals (or teams) working long hours to create all manner of extra content and gameplay tweaks, while console players must wait like Dickens characters for their next serving of official DLC. The PC is an immeasurably better place to play Skyrim than on console, and its modding community is why.

The jump-off for Skyrim's legions of modders is the Creation Kit - a suite of world-building tools that let players and would-be designers play around with the game's toybox of items, characters and dungeons. The Creation Kit is free to download (as are its equivalents for other Bethesda games) and very powerful: depending on your skill level you can create anything from simple dungeons to fully-voiced, ten-hour questlines with new animations, weapons, spells and lighting effects. Or, if you're Scott Caunce, you can cover everything in palm trees.

Tropical Skyrim is one of most famous mods, after being picked up around the web by different games outlets for taking a (metaphorical) fleet of snow ploughs to Skyrim's blustery landscape and turning it into an exotic paradise of palm fronds and swooping tropical birds.

"I've never been able to resist the urge to delve into a game's files and change whatever I can," says Caunce, the mod's creator, who got properly into modding with Oblivion. As the modding tools from one Bethesda game to the next are largely similar, building new jungles, deserts and volcanoes in Oblivion was good training for his work in Skyrim. "When I first got to use Skyrim's Creation Kit, I was almost as excited as when I got the game itself," he says. "I was able to jump straight in."

Creating a new world is more than just making an island and dumping trees on it.

Transforming Skyrim from a bitter winter wonderland into a Sandals resort was labour intensive - although according to Caunce, not for the reasons people expect. Swapping out pine trees for palm trees is just a case of swapping the models and textures of one for the other. The elbow grease gets slathered on the tiny details - removing the blowing snow effects, the icicles hanging from roofs, Skyrim's bleached arctic colour palette and so on. It's a lot of work for one person.

"The question of why I don't create a new world space [complete with quests and NPCs] is one I'm asked frequently. The answer is simple: I don't have the time,” he says. “Creating a new world is more than just making an island and dumping trees on it. You need new buildings, new NPCs, lots of hand-placed objects, new voices, new dungeons and so on. That's a lot of work for a solo modder, so I simply decided to replace Skyrim. [That way], all I needed to do was focus on what I do best: the environment."

But when the Nexus community pulls together to create something, you really can end up with the sort of mods Caunce is describing: projects that really play like official DLC. Moonpath to Elsweyr, the Skyrim Nexus' most popular quest mod with a whopping 310,000 unique downloads, was made by a team of more than ten people. Rather than simply stitching together existing dungeons sections and some retextured items, Moonpath adds new story, convincing dialogue and voice acting, armours, animations, enemies - even an airship.

I enjoyed making a velociraptor, so, hey, why not put that in?

"I started modding because I wanted to learn something new," says Tomas Sala, Moonpath's creative lead. "I got a good feeling for all the tools and created [Moonpath's] desert and waterways. Then it became a bit of an all-consuming rush to mod some basic quests and storylines - not based on any pre-determined path, but on what environments would be cool to make. A sinkhole in the jungle, an airship mooring, a bit of desert and so on. At some point I got into creating custom character models, and I enjoyed making a velociraptor, so, hey, why not put that in? I loved the Sload concept in the original Bethesda concept art, so why not add that? And best of all, I'd done a fantasy airship model in the past, and I thought that would be really cool. So, I put it in, and created the airship storyline around it."

The result feels professional. After hitching a ride on a cart outside a tavern in Falkreath, your character journeys with a Khajiit caravan along one of their mystical moonpaths - secret routes the cat-people use to travel through Tamriel undetected. Along the way you'll fight off tropical spiders, investigate a Thalmor invasion, battle that Sload and maybe pick up a new companion. If Bethesda released Moonpath as DLC, people would buy it.

Not every successful Nexus project is as grand in scope. In fact, the most downloaded file on the Skyrim Nexus isn't a new questline or a world overhaul at all. SkyUI, with over two million unique downloads, is instead a fix for one of Skyrim's most grating design flaws: that horrible menu system that makes rooting through your inventory like looking for a needle in a huge bag full of other, sharper needles.

"I'm sure almost everyone sees a few subjective flaws in each game they play," says Sebastian Jeckel, one of SkyUI's two co-creators. "So if there's minor thing that annoys you and it turns out changing it is in your grasp, you just do it."

Jeckel started modding Bethesda games with Morrowind, building new dungeons and areas ("I'm not an artist, but I'm good at arranging existing components"). But it was the mechanics of the games that interested him most, leading to his joining a team that created a gameplay enhancement suite for Fallout 3: FO3 Wanderer's Edition - itself a successful project, with over half a million unique downloads. Jeckel - a computer science student - describes his time in the modding community as a learning experience.

"[SkyUI] involved reverse engineering and a lot of low-level programming, which was something I had always wanted to learn but had no practical experience with. To get this experience, you need a project. There was a high demand for a UI mod among the Skyrim community, so it was this mix of demand, challenge and learning experience that motivated me to start work. The fact that people want and like something you made is rewarding. It gives you a sense of purpose."

At the eye of this storm of creativity is the modding community website Nexus Mods.

At the eye of this storm of creativity is the modding community website Nexus Mods. While Bethesda recently added mods to the Steam Workshop, making Steam a potential one-stop shop for all your Skyrim needs, millions of users have been making use of the Nexus Mods portals for years; uploading and downloading mods, taking screenshots, leaving comments and debating and critiquing on its forums - a social network for communities modding nearly two dozen games including Far Cry 3, The Witcher 2, XCOM, Dragon Age and the entire recent Bethesda back catalogue. The site holds almost 100,000 files by more than 30,000 authors. At the time of writing, Nexusmods has clocked more than 570 million downloads. And it was all started by a 15-year-old.

Robin Scott started building what would eventually become the Nexus in 2001, starting a fansite called Morrowind Chronicles with a friend, in part to practice making websites. As other popular mod sites crumpled under the weight of server costs, Scott stepped up. By 2005, the site had 80,000 members.

From there the site grew exponentially with the release of each Bethesda game: 500,000 members with the release of Oblivion; 900,000 after Fallout 3; 2,250,000 by the release of Fallout: New Vegas. By the time Skyrim blew in like a cold breeze, Scott had hired his first member of staff to cope with the demand. The sheer volume of people uploading and downloading mods - 7 million page views per day - broke the site at the end of 2011, leading to what Scott calls "a very sleepless month".

That those spikes in numbers follow the release of Bethesda games is no coincidence; Bethesda's practice of releasing deep modding tools for its Elder Scrolls and Fallout games is one that's almost unique among triple-A publishers. For Scott, however, building a game with mods in mind is a no-brainer.

Bethesda provides the tools and leaves its fans to do the rest.

"The current developer trend with modding seems to be to release the game, release a few patches, then think about modding," he says. "It's almost pointless - by that time, people have uninstalled your game and moved on. It's the early modding adoption policy that Bethesda took with their games that has led to their prolific success within the modding community. I don't understand why [more] developers don't do this. Most developers just don't understand what a good modding community can do for a game. They're short-sighted, essentially."

Scott describes Bethesda's relationships with its legions of modders as very "hands-off". Bethesda provides the tools and leaves its fans to do the rest - the only stipulation being that you cannot sell the mods you make. This leads to an interesting question: for all the talent on show, what kind of person would willingly plough not just ten or twenty hours, but hundreds of hours into their projects without the promise of compensation?

"[They're] very talented, dedicated, generous people, for sure," says Scott. "Some do it for fame or glory, some do it as a good project to put on their CVs to game developers, while others simply do it for the joy of working on their creation and seeing others enjoy it."

"It amazes even me," agrees Moonpath's Sala. "I think the communities are what push modders. The instant feeback from users is really special. So, one night a user would mention the jungles [in Moonpath] felt too confined, then I would add a new area and blow that user's mind. There's nothing like it in my experience - it's like prototyping and entertaining in real time. It's addictive."

"I never even thought about what the absolute numbers meant for a long time," SkyUI's Jeckel recalls. "Of course you could think, 'at 50 cents per download, I'd be rich', but... ah, damn." You can see his point.

But for the rest of Skyrim's PC following, Bethesda's no-charge policy is a gift. If you're tired of trudging around the same old Skyrim, through the same old snow, bellowing at the same old dragons, Skyrim's modders have built a whole alternate dimension of tropical birds, secret moonpaths and fastidiously organised satchels for you to explore - and it's all out there for free.