[Everything we know about Genshin Impact 3.0]

The Genshin Impact 3.0 release is imminent—it's been a long time coming, but we're finally getting to venture into the forest realm of the Dendro Archon. Finally, it's time to take the next step in Genshin's overarching story of gods and mortals not knowing how to be pals.

Alongside the new lush, flower-filled region, we've three new characters in the form of Tighnari, Collei, and Dori, the first two of which are Genshin's first Dendro characters. The good news is that Collei will be free in the upcoming Graven Innocence event, so everyone will be able to give Dendro a shot.

There are also new events, big bosses, region weapons, artifacts, and a healthy dose of content that all players were anticipating. In this Genshin Impact 3.0 guide, I'll explain all of the new stuff that's arriving as part of Sumeru, as well as when you can expect to play it for yourself.

When is the Genshin Impact 3.0 release date?

Genshin Impact 3.0 will release on August 24. As usual, the update will be available after a brief maintenance period for which players will receive Primogem compensation. 

The first phase features Tighnari and Zhongli's banners, while the second phase will see the return of Ganyu and Kokomi. Dendro character, Collei, will feature on the first two as a boosted four-star, while electro four-star Dori, will be boosted on Ganyu and Kokomi's banners. 

Who are the Genshin Impact 3.0 characters?

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Tighnari (Image credit: miHoYo)

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Collei (Image credit: miHoYo)

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Dori (Image credit: miHoYo)

 There are three new characters in Genshin Impact 3.0: 

• Tighnari: This five-star fox boy is a Dendro archer who specialises in firing arrows that split into multiple projectiles that strike enemies. He is also a forest watcher and head of the Avidya forest rangers to which Collei belongs. Tighnari's banner will be available in the first phase of Genshin Impact 3.0 on August 24.
• Collei: This four-star ranger-in-training is pretty similar to Amber in a lot of ways; she uses a bow, likes to glide, and has a cuddly mascot that she uses as part of her burst. It's not so surprising when you consider that they became friends in the Genshin Impact prequel manga. You'll be able to get Collei for free in the Graven Innocence event, or as a boosted four-star on Tighnari or Zhongli's banners.
• Dori: This four-star Electro merchant is a claymore-user with a genie. She primarily acts as a support character and has a handy skill where her genie attaches a tether to the active character to heal them and regenerate energy. You can get Dori as a boosted four-star in the second phase of Genshin Impact 3.0 by wishing on Ganyu or Kokomi's banners. This should be around September 14.

Shield-master Zhongli, Hydro-healer Kokomi, and Cryo DPS Ganyu are also returning for reruns in Genshin Impact 3.0, with Zhongli in the first phase, and Kokomi and Ganyu in the second. 

Sumeru and Dendro

The new Genshin Impact region of Sumeru has been teased for quite a long time now through the dialogue of NPCs and the new version livestreams. Sumeru is the realm of the Dendro Archon, basically the god of flowers and foliage. As such, the region is filled with lush rainforests and Sumeru City is even built into a big ol' tree. The city is also home to the Akademiya, Sumeru's ruling class of scholars who strictly control knowledge as a resource using the Akasha Terminals. 

Besides the main city there is also Port Ormos, the trade centre for Sumeru where Dori lives. There is also Avidya rainforest and its spirits, a ruin-filled desert, and a massive overgrown robot, but as with Inazuma, we might not get to see all of this at first. The new Archon quest for Sumeru is set to run for a few versions, so miHoYo might gradually expand the area to include more.

Sumeru also sees the full introduction of the Dendro element. Though it previously existed in the game, Dendro is getting characters like Tighnari and Collei as well as the fully fleshed out new elemental reactions: Burning, Bloom, and Catalyze. Similar to the puzzles in Inazuma, you'll be able to use Electro, Hydro, and Pyro to change the state of certain objects in the region. If you're curious about the combat specifics of Dendro, you can see the full demonstration in the video above.

Genshin Impact 3.0 events

(Image credit: miHoYo)

Besides the new Archon quest centred around Lesser Lord Kusanali and "the withering" that's destroying Sumeru's idyllic forests, there are also a number of events. 

In Graven Innocence, we'll be helping Collei come up with ideas for a toy store in Port Ormos by finding inspiration throughout Sumeru. The biggest part of this event is that you can get Collei for free just by completing the tutorial quest.

The next event, Tablet Analytics, is about helping an alchemist experiment with "remelting tablets" by using their buffs in combat challenges to earn rewards. The Seelie companions are also back in Lost Riches, and as with Inazuma, you'll be able to grab your very own Dendro Seelie by searching for buried treasure.

Lastly, Ley Line Overflow returns, likely at the end of the version, so players can get double drops of Mora or EXP materials from Ley Lines of Wealth or Wisdom. 

Genshin Impact 3.0 bosses

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Jadeplume Terrorshroom (Image credit: miHoYo)

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Electro Regisvine (Image credit: miHoYo)

There are two new bosses in the new Sumeru region: 

• Jadeplume Terrorshroom: The big new boss for Sumeru is the amazingly named Jadeplume Terrorshroom, and it's kind of like a fungal horse-dog-ostrich creature? This boss will have a rage state called "Activated" but you can apparently change its state by inflicting Burning with Pyro, which will cause it to spread spores around the arena.
• Electro Regisvine: We haven't seen a new Regisvine in a long time, but this new Electro variant has some special abilities to set it apart from its Pyro and Cryo cousins. It can create Waxing and Waning Stamens, and if present at the same time, they'll create a big Electro explosion.

I also wouldn't be surprised if we saw a story-based boss similar to the Raiden Shogun is version 2.0, but we'll have to wait and see. 

Genshin Impact 3.0 Weapons and artifacts

(Image credit: miHoYo)

The new characters are predominantly archers, so it's no surprise that we're getting two new bows on the weapon banner, and a series of Sumeru-themed four-star weapons that will presumably be accessible through quests, in the same way they were for Inazuma:

Weapon	Type	Rarity	Source
Hunter's Path	Bow	Five-star	Epitome Invocation banner
End of the Line	Bow	Four-star	Epitome Invocation banner
King's Squire	Bow	Four-star	Sumeru region
Sapwood Blade	Sword	Four-star	Sumeru region
Moonpiercer	Polearm	Four-star	Sumeru region
Forest Regalia	Claymore	Four-star	Sumeru region
Fruit of Fulfillment	Catalyst	Four-star	Sumeru region

There are also two new artifact sets focused around Dendro and elemental reactions that you'll be able to get from Domains in Sumeru: 

Artifact	Two-piece effect	Four-piece effect
Deepwood Memories	15% Dendro damage bonus	After elemental skills or bursts hit opponents, the targets' Dendro resistance is decreased by 30% for eight seconds
Gilded Dreams	+80 elemental mastery	when triggering an elemental reaction, gain buffs based on elemental party composition. Attack is increased by 14% for every character with the same element as the equipper, and elemental mastery is buffed by 50 for every different element. These buffs will only count three characters and can be triggered once every eight seconds.

Also, Sumeru has crocodiles

(Image credit: miHoYo)

Look at this angry boi.

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[Finally, a game that will just let me be a creepy witch in the woods]

I am on a first-name basis with the coven of incoming witch games and thank goodness witchcrafting and cottage-building game Reka only has a first name, because I'm adding it to my Steam Witchlist too. German studio Emberstorm Entertainment has been posting short clips of its debut project on Twitter and I was immediately enthralled by its slightly spooky 19th century rural Europe.

The early snippets of Reka that the studio has shared include crafting potions in your home, covering your cottage with witchy clutter like books and herbs and cats, and assisting locals with magical rituals.

"We based the world of Reka on the slavic mythology, especially that of the Slavs of eastern Germany," Emberstorm's Tobias Hermann explains. Reka's countryside is covered with explorable fields and forests in autumnal colors, sprinkled with small villages and wildlife—the fantastical not-too-distant past of Emberstorm's home in Berlin.

"We have also implemented a lot of the slavic witchcrafting lore. The combined result of the two is that you, as the player character, are the apprentice of Baba Jaga and you inherited her chicken-legged house to travel the world and work as a wayfaring witch, fulfilling contracts to aid or curse people and mythological creatures."

Emberstorm did not handwave the chicken-legged house, I feel it is important to notice. Those are huge legs. And yes, your creepy cottage does travel with you.

You had many great guesses! This chicken legged hut is your very own home, and you'll get to build it the way you want it! #gamedev #witch #indiedev pic.twitter.com/pV8KqbEIyXAugust 11, 2022

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So you've inherited a little piece of property, which you're in charge of decorating while collecting crafting ingredients and assisting your neighbours. Is this another town life sim? Not really. Nor is it a survival game like Valheim. Hermann says that Reka's cottage building system is all about aesthetics (a home covered with cats is indeed an aesthetic) and that there are no combat or survival elements in Reka.

I just want to be a creepy lady in the woods hanging skulls on my walls and scolding ghosts and such.

Lauren Morton, wannabe witch

Instead, you'll use crafting stations in your home to prepare balms and ointments, pacify ghosts with rituals, and help the spirits of animals who've died in the woods to pass on. For your troubles, you'll get more decor, of course. Sometimes you'll find these goodies in chests hidden around out in the woods too. In its most recent clip, Reka's snappable building system looks pretty permissive with placing pieces like rooves and windows and all.

I am not a certified modern witch chick myself. But as the woman who plays The Sims only by building and who stayed home in Valheim to work on constructing a small village and had to be dragged out to fight each boss, the cozy crafting and decorating goals are speaking to me. I'm psyched for the likes of Potionomics and have happily sunk several hours into early access Potion Craft. But the truth is that I don't want to be a capitalism-compliant Boss Witch entrepreneur. I just want to be a creepy lady in the woods hanging skulls on my walls and scolding ghosts and such.

Emberstorm isn't ready to reveal its release plans—the "when?" and "what?" of demos and early access and all those questions. In the meantime, me and all the other witch game girlies will have to keep one eye on its Steam page and another on Reka's Twitter account for more witch aesthetics this autumn.

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[Many existing PCIe 4.0 SSDs should work okay with DirectStorage says Phison]

Phison, the manufacturer of SSD controllers found on many consumer NVMe drives, has released a bit more information about its new I/O+ technology and firmware update, which is designed to accelerate DirectStorage workloads. The good news is that its popular E18 controller, which can be found at the heart of plenty of modern PCIe 4.0 SSDs, already offers "exceptional performance that surpasses Microsoft’s recommendations for DirectStorage."

This may have you wondering what the Phison firmware update actually does if its main PCIe 4.0 controller is already good enough for DirectStorage? Well, it appears to offer a best-case scenario: "I/O+ Technology increases E18’s capabilities by reducing block level read disturb (BLRD). The technology allows game developers to build higher detail settings into next generation games that require guaranteed bandwidth."

This is reassuring news given Sabrent's recent Rocket 4 Plus G announcement which suggested that existing drives weren't up to the task of handling the needs of DirectStorage. You can now rest assured that you're probably covered, and don't need to rush out and buy another expensive SSD. A firmware update may indeed be needed to get the most out of some drives.

It does look like there is a significant shift coming that will require a lot more from our SSDs. The Phison I/O+ technology update covers this increased demand and will be made available for drives that are built around its PS5108-E18 controller paired with Micron B47R NAND. The update, which will be made available for free to end users, is already being made available to drive manufacturers so that they can validate it first.

The update is needed because DirectStorage potentially operates in a very different way than how we use drives currently. Right now consumer SSDs are optimized for bursty performance, but with long idle periods in between. DirectStorage is much more demanding when it comes to sustained workloads, with no idle time to handle maintenance operations. The I/O+ update handles these maintenance operations without interrupting IO. It does this using "smart scheduling and adaptive wear algorithms."

Peak Storage

(Image credit: Future)

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A key technology of DirectStorage is BypassIO, which is an optimized IO path for reading files. Traditional Windows storage involves a total of eleven steps between the application and the NVMe driver, BypassIO reduces this to just three. This reduces the CPU load and also reduces latency at the same time. 

It's worth noting that this initial firmware update is only for E18 controllers paired with Micron's B47R NAND. E18 SSDs that feature Micron 96L and Kioxia BICS5 flash won't be supported at this time, but "may be in the future." 

Ultimately we're still left waiting for Microsoft to outline what the drive requirements are for DirectStorage. And then it's going to be down to how game developers actually use the shiny new storage API. There are plenty of unknowns still at this point.

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[Humankind's cities can now be turned into gargantuan cakes]

Humankind is celebrating its first anniversary by giving out hats and turning cities into giant cakes. This sounds like something Lex Luthor would do on his birthday, but who am I to judge? I just drink too much and cry about the inevitability of death.

These hats can be stuck on your custom avatar, and there are new hairstyles to choose from as well. More impressive is the project that allows you to turn your cities into giant celebratory treats. Would Carthage look better as a cake? That's up to historians to decide. 

Old in-game events are also returning, so it's a good time to hop in and see what you've missed. By completing them, you can earn rewards like new avatars and player icons. And if you've played through them already, there's also something new: the 100 Years War scenario, where you'll fight the English as the Franks on a map of France. 

Humankind has also released a couple of culture DLCs since we last checked in, adding a variety of Latin American and African cultures, along with new wonders, independent peoples and narrative events. I haven't spent much time with it since my Humankind review, and there's not much in the DLCs beckoning me back, but I reinstalled it anyway because of course I want to make city-sized cakes. Technically it's just the city centre, but that's still quite a big dessert. 

The anniversary event will run until August 22. 

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[Where to find Kame House in Fortnite]

Kame House is the latest point of interest in the new Fortnite x Dragon Ball event, which runs until September 17. As part of the new Power Unleashed challenges, you'll need to visit a familiar training location. This training location is, of course, Kame House, which doubles as a hiding spot from opponents if the area is quiet.

It's relatively easy to find and once you're there, you'll meet a familiar face who'll have some special abilities on sale that could make or break a match.

Where to find Kame House 

It's up to you whether you want to set a waypoint for Kame House before you begin a match or forge a path there if the closing circle allows it. Kame House can be found in the east of the battle royale map on its own little island. It's a hotspot for players right now, so be careful and try to avoid being blasted by a Kamehameha. 

(Image credit: Epic Games)

Once you arrive at Kame House you'll find Bulma walking around. She has a speech bubble above her head which means you can interact with her. She has the Kamehameha and Nimbus Cloud on sale for 250 gold bars each, so if you're having trouble reaching the Capsule Corp drops in time, she's a solid way to get these new abilities. You can also explore the house to find weapons, ammo, chests and more.

Bulma, alongside other Dragon Ball character skins, can be purchased from the in-game store, as well as other goodies for all you anime fans out there. 

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[Microsoft Xbox Adaptive Controller support is coming to Linux]

Since late 2018, the Microsoft Xbox Adaptive Controller (XAC) has been making PC gaming more accessible for gamers with disabilities and injuries. Now, thanks to the wit of one software engineer, XAC drivers will soon be coming to Linux.

With its incredible ability to adapt to each individual user's needs, the Xbox Adaptive Controller has given those PC and Xbox users who lack the full range of movement a chance to enjoy their favourite games. That's without having to MacGuyver game controller solutions out of random household objects, or resign themselves to not playing games at all (a true travesty).

With the help of software engineer and co-author of The Definitive Guide to Linux Network Programming, Nathan Yocom, Linux users will soon be able to enjoy the freedom the XAC's modular gaming setup can bring, too (thanks Phoronix).

In order to bring Xbox Adaptive Controller support to Linux users, Yocom has been extending Xpad driver code that's already available on the Linux kernel. It brings with it support for the layer button, with 4 active states mapped to an Axis control, as well as the Xbox button.

The XAC driver code doesn't appear to be ready as yet, but updates are being added regularly and it shouldn't be long before Yocom is ready to bring this highly adaptable accessibility option to Linux users.

So, while last year Microsoft's inclusive lead revealed there's a "bit of a plateau" being faced in the field of designing accessibility tech, it appears the software side is far from standing still.

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[Fortnite players can't get enough of DBZ's absurd finisher]

The Fortnite x Dragon Ball crossover recently launched in Epic's all-conquering, brand-crossing metaverse, introducing OTT elements from the series as well as four characters (Son Goku, Vegeta, Bulma and Beerus). Mainly, though, players like the Kamehameha special attack, which is both fun to say out loud and a giant opponent-slaying energy beam launched in midair.

The move has to be acquired before using (here's how to get it) and does seem slightly overpowered, melting through opponents in seconds, but that is why players love it. I mean, the Kamehameha is supposed to be this legendary baddie-boshing finishing move, so it feels like it should be capable of taking out John Cena.

The amusement factor, though, is partly the move itself but then the wider world of Fortnite. You can pull this off with all sorts of characters, accessories, and emotes around it, leading to the daftest combination imaginable. We'll get to the wackier ones, but first some of the more straightforward DBZ love, contextualised by Fortnite's array of branded expression:

goku gets a dub with the kamehameha then hits the griddy #Fortnite pic.twitter.com/YscAsZ27s9August 16, 2022

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I sniped someone with a Kamehameha midair as Vegeta in Fortnite.WHAT IS THIS GAME LMAOOOO pic.twitter.com/O7uLmrdRcnAugust 16, 2022

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Here are two DBZ characters winning a match with the move, after which Goku does Gangnam Style in celebration.

goku and vegeta get a victory royale with the kamehameha then goku does the gangnam style #Fortnite pic.twitter.com/fUM1a83vGOAugust 16, 2022

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Of course, it doesn't always go to plan... bit of strong language near the end of this one.

The Kamehameha Counter #fortnitexdragonball #Goku #Fortnite #FortniteClips pic.twitter.com/NZoLYbmYJ4August 16, 2022

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Part of the fun is that it's not just the DBZ characters pulling off this ludicrous move. Here's Twitter user Robin, with a video of said incident following: "I opened up Fortnite and in my first game while I was talking to Bulma, Rick Sanchez leaped out of the water like a dolphin and kahmehameha's me, killing me instantly."

https://t.co/EqtORwkD9M pic.twitter.com/9gEoBuIiSnAugust 16, 2022

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The move is also reminiscent of another classic videogame special, Ryu's Shinku Hadoken. Fortnite being Fortnite, Ryu is ready to go with the Kamehameha.

Shinku Hadoken lookin good in #SF6 #PS5Share, #Fortnite pic.twitter.com/JVgCg0k7brAugust 16, 2022

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And if one Kamehameha isn't enough...

This new Fortnite x DBZ update is nuts I’m loving it so far! Check out this Double Kamehameha we pulled off #Fortnite #DBZ #Kamehameha pic.twitter.com/CIKtnpzM7aAugust 17, 2022

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Here's a moment for the DBZ canon:

vageta shotguns goku, takes a drink, then takes a selfie and posts it #Fortnite pic.twitter.com/Cq3YhgXFw0August 16, 2022

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In the wider sense, Fortnite is also now something of a playground duelling dream. Who would win in a fight between Son Goku and Naruto? The question is no longer theoretical, and can be answered as many times as one likes.

Playing Fortnite in 2022 be like... pic.twitter.com/q8UpBvtMFTAugust 16, 2022

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I mean, forget anime for a moment. Here's John Wick getting Kamehameha-nuked by LeBron James:

STOP THERE JOHN WICK.IT IS I, LEBRON JAMES, HERE TO STOP YOU WITH THE KAMEHAMEHA pic.twitter.com/UCSFWZWGBwAugust 16, 2022

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Darth Vader getting splooshed by Venom's Kamehameha:

Darth Vader is no match for Venom with the Kamehameha pic.twitter.com/bUDmrvFl35August 16, 2022

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I also saw a clip where Darth Vader won a match by Kamehameha-ing, while wearing an Among Us backpack, then celebrated with the Naruto run emote. But the guy's screaming afterwards was so unpleasant I'll spare you the reality and just let that scene linger in the imagination.

Which is probably why I really feel this tweet:

I don't think I have the mental capacity to process fortnite anymore. pic.twitter.com/dwsokKDbXMAugust 16, 2022

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The DBZ crossover with Fortnite runs until September 17, with various events rolling out across the length of it.

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[After eight years, the space MMO where players create the ships launches next month]

Developer Novaquark has announced that the ambitious, player-driven MMO Dual Universe will launch on PC September 27. The game's been in development for eight years and the pitch is essentially a player-created EVE Online, with a flexible voxel-based crafting system that allows players to build more-or-less what they want.

Dual Universe has been in beta for the last two years, over which time it's gradually implemented stuff like space warfare, asteroid mining, and space markets, without the whole galaxy collapsing. The launch will also feature a new first-time player experience (something that EVE itself has, somewhat belatedly, become obsessive about in recent years).

The developer claims that this features some of "the most advanced voxel technology ever created", and that player creation is only one part of the game's appeal: the point being that most systems are down to players. The economy is player-driven and the idea is that every playstyle should be able to find a niche.

I've mentioned EVE a few times already because the comparison is simply unavoidable. Novaquark talks about jobs such as running an automated mining operation, getting involved in ore processing, creating ships, "sell[ing] codes that control weapons systems", and other such familiar galactic pursuits. The major differences come down to the creation system and that planets play a role, but this is taking many cues from CCP's classic title.

Including, of course, that the game is persistent and takes place on a single server, though it also has quite a neat idea for those who just want to try it out: the launch comes alongside a free trial for new players, which will run on its own separate shard. Anyone who's played the game during beta gets two weeks free, and those who remain active get an XP booster that runs for a whopping six months.

"Since Dual Universe’s beta launched two years ago, our community of dedicated Novean explorers, plunderers, miners, and pioneers have created amazing stories in towering cities, underground bases, and orbital space stations," says Nouredine Abboud, CEO of Novaquark. "We are incredibly thankful for everyone who has embarked on this journey with us so far, and are thrilled to open this new chapter of the game’s incredible voyage."

Dual Universe will be available September 27 on both Steam and via its own website.

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[Amazon's take on Fallout's vaults looks pretty good in leaked shots]

Someone needs to check the seals on those vault doors, because Amazon's Fallout sets just keep on leaking. Last time, we got our first enthralling glimpse of the upcoming TV show's enormous take on Fallout's power armour, and now we've gotten a look at Amazon's version of vault life thanks to some surreptitious snaps of the set for Vault 32.

The pictures come courtesy of an account called BethesdaArabic, which isn't actually affiliated with Bethesda but is—in fairness—definitely in Arabic, and mostly show shots of a vault interior. There's a lot of hallways, a creche, and a room that resembles a classroom, along with a few shots of an exterior wooden barn which I have to guess is the above-ground disguise for the vault's entrance. You can see the pics in the tweet thread below.

تسريبات بالجملة حول صور مسلسل #FalloutTV لكن هذه المره حول الملجئ 33 الذي سيكون ملجئ جديد بالكامل بالسلسلة 1/3 pic.twitter.com/WKWKGA7AyiAugust 16, 2022

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It looks pretty good, if you ask me. I remain sceptical that the final product will reach the bar set by Fallout 1 and New Vegas, but I have to give the set designers and prop people credit for capturing Fallout's vibe so well. The friendly rounded edges and submarine-like atmosphere of the vault's corridors feel very familiar indeed, as do the scattered chairs and cots that look like the aftermath of some kind of disturbance or uprising.

BethesdaArabic's tweet refers to the vault in these shots as Vault 33, but if you squint at the photos of the creche and the exterior you can just about make out the number 32 emblazoned on the walls. Vault 32 isn't one that's been mentioned in the games, so there's not much we can deduce from its name, but some knowledgeable fans have pointed out that it tends to be the west coast vaults that get lower double-digit numbers in the games: Vault 34, for example, was one of the vaults featured in New Vegas. It might be that Amazon's setting will be closer to Fallout's Californian roots than its heavily Bethesda-inspired design suggests.

The TV show began filming for real back in mid-July, so we're not going to see this one in motion for a year or two yet. Still, if candid photos from the set keep leaking out like this, we might be able to stitch together a mutoscope version of the first episode ourselves before too long.

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[How to use Qurious Crafting in Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak]

Curious about Qurious Crafting? Monster Hunter Rise: Sunbreak recently received its title update, adding new monsters like the Lucent Nargacuga and the Seething Bazelgeuse, but more importantly, a new system that lets you reroll armor and boost weapons. Honestly, it's a bit of a game changer, especially in terms of rerolling armor.

You can buff weapons in a similar way to Ramp Up from the base game, adding stats into affinity, element damage, or just pure attack. Qurious Armor Crafting, on the other hand, is more akin to the Melding Pot that you already use to roll talismans. Essentially, you use a special material to unlock armor augments and perform a reroll, potentially altering your stats or adding skills.

In this Qurious Crafting guide, I'll explain how to unlock the Anomaly Investigations you need, where to get Amber Essence, and how to actually make the new system work. If you're new to Monster Hunter Rise, you might also want to know how to start Sunbreak, some tips about what's new in the expansion, or how to get all of the Sunbreak secret armor.

How to unlock Qurious Crafting

(Image credit: Capcom)

Since Qurious Crafting is an endgame feature, you'll first have to defeat Gaismagorm and get to MR10. This will open up Afflicted Monster hunts, and once you've beaten the Afflicted Arzuros, you'll unlock Anomaly Investigations. Simply select one from the randomised quest pool with Chichae and when you complete it, Qurious Crafting for both weapons and armor will have opened up at Minayle the Blacksmith.

Qurious Crafting: How to buff weapons

(Image credit: Capcom)

You craft Sunbreak's best weapons with Afflicted Materials, so it's probably a good idea to forge one of these before you consider investing too heavily in upgrades, especially as unlocking a weapon for augment also costs Afflicted Materials. Here's a brief rundown of how it works:

• Select a weapon in Qurious Crafting and enable augmentation by paying with Afflicted Materials.
• This unlocks three Anomaly Slots and potential buffs depending on the weapon. These include boosts to attack, affinity, elemental damage, sharpness, or even a slot upgrade for rampage decorations.
• You can purchase two different levels of each upgrade with Afflicted Materials and slot them into your weapon, which takes up some of the Anomaly Slots. You can then unlock two more slots with Afflicted Materials.

It's a system that's very similar to altering Buddy Skills; there are buffs to select, but you only have a certain number of slots to work with, so you have to choose wisely and tweak towards your playstyle.

Qurious Crafting: How to reroll armor

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Some augments are definitely better than others (Image credit: Capcom)

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You'll receive Amber Essence at the end of each Anomaly Investigation (Image credit: Capcom)

The stronger system by far is Qurious Armor Crafting, since it gives you a chance to buff resistances, defense, and add new armor skills and decoration slots. You're going to need another resource in order to do this, though: Amber Essence. You get Amber Essence by completing Anomaly Investigations and it's used to unlock armor augmentation and perform rerolls. As with weapons, you'll want to make sure you have high rarity armor you're willing to invest in first. Here's how the process works:

• Complete an Anomaly Investigation to earn either Amber Essence+ if you have rarity nine armor, or Prime Amber Essence for rarity ten. These will be listed as rewards on the monster's quest page. You'll have to unlock more investigations to get Prime Amber Essence.
• Head to Minayle and use the Amber Essence to unlock augmentation for an armor piece.
• Now you can use any Amber Essence to augment your armor, which will potentially reroll its resistances, defense, decoration slots, or will add skills. These rerolls can also remove skills and reduce stats as well, making them a bit of a trade-off.
• If you like the new rerolled version, you can select it, but if you'd prefer to keep your old reroll, you can choose that instead.

You can also complete Research Requests for Bahari where you hunt specific Afflicted Monsters. When you hunt ten of these monsters, you'll be rewarded with Investigation Coins that you can use in his shop to purchase a number of items, including Amber Essence.

How to unlock more Anomaly Investigations

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A Qurio-infested material during a hunt (Image credit: Capcom)

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The Anomaly Investigations are randomised. (Image credit: Capcom)

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Bahari will ask you to hunt different monsters to complete Research Requests (Image credit: Capcom)

Rare Afflicted Monster materials only come from high level Anomaly Investigations, and you'll have to unlock these by breaking parts on Afflicted Monsters and gathering Qurio-infested items during the afflicted hunts. You can recognise these items as there will be little red fireflies hovering around them.

Anomaly Investigations are randomised, but they still have a level system, so these are vital if you want to unlock better hunts. If you find a random Anomaly Investigation that you really like, you can lock it in order to farm multiple times.

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[How to find Capsule Corp drops and unlock the Kamehameha in Fortnite]

The Fortnite x Dragon Ball event is now live and you might have noticed some Capsule Corp capsules falling from the skies above. Picking up one of these capsules allows you to use the powerful Kamehameha and Nimbus Cloud, so it's well worth chasing these as they appear during a match.

You'll also need to find and use these extra abilities if you want to complete the various Dragon Ball challenges on offer, so let's take a look at where to find the Capsule Corp capsules and how to wield the Kamehameha.

Where to find Capsule Corp drops 

Let's start with the bad news: drop points for the capsules are randomised each match, so there's no exact location I can give. The good news is that they appear very close to many named locations, like Reality Falls, north of Lazy Lagoon and Sleepy Sound.

When they begin to fall, you'll hear a very loud and slightly ominous whooshing noise. This is the signal that several capsules are about to land, so open up your map and it'll show you where the various capsules are going to fall. You'll also see a trail in the sky the closer they get to the ground and an orange hue on the horizon once they're down, so you need to leg it to reach them first.

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(Image credit: Epic Games)

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(Image credit: Epic Games)

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(Image credit: Epic Games)

How to open capsules and get the Kamehameha 

If you reach the capsule first, run towards it and follow the onscreen prompt to extract what's inside—namely, the Kamehameha and the Nimbus Cloud. The Nimbus Cloud will let you yeet yourself a considerable distance through the air then ride awayon a little cloud, which is perfect when you're trying to win a match. or escape opponents. The Kamehameha, on the other hand, unleashes a devastating beam of energy that will obliterate your foes—power comes in response to a need, not a desire, after all.

Of course, other players will be trying to get their hands on the capsule, so make sure you've got a weapon or two handy to make sure you're not eliminated just as you reach it. 

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[Calling all Lord of the Rings fans: I've found your next gaming keyboard]

Drop has just brought to us something I didn't know I needed, but will forever be grateful for the existence of: Elvish and Dwarfish Lord of the Rings mechanical keyboards. Like a twinkling white star above the dark mountains of earth, the beauty of these glorious tenkeyless keyboards has truly smote my heart.

With a refined, muted green facade, the Elven keyboard is adorned with custom Two Trees of Valinor artwork from Oshetart above the arrow keys. The broken blade of Andúril sits upon the enter key, surrounded by Tengwar (as well as Latin) glyphs, and Sindarin phrases such as "speak out loud" for the caps lock key (thanks for the spot Golem.de).

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(Image credit: Drop)

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(Image credit: Drop)

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(Image credit: Drop)

The Dwarves have been graced with shades of rock and stone, and Doors of Moria artwork from Matt3o sits in the space above the arrow keys, so you can feel like a king under your mountain. Cirth and Latin legends, as well as Khuzdul phrases, are littered across the keycaps, and the left Windows key is marked by the One Ring.

Both are built around the ENTR anodized aluminum case as a base, and come with Holy Panda X Switches, tactile switches designed by Drop and produced by Gateron. 

Some things to be aware of: while the switches are MX compatible, they aren't hot swappable. The Elvish and Dwarvish lettering doesn't really correspond to the Latin lettering either. And just so you know, the artwork sadly doesn't glow with under-key lighting as if touched by the last light of Durin's day.

Each keyboard does come with some novelty keycaps and a few from each one's respective orange keycap set: a scorching Durin's Forge orange for the Dwarves, and an airy Autumn in Rivendell orange for the Elves.

Perfect peripherals

(Image credit: Colorwave)

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I can't decide which one is more beautiful, but I'm sure either will go exceptionally well with the One Ring artisan keycap or these handcrafted Smaug wrist rest, both of which are also a part of the Drop x Lord of the Rings collection.

Pre-order prices are $169, down from $199, and the boards are expected to ship in mid-October 2022.

Henceforth I will call nothing fair unless it be these keyboards.

View the full article

[Logitech's new VR accessory brings Valve Index audio to the Quest 2]

Good audio is crucially important for immersive virtual reality, yet surprisingly today's most popular VR headset, the Meta Quest 2, doesn't excel in this area. Its out-of-the-box audio system is a couple of slim speakers built-in to the headset's strap, which leave a lot to be desired in quality, volume, and directionality. That's why I'm keen to see what Logitech has in store with its latest VR accessory, which aims to level up the Quest 2's weak-hearted audio.

It's called the Logitech G Chorus, and its whole deal is getting two open-back custom-tuned open BMR drivers onto either side of your ears for greatly improved audio in VR.

It works by integrating directly onto the Quest 2's strap mounting arms, which has the added benefit of allowing the Chorus to be compatible with a range of non-standard straps. Logi says hard or soft straps should be just fine either way, which is good if, like me, you've invested in the better balanced Elite strap or something similar.

You'll be adding an extra 182g to the weight of the Quest with the Chorus installed, so I'd probably recommend a more comfortable strap to go with it, anyways.

Since the Chorus connects via USB Type-C, it does take up the port on the VR headset. However, the device includes a USB Type-C passthrough, so charging or linking the Quest to your PC via a cable shouldn't be an issue with the Chorus installed.

Volume control is taken care of by the Quest 2's integrated buttons, and if you want to mute your VR swiftly, you only need to flip the Chorus speakers up and out the way to do so.

(Image credit: Logitech)

Virtual reality

(Image credit: Valve)

Best VR headset: which kit should you choose?
Best graphics card: you need serious GPU power for VR
Best gaming laptop: don't get tied to your desktop in VR

If you've ever used Valve's Index VR headset, you might notice some similarities here. Both adhere to the same basic principle of an off-ear speaker, and the Valve Index also incorporates BMR drivers—a product of its own research on high-end VR audio. I'll admit I was surprised by just how much I loved the off-ear speaker system on the Valve Index—something about it felt like it was far too simple to really deliver. But it really does deliver everything you need in VR: positional audio, plenty of volume, and a surprising amount of isolation from the outside world.

If the Chorus can match the Index's directionality and comfort over long periods in VR, I'll be impressed. The Chorus is set to cost $100 when it goes on sale at the end of August (pre-orders open now), so I'm expecting a high standard to justify the cost at the very least. 

It is, however, unfortunate for Logitech that Meta has recently increased the price of the Quest 2 by exactly $100, otherwise, this would be an easier purchase for fresh-faced VR owners. When you start to add a couple of expensive accessories to the $500 Quest 2—a comfortable strap, a battery pack, a Link cable, and the improved audio option—you can begin to rack up a price tag not all that far off the already excellent Valve Index at $999.

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[This tiny registry tweak shows you what resolution DLSS is rendering at]

Upscaling tech has been the surprise hit of recent graphics card releases. 

Ray tracing may grab the headlines, and make for some beautiful images, but being able to run your games at higher frame rates with little noticeable difference in quality is often more useful.

Nvidia has the lead here with its Deep Learning Super Sampling (DLSS), producing far better image quality than the competition, although AMD's FSR 2.0 is closing the gap. Competition is great though and means both AMD and Nvidia are trying to perfect their technologies to get the most out of the latest games.

One frustration with DLSS is that a lot of the settings are hidden out of sight. That's absolutely fine if you just want to get on and enjoy your games, but if you enjoy peering behind the curtain to see what's actually happening, you can be left wanting. Until you discover this simple little registry tweak that is. 

By adding a single line to the registry, you can see what version of DLSS the game is running, which of Microsoft's DirectX APIs is being used, and possibly most interesting of all, what resolution the game is rendering at and what it is upscaling to. This is all shown in a simple text interface in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, and it's easy to turn it all off again once you've played around a bit too.

To get up and running with this, simply hit Win + R and enter Regedit in the box. Make your way to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\NVIDIA Corporation\Global\NGXCore and right-click on the right-hand panel and create a new DWORD (32-bit) Value called ShowDlssIndicator. Set the value of this to 1024 in decimal and then close the Registry Editor and you're done.

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(Image credit: Microsoft)

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(Image credit: Sony, Nvidia)

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(Image credit: CD Projekt Red, Nvidia)

Now when you launch a game that runs DLSS you'll get the pertinent information in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. Note that while this does work in Cyberpunk 2077, Chromatic Aberration makes it very hard to read, so you'll want to turn that off. It's much easier to see what's happening in most other games, such as in God of War for example.

To turn it off again, just go to the same registry address and set ShowDlssIndicator to 0 or delete it completely if you prefer. Job done. 

View the full article

[There's now a permanent Stalker-themed supermarket in Kyiv where you can buy Stalker brownies and more]

Everyone knows the best part of Stalker is the groceries. Sure, I vaguely recall something about fending off armies of mutated horrors with clanky old Warsaw Pact rifles, but I think most of my time in those games was spent frantically scarfing down doktorskaya sausage while bullets whistled overhead and hungry beasts tracked my scent.

It's for this reason, I have to assume, that the latest step in GSC Game World's marketing campaign for Stalker 2 is a Stalker-themed supermarket in eastern Kyiv. Filled with produce themed after the games (alongside completely standard fruit, veg, and meat, which is possibly even weirder than the Stalker brownies) and decorated throughout in post-apocalyptic rust-chic, the new store promises to let you do your weekly shop while reminiscing about all the times you hunkered down in a drainage pipe and cured bullet wounds with bread. You can see a few photos of the store below.

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A Stalker themed supermarket in Kyiv (Image credit: Silpo/GSC Game World)

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Stalker-themed food (Image credit: Silpo/GSC Game World)

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A coffee stand modelled on Sidorovich's bunker (Image credit: Silpo/GSC Game World)

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The supermarket layout (Image credit: Silpo/GSC Game World)

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The supermarket's meat section (Image credit: Silpo/GSC Game World)

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Another part of the store (Image credit: Silpo/GSC Game World)

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The supermarket fish section (Image credit: Silpo/GSC Game World)

The supermarket is the product of a partnership between GSC and Silpo, a chain of Ukrainian stores that specialises in themed experiences like this one. In the past, Silpo has built cyberpunk supermarkets, anime supermarkets, in one instance (which I'm not convinced isn't a fevered invention of my own dying brain) even a store themed around GTA: San Andreas. It's permanent, too; GSC's Zakhar Bocharov tells PCG that the supermarket is no fleeting pop-up: "It will be around for, like, forever. As long as the shop is there, it will be a Stalker-style shop".

Like so much else, the store's opening was disrupted by Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February this year. In fact, although the supermarket already looks plenty Stalker-ish to me, there are still elements of it that haven't been installed yet because of wartime disruption. Plans for installations that mimic Zone-style anomalies and statues of Stalker's slavering monsters have had to be postponed because of the ongoing conflict. They'll hopefully come as part of a planned "visual upgrade" scheduled for some point in the future, says Bocharov.

I had to re-read a lot of things about this project when I first came across it just to convince myself it was real. I tend to associate the suburban tedium of a supermarket more with Fallout's post-apocalyptic setting than with Stalker's, so the sight of a coffee counter modelled after Sidorovich's bunker from the first game had me briefly concerned I'd developed videogame news cabin fever. It's plenty real, though, and I suppose the next time I'm in Kyiv I will make dutiful pilgrimage to Berezneva Street to stock up on kolbasa. Then I'll look for a drainage pipe to sit in while I eat it.

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[Everything we know about World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic]

It's not long to wait until Wrath of the Lich King Classic, so it's time to get excited all over again for one of World of Warcraft's most beloved expansions. It's hard to believe that the original WotLK launched over 13 years ago, at the end of 2008—the expansion that essentially brought Arthas Menethil, as the Lich King, front and centre for the first time since Warcraft 3.

Like Burning Crusade Classic before it, WotLK Classic won't be exactly the same as it was back then. Much of it will remain untouched though, and the changes that are planned aren't going to alter what made the expansion great. If you're curious to know more, I'll go over everything below. Here's what we know about World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King Classic. 

Release date

When is the pre-patch?

The Wrath of the Lich King Classic pre-patch arrives on August 30. This includes character balancing and reworks, the inscription profession, achievements, and the "new" Death Knight class.

The roadmap for the pre-patch is as follows:

• September 6 - 13: Zombie Plague event
• September 13 - 25: Scourge Invasion
• September 26: Wrath Classic release date

Wrath of the Lich King Classic release date 

Blizzard has confirmed that Wrath of the Lich King Classic will arrive on September 26. The beta started in June and you can opt-in via the official website.

With the new Dragonflight expansion arriving on retail WoW by the end of 2022, the Wrath Classic release date gives it some breathing space if you're hoping to check out both.  

The King returns September 26. #WrathClassic https://t.co/eafQneexuG pic.twitter.com/Mr6vT5GfdwJuly 25, 2022

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How much will it cost? 

Wrath of the Lich King Classic will be part of the monthly World of Warcraft subscription ($15/£10/€13) and includes access to WoW Classic/TBC Classic/WoW Shadowlands. 

It's unclear whether you'll need to pay to clone your character (if you also want to continue playing the other Classic versions), but I'll update this guide as soon as there's more. Otherwise, you will only need to pay extra if you decide to use a level boost or transfer your existing character to another server.

Expansion summary

(Image credit: Blizzard)

What to expect from Wrath of the Lich King Classic 

The second World of Warcraft expansion is one of the most popular. Arthas Menethil's journey started back in Warcraft 3, and this expansion takes us to Northrend to essentially conclude his story and face him as the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel. This is also the expansion that introduced the popular Ulduar raid as well as the Death Knight class.

Here's a summary of what the expansion includes:

• Level cap increased to 80
• Death Knight class (starts at level 55)
• Northrend continent opens up with 11 new zones
• Several new raids including Ulduar and Icecrown Citadel
• Dual talent specialisation
• Achievements
• Inscription profession added

What's changing

So, what will be different? 

Blizzard has stated that a number of quality of life changes will be added to Wrath of the Lich King Classic, that weren't there in the original. 

You can roll your first Death Knight without the need for a level 55 (or higher) character on your realm. This essentially means you can skip a huge chunk of leveling and get to Northrend much faster than you would if you were just starting your journey in Classic. This will only apply to the first one you make though—any subsequent Death Knights will require you to meet the original unlock requirements, which includes one Death Knight per realm and an existing level 55+ character on the same realm. 

Level 70 boosts will be available to buy so you can step into Azeroth and begin your journey to Northrend from launch, rather than having to grind through the previous 70 levels before you're able to hit the new stuff. Level boosts were offered for Burning Crusade Classic, too.

One of the more surprising changes is the removal of the dungeon finder tool, which was originally added in the original WotLK expansion. Many of the complaints about modern WoW is that it's lost its sense of community, and this is largely blamed on the introduction of automated group finders where there's little need to communicate with one another to get into group content.

The Barber Shop will see many improvements over the original and might even include many of the options that are available in modern WoW. And thanks to player feedback during TBC Classic, Personal Arena Rating will replace Arena Teams in WotLK. 

(Image credit: Blizzard)

Wrath of the Lich King Classic will introduce 'Fresh Start' servers 

Wrath of the Lich King is one of the most fondly remembered of all World of Warcraft expansions, and Blizzard is clearly expecting a good number of players to jump into WoW Classic for the first time. But no one likes to feel that they're late to the party, so "fresh start" servers aim to let people create a new character from scratch and build a new community with like-minded players.

These new servers will come with some restrictions: 

• For at least 90 days, you will not be allowed to boost a character on Fresh Start realms.
• For at least 90 days, Fresh Start realms will not be available destinations for character transfers.
• Death Knights cannot be created on these realms without a level 55 character on that same realm.

It's important to note that the 90-day limit is the absolute minimum that Blizzard is considering lifting these restrictions. A post on the official forums reassured players that feedback would be listened to and Blizzard won't rush any decision regarding character transfers.

Additionally, all WoW Classic and Burning Crusade Classic zones and dungeons will be unlocked on these new servers, including the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj.

Phases

(Image credit: Blizzard)

Wrath of the Lich King Classic phases 

We don't know what the planned schedule for the WotLK phases is, but we do know what content you can expect for each one. Here's the list: 

• Phase 1 (October 6): Naxxramas, The Eye of Eternity, The Obsidian Sanctum
• Phase 2 (TBA): Ulduar
• Phase 3 (TBA): Trial of the Crusader, Onyxia's Lair
• Phase 4 (TBA): Icecrown Citadel
• Phase 5 (TBA): The Ruby Sanctum

You'll be able to make a Death Knight during the WotLK pre-patch, too, which will give you the chance to try out the "new" hero class before arriving in Northrend for the first time. 

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[Intel's Arc A380 GPU should go on sale in the US for the first time this month]

It's been a long time coming but Intel may finally be breaking into the US market with its Arc graphics cards. The ASRock Arc A380 is now available for backorder on retailer Newegg's website with an expected ETA date of August 22.

The A380 was officially launched back in June, however, it was limited to China only and a single model of card: Gunnir's Photon. Since then Intel's Alchemist GPU generation has stalled in reaching further shores, with no definitive date for its arrival.

However, it now appears that ASRock's Challenger Arc A380 will turn up before the end of the month.

The ASRock Challenger Arc A380 is listed for $140 at Newegg (well spotted, momomo_us), placing it around the price of AMD's Radeon RX 6400. Nvidia's GTX 1650 is a little more expensive on the site, but generally, you're looking at a price that should be a match for the MSRP of that card, too.

Unfortunately, the A380 is not a match for either of those cards right now. Intel provided us with its official A380 benchmarks, ripped from its reviewer's guide, and it's slower than both of those aforementioned cards most of the time. In a few instances, the A380 does top the RX 6400, but they are few. It's important to remember the context of these benchmarks, as well—Intel's Arc GPUs can be hit or miss depending on the game and API.

Though with Newegg only asking $140 for the ASRock A380, it's not an abhorrent offer next to inflated prices for the ageing GTX 1650. While the AMD RX 6400 is a better, more recent graphics card at the same price, at least the A380 is somewhat comparatively priced at the low-end. It's also another entry-level graphics card in a somewhat uninspired market for budget GPUs today and could have some knock-on impact on the prices of AMD and Nvidia's offerings.

View the full article

[Wrath of the Lich King Classic's pre-patch arrives later this month]

The wait is almost over. Blizzard has finally announced that the Wrath of the Lich King Classic pre-patch will go live on August 30. The 50% XP buff will remain for the duration of the pre-patch and will also apply to Death Knights.

You won't need an existing level 55 character to play a Death Knight either, as this restriction will be removed for the first one you create, unless you start on one of the new "fresh start" servers. If you're after an army of Death Knights though, you're out of luck as you can only have one per realm and original restrictions will apply to any others you make.

The journey to Northrend begins August 30. https://t.co/FT05NXZAl7 pic.twitter.com/ePkhQlxbDaAugust 16, 2022

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Along with the "new" Death Knight class, character balancing and other systems will arrive with the pre-patch. These include the inscription profession, achievements, and updates to both Stormwind City and Orgrimmar. Blizzard has also released a mini-roadmap for the update—the Zombie Plague event will hit major cities on September 6 and the Scourge Invasion start assaulting various locations on September 13.

The fresh start servers haven't been announced yet, though they're expected to go live with the pre-patch at the end of August. 

With Wrath of the Lich King Classic launching on September 26, that gives us a little under a month to prepare for the journey to Northrend. You'd better wrap up warm.

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[Today's Wordle 424 answer and hint: Wednesday, August 17]

You're now just a short scroll away from all the hints and tips you need to solve today's Wordle. Need something more? No problem. You'll also find the answer to the August 17 (424) puzzle just below.

I'm constantly amazed by Wordle's ability to take common words—words I'd see a hundred times a day and somehow barely notice them—and turn them into something strange and unfathomable. I love it, even when I lose. It's like seeing something old in a brand new light.

Wordle hint

Today's Wordle: A hint for Wednesday, August 17

If you have to repeat something, so by the end you've done whatever that was—a request, a task, anything—exactly two times then you've done it…? Two vowels today, and at least one relatively uncommon consonant too. 

Wordle help: 3 tips for beating Wordle every day 

If there's one thing better than playing Wordle, it's playing Wordle well, which is why I'm going to share a few quick tips to help set you on the path to success:

• A good opener contains a balanced mix of unique vowels and consonants. 
• A tactical second guess helps to narrow down the pool of letters quickly.
• The solution may contain repeat letters.

There's no time pressure beyond making sure it's done by midnight. So there's no reason to not treat the game like a casual newspaper crossword and come back to it later if you're coming up blank.

Wordle answer

(Image credit: Josh Wardle)

What is the Wordle 424 answer?

Too many possibilities and not enough guesses left? The answer to the August 17 (424) Wordle is TWICE.

Previous answers

Wordle archive: Which words have been used

The more past Wordle answers you can cram into your memory banks, the better your chances of guessing today's Wordle answer without accidentally picking a solution that's already been used. Past Wordle answers can also give you some excellent ideas for fun starting words that keep your daily puzzle solving fresh.

Here are some recent Wordle solutions:

• August 16: GRUEL
• August 15: POKER
• August 14: KHAKI
• August 13: HUNKY
• August 12: LABEL
• August 11: GLEAN
• August 10: CLING
• August 9: PATTY
• August 8: UNFIT
• August 7: SMEAR

Learn more about Wordle 

Every day Wordle presents you with six rows of five boxes, and it's up to you to work out which secret five-letter word is hiding inside them.

You'll want to start with a strong word like ALERT—something containing multiple vowels, common consonants, and no repeat letters. Hit Enter and the boxes will show you which letters you've got right or wrong. If a box turns ️, it means that letter isn't in the secret word at all. means the letter is in the word, but not in that position. means you've got the right letter in the right spot.

You'll want your second go to compliment the first, using another "good" word to cover any common letters you missed last time while also trying to avoid any letter you now know for a fact isn't present in today's answer.

After that it's just a case of using what you've learned to narrow your guesses down to the right word. You have six tries in total and can only use real words (so no filling the boxes with EEEEE to see if there's an E). Don't forget letters can repeat too (ex: BOOKS).

If you need any further advice feel free to check out our Wordle tips, and if you'd like to find out which words have already been used you'll find those below.

Originally, Wordle was dreamed up by software engineer Josh Wardle, as a surprise for his partner who loves word games. From there it spread to his family, and finally got released to the public. The word puzzle game has since inspired tons of games like Wordle, refocusing the daily gimmick around music or math or geography. It wasn't long before Wordle became so popular it was sold to the New York Times for seven figures. Surely it's only a matter of time before we all solely communicate in tricolor boxes. 

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[Welcome Nandou]

Hello Nandou,

Welcome to UnityHQ Nolfseries Community. Please feel free to browse around and get to know the others. If you have any questions please don't hesitate to ask.

Nandou joined on the 08/17/2022.

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[The best Skyrim mods]

The best Skyrim mods can be tough to find when there are over 68,000 of them on NexusMods and 28,000 on the Steam Workshop. At this point if you can imagine it chances are there's a mod for it—as well as plenty of things you would rather not imagine. From interface tweaks to entirely new campaigns, fully voiced companions, and of course ridiculous memes, it's all out there. Some of it is very out there.

Skyrim Console Commands

(Image credit: Bethesda)

There's no need to play Skyrim as a humble warrior. Become a giant, fly, walk through walls, spawn any item you want, and even become Santa Claus with Skyrim console commands.

It can be overwhelming to sort through all those mods, and installing a pre-canned list usually means adding a bunch of things you don't actually want, then not being able to get rid of them without messing up a bunch of dependencies. That's why our guide assumes a manual pick-and-choose style of modding, and is sorted into categories so you can find a selection of individual mods that are compatible and suit your playstyle.

The first thing you'll need to know if you're playing Skyrim on a modern PC in 2022 is that it's going to have problems running at a framerate higher than 60fps. The physics engine wasn't designed for it, and you'll end up hearing loud, repeated sound effects as things like water splashes loop continually, as well as seeing horses float into the air, bodies bounce around, and so on. Go into your GPU software's control panel and make sure Skyrim is capped at 60fps to fix all that.

Now we'll cover how to get started with Skyrim mods, as well as recommending some essential improvements. Check the subsequent pages for all the best Skyrim quest mods, new spells, equipment, followers, combat changes, and more.

If you're looking for Skyrim Special Edition mods, follow that link to our separate collection. These mods are for vanilla Skyrim, AKA Oldrim or Skyrim Legendary Edition. Mods added in the latest update of this list have been marked with a .

Table of contents

Page 1: Getting started - how to install, patches, interface, and textures
Page 2: Content mods - quests, characters, creatures, and places
Page 3: Gameplay mods - weapons, magic, systems, and tweaks

How to install Skyrim mods

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Once you've found some mods you'd like to try, here are the tools you can use to get them working. Make sure you read the description page for each of your mods: many of them require specific steps and instructions.

Vortex

Replacing the old Nexus Mod Manager is Vortex, a newer program for organizing your mod loadout. Available from the NexusMods website, like most of the mods on our list, it will handle everything for you. It's easy to use and makes downloading, activating, and deactivating mods a breeze. It's also useful in that it supports tons of other games, like The Witcher 3, Fallout 4, and many more. 

Skyrim Script Extender

Skyrim Script Exstender (SKSE) is a utility that's required for many of the more complex mods to work. Not every mod on this list requires it, but plenty do, including the essential SkyUI, so you're best off just installing it up front. SKSE is now available directly through Steam, but you can still find it here if you prefer manual installation. 

Steam Workshop

You can also browse and use Skyrim mods via the Steam Workshop. It's easy to navigate and adding them to your roster is accomplish by simply clicking the subscribe button. Keep in mind that more complex mods usually require a few more steps to install, and even if they appear in the Workshop they may require additional steps to get running. Always read the description.

Patches

(Image credit: Bethesda)

It's no secret Bethesda's RPGs can be more than a bit buggy. Thankfully, long after the official patches stopped rolling out, modders remained devoted to making the game more stable and usable. Here are some mods that will improve your overall experience.

Unofficial Skyrim Patch, Unofficial High Resolution Patch

Created by the same modders as the Unofficial Oblivion patches, the Unofficial Skyrim patches catch a huge amount of bugs the official patches don't. A lot of them are things you might never notice, like objects that were placed slightly wrong so they clip through each other or quests that break if you do something unusual, but it's still better to have them than not. There's one for the Legendary Edition and one for the official High Resolution textures patch.

Fix Lip Sync

If you've ever seen a delay between an NPC's spoken dialogue and when their lips start moving, it's a long-running bug apparently caused by an optimization patch in Skyrim version 1.9. This mod fixes it.

User Interface mods

SkyUI

Skyrim's original UI is, well, terrible. SkyUI makes it easier to use, more pleasant to read, and much more useful for sorting through your loot and menus. Most importantly, SkyUI adds a mod configuration menu to the pause screen, letting you tweak and adjust compatible mods (including many on this list). A lot of mods don't require SkyUI and will run just fine without it, but you'll get much more out of your mods if you have it.

In other words, it's highly recommended.

RaceMenu

An improved character creation menu, with numeric displays for all sliders, and the ability to choose any color for your hair, skin, or other tints rather than being limited based on race. There's a sculpt mode if you want to get right into messing with the geometry of your head, and you can turn the light illuminating your face on and off to see how your features will look in different situations, which is a blessing.

Better Dialogue Controls

Using a keyboard and mouse for Skyrim means sometimes the game gets confused when you're selecting a dialogue option. You've noticed, surely, that sometimes when you choose a response the game thinks you've chosen a different one. Skyrim's dialogue controls are weird and clunky, and this mod completely and thankfully fixes that. The same modder also created one for message boxes.

A Quality World Map

Skyrim's map is functional but boring. A Quality World Map offers multiple ways to fix it. You can replace the map with a much more detailed world texture, with colors that help delineate the separate areas much more obviously, but there's also an option to have a paper map with a more Oblivion look if that's your thing. 

Better Free Camera

(Image credit: Utopium)

To get the perfect screenshot, normally you have to use Skyrim console commands. Better free camera instead lets you set hotkeys for free camera mode, toggling the HUD, clipping, pausing time or adjusting its speed, and everything else a dedicated screenshot hunter needs. Well, almost everything. Combine it with Puppeteer Master to pose NPCs, override their AI, and select animations.

Immersive HUD

You don't need your HUD onscreen all the time. This mod hides the crosshairs and status bars when you're not actively using them, such as outside combat. You can also toggle the compass and quest markers on and off with a keypress, and adjust their opacity.

Vendor Sale Delay - GONE

This is a small mod, but it makes the game much less frustrating. Now instead of having to listen to the vendor dialogue before they’ll trade with you, the trade window opens up immediately while they give their speech about their junk—I mean "treasures."

HUD Clock

On the other hand, sometimes you want a little more info on-screen. This widget adds a clock to your screen—with several different elegant and unobtrusive faces you can choose through SkyUI's mod configuration menu—so you can keep track of the time and date. The Dovahkiin's got a smartwatch.

Textures & Lighting mods

Skyrim, frankly, wasn't really that fantastic-looking to begin with, so there have naturally been a lot—a lot—of visual improvement mods over the years. Here's how to squeeze improved visuals out of the aging RPG.

Total Character Makeover 

A compilation of changes to existing NPC appearances, the Total Character Makeover makes everyone in Skyrim look better without making them too much better-looking, if you catch our drift. No nudity, no anime hair, no glamazon makeup, just a suite of new textures and tweaks to everything from beards to vampire fangs. 

Enhanced Lights and FX

You may have noticed some things in Skyrim that should be sources of light don't actually cast any, while in other places things are brightly lit for no real reason. Enhanced Lights and FX fixes that, making light shine where it should. There are options for just how dark you want interiors to be, and enabling those will mean torches and spells like candlelight are vital. It also makes some nice tweaks to the appearance of smoke.

2K Textures

Does what it says: replaces Skyrim's textures: sky, water, architecture, clothing, clutter, reflections, and so on, of the cities, towns, dungeons, and landscapes. There's a full version if your PC can handle it, but there's also a lite version that should make things look nicer without killing your performance.

Climates of Tamriel

This comprehensive mod adds hundreds of new weather systems, a huge library of new cloud systems, a new sun, improved lighting for both fans of a fantasy look and realistic visuals, and even audio improvements. With all of these systems combining, each day in Skyrim will feel different from the last.

Real Clouds

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Designed to be compatible with weather mods like Climates of Tamriel, Real Clouds adds "pseudo-volumetric" clouds that look three-dimensional. You'll be able to see sheets of distant rain falling, and clouds at varying heights that react to the current weather. Even if you're not using a mod that alters the way weather works, this provides some nice and diverse cloud cover. You can even fly through these fluffy sky friends.

Book of Silence

A pretty hefty collection of high-quality replacements for Skyrim textures, covering everything from equipment, landscapes, dungeons, and architecture. While they look much nicer, the textures are the same resolution as Bethesda's high-res DLC pack so it shouldn't slow you down.

Make sure you read the notes on the mod's page. There are hotfixes required to get everything working.

Static Mesh Improvement

This mod edits a number of 3D models in the game, and with over 700 meshes placed in over 15,000 locations in the world, it's a welcome difference. You'll notice better looking architectural elements, furniture, objects in the landscape, and all sorts of other models that didn't get much attention from Bethesda.

Immersive Animations

Immersive Animations adds dozens of little touch-ups to Skyrim's existing animations, plus a few nifty new ones. It's also compatible with Dual Sheath Redux, allowing for all sorts of nice animations for having your shield on your back, or sheathing two weapons at once.

YY Anim Replacer — Zweihander

Zweihander is a set of new animations for two handed weapons in Skyrim. The big selling point is the idle animation, which sees you resting your sword/axe/hammer on your shoulder. There's lots more than that though, with animations for running, turning and even a leaping overhead strike included. It's all customizable too, so you can mix and match new and old animations.

Sounds of Skyrim

Get immersed in new audio: tons of it. Hundreds of new sounds effects are included to make dungeons and sewers spookier, enhance the wilderness and wildlife, and make cities and villages more lively and real. This mod is a treat for your ears, and has customizable modules for each type of area.

FXAA Injector

Enhances your graphics with FXAA and other post effects, such as sharpen and bloom, creating crisper visuals and more vibrant colors. Conveniently, you can adjust these settings while you play by alt-tabbing out and moving the sliders on the mod's desktop utility.

Skyrim Flora Overhaul

This mod comes in three different versions, depending on how drastically you want to change your game. All versions promise more luxurious trees and bark, taller grass, and prettier plant life. The heavier versions completely replace the trees altogether and give you lusher greens for a summery feel.

Realistic Water Two

Realistic Water Two, drawing and expanding on the work of some earlier water mods, adds better ripples, larger splashes, re-textured foam and faster water flow in streams, bobbing chunks of ice, and even murky, stagnant-looking water in dungeons. It's the next best thing to getting wet.

True Vision ENB

If you're looking to get closer to reality with crisp visuals, this ENB configuration is one to try. With hyper-realistic color corrections, realistic specular highlights and reflections, improved spell effects, and tons of other adjustments, it makes Skyrim look like a real-world place.

Enhanced Camera

Remaining in first-person mode helps a game feel immersive, and this mod does that in spades. Not only can you look down and see your entire body while playing, but other activities such as crafting, cooking, riding horses and even riding dragons won't break you out of first-person mode.

Book Covers

It may not seem like that big of a deal, but these little high-res book covers do make for an extremely pleasant upgrade over the standard, muddily-textured ones. When you're relaxing at home or perusing (or robbing) a bookstore or library, make sure you've installed this lovely cover mod.

Hearthfire Dolls Are Ugly 

Because they are! What self-respecting parent wants to give their kid a dirty, beat-up naked doll? Instead, give them an actual cute dolly, or an adorable teddy bear in a variety of different colours.

Content & gameplay mods

Table of contents

Page 1: Getting started - how to install mods, patches, interface, and textures
Page 2: Content mods - quests, characters, creatures, and places
Page 3: Gameplay mods - weapons, skills, systems, and tweaks

These content mods for Skyrim can keep you playing for years. From the full-sized fan expansion Enderal to new cities and factions, there's so much you can add to the world of Skyrim. Get adventurin'.

Quests and expansions

Enderal: The Shards of Order

This total conversion mod creates an entirely new world, very nearly the size of Skyrim itself, and populates it with new dungeons, quests, monsters, and fully-voice NPCs. Some of Skyrim's systems have also been tweaked, there's a new custom story to enjoy, and a good 50+ hours of new adventures to be hard. You can read about the opening hours of Enderal here. 

The Forgotten City

This extensive mod not only gives you a new city to explore, but a murder mystery to solve, NPCs to interrogate, secrets to uncover, and, oh yeah, a chance to do some time travel. Voiced by over a dozen actors, this mod took years of development time and is recommended for characters over level five. We tried it out here. (The Forgotten City has also been made into a standalone game.) 

Pirates of Skyrim – The Northern Cardinal Under the Black Flag 

(Image credit: BigBizkit)

Become captain of your own ship, then commit acts of piracy or do battle with pirates. The only thing missing is being able to sail in real-time, though that was unlikely to ever be an option. Instead, once you've completed a short questline to unlock your upgradeable ship and recruited at least three crew by giving sailors' journals to your followers, you can fast travel out into the Sea of Ghosts, then either dive for treasure or look through the telescopes for ships to board. You can raid pirate ships if you'd rather pretend to be a pirate hunter, or faction warships if you're playing privateer. After every victory, line your ship's trophy room with the booty.

Moonpath to Elsewyr

For those who are sick of snowy mountains, Moonpath to Elsweyr offers two brand new environments: lush jungle and barren desert. This quest mod takes you to the Khajit homeland of Elsweyr, which you can travel across in your airship. Did I mention you get an airship? You get an airship. We spoke to its creator about making one of the first Skyrim quest mods. 

Vigilant

Vigilant is a four-part quest mod that adds some fitting Dark Souls flair to Tamriel. After getting stuck in Oblivion, you'll face off against otherworldly monsters and big, Souls-style bosses while exploring areas filled with special items and keys. Beyond that, the 'Anvil of Zenithar' allows players to craft their own wares after finishing objectives, besting bosses and reaching new areas. An additional mod gives Vigilant voice-acting too.

The same modder has also created a Bloodborne adventure called Glenmoril.

Wyrmstooth

Download on Nexus or Steam

Wyrmstooth adds a fully voiced new questline, set after the events of Skyrim's main story, in which the Dragonborn is hired to defeat a dragon that is harassing the ships of the East Empire Company. Your job is to assemble a team of mercenary companions and travel to the island of Wyrmstooth, which features a variety of side quests and a gigantic dungeon. It also has a new home—an Imperial fort that can be repaired and expanded—as well as an animal companion recruited via one of its 15 sidequests, new spells, a new dragon shout, and a puzzle that apparently involves possessing a draugr. 

Falskaar

Falksaar is a massive 'DLC sized' continent created by a young modder as an audition piece for Bethesda. The island itself is impressive, comparable in size and scope to Dragonborn's Solstheim, though a bit more linear. Still, the continent itself is well-worth exploring.

Legacy of the Dragonborn 

Legacy of the Dragonborn adds a gallery in Solitude where you can keep mementos of your time in Skyrim. It's a museum about you, with space for almost every unique item in the game. All those quest rewards and Daedric artifacts you went to so much trouble to earn but don't use can be displayed in a beautiful building with its own library, store room and more. The curator hands out quests to help fill it, there's an entire archeology system with its own perks, and Legacy is compatible with several major quest mods like Moonpath, Moon and Star, and Undeath so you can display items from those as well. The only downside is that it won't recognize items received before installing it, so it's worth starting a fresh save.  

Imperial Mail 

Post offices may not sound like an exciting addition to Skyrim, but Imperial Mail adds a heck of a lot of convenience. Once you open an account at either the central office in Solitude or any of the marked taverns, you can forward equipment between them for a fee—meaning you can send a bunch of heavy gear back home after a quest, then carry on. There are also quests on offer if you want to help the Imperial Mail out by delivering messages, and it's compatible with Legacy of the Dragbonborn so you can send items direct to the gallery.

Faction: Pit Fighter

Miss the arena? This quest mod adds a group of pit fighters you can join to the Gray Quarter of Windhelm, each of them voice-acted. The bouts take place in bespoke arenas outside the bounds of the map, and you can choose to fight one-on-one, against teams, or against wild animals. You'll have to wait between fights, so it's a good faction to visit in between other questlines. If you use the Open Cities mod download this version instead, and make sure to read the notes on that page to get the voices working.

The Paarthurnax Dilemma 

Ever wanted to tell the Blades to get bent when they tell you to kill your dragon bro? Well, now you can! With this mod from Arthmoor, you now have the option to explain matters to the Blades and make them see reason (although you might have to get a bit forceful—darn).

Cutting Room Floor

Adds in a lot of content that Bethesda cut before release, including NPCs, dialogue, items, quests, and locations like villages, towers, farms, mills, and more. The mod author, Arthmoor, also organized and cleaned up the code so that everything would make sense and run smoothly. 

Heljarchen Farm

Have a burning desire to beat Nazeem at his own career? This mod adds a Hearthfire-style farm to Skyrim. Check out the notices posted at some of the inns, buy the property, and rebuild the ruined farm in Dawnstar into a model of agriculture with livestock and several farm fields. You can even upgrade it to include a guardhouse and your own meadery.

Sea of Ghosts

Ahoy, matey! Fancy yourself a ship captain? This mod lets you acquire a ship, hire a crew, and set sail for a number of quests on the Sea of Ghosts. There are seven quests scattered over a number of new islands, and the mod features professional voice acting to boot.

Enhanced Skyrim Factions - The Companions

Ever thought it was pretty stupid that you got into the Circle after only doing a few minor quests, or that you were railroaded into becoming a werewolf? With this mod, you get a lot more quests, becoming a werewolf is your choice, and you can battle the Silver Hand with members other than Farkas or Aela.

Undeath

As the saying goes: if you can't beat 'em, join 'em. Alternately, you can beat 'em and join 'em. I'm talking about necromancers, in this case. Undeath is a custom quest in which you're tasked with wiping out an evil cabal of necromancers, with the twist that you can choose to continue their dark unholy work. You can even perform a ritual that will allow you to become a powerful Lich and command an army of the undead. It's meant for players over level 30. We covered it here.

Moon and Star

A dangerous criminal from Morrowind has arrived in Skyrim, and your quest to track him down will take you to a new town and an inventive, puzzle-filled dungeon, introduce you to several new NPCs including merchants and traders, and outfit you with new weapons and spells.

Helgen Reborn

A huge and fantastic quest mod that centres around rebuilding and ruling the town of Helgen, also known as “that place that got burnt down at the start of the game." Following the quest will lead you to creating a ragtag bunch of misfits to act as the town guard, while the city itself slowly expands around you.

You also wind up with the coolest player home ever designed: read our article about it.

Descent into Madness

Descent into Madness was one of the highlights of Richard Cobbett's Week of Madness diary. Take a nap in your bed in Breezehome and you'll be transported into the realm of Sheogorath, where two nations called Madness and Dementia are engaged in an eternal clash of the crazies. Each side offers a different, hour-long questline full of puzzles and riddles, all set within a bizarre, dreamlike landscape.

The Notice Board

Taking a page from The Witcher, this mod adds a notice board outside inns in every city in Skyrim. There you can collect radiant missions, some to gather materials or ingredients, some to fetch a specific item, others to hunt down bandits for a bounty or rescue a citizen. It's a good way to keep yourself busy when you're not saving the world.

Alternate Start - Live Another Life

If you want to begin a new game of Skyrim as someone other than the Dragonborn, this is one of several mods that give you a fresh start. Skip the opening sequence and begin life as someone arriving by boat, locked in a jail cell, a visitor at an inn, an outlaw in the wilderness, and many more.

New Beginnings

Looking for more ways to start a new playthrough? This mod expands on the original Live Another Life by Arthmoor with over a dozen new beginnings, including the option to start as a vampire, a werewolf, or even a skooma addict.  And just like the original mod, there’s a good mix of safe options along with those that are downright deadly. 

Skyrim Unbound Reborn [Alternate Start]

(Image credit: Bethesda)

An alternative to Alternate Start - Live Another Life, this is a more freeform way of deciding how your adventure begins. Rather than choosing from preset options like bandit or necromancer, when you create a new character you open the Mod Configuration menu and toggle a ton of individual options. Select the equipment and spells you have, how much money you own, where you begin, and whether you're the Dragonborn. You can also customize when the main questline starts, whether dragons appear, if you start with a bounty on your head, and what time of day it is. You can even set individual options to random for a surprise. Once you're done, go back to the first page and click Begin Your Adventure to set off. Our coverage is here.

Companions and NPCs

Inigo

Maybe you don't think a blue Khajiit who follows you around commenting on everything and being sarcastic about Lydia is what Skyrim needs, but trust us on this. Inigo is a follower with tons of dialogue, some tied to his own questline and more that crops up at appropriate times depending on the location you're at. He can be told where to go and what to do by whistling, and will follow you even if you've got an existing companion, chatting away with them thanks to skilfully repurposed voice lines. 

Vilja in Skyrim

(Image credit: Emma Amgepo Lycanthrops)

A sequel to a much-loved Oblivion mod (which Terry Pratchett contributed to), Vilja in Skyrim adds the great-granddaughter of the original Vilja as a follower. She's an alchemist with her own questline to follow and a unique system to give her orders, essentially spells bound to hotkeys that can be used to co-ordinate attacks. Like Inigo she doesn't count toward your follower limit, and if introduced to each other Inigo and Vilja will even chat amongst themselves. 

Citizens of Tamriel

Citizens of Tamriel adds new NPCs to Skyrim with some much-needed personality. Skyrim's larger characters have interesting things to say but average folks? Not so much. Citizens of Tamriel is a fully voice acted mod that adds new minor characters with personalities and branching conversations that go beyond simple quest directives or one-liners.

Immersive Citizens - AI Overhaul

This AI overhaul makes citizen react more sensibly to attacks, running away to secure locations when dragons or the like attack their settlements. It also changes the way combatants act, with some sensibly backing off to regroup at low health or making judgements about whether an opponent's worth taking on based on their level and equipment. Also makes changes to NPC schedules, their responses to weather conditions and more, making all Skyrim's citizens behave more believably.

Guard Dialogue Overhaul

Guards in Skyrim are total arseholes. They constantly belittle you, even when you've saved the world several times over. This mod helps fix that. As you climb the ladder of respectability, more common phrases (arrow to the knee, etc.) will become less common and they'll start being more respectful.

Interesting NPCs

(Image credit: Bethesda)

If you'd like your companions to be a bit more fun to have around, this mod adds a ton of new followers with custom voices and tons of location-based commentary, their own quest lines, and some interesting and unique appearances. If you find one you particularly like, great news—you can marry them.

Diverse Guards

Ever noticed that Skyrim's Imperial army is a no-girls-allowed club? Oh sure, there are female named characters like Legate Rikke, but the actual rank and file soldiers, with the exception of Windhelm and Riften, are always male. This mod edits the list of models that town guards and Imperial soldiers are randomly drawn from, adding some women into the mix, and also adds in several different faces for the male guards.

Immersive Patrols

Immersive Patrols creates a series of patrols for Skyrim's different factions: Stormcloak, Imperial, Thalmor, Dawnguard, Bandits, and so on. Occasionally these routes intersect, resulting in two opposed factions fighting to the death. Imperials and Stormcloaks regularly clash at designated warzones, with the survivors either reinforcing or taking control of the nearest fort. It adds a tremendous amount of life to Skyrim's conflict, and generates far more of those emergent clashes we all love to watch.

Amazing Follower Tweaks

Want multiple followers? Want to micromanage them, pick their outfits, tell them which spells to use, how to fight, where to live, and how to level up? This mod allows that, and more, including making them smart enough to avoid traps, ignore friendly fire, and ride horses.

Travelers of Skyrim

The roads of Skyrim are typically pretty empty, except for you and the occasional bandit who is forced to make his living trying to rob you since you're the only person on the roads of Skyrim. This mod adds dozens of fellow travelers who move between the cities and towns. Now you'll encounter traveling merchants, alchemists, mercenaries, and mages when you hit the road.

Cats of the Jarls

(Image credit: gg77, Bethesda)

Download on Steam or Nexus

The Jarls all have cats. The cats all have little outfits. Is it lore-friendly? Heck, who cares? I mean, look at the little boots. You might want to go with the version without purring because these little house cats can start sounding like a parade of classic cars if you listen long enough. If you don't want cats for Jarls, perhaps you just want the Creatures of Nirn - Khajit Alfiq mod that it's based off of, which adds the tiny Khajiit species to they game. Remember, they do not like being mistaken for house cats.

Locations

Daedric Shrines

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Sure, Azura gets a huge statue because she's the one Daedric Prince with a decent PR department, but worshippers of the other Demon Lords of Misrule have to hide their devotion away in dungeons or modest shrines that only appear if you complete certain quests. Sheogorath and Sanguine get nothing even if you do finish their sidequests (which are two of the best in the whole game). This mod fixes that by adding shrine statues for them, while replacing the statues of those who do appear with newer models. Going above and beyond, it also replaces the statues of Dibella, both big and small, even though the goddess of love is technically one of the Nine Divines. Comes in 2K and 4K versions.

Bigger Dragon Bridge

(Image credit: Bethesda)

There's no way you could fit a dragon on Dragon Bridge. It looks like it should have a warning sign that says "no more than three sheep abreast". If you think the feature that the town of Dragon Bridge in Haafingar Hold derives its name from should be a little more impressively scaled, this mod bumps it up. Now it looks like something you could get at least six sheep across in a row.

Airship Dev Aveza

Want your own flying ship? Yeah, course you do. This takes the airship model from the Moonpath to Elsweyr quest mod and combines it with the interactions from a separate skyship mod to make the best flying fantasy you'll get. The Dev Aveza is docked behind Solitude, and once it's yours can be flown all over the map. It's a much easier way to get to the top of the Throat of the World than walking, and it's got room on board for all your belongings.

The Great City of Winterhold

(Image credit: Bethesda, soldierofwar)

Winterhold used to be the capital of Skyrim, but it sure doesn't look like it when you show up. This mod solves that problem, adding in the remnants of a once great city with walls and ruins that really show its history. The same modder has overhauled other Skyrim cities like Dragonbridge and even Solitude.

Legendary Cities

This mod adds ten new cities to Skyrim, all drawn from The Elder Scrolls: Arena, like Amol, Black Moor, Granite Hall, and others. Respectful of game lore, the cities have been added as close to their original locations as possible, and fit in with Skyrim's aesthetic nicely. They've even been populated with NPCs. We explored it here.

Hidden Hideouts of Skyrim

Puts a ton of hidden shelters in the game, dotted all over the landscape. They're great fun to stumble upon and perfect for outlaws to stash their stuff or just disappear from the law. The mod is customizable depending on how easily players want to find these places (you can turn map markers off).

Ranger Cabins and Corners of Skyrim

These mods work together to enhance a survival playthrough. The first puts a hunter cabin in each Hold, which can be used as a basic starting player home. Also includes some lore-friendly weapons and arrows for ranger characters, including a "secret stash" of better weapons out in the woods of Falkreath. Corners of Skyrim puts even smaller shelters in the game, great as emergency shelters that offer a few basic necessities. They both feature creative architecture and are lore-friendly. Player can decide if they want to see NPCs living in the shelters or not.  

Creatures & Enemies

The Sinister Seven

(Image credit: Bethesda)

If you enjoy the feeling of being hunted, The Sinister Seven delivers. As you level up you'll be pursued by more and more challenging assassins, including seven bosses who wear unique magical masks. The first of those appears when you reach level 12, with another every even-numbered level after that. Though sometimes they'll attack you in a settlement and get mobbed by guards, they can also appear while you're weakened from a previous fight or slogging through the wilderness, resulting in a tough duel you might have to give up and run away from.

Really Useful Dragons and Macho Dragons

You've got two options for replacing Skyrim's dragons with something goofy-looking. The "Really Useful Dragons mod" adds Thomas the Tank Engine, who seems to make it into even more games via mods than Shrek these days, and Macho Dragons turns them into 'Macho Man' Randy Savage. Both are hilarious and creepy in their own way. Note that the first actually adds a variety of characters from Thomas the Tank Engine, if that's a selling point for you.

No Spiders and Insects Begone

Arachnophobes might appreciate the mod that replaces the spider textures with Spider-Man, although it still looks freaky as all get-out to me. Insects Begone is a more lore-friendly attempt at getting rid of the bugs, swapping spiders for bears and chaurus for skeevers as well as deleting spiderwebs and other arachnid clutter.

Enhanced Mighty Dragons Reborn

Guess what? You're not the only one who can shout, Dragonborn. This mod gives dragons a whole new toolbox of spells and shouts, new abilities like disarming attacks and the power to summon animals or other monsters. One can raise the dead, another can't fly—it's a skeleton—but uses deadly physical attacks. It's completely customizable as well, in terms of difficulty, frequency, and loot. We tried out these new dragons here.

Automatic Variants

There are a lot of excellent retexture mods available for Skyrim, but the sad thing is that you can only ever use one at a time. Automatic Variants exists to correct that problem. It allows Skyrim to randomly choose different skins from a pool of variants. Pick a bunch you like, and the mod will distribute those textures for you in the game.

Bellyache's Animal and Creature Pack

While it doesn't add new species, this mod does add around 100 recolored or touched-up textures for Skyrim's animals, everything from goats to bears to werewolves to the oft-discussed mudcrabs. You can choose from high or medium resolutions.

Immersive Creatures

If you're tired of fighting vanilla creatures and don't mind digressing from the lore, check out Immersive Creatures. A huge collection of modders contributed to assemble an astonishing 2,500+ new creatures to populate Skyrim. From goblins to crocodile demons to dragon-people—and even a mechanical dragon.

High Level Enemies

Play Skyrim long enough and you'll notice that the difficulty drops off sharply at later levels. The problem is that a lot of standard enemy types don't have high level variants. The toughest Bandit, for example, is level 25, not much of a challenge when your Dovakhin gets past level 30. High Level Enemies contains hundreds of new enemy types, ensuring that basic enemies remain a challenge well into the endgame.

Realistic Animals and Predators

Animals have been revamped with better AI and more realistic behavior. Bears will hibernate in winter, animals will travel to water to drink each day, and predators not only hunt but whatever they consume will remain in their inventory (belly) for a while. Instead of always attacking, they may flee, or simply just watch you. Plus, you won't just see full-grown animals but also their young following them around.

Gameplay mods

Table of Contents

Page 1: Getting started - How to install mods, patches, interface, and textures
Page 2: Content mods - quests, characters, creatures, and places
Page 3: Gameplay mods - weapons, skills, systems, and tweaks

Some of these Skyrim mods overhaul and add to the game's item pool, while others add entirely new systems and ways to play. Want to go fishing? Become the king of Skyrim? Turn Skyrim into a survival game? It's all here.

Weapons & Equipment

Cloaks of Skyrim 

It's not real fantasy if people aren't wearing big flappy cloaks. Cloaks of Skyrim populates the world with a variety of new capes and cloaks, automatically adding them to the inventories of random guards and bandits and so on, which makes them look much more impressive. And then you can loot those impressive cloaks off their corpses. It's worth adding 360 Walk and Run Plus as well, which prevents some of the clipping issues that otherwise ruin the effect. There's nothing to be done about Argonian and Khajiit tails, however, so this mod simply removes them when cloaks are worn.

Fall of the Space Core 

A collaboration between Valve and Bethesda to celebrate the opening of the Skyrim Steam Workshop, this mod adds the space core from Portal 2. Yeah, the little guy who is obsessed with space. He falls to earth when you're near Whiterun and can be picked up, then crafted into armor. Make sure to keep an eye on your skills screen for another effect added by this mod.

Zim's Immersive Artifacts

Makes lore-friendly and balanced changes to many unique items in the game, including Auriel's Bow, the Gauldur Amulet, Harkon's Sword, the Jagged Crown, and plenty more, including artifacts from the Dawnguard and Dragonborn expansions. There are lots of customization options for the player in case they don't want all the items affected.

Books Books Books

There are plenty of books in Skyrim, but what if there were… more? Books Books Books adds more than 200 books, many from previous Elder Scrolls games, to the College of Winterhold's library as well as leveled lists, meaning they'll show up as random loot and being sold by merchants. If you want to read the 36 Sermons of Vivec from Morrowind while you're playing Skyrim, here you go. Books Books Books also includes some apocryphal texts from The Imperial Library website written by Elder Scrolls developers.

Immersive Weapons

This mod provides a hefty selection of new weapons that fit in nicely with the existing look and feel of Skyrim. You'll find axes, daggers, maces, and any number of new swords, all beautifully designed and textured and suitable for veteran characters and those just starting out.

Belt Fastened Quivers

Belt Fastened Quivers moves all arrow quivers from the back, where they often clip through things like backpacks or cloaks, down to the waist, adding new animations for the new position. It was originally made as part of Frostfall, so if you're using that, you don't need the standalone mod. If you aren't, however, it's still well worth getting just to stop your arrows from clipping through the items from Immersive Amours and Wet and Cold.

Immersive Armors

This mod brings you a huge collection of great-looking lore-friendly armor. And it's not just for you, either: the armors are assigned to various NPCs and randomized loot lists throughout the game. You can even turn individual armors on and off through SkyUI's configuration menu, giving you full control over what items actually appear in your game.

Warmonger Armory

Warmonger Armory is another compilation mod. It adds a ton of great looking new armor, clothing and weapons to the game, including some using DLC equipment. Once again these items are carefully distributed around the world, given to specific NPCs, and added to randomized equipment lists.

Unique Uniques

Skyrim is full of unique items with fascinating lore behind them, but unfortunately very few of them have the looks to go with their backstory. InsanitySorrow's Unique Uniques adds new textures and meshes for several of the game's unique weapons, giving you a great excuse to bust out Dragonbane again.

Project Flintlock

A lot of games have been called "Skyrim with guns" but now Skyrim fits that description too, thanks to this mod that lets you carry a blunderbuss, a flintlock rifle, and a grenade launcher. With custom sounds and bayonets, it's time to introduce those primitive Skyrim screwheads to your boomstick. We tried it out here.

Skyrim 40,000

(Image credit: Bethesda)

For the times when you feel like saying to hell with canon and just being a space marine from Warhammer 40,000. You get access to the full suite of transhuman abilities, able to hold your breath basically forever, see in the dark, and spit acid. There's a power for bumping your height up to proper space marine scale and then back down when you get sick of being humongous. To get a full suit of ceramite in your chosen legion's colors you'll need to craft it, though the only ingredient needed is money. Craftable weapons include plasma and bolt pistols, power swords, chainswords, and more. Save your game before you craft a chainsword, since they can cause crashes. The Dwemer Autoblade mod is a safer option. 

New Systems

Simply Climb

(Image credit: Bethesda)

"See that mountain? You can clumsily wallhack up it by hammering the space bar while you run directly into it and flick the mouse left and right." Skyrim doesn't really live up to the promise of its mountainous landscape, and as soon as you leave the path to go exploring you end up clacking away at the keyboard like a maniac. Simply Climb gives you a climb button, mapped to right-ctrl by default, that shifts you upwards and forwards at the cost of some stamina (the amount you climb is determined by your light armor skill). There's no animation for this so it's recommended for use in first-person.

Cleric

(Image credit: Bethesda)

If only building a relationship with divinity in the real world was this simple. As you earn XP by interacting with shrines or spending time at temples, you'll be able to afford perks like the ability to turn undead or resurrect fallen allies. Access the Cleric mod via the Mod Configuration menu and you'll see your current level and number of unspent perks. A good first perk is Bless, a spell that buffs allies and earns clerical XP, which you can also use to reforge any god's amulet into a blessed amulet that earns clerical XP while you're wearing it. After that, you can diversify into a Crusader who gets bonuses when fighting chosen enemies or a Monk who specializes in martial arts or dragon shouts. Alternatively, become a Cultist of the Daedric Princes who curses those who offend you. Unlike some other religion mods, there's no guesswork in working out how to please your chosen deity or what they'll consider sins, with everything spelled out on the menu.

Fishing in Skyrim

A great addition to survival playthroughs. No more fishing with your bare hands! Adds fishing poles, fishing nets, a bait mechanic, spellbooks, and the explosive “Dwarven boomfishing” ability. You can also fish up new and exciting junk, some of which you can sell off for extra gold.

Moonlight Tales

Being a lycanthrope is so much better with this mod, which features new music, over 200 new beast skins, new enemies, and lots of customization through MCM. Also, who doesn't want to try being a werebear?

Perseid's Inns and Taverns

Wandering into a tavern or inn on a cold and blustery night isn't the experience it really should be, and this mod makes inns a bit more realistic. Room rates widely vary, you can arrange for an extended say, and you can even arrange lodging for your followers so they're not just standing next to your bed all night while you sleep.

Become High King of Skyrim

With great power comes great responsibility. But what about great rewards? With all of your accomplishments and deadly abilities, it would make sense for you to become King of Skyrim, don't you think? Move into a huge castle, have your own army follow you everywhere, and throw citizens in prison or have them beheaded. It's good to be the king.

Tame the Beasts of Skyrim 2

You don't just have to slaughter every creature in Skyrim: you can also tame them, keep them on a farm, and have them accompany you on quests. Whether you want a pet mammoth or a pet chicken, this mod will allow you to assemble an impressive bestiary of loyal creatures. You can even breed them to create more powerful animals. Here's our write-up.

Alchemy and Cooking Overhaul

Spice up cooking and alchemy with this expansive mod that adds dozens of new ingredients, recipes, and effects. Portable alchemy stations mean you can craft on the go, potions can be sorted from weakest to strongest, and you'll even be able to cook up alchemical bombs to hurl at your enemies—even while on horseback.

Survival & Immersion

Frostfall

It's cold in Skyrim, and Frostfall lets you really feel it. An immersive survival system tracks weather, climate, time of day, and even the type of clothing you're wearing to determine how cold you are. It also allows you to gain experience in terms of camping and endurance skill, and a new ability helps you find the creatures and items you'll need to survive.

Realistic Needs and Diseases

In Skyrim you may contract a disease or two from time to time, but they're typically unchanging and you can deal with them at your leisure. This mod makes diseases progressive, meaning they get worse and worse until they're cured, though there's also a chance your might fight off the infection with bed rest. Hunger and thirst also have stages of severity, food can spoil, and getting enough sleep is important. It's entirely customizable as well.

Wet and Cold

You're not the only one dealing with the harsh elements in Skyrim. Using this mod, NPCs will bundle up in the cold, move inside if its raining, and do their best to avoid blizzards. The mod also adds effects like wet-sounding footsteps, visible vapor from your breath when it's chilly, and reduced movement speed in heavy snow and strong wind.

Hunterborn

This mod provides a more immersive experience for hunters. No longer do you simply yank loot or food out an animal's inventory, you can now dress the carcass, skin it, and butcher it. You can even carry the entire animal back to your camp or to a vendor. The mod comes with hunting knives, dozens of new ingredients that can be harvested, and new recipes.

Campfire

Intending to make outdoor living a robust experience, this mod lets you build several different kinds of fires, from a weak and flickering fire to a roaring blaze suitable for cooking. You can also buy or craft camping gear like tents and tanning racks, and backpacks that display your various cooking pots and waterskins. If you're married, your spouse can camp with you. Here's our piece about it.

Combat & Magic

The Dance of Death and VioLens 

Bethesda left several unassigned kill moves lurking in Skyrim's code when the game was released, including some very cool shield bash kills. The Dance of Death re-enables them and re-organises all kill moves so that they're gradually unlocked as you earn perks. It also includes a full menu that lets you control the rate of kill moves. Alternatively there's VioLens — A Killmove Mod, which features much of the same functionality but also works for ranged attacks. 

Immersive College of Winterhold

Ever thought the College of Winterhold should better resemble an institution of higher learning? This mod adds awesome visuals, ongoing experiments, the ability to specialize in certain schools of magic, and even an option to refuse the title of Arch-Mage (and give it to Tolfdir instead). Custom options in MCM. 

Individualize Shout Cooldowns

Another simple mod that just makes sense. This mod gives a separate cooldown for each Shout, allowing the player to use several Shouts at the same time. It also adds SkyUI-type Active Effects so that you can see how many Shouts are active. The actual time for the cooldowns has not been adjusted from vanilla, and no Shouts have been altered. 

Perkus Maximus

Some of Skyrim's perks and skills are a wee bit drab. Enchantment, for example, is a useful skill but isn't much fun to put points into simply because most of its perks are simple increases in enhancement strength. Perkus Maximus overhauls a number of systems, keeping passive effects but adding powerful and interesting active effects as well. We covered this mod here.

Duel: Combat Realism

So long, hack-and-slash combat: you're going to need to be far more careful tackling foes to-to-toe. This functions due to some changes to AI and especially damage: getting hit with a sword or an axe is something you can't just shrug off anymore. As a result, combat is more tense, takes more patience, and is considerably more challenging.

Apocalypse—Magic of Skyrim

Apocalypse adds 140 new spells to Skyrim, most of them pretty well balanced. These aren't just 'spray lightning/fire/cold until someone dies' spells either. There's a whole variety of cool summons, disabling effects, and unusual attacks available.

Lost Grimoire

(Image credit: Steelfeathers)

Here's another 120+ spells, all seamlessly inserted into the vendor interfaces of Skyrim's wizards. Lost Grimoire's spells aren't super wacky, but a few are what you might call unusual. Sleight of Hand swaps your weapon for the one in your target's hand, while Infestation diseases the target and makes spiders explode from their corpse, which then spread the infection to others. There are spells to disguise yourself as a member of a faction while wearing their armor, walk on water, and give yourself claws. New, stealthy damage spells are heightened by a change that adds sneak attack damage to destruction magic, making magical assassin a valid playtype. Also, you can summon a ghost mammoth. 

Arcanum

(Image credit: Bethesda, modded by Kosorsomesaykosm)

Arcanum is another enormous quest mod that adds over 100 spells inspired by all sorts of fantasy settings. It includes spells from schools of Destruction, Restoration, Illusion, and Conjuration. When you're feeling experimental, you can also use its spell crafting system to throw together spell effects and visual effects to make your own combinations.

Way of the Monk

You probably don't spend much time fighting unarmed: it's just not that much fun. Way of the Monk fixes this by giving you more combat options when taking on the world fist-first. There are new skills, perks, spiked gloves, and ways to enchant your fists to do different types of magic damage.

Sneak Tools

There should be more to stealth than just being invisible and gaining surprise damage bonuses. Now you can be a genuine slippery, filthy, sneaky type. Slit the throats of the unaware. Knock people unconscious from behind. Wear masks that hide your identity. Douse torches and lanterns to move through the shadows. Add an arsenal of trick arrows, including one that launches ropes that allows you to climb walls.

Thunderchild

Skyrim's Dragon shouts are cool. Much cooler than regular magic. The best fighter/mage in Skyrim is frequently just an ordinary fighter who yells a lot. Thunderchild expands the Dovakhin's magic vocals with a bunch of cool new shouts. Yell until you teleport, shout ghosts into existence, holler until the earth quakes or just scream so hard you open up a black hole.

Gifts of the Outsider

Bring a little Dishonored into Skyrim. Some of the powers like Blink, Possession, Devouring Swarm, Wind Blast, and Void Gaze are at your disposal once your read a mysterious book, meet the mysterious Outsider, and visit a series of shrines.

Convenient Tweaks

SkyTweak

(Image credit: Grimy Bunyip)

There are 14 pages of options in SkyTweak, letting you alter variables relating to experience point gain, stealth, how vendors work, combat, magic—a little bit of everything. It's guaranteed to contain options you won't be able to live without once you've started messing with them. Want to change how far away NPCs are before they greet you, or reduce the pause between lines? How about messing with the AI's search time or how much light affects your ability to hide? Want to change the time scale, adjust fall damage, or arrow recovery chance? Some of these options exist in other mods, or Skyrim console commands, but SkyTweak slaps them all into menus to bring up every time you're annoyed by something as minor as how frequently enemies dodge projectiles or the number of times you're allowed to hit a follower before they turn on you. 

Project Proteus

(Image credit: Bethesda / Phenderix)

While you could switch to another savegame to play your Khajiit archer for a while, Project Proteus lets you import your characters into an existing world state—meaning you can switch to a character with their own items, skills, and spells, but keep your current quest progression. NPCs who have died remain dead, items left in storage can be retrieved, and so on. It also lets you edit NPCs and items, even the weather. Some of what Project Proteus makes possible is already doable with Skyrim's console commands and existing mods, but this brings it all together in a single pop-up menu. 

Long Conversations

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Most of Skyrim's conversations are over in a flash. People just aren't that chatty in the frozen north. Every now and then though, you have a longer chin-wag with a greybeard, or one of your fully voiced followers added by mods, and suddenly half a day's gone by. With this mod, time slows down while you're talking so you don't lose hours because you initiated the wrong convo.

Ish's Souls to Perks

How many spare dragon souls have you got? If you've been playing a while, probably tons. Now you can put your spare souls to use. This mod adds a Dragon Stone (look for it near the Guardian Stones) where you can exchange souls (the amount is configurable) for perks.

No NPC Greetings

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Sick of NPCs repeating the same catchphrase from across the street every time they see you? Sick of guards commenting on your best skills, which they somehow know all about just by looking at you—even Sneak? This mod has a few options for fixing the issue, whether you want to reduce the distance these barks trigger at, or get rid of them altogether.

Simply Knock

One of those small mods that just makes sense. Created by Chesko, author of Frostfall, this mod gives players the ability to knock on locked doors instead of having to break and enter. Someone might answer the door, or you can convince them to open up with your Speech skills. Customize options through MCM. 

Convenient Horses

Basically, it makes horses a million times better. Your followers can ride them, and fight while riding. You can conduct conversations and loot while on horseback. There are a variety of new saddles and armor types. Dismounting is quicker and automatically draws your weapon. You can auto-mount horses when they're called, and even dictate their AI in combat.

Unread Books Glow 

Want to know which skill books you haven't read? Now they glow bright red. Spell tomes are green until you've learned their spells, and other books are different shades of blue depending on whether they trigger quests or not. The other advantage of this mod is that you can tell which books you need for that completionist library you're putting together at a glance.

Not So Fast

Dragons returning is a pretty big deal, but the main questline feels like you’re on a runaway train at times. This mod helps you modify the order of events to a more reasonable pace. Not only can you get Breezehome when you hand in the Dragonstone, but you can also ignore the Civil War part altogether! Fully customizable through MCM.   

Realistic Humanoid Movement Speed

(Image credit: Bethesda)

Sick of walking like a turtle and sprinting like a cheetah? This mod fixes the problem. Your movement speed is adjusted to more reasonable levels, from a brisk walk that lets you keep up with NPCs, to slower run speeds that make it challenging to escape from that cranky troll. Also eliminates “skating” from sneak running. 

Honed Metal

Does your character have better things to do than learn smithing, or are they opposed to getting their hands dirty like a common peasant? With this mod, you can simply hire blacksmiths to craft, temper, and hone your gear for you. It's a fantastic gold dump, as they'll automatically craft everything to the very best of their ability and charge you for it. Also different blacksmiths have different skills—the smith in Solitude can craft up to Legendary, but not so much the smith in Riverwood. Eorlund Gray-Mane is basically a smithing god. MCM supported with lots of customization options.  

The Choice is Yours

Lets you be way more in charge of what quests you want to take on. Stops random auto-quest greetings from NPCs, stops books from giving auto-quests, and lets you customize when they want to see certain quests become available. Full MCM support. Optimal experience paired with Timing Is Everything.

Wearable Lanterns

If you're using some of the lighting mods you'll notice that nighttime in Skyrim has gotten much darker. Spells and torches can help, but warriors who want to use their off-hand are out of luck. Chesko's Wearable Lantern mod sorts out this problem, letting you clip a light source to your belt, front or rear. Companions can also carry the lanterns, and will automatically douse them when you enter sneak mode.

Table of Contents

Page 1: Getting started - How to install mods, patches, interface, and textures
Page 2: Content mods - quests, characters, creatures, and places
Page 3: Gameplay mods - weapons, skills, systems, and tweaks

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[Welp, I built Saudi Arabia's stupid skinny city in Cities: Skylines]

We got our first look at Line City a couple weeks ago, which is Saudi Arabia's bizarre plan to spend a gazillion dollars to build a weird science fiction city along the Red Sea. According to the two-minute video above, the city will be a big ol' straight line that stretches for 170 kilometers through the desert. The entire city will stand the height of a skyscraper while only being 200 meters wide and entirely covered with mirrors. For… reasons? Presumably, there are reasons.

While I think Line City would make a good location for a futuristic zombie movie where people have to fight their way from one end of the city to the other—by all means,  make this film—it seems like a terrible place to house 9 million people without first asking them if they want to live in a weird skinny mirrored skyscraper city. Not to mention all the people who will be displaced or worse just to build the dumb thing.

But ridiculous plans in real life sometimes make for fun plans in videogames, so I went ahead and built the longest, skinniest city I could in Cities: Skylines just to see if it'd work. To avoid being sued or murdered, I call my creation Skinny City.

And I have to admit, Skinny City sorta worked. It's not as tall as Line City, it's not completely mirrored, and parts of it could have been considerably straighter if I'd put in even an iota more effort while drawing my very long road. But it's amazing how easy it is to build an incredibly stupid city when you have unlimited funds, which is what I had using Cities: Skylines' infinite money toggle and what certain princes have thanks to them being clever enough to be born to the right parents. I also used a mod that let me unlock every square of the map so I could build all the way out to the edges.

To show off the glory of my creation I took the audio from the official Line City video above and cut together a trailer for Skinny City. You can watch it below (don't forget to put the sound on) though it'll honestly make much more sense if you watch the original two-minute "What is The Line?" video at the top of this page first.

As you can see, I went with trams for local transportation—Line City is a zero-car environment—so I drew my road with two-way tram lines and used a mod that let me add a tram turnabout just so they don't have to go all the way from one end of the city to the other just to change direction. That kept out most of the cars, except the endless parade of donut and hotdog trucks, so I didn't really major traffic jams. Line City is also supposed to have a high-speed train that takes passengers from one end of the city to the other in 20 minutes. I went with a monorail for that. Total trip time: only 4 minutes (though Skinny City is 26km long instead of 170km).

Water and power took the most work, because while it would have been easy to throw pumps and some windmills along the river and run them into town with pipes and wires, I felt like everything in Skinny City should be inside Skinny City, or at least smooshed up alongside it, so I used the terrain tool to dig a massive trench from the river right up to the city's edge and crammed all my utilities into it. 

This immediately made everybody in Skinny City violently ill because I was pumping wastewater right back into people's homes. Whoops!

I had to dig another huge ugly trench from the riverbed to my city and put the water pumps there, and everyone started feeling better except all the people who died. (Line City doesn't say what it'll do with its dead: presumably pull them out of their housing units with drones and stack them up in a glorious shining cemetery skyscraper that's only a five-minute walk away.)

If I'm unhappy with one thing about Skinny City, it's efficiency. Having my stupid city just be one big line meant having to place far more service buildings, like cop shops and schools, because those operate on a radius of influence and in Skinny City you can't build things around things, you can only build things next to things. That means while my city's universities can accommodate 18,000 students, I only have about 250 enrolled right now. My crime rate is an extremely low 3%, but I must have tons of completely bored policemen due to having so many stations in the city.

There's also not a great place to put buildings that generate pollution, like garbage dumps or crematoriums or any industrial buildings whatsoever. I don't know where these things will go in Line City, either. Will there be garbage skyscrapers? Farming towers? The video, suspiciously, doesn't mention how Line City will manufacture anything. Skinny City certainly doesn't. City expenses are currently $64,018, with total income sitting at a cool $12 from public transportation fees. Seems feasible.

Plus, I can't imagine living in the city and trying to give people directions to my home: "So just turn left and go straight for exactly 21.36km. I live at 464798590372 Skinny Road. You can't miss it."

And finally, I clicked on one of the monorails as it was zipping from one end of the city to the other, and it said there was only a single person on board, who I can only assume was an extremely lonely driver. I guess my citizens just don't have a reason to travel from one end of the city to the other, unless I happen to build something useful there. Like maybe a road to a city that isn't quite so stupidly skinny.

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[Final Fantasy 16 director says series is 'struggling' to adapt]

One of the most iconic franchises in videogame history is having a hard time staying relevant, according to Final Fantasy 14 and 16 director Naoki Yoshida.

“In terms of whether Final Fantasy is successfully adapting to industry trends, I believe the series is currently struggling," Yoshida told Inverse. "We’re now at a point where we receive a wide variety of requests regarding the direction of our game design. To be honest, it’d be impossible to satisfy all those requests with a single title. My current impression is that all we can really do is create multiple games, and continue creating the best that we can at any given time."

The director, who has worked at Square Enix for the last 18 years, could be referring to a lot of trends that have taken hold of gaming or that threaten to. In February, he addressed Square Enix and the gaming industry's growing interest in NFTs and 'play-to-earn' cryptocurrency mechanics, confirming that the FF14 won't incorporate them. And, while the MMO is memed as having a free trial that you can play up through its Heavensward expansion, it's still not a completely free-to-play live service game like a Genshin Impact or what Ubisoft's upcoming Assassin's Creed Infinity promises to be. Final Fantasy 16, the next main entry in the series won't be either, nor will it be open world, but it will include genre-bending battles between its iconic summons—a first for the series.

Outside the numbered entries, Final Fantasy games have slightly pushed things in more modern directions. There are several Final Fantasy mobile gacha games; Brave Exvius hit 45 million downloads last year. Final Fantasy 7 Remake and the other spin-offs continue to break away from the original game's trajectory, like the battle royale shooter that launched last year. But none of them have truly taken off or had as much of an impact as the series had in the late '90s and early 2000s.

Yoshida told Inverse that the series isn't about chasing trends, but setting them, and that FF16's storytelling will reflect that. But it sounds like he wants to do much more than that. The long development cycles for its past few numbered entries probably make that difficult.

The side projects could push further out into the unknown, but it might be hard to convince Square Enix, a notoriously risk-averse company, to let a team do that. Yoshida seems interested in pushing further after Final Fantasy 16 is out next year. 

"I am the kind of person who’s happy as long as they can make games, so while there isn’t anything in particular, I occasionally think that I would like to make one more MMORPG title, from scratch, before I die," Yoshida said.

After the clever and historic ending of FF14's original incarnation and its recent explosion in popularity, I hope he gets his wish.

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[These AI-generated Overwatch fusions are beautiful and terrifying]

I've gone back and forth on AI art being cool and scary, but I can't deny that these Overwatch hero fusion renders I saw on Reddit last week are pretty sweet. It is fascinating that we can now ask an AI's opinion of what Soldier 76 and Mei would look like smooshed together, and it can spit out a shockingly cool, arguably original character design.

That's what author Drew Harrison did when he became one of the few thousand with access to Stable Diffusion, an AI image model similar to other popular tools like DALL-E and Midjourney. Harrison started by feeding the AI simple instructions like "make a fusion portrait of Mercy from Overwatch and Junkrat from Overwatch" and in some cases took more direct control over artistic influences with tags like 4K, highly detailed, cinematic lighting. Having only messed around with the DALL-E Mini online tool for a bit, I wasn't aware you can get so specific with instructions.

The results are striking:

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Mei 76 (Image credit: Drew Harrison/Stable Diffusion)

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Moidhog (Image credit: Drew Harrison/Stable Diffusion)

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Mercrat (Image credit: Drew Harrison/Stable Diffusion)

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Sigmettra (Image credit: Drew Harrison/Stable Diffusion)

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Doomfistio (Image credit: Drew Harrison/Stable Diffusion)

I'm particularly intrigued/unnerved by the glare of Mercy x Junkrat (Mercrat) and the arm-mounted belly on Moira x Roadhog's (Moidhog) arm. You often can't expect an AI to spit out a fridge-worthy sketch on its first try. Harrison told me that AI art is often a process of trial and error.

"You try a prompt, see what comes back, revise, rerun, and repeat until you get the desired image," Harrison said. Speed is why Harrison currently favors Stable Diffusion over other AI art tools. He describes Stable Diffusion as "lightning quick and lightweight," two major advantages when your only creative bottleneck is render time and VRAM.

Stable Diffusion is also the biggest AI art tool in the process of going open-source, though it sounds like you'll need a pretty beefy rig to run it.

AI art still has some clear limitations, though. As you can see from Mercrat's weird octo-hand, AI models still don't seem to know what to do about fingers and palms. Sometimes there are too many fingers, or not enough, or what's there is a blurry mess. AI also tends to go weird on proportions when mimicking humans, though Moidhog is an extreme example. Check out the full gallery of Overwatch fusions here.

While I do hope Mei 76 becomes an actual Overwatch hero someday, the rapid proliferation of AI art makes me a little uneasy. Stable Diffusion, like every other AI, is trained on a dataset of internet images pulled from everywhere and anywhere. As Harrison demonstrated to me with "a fusion of Joe Biden and Barack Obama painted by Van Gogh," these tools are capable of seeking out and mimicking a specific person's style.

You could argue this is no different than a person drawing inspiration from another artist, but when we're talking about a computer brain storing millions of copies of other people's art, it's hard to know where inspiration ends and copying begins.

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[Diablo 2 player completes pacifist Hell run previously only theorized to be possible]

It took over 50 hours of playtime, but MacroBioBoi finally did it: They completed the "world's first ever completely untwinked solo self-found Hell pacifist Sorceress run" in Diablo 2: Resurrected. 

In terms that'll be more familiar to people who aren't Diablo 2 speedrunners, Macro beat Diablo 2: Resurrected on the hardest difficulty without attacking anything, using only items they found during the run. ("Twinking," in Diablo 2 parlance, means using the trading system to give a character items.) Diablo 2 speedrunners had come up with theoretical ways to accomplish the run, but Macro was the first to do it for real.

"The only people who ever took the run past Normal had twinked a character with edited gear to see if it was possible," they told PC Gamer. 

The Diablo 2 speedrunning community has created a detailed set of rules which define what a pacifist run is. You can't attack, of course, but there's more to it than that. You also can't force anything else to attack, set traps, or use damaging auras, either. For the most part, the damage you deal has to be dealt as a direct consequence of a creature choosing to attack you. To accomplish that, Macro loaded up their Sorceress with "chance to cast" items and abilities that sometimes cause a spell to be cast when their character takes a hit. By the end, they had a set of armor that caused them to cast the powerful area-of-effect Nova spell every time an enemy hit them. They also dumped points into the Cold Armor passive skills, which increase defense (the Sorceress doesn't have many hitpoints) and do cold damage to enemies who hit them. 

Macro, who has the Pacifist Paladin speedrun record in Diablo 2: Lord of Darkness on Normal at 2h 25m 45, thought switching to Resurrected might make things easier for this Hell difficulty run. It didn't work out that way.

"I thought this run would be tough, but with the addition of Synergies to the skill Nova in Diablo 2: Resurrected [bonus damage for related skills], I figured it would actually be a lot easier than it was in Lord of Darkness," Macro told PC Gamer. "That quickly fell apart after eight hours trying to get a specific spawn pattern for the Seal Boss Lord De Seis in the Chaos Sanctuary. I couldn't survive his minions long enough to kill him, and if you die and go back to town, he will often cast a Bestow buff on himself that makes him regenerate faster than any amount of Nova procs from my gear could put out."

My background is in microbiology and science in general, so I've always been prone to asking the impossible questions.

To deal damage faster than Lord De Seis could regenerate health, Macro needed an item that gave their character a 5% chance to cast Blaze, a spell which creates a burning patch on the ground. If Lord De Seis stood in the fire, he'd take damage every frame, preventing him from regenerating. (The full explanation involves even more complexity than this; it's in the video embedded above, starting at about 5:05.)

"I needed to force him into that fire, and he's a very difficult monster to manipulate to move," said Macro. "We basically got lucky that on my last attempt, he didn't Bestow himself and after 10 or so deaths, we got him."

It's a hell of an accomplishment, but Macro, who's been playing Diablo 2 since they were a kid, is already streaming another attempt at the run, this time with a Paladin. Unlike the Sorceress, Macro says that the Paladin doesn't have any skills that can kill Lord De Seis.

"I need to farm a very specific weapon from Mephisto in Nightmare to have a chance at doing it," Macro said. "It's called Boneslayer Blade, and it takes me about five minutes to kill Mephisto each time I do it. I started the challenge two days ago and I'm streaming it all again for people to watch me suffer."

MacroBioBoi streams on Twitch, and also covers Diablo 2: Resurrected for Maxroll. They aren't a Diablo 2 purist, though, and after they're done with their current run, Diablo 4 will be on their mind.

"I come from a very heavy MMORPG background (EverQuest and WoW) and it seems like Diablo 4 will instigate a lot of social gameplay that I really miss when playing most ARPGs nowadays," Macro told PC Gamer. "I like the restriction on trading for BIS gear [the best items], and the pure aesthetic of it seems like a beautiful return to form after Diablo 3 and Diablo Immortal. Unlike most Diablo 2 players, I'm a fan of Diablo 3, but the aesthetic was missing for me. Add on that the Necromancer is a starting option for you to play, and they won my preorder."

When the socializing is over, I wouldn't be surprised if Macro started building characters according to unreasonably restrictive rulesets in Diablo 4, too.

"My background is in microbiology and science in general, so I've always been prone to asking the impossible questions," they said, "and if there's no answer, testing something until I figure it out."

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