What are the best Skyrim mods on PS4, Xbox One, and PC?

Take on Tamriel in a brand new way with the best Skyrim mods!

Guide by Staff Contributor

Updated on Sept. 20, 2021

Skyrim refuses to stay gone for long. The Special Edition landed on consoles and PC and finally brought mods to both PS4 and Xbox One.

Then at the end of 2021, the 10th anniversary edition brings the best Skyrim mods to the current generation, as well as brand-new content to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S.

If you need a quick refresh on how to get skyrim mods, it's fairly easy. Just hit up the official site and filter by your platform of choice. From there you can download to your console (provided you have a Bethesda.net ID).

But what mods to choose? We've trawled through the 5700-plus available mods for consoles and found a wide range of additions to improve the base game. Some fix problems, others introduce new magic and weapons or make life just that little bit more convenient for the adventurer. A few introduce entirely new locations and quests.

Let us know if you're enjoying other mods and we'll check them out and update as we discover more.

What are the best Skyrim mods on PS4 and Xbox One?

True Vision ENB

This mod allows you to use ENB shaders and presets to bring Skyrim's visuals inline with current standards. There a lot of options to choose from which can impact game performance, so it’s worthwhile using some presets to get you started. Check out the likes of True Vision ENB for more tips.

Apocalypse - Magic of Skyrim

The Apocalypse mod ads 140 spells to Skyrim, from everyday basics to terrifying destruction-based hexes. Each spell comes with its own little bit of lore and adds a bit of pizazz to Skyrims otherwise fairly vanilla spellcasting.

Immersersive armour/weapons

Not a magic fan? Then check out the Immersive armour and weapons mod. Each item comes with its own lore and there are a bunch of new sets and individual items you can add to the game. This mod is perfect for those of who you have already smithed the top armour sets about 200 hours ago.

Realistic needs and desire

Unlike the Fallout series, The Elder Scrolls don’t yet have a hardcore mode. The Realistic Needs and Diseases mod solves that issue. You’ll need to sleep, eat and manage your diseases as you’ll encounter some pretty severe debuffs if you get sick.

There’s plenty of food to be found in barrels and fresh water to drink in the towns and wilderness in Skyrim, but be sure to dress appropriately and prepare for trips up the mountains where resources are scarce.

Interesting NPCs

Bored of the repetitive NPC chatter? The Interesting NPC mod adds a tonne of new NPCs with unique dialogue, quests and lore. The voice-acting is of a high standard, with the odd funny line here and there.

Skyrim redone

Skyrim Redone is for those of who really want to shake things up. This mod offers a complete overhaul of Skyrim’s major systems, player skills and stats. It also comes with a better Sneak package including a grappling hook and new gear. This mod could seriously break your game, so we’d advise getting rid of other mods before you begin.

Modders patch the bugs that Bethesda doesn't

We're not saying Bethesda games are notorious for being buggy, but Bethesda games are notorious for being buggy. Which is why you need the Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition patch.

Updated regularly, this mod aims to fix as many bugs and glitches in Skyrim Special Edition as possible, from text and NPC bugs to quest and gameplay problems. You can read a full changelog here and it's huge, which is why the authors are asking you to help them by reporting any bugs to them. They're doing you a massive favour with this patch, so let's all get involved and spread the love.

Visit the award-winning Forgotten City

Returning to Skyrim isn't just about returning to familiar places. In fact, if you've trampled around Skyrim for hours in a previous console life, why not visit an entirely new area and try original quests?

The Forgotten City mod is an award-winning expansion to Skyrim offering up 8 hours worth of new adventures. Full of puzzles, dilemmas, great storytelling, an original score and multiple endings, it's a fantastic and worthy addition to The Elder Scrolls world. You only need to be level 5 or above to experience it, so we recommend checking it out at the very least to see what a dedicated modding community can build.

Craft all 85 scrolls in the game

The problem with magic in Skyrim is that it takes an age to level up and get the best spells, and it uses an absolute wedge of magika for the really cool high-level spells.

Well, this Scroll Crafting mod is the only thing budding Gandalfs need, empowering players to create pure magic build characters from the off.

It caters to 85 craftable scrolls and creates a player dungeon in the College of Winterhold, which brings with it a new perk system, complete with inscription table and chest to keep your scrolls and materials safe. Oh, and there's the ability to create paper rolls for scroll crafting and a crafting book to ensure you have everything you need to cook up a batch of magic for your adventures.

Cheat your way to success with the Cheat Room

There's a fairly decent chance that you could be playing Skyrim: Special Edition having played in the world of Skyrim many times before. This is a best-selling PS3 and Xbox 360 game, after all - and if that's the case, you may want to give yourself a leg up. For that, there's The Cheat Room - which does pretty much exactly what you'd expect it to do, to be honest.

The cheat room keeps things nice and simple - this Xbox One exclusive mod gives you access to a single room and gives you access to a spell that you can cast to teleport yourself in there. Inside you'll find every item in the game, plus triggers that can let you duplicate items, level yourself up, learn every shout, add money - all that good stuff.

On top of that, the room even offers you access to special triggers that'll let you modify the game in ways similar to how PC users with console access can - change levels, spawn characters, change relationships, change your character's appearance - whatever you want. Useful!

Use new Elemental Destruction magic

Destruction magic is the main damage-dealer for mages in Skyrim, but the base game only comes with three different types: fire, frost and shock. If you're building out a pure magic character for your adventures, you're going to want a little more oomph to your open palms.

Which is where the Elemental Destruction Magic mod comes in. It adds 30 Earth, Water and Wind Destruction spells to the game, along with three weapon and three armour enhancements and a Dragon Priest mask for each element.

You don't get all of this for free though. You'll need to level up your destruction skill to get the better magic, and all spells need to be bought or found. Faralda at the College of Winterhold sells all the spells but there's also a chance you'll find enchanted weapons with these new spells as loot. Be warned though; enemies will also have the ability to use these spells too - they're not strictly for the player.

Invite sassy Sofia along as your new favourite companion

The Skyrim companions are a generally nice bunch. They don't say a lot, but there's no denying they're useful in a fight and can carry all that extra loot when you're deep in the darkest of dungeons. But you know, they lack the personality to really create a magical rapport as you wander across Skyrim.

Enter Sofia, the modded companion with attitude. Fully voiced, forever sarcastic, boastful and a tease, Sofia will liven up your adventures with her custom dialogue and rebellious spirit. She's great fun and is likely to become your new BFF as you kick it across the wilderness together.

Improve the NPC AI across the board

Bethesda's radiant AI system for its open world games was pretty state of the art when it made its debut back in Oblivion, and while it has been upgraded and still impresses in some ways it's probably quite fair to say it's not quite as impressive now as it used to be. Luckily for us, some fans have been beavering away trying to improve the AI of the citizens of Skyrim.

The Immersive Citizens mod is available in both PS4 and Xbox One variants. It improves NPC behavior across the board, making them more unpredictable in their actions and making them react to things like weather and other external stimuli.

Most importantly, this mod also changes how NPCs react to combat and being under threat. NPCs will evaluate dangerous situations and if they think they're about to be crushed they'll try to run away to a safe place, usually a building within a city. If you're using it with some other types of mod be aware there may be clashes - they're listed in detail on the Immersive Citizens mod page.

Claim these lethal Power Greatswords

Surprises are cool so let's not spoil anything here. The Power Greatswords mod adds four new two-handed blades to the game for you to use, and it's fair to say they are pretty damn lethal.

As well as not saying exactly what they do in terms of damage, you're also going to have to find them in Skyrim (although if you know the game it's not that tricky). The Big Blue Greatsword, BloodNord Blade, and Blue Night Greatsword are found near an NPC witch, and the Dragon Greatsword... well, the clue's in the name. Good luck hunting them down.

Fight for your life with hardcore difficulty and mortal wounds

Difficulty in Skyrim is a bit warped. Higher level enemies are deadly, but they can also take an absolute age to kill. Whacking a hagraven 50 times just isn't fun.

This Hardcore Difficulty mod adjusts the unfair Legendary, Master and Expert settings. At Legendary difficulty you'll be dealing 4 times the normal damage - but so will your enemies - meaning fights are a lot tenser and deadly. Combine this with the Mortal Wounds mod, meaning you won't regenerate health, and combat becomes a much more thrilling experience in Skyrim.

Speed up that EXP bar for faster levelling

Earlier on we've listed a few cheat mods that let you cheat in a more outright and brazen way, but if you want something a little lighter-touch, perhaps just increasing the leveling curve of the game across the board is more your speed.

The Faster Levelling mod does just that - no fuss, no messing about - it just increases the rate at which your skills level up, making your skills advance over twice as quickly as they do in the vanilla game. While other mods give you access to this kind of feature-set alongside other potentially tempting cheats that you might not want to use, this mod just does this and only this - removing the temptation.

It's available in both PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions.

Visit Conan and hear the lamentation of the women

This is perfect for all the Conan fans out there. The Conan Hyborian Age mod adds a new dungeon and quest to Skyrim, based on the 1982 movie and featuring replica movie props and the big man himself - although you can't play as Conan, he's just an NPC.

It's a great package, with the quest featuring original battle music, Conan lore on the loading screens, new bosses and enemies and the kind of attention to detail that shows a real love for modding and the source material.

Calm down annoying animals

You know how it is. You're on a quest, fully focused on reaching your objective, adjusting your plan of attack in your mind, when out of the blue a bunch of friggin' mudcrabs start giving it large. I'm not starting any trouble, so what's up with these aggressive little sods having a pop at me?

The Less Aggressive Animals mod calms everyone down. It neuters some of the most annoying creatures in Skyrim; mudcrabs, skeevers, wolves and spriggans. And it also makes bears, horkers, giants, mammoths and sabre cats more cautious. They won't attack on sight, but they will defend themselves if you get too close. Now you can go about your dungeon raiding business without sneak attacks from the local wildlife.

Carry more loot

Fact: there is never enough space to carry everything you want in any RPG. You start off with good intentions. "I'll only carry what I need and my favourite weapons," you tell yourself. But within half an hour you carry everything on the off chance some old biddy in the next town will gift you an amazing weapon if you give her a mundane item. And you're paranoid about anything you leave behind in case you need it 67 hours later. The next thing you know you're walking like a slug and sifting through your backpack throwing out all kinds of junk.

Which is where the Ring of Increased Carry Weight comes in. It actually gives you two rings; one with an extra 1,000 carry weight capacity, and another offering an extra million. Yeah, that should do it. Buy the ring from Belethor's place in Whiterun and horde away like the little magpie you are.

Find your way more easily

Sure, you've got a map, but that doesn't list a lot of the smaller places in Skyrim. And lots of roads, paths and intersections are just completely unmarked. How are you meant to find your way around?

Enter the Point The Way mod, which litters the world with signposts and directions, making your travels a damn-sight less frustrating. Simple, and incredibly useful.

Let's talk about our feelings

If you're going to be spending hours in Skyrim you're going to want to hear more varied conversation. The inhabitants of Whiterun aren't that chatty and you'll soon hear the same dialogue repeated over and over again.

The Relationship Dialogue Overhaul is here to save your sanity. It adds over 5,000 new lines of dialogue from 42 different voice types, for friends, spouses, rivals and followers - the people you overhear all the time, basically. Friends will recognise you more often and have more to say, followers will comment during combat, and the mod corrects mistakes with the original dialogue as well as using speech that has been hidden away in-game. It's one big social mod and you should use it to make the world of Skyrim come alive.

Exploit the capitalist system

There you are with a backpack full of goodies after a long day adventuring. You're going to sell them and make a fortune, and then use that money to buy some sweet-ass armour. Then you get to the local merchant and realise the dude behind the counter can't even begin to afford your goods.

Which is where the Rich Merchants of Skyrim mod comes in. It increases the amount of money a shop has, meaning it can afford to buy all that loot you've been chugging around for days, dangerously close to your maximum inventory weight. Sorted.

Light the way better with the Lampposts of Skyrim

Sometimes the smallest change can seriously up your immersion, and Lampposts of Skyrim is one of those mods that not only increases immersion but actually features a smart change that adds something to the game in ease-of-use terms, too.

Put simply, this mod adds lampposts to many of the roads around Skyrim. It doesn't exactly make sense that officially-laid roads near towns would be pitch-black at night, and so this mod fixes that. This helps with immersion but also is useful - these lampposts make it easier to travel at night and help you to stick to or keep away from the roads depending on your inclination.

There are PlayStation 4 and Xbox One versions of the mod available.

Restore a whole bunch of missing content

For whatever reasons, there's a whole bunch of content hidden away in Skyrim's code that just never made it to the final game. The Cutting Room Floor mod restores a lot of it, bringing back NPCs, locations, and finishing up some questlines that you would otherwise never see in the vanilla version of the game. Now you'll feel like you're getting the full Skyrim experience.

Turn Skyrim into a survival game

Frostfall: Hypothermia Camping Survival is one of the highest-rated mods for PC Skyrim for good reason. It essentially turns Skyrim into a survival sim, with three new mechanics based on camping, cold water and hypothermia. You can tweak these to your own specifications, and go as hardcore as you like with them.

It also adds new spells, an endurance skill, snow and ice effects and disables fast travel if you want to play really hardcore. If you're looking to immerse yourself deeper in the world of Skyrim, Frostfall is an absolute must.

More crafting options for thieves and archers

Crafting is actually pretty good in Skyrim, and very useful for most builds. But for those of us who like to play it a bit more stealthily, there's not a lot to craft for our weapon of choice - the bow - and you can never have enough lockpicks, right?

Sure enough then, Ars Metallica helps solve that problem. It basically lets you craft more arrows using common resources, as well as making lockpicks and providing skill advancement for using the forge itself.

Burp and fart more

We're all for more realism in games. The beauty of the Immersive Indigestion mod is that the person who created it really put their all into it: "some of the sounds I created myself using my own indigestion." That's dedication for you.

So with this mod NPCs will now burp and fart when they are around you, usually when they are exerting themselves, such as when swinging weapons. That's it really. A guffing and grumbling mod. Excellent.

Explore Falskaar

Now this is a mod. Falskaar adds a whole new land mass to Skyrim, complete with NPCs and dungeons to explore with its 26 new quests.

There's over 20 hours worth of game here according to the creators, as well as additional spells and a new shout, to round out the package. It's not so much a mod as an unofficial expansion pack to the game. Go get it.

Add 370 new spells

This one is strictly for the mages. The Phenderix Magic Evolved mod adds 370+ new spells to the game, making mages the most powerful class in Skyrim. Spells are varied and creative, with a whole new range of archetypes including poison, darkness, spirit, blood and summoning.

Want to summon any creature in Skyrim? Now you can. Want to continue to dual-wield weapons while using magic as a power? Oh yes. Also, you can turn an enemy into a chicken. If wizarding is your thing, you need to be all over this.

Brush your shoulders off

Skyrim's not exactly the place you're going to get a suntan, but it's only on the higher hills and peaks that the snow feels deep underfoot. Weather effects aren't really reflected on your character, unfortunately, which breaks the illusions somewhat.

So this simple Rain and Snow FX mod is a really nice way of adding a layer of snow to your hero's shoulders or have water drip from your adventurer's clothes when they clamber out of water. A very nice little touch.

Cheat and carry everything you could possibly want

Sometimes you've got to act like a spoilt child and have everything now.

The minimally-named Cheat Mod gives you a container in the Warmaiden's forge in Whiterun, where you will find 1000 of every crafting ingredient. It also gives you strongboxes with 100,000 pieces of gold and a ring that boosts your carry weight by 500,000.

Wield Sauron's mace and other legendary weapons

Every fantasy role-playing game owes a lot to JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, of that there is no doubt. Now you can partially recreate some of that original magic by using the LOTR Weapon Collection mod, which as its name suggests adds weapons from the classic stories.

Here you'll find Sting, Sauron's mace, Wraith greatswords, Legolas' bow and more.

Try an entirely new alternate start

Playing Skrim for a second time but want a completely fresh start? The Live Another Life mod allows you do exactly that. You will not be on that wagon, heading for the chop before a dragon attacks and throws everything into chaos. Oh no, this cuts out the entire Helgen sequence, meaning you can choose your race and get exploring Skyrim as soon as you begin.