Surviving in the harsh wilderness of Skyrim just got a lot more immersive thanks to a mod that takes survival aspects from other custom add-ons and tweaks them to make this province of Tamriel a little more believable. While The Elder Scrolls 6 is still in development, fans of the series are keeping themselves busy with the fifth installment in Bethesda's epic fantasy franchise, and modifying the heck out of the game is just one way the community is extending the shelf life.
Skyrim fans are still making mods for the game, some eleven years after it released. This means that, especially for PC users, there are so many different ways to change up the vanilla experience, whether it's keeping the visuals up to date, adding new quests or NPCs, tweaking the overall experience, or just fixing some bugs. There are silly mods for those who don't want to take things too seriously, lengthy mods that are the product of a lot of time and effort, and there are even those mods that go the extra mile to inject more immersion into this already immersive RPG.
A recent example comes from Nexus Mods user tcbflash who recently uploaded "My Survival Mode AE," a modification for Skyrim that specifically hones in on the survival aspects. Taking features from similar projects, such as isoku's "iNeed," as well as from the game's official Survival Mode, the modder has created a kind of all-in-one experience for those that want to really test their mettle in the game's cold region. For example, it takes the sleep system from "iNeed" and makes it so the player won't die immediately from lack of sleep, but will bring about "penalties." It should be noted that this mod if specifically for the Anniversary Edition of the game and users will need to install all the other modifications that are mentioned in the description.
Survival Mode was added to Skyrim's Anniversary Edition towards the latter parts of 2021. As the name suggests, it takes the vanilla game and ramps up the difficulty by disabling fast travel, incorporating the need to stay warm, reducing the carry weight, making it so the Dragonborn needs to eat, and more. The essence of this mode was to make the experience much more engrossing, and tcbflash's mod seems to take this idea one step further.
Given that Skyrim is already one of the most immersive RPGs around, the idea of making it even more mesmerizing will be appealing to many, especially those who have played the vanilla build to death. It's reasons like this why TES5 is still going strong today, and the follow-up, whenever that releases, is going to have a lot to live up to if it hopes to enjoy a similar legacy.
The Elder Scrolls 5: Skyrim - Anniversary Edition is available now for PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
Source: Nexus Mods
