What if Skyrim, but better?
Legends of the Frost (LOTF) is a Wabbajack list for Skyrim SE. It is the lightest list I could conceive of, designed to be as close to vanilla as possible while bringing some much needed improvements to texture sharpness, distant terrain, and certain gameplay mechanics. I created it because for all my years of playing modding Skyrim SE I never finished the main quest once. With any other setup, I get caught in the same loop as most people: Updating, rebuilding, starting over again. LOTF is my attempt to fix that.
Legends of the Frost features rebuilt terrain LOD with SSELODGen as well as highly improved object LOD and hybrid tree LOD generated with DynDOLOD. All facegen for vanilla NPCs was recreated at twice the vanilla resolution with higher quality assets.
Please check the Documentation for more details on the included mods, or check out the Load Order Library page for the full mod list and load order.
Check out DroppedIceCream’s amazing showcase for LOTF:
LOTF has no significant performance impact. It was not designed to be a “lite” list but the absence of a fully-featured ENB preset as well as the optional performance tweaks should still make the list more than playable on all but the weakest PCs. While I relied almost exclusively on Skyrim Realistic Overhaul and Project Clarity for textures with largely vanilla-sized textures, DynDOLOD does increase the amount of VRAM required.
I personally play @1440p60FPS on a rather high-end PC (i7 10700k, RTX 3080) and barely ever dropped below 144FPS when I uncapped the framerate for testing purposes.
Since LOTF 2.0, there is now an optional performance profile included. While this profile and Creation Club support are mutually exclusive, it may be a great alternative for people on very low-end hardware. The INI settings were toned down and DynDOLOD was regenerated on Medium without hybrid/ultra tree LOD.
Just like my Fallout 4 list is named after one of my favourite songs, I picked “Legends of the Frost” as tribute to the incredible Miracle of Sound (he’s brilliant and you should check him out!). Way back in 2012, he collaborated with the equally amazing Malukah on a Skyrim-themed song called, you guessed it, Legends of the Frost. It’s one of his older songs, but it holds up very well and I love how perfectly he captured the atmosphere of the game (as he always does).