Introduction
About Legends of the Frost
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.
- LOTF is a small list in scope, strictly limited to fixing vanilla annoyances.
- LOTF features better distant terrain, sharper textures, and improved combat.
- LOTF is lightly customisable, including performance, interface, and gameplay adjustments.
Support for LOTF is provided on the Aetherius Modding Discord server. Please post in the #lotf-support forum.
Features
- All essentials are installed, including the Skyrim Script Extender, the USSEP, SSE Engine Fixes, SSE Display Tweaks, etc.
- Includes a plethora of additional fixes and tweaks for a smoother vanilla-like experience.
- Fixed green-tinted blonde hair, weirdly bright falling leaves at night, and more.
- More lush trees, actually 3D roads, less oily water, and many other visual improvements.
- High quality texture overhaul for many objects provided by Skyland AIO.
- All remaining textures replaced by cleaned and upscaled versions, courtesy of the Project Clarity series.
- Improved weathers and lighting with RAID Weathers and the full suite of shader tweaks based on Community Shaders by doodlez.
- Modern interface thanks to SkyUI. The HUD is toggleable with Ultimate Immersion Toggle. Better Reading UI.
- More resource management-oriented combat with Blade and Blunt (and vanilla damage modifiers).
- Better sound quality with Audio Overhaul for Skyrim.
- Optional Widescreen support (for 2560x1080 or 3440x1440 monitors).
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:
Note that it was made for a pre-3.0 version of LOTF and the graphics HAVE changed.
Performance
LOTF has no significant performance impact. It was not designed to be a “lite” list but the absence of an 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 Skyland AIO 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. The framerate is capped at 60FPS by default which should be very achievable for most PCs.
Since LOTF 2.0, there is now an optional performance profile included. The INI settings were toned down and DynDOLOD was regenerated on Medium with less demanding mesh rules for trees.
Since LOTF 3.1, the performance profile has been abolished; however, the DynDOLOD output is now always using medium mesh rules and there are optional performance INIs available.
About the name
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. Though it is one of his older songs, it holds up very well and I love how perfectly he captured the atmosphere of the game (as he always does).