Creatures, NPCs and Players

updated July 31st, 2019

Ahhhh NPCs, those innocent beings that we all love to slaughter. Unfortunately, there's not much variety to them due to the dreaded excuse of "engine limitations". Note that this section can be somewhat lackluster at times. Skyrim  ̶h̶a̶s̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶b̶e̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶r̶o̶u̶n̶d̶ ̶l̶o̶n̶g̶ ̶e̶n̶o̶u̶g̶h̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶l̶l̶y̶ ̶g̶o̶o̶d̶ ̶c̶r̶e̶a̶t̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶s̶ (when was this line written? 2012?), so we advise you to pick and choose whichever of these mods sound good to you!

In this section, we will discuss:

-Enemies and Monsters

-Followers

-Random NPCs

-NPC Appearance Makeover

Enemies and Monsters

Okay, so it's been almost 7 years, and there is STILL no big enemy overhaul mods that are actually good. So to remedy this, here are a list of some smaller ones.

Followers

Followers are awesome, simple as that. They can range from adventurous sellswords you meet along your journey, or friends you make and travel together on amazing quests! /tesg/ followers are great because instead of having some random guy following you around, you have a little piece of /tesg/ sprinkled into your game. A person that you meet in the threads and want to adventure with and take great screenshots with. DON'T USE UFO. IT'S NOT OLD AS SHIT ANYMORE, BUT IT'S LOADED WITH BUGS.

Also, here are some unique followers.

Random NPCs

It truly is hard to create NPCs that actually sound good, look good, and are actually interesting and useful in the game. These are the most popular and biggest NPC mods out there. They're pretty good but be warned, you're not gonna get quality professional voice acting from these mods.  Even if this is a Bethesda game...

Interesting NPCs 

Adds tons of very detailed, well written, and well-rounded NPCs into the game, along with several quests to go with them. However, every single kid it adds is an absolute shithead. We added the warning emblem and lore-breaking emblem because this mod will test your mental stability and give you an extreme strong desire to murder children. That aside, a good fourth of the NPCs are really good. They have interesting personalities, unique scripts, and voices that fit and don't have mic static. The other three fourths of the mod is awful. Just listen to them, here we have 2 examples of some decent to good voices.
 

And here are some really bad ones.  Note that THIS quality will be present in most of the other NPCs.

Cutting Room Floor

This mod restores a few NPCs with some removed dialogue, small quests, and some buildings that were unused in Skyrim. The reason why they weren't added was probably because Bethesda ran out of time... or were lazy as usual.
 

DIVERSITY

It adds over one hundred new NPC:s with unique appearences to the Vanilla levelled lists for added racial diversity while staying lore friendly. Stats, levels, items, abilities, spawning, etc is entirely handled by Vanilla mechanisms, which ensures great compatibility with mods that for example tweak combat stats, or add and change clothing and weapons.

NPC Appearance Makeovers

It truly is hard to look at the ugly npcs in the game, well these mods hopefully correct those ugly npcs by making them look good, interesting and unique looking. These are the most popular and biggest NPC appearance makeovers out there. They're pretty good.

Player Characters

As I don't feel SE requires its own Wai-fu and Husbando-fu guides, I'll add the main character creation files, bodies, textures here. You can follow the Wai-fu and Husbando-fu guides for the most part, note that most, if not all, hair and textures work just fine on Special Edition, I recommend you update the .esp, check in-game if any of the meshes look weird, if you find a hairpack with weird meshes, update them as well.

Sliders

Enhanced Character Edit is a mod that adds 40 new sliders to edit your character with such iris size, dimple depth, nostril size, and many more!  It also adds new color sliders, zoom in/out feature for the camera, and a save and load feature.

This save and load feature is used to save facemorph information

so you can make new characters with an old face or even make your own presets for future characters.

This also changes face meshes for both males and females.

IN MY PERSONAL OPINION the better of the two, RaceMenu is a redesign of the original character generator.  It changes the menus to a neater and nicer looking SkyUI style.  Like SkyUI, it also adds a search bar. 

A new warpaint feature is also added which gives you more color options and allows you to have more than one piece of warpaint on your face. This mod also adds extra sliders but only for the body.  The sliders effect how big a part of the body is like head, arms, legs, and yes even butt size.  This does not  add new face sliders. HOWEVER with the newest update to Racemenu, you can now manually edit the faces vertices however you want with the new sculpt mode. You can also Bodyslide your character's body directly from in-game with the BodyMorph function.

Bonus points for RaceMenu is the fact that you can add all the extra sliders added by ECE to it (see *remember to insert link here*), while keeping a better face sculpt tool, overlays and all the other extra features.

OPTIONAL: Ethereal Elven Overhaul revamps all three of the playable elf races. It alters facial features, changes face morphs, and adds new facepaint to make elves look more appealing but still give them that "elven" look.  It also overhauls all vanilla elf NPCs to the new Ethereal style.

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This mod is compatible with both CBBE and UNP body mods.  This is not compatible with ECE and CharGen Extension to a certain extent. When using any of these mods with EEO, elves will not be affected my the new morphs added by ECE but with the morphs from EEO.  Any extra menu options not added by EEO will appear, but they will do nothing or be incompatible.  This works with RaceMenu fine, since RaceMenu doesn't fiddle with facemorphs.

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Note that the SE version linked is just a "patch" for the LE version of EEO, you still need to download the original LE version and apply the patch linked, read the mod page for proper instructions.

Hairs

Bodies

XPMSSE

Pretty much the same thing as the Legendary Edition mod.

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Necessary for pretty much anything, so installation is obligatory.

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If you plan on using the physics files below, XPMSSE is obligatory.

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Don't forget to install FNIS as well.

Physics

FAQ

Q: Where the hell did the community followers go?

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A: All Legendary Edition followers need to be converted to Special Edition manually, look for a tutorial on how to convert followers if you really want to do it.

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Q: Why isn't this or that mod in the guide?

A: Some mods haven't been officially ported to Special Edition yet, if a mod you like isn't listed, try converting it yourself.

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Q: Where the hell are all the texture mods?

A: Most textures from Legendary Edition work with SE, so go to the Wai-fu or Husbando-fu guides and check the textures there.

Note however that there aren't a lot of textures for the Special variant of CBBE. Some that I know out of the top of my head are the default CBBE, Bijin and Fair Skin. Textures without the vegene work just fine however. Note, I am talking about textures and not other mods listed on the guide, if you want any of the mods listed on the waifu guide, ie hairs, then you'll have to convert them yourself.

For any conflicting information from this page and the waifu guide, take this page as the proper info when it comes to SE information, as the Wai-fu guide was written for LE.

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Q: Why aren't there any good monster overhauls already? It's been almost... 8 years!

A:W̶e̶'̶v̶e̶ ̶e̶x̶p̶l̶a̶i̶n̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶h̶i̶s̶ ̶b̶e̶f̶o̶r̶e̶.̶ ̶S̶k̶y̶r̶i̶m̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶s̶t̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶n̶g̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶p̶a̶r̶e̶d̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶O̶b̶l̶i̶v̶i̶o̶n̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶M̶o̶r̶r̶o̶w̶i̶n̶d̶.̶ ̶ ̶B̶o̶t̶h̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶e̶s̶ ̶h̶a̶d̶ ̶a̶ ̶l̶o̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶i̶m̶e̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶g̶r̶o̶w̶ ̶i̶n̶ ̶t̶e̶r̶m̶s̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶d̶i̶n̶g̶.̶ ̶M̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶o̶f̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶v̶e̶r̶h̶a̶u̶l̶s̶ ̶y̶o̶u̶ ̶s̶e̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶t̶o̶o̶k̶ ̶a̶l̶m̶o̶s̶t̶ ̶3̶-̶4̶ ̶y̶e̶a̶r̶s̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶m̶a̶k̶e̶!̶ ̶Q̶u̶a̶l̶i̶t̶y̶ ̶t̶a̶k̶e̶s̶ ̶t̶i̶m̶e̶,̶ ̶s̶o̶ ̶p̶l̶e̶a̶s̶e̶ ̶b̶e̶ ̶p̶a̶t̶i̶e̶n̶t̶.̶ ̶W̶e̶'̶r̶e̶ ̶s̶u̶r̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶a̶t̶ ̶a̶ ̶o̶v̶e̶r̶h̶a̶u̶l̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶ ̶l̶i̶k̶e̶ ̶"̶F̶r̶a̶n̶c̶e̶s̶c̶o̶’̶s̶ ̶L̶e̶v̶e̶l̶e̶d̶ ̶C̶r̶e̶a̶t̶u̶r̶e̶s̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶I̶t̶e̶m̶s̶ ̶m̶o̶d̶"̶ ̶o̶r̶ ̶"̶M̶a̶r̶t̶'̶s̶ ̶M̶o̶n̶s̶t̶e̶r̶ ̶M̶o̶d̶"̶ ̶w̶i̶l̶l̶ ̶c̶o̶m̶e̶ ̶o̶u̶t̶ ̶s̶o̶o̶n̶!̶̶

Uhhh well....shit. Guess people don't care anymore? Everyone pretty much moved on to modding Fallout 4. Mihail still releases monsters almost daily now, but still hasn't made a compilation of his monsters.

Q: Will you be adding more to these guides?

A: Of course!  We'll try to keep all the guides up to date and will notify everyone if something has changed or has been added on. We also accept submissions if the mod is good enough!