Modders have put a lot of effort into making sure Skyrim has continually evolved and expanded in the eleven years since it was first released into the world.
A lot of these efforts have focused on making the game’s combat a lot more interesting and in-depth, with new weapons, spells and animations helping to spice things up and new enemies providing some fresh challenges for even the most hardened of warriors.
If your Dragonborn is of the magic-wielding variety and has an endless thirst for knowledge that might help them fend off automatons or draugr as they venture into ruins to conduct research, a new mod might be worth adding to their arsenal.
Think your Skyrim character’s elemental studies at the College of Winterhold need to go a step further?
The mod in question is called ‘Phenderix Elements’, and, naturally, is the work of modder Phenderix. A lot of their previous work has also centred around the arcane, providing enough new spells to fill all of the tomes in Urag gro-Shub’s library and even catering to mages whose debates often devolve into brawls.
This time, they’ve decided to offer sorcerers and sorceresses who specialise in certain types of elemental magic a chance to further immerse themselves in the likes of fire, lightning and poison, by taking on powerful auras inspired by them.
For example, if you’re a mage that uses wind-based spells, activating the form associated with this speciality will buff your movement speed and how high you jump, in addition to stopping you from taking fall damage.
The downside is that, in order to keep things balanced, the forms will also come with some downsides, for example, the wind form's attacks don’t deal as much pure damage as other elements, instead relying on staggering enemies.
They will, however, allow you to mess around with unique elemental dynamic spells, which look to be bolts, blasts and beams that are only effective if you have a form active, but have interesting visuals and scale in effectiveness with your magical skills. They’ll also automatically add elemental damage to your regular arrows, crossbow bolts and unarmed attacks.
Unlocking these new abilities looks to take place via a spell named ‘<Phenderix Elements>’, which opens a menu where you can obtain them and some other new spells by spending ‘element points’ that the mod dishes out.
The mod has quite a few requirements, with ‘powerofthree's Papyrus Extender’, ‘powerofthree's Tweaks’ and meh321’s ‘Address Library for SKSE Plugins’ all being necessary, in addition to powerofthree’s ‘Keyword Item Distributor (KID)’ and expired6978’s ‘UIExtensions’.
Regardless of whether you’re elementally blasting with the same reckless abandon as Danny DeVito, make sure to follow us for more updates on The Elder Scrolls 6 and the interesting world of Skyrim modding. You can also check out our mods of the month for November.