Modders have put an awful lot of effort into making sure Skyrim has continually evolved and expanded in the years since it was first released into the world.
Many have focused on changing the game by adding unique weapons, incredibly powerful spells, and interesting new quests to it. A few have even gone as far as outfitting its HUD with a Witcher 3-style quick access wheel or giving the Dragonborn some Assassin’s Creed-style climbing skills.
If you’re planning on making a return to Tamriel while you wait for Starfield or Skyblivion to arrive and love the subtle immersive details of Red Dead Redemption 2, a new mod might be worth adding to your load order.
Ever wished Skyrim felt as immersive as Red Dead Redemption 2?
The mod in question is called ‘Immersive Death Cycle’, and is the work of modders JaySerpa and Naxmaardur.
Some of the former’s previous projects have helped expand some of Skyrim’s vanilla quests into more memorable adventures, while the latter has added some rather gruesome undead creature variants to it.
Inspired by a YouTube thumbnail that showed off the effects of the Red Dead Redemption 2 mechanic that allows corpses of dead people and animals that’ve been left out in the elements to gradually decompose over time, they’ve combined their powers in an effort to achieve something similar in Skyrim.
The mod the pair have produced mainly concentrates on the bodies of animals and creatures, making it so that those you kill will begin to look visibly decayed four in-game hours after their expiration, as you can see in video below. They can then be reduced to a pile of bones at the 12 hour mark, which you can handily loot for some useful alchemy ingredients.
While some of the creatures covered by the mod, such as Giants and Falmer, are currently exempt from that last stage, everything from bears, to rabbits and even horkers can go through both, with those which start off the game already dead also having had the decay effects applied to them.
Unlike RDR2’s clever system, the mod won’t affect the bodies of any human and elven characters you slay, though it does come with an optional plugin that, with the help of WDog367’s ‘Undead FX’, adds some decay to NPCs that only appear in the game as corpses.
“Maybe this mod will inspire someone to make a proper ‘NPC corpses deteriorate over time’ mod,” JaySerpa says in its description, adding: “Until then, this optional plugin will have to do.”
Regardless of whether you’re now filling the pristine countryside of Tamriel with rotting carcasses, make sure to follow us for updates on Starfield, The Elder Scrolls 6 and the interesting world of Bethesda game modding.
You can also check out our latest mods of the month.