I play Skyrim to get away from the concrete jungle.
I trade the skyscrapers for watchtowers and the asphalt for dirt roads, the nightclubs for taverns, and the noisy city nights for a symphony of crickets.
While playing Skyrim will never be as relaxing or liberating as a good hike in the mountains, it’s definitely a lot more convenient – and with the right mods, it can be about as beautiful.
One of the main ways to improve Skyrim’s natural beauty is to upgrade the grass, flowers, trees, and all the other plants that coat the land.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re looking for realism, fantastic beauty, or just a change of scenery – you’ll find something you like among these wonderful flora mods.
The devil is in the details – or in the case of Skyrim, it’s immersion that hides in the smallest things.
Waterplants by Halifax0815 aims to refine your moments of lakeside self-reflection by adding aquatic plants such as lotus flowers, kelp, and watergrass to your game.
They’re bright and colorful – and the textures are top-notch.
These leafy friends add an extra degree of realism to shores all around Skyrim.
Fortunately, Waterplants is compatible with major water-enhancing mods like Realistic Water 2, and includes patches to accommodate other popular flora mods like Folkvangr and Northern Grass.
Many think that forests in Skyrim don’t have enough trees.
Me? I think it’s more about size.
FadingSignal’s Simply Bigger Trees makes Skyrim’s forests into places you can really get lost in.
It’s not necessarily realistic, but the feeling you get from walking among the colossal trees is much closer to what you feel when walking through a forest in real life.
Forests are living things that eat you up on one side and spit you out somewhere else – and with this mod, that’s how you’ll feel.
If you’d instead get more variety rather than more immersion, you have to try the Skyrim Flora Overhaul.
Creator Vurt supercharges Skyrim’s bio-diversity through 18 new tree models and over 65 new plants, including diverse grass, beautiful flowers, and a couple of other surprises.
Once installed, natural environments in Skyrim will never be the same.
There’s more volume, more vivid colors – and trees belonging to the same species now offer more variation in the form of bent branches and trunks.
In addition, trees in forests are also larger. They’re not quite as colossal as with Simply Bigger Trees, but it has a similar effect.
Wandering Skyrim’s forests alone at night can be scary. But after a couple of visits, you’ll get used to it.
That’s where Dark Forests of Skyrim comes in.
This mod by MobiusBelmont reworks Skyrim’s landscapes, introducing many more trees – including dead ones – and inaugurating brand-new creepy forests full of twisting branches and ominous fog.
You’ll even find some giant mushroom forests here and there! It’s like Morrowind all over again, minus the terrible combat.
Next up, we’re taking a look at an instant classic by BrosisJK – Northern Grass.
This flora overhaul lowers its gaze from the towering trees to the humble grass covering most of the land.
It seeks to make it stand out, lush and vibrant, without damaging Skyrim’s cold climate ambiance.
Considering only tiny shrubs and moss tend to thrive in such cold tundra-like climates, I don’t think it’s the most realistic mod – but as long as you’re not a botanist, you probably won’t mind.
This mod manages to make grass abundant and aesthetically pleasing without breaking Skyrim’s cold spell. It’s a must-have for sure.
Not all mods need to rework gigantic swabs of land to make it into the ranking.
After all, beauty isn’t about numbers.
Cathedral 3D Mountain Flowers by Johnny Wang replaces some of Skyrim’s vanilla flowers for ultra-high-quality textures created from photographs of the real deal.
The result is a gorgeous set of flowers that’ll really make you stop, and… well, you can’t smell them, but you get my drift.
If you like what it does to your landscapes then make sure to check out Cathedral 3D Pine Grass too.
Northern Grass is fantastic. But if you don’t care that much about keeping Skyrim realistically bleak, you need to get Tamrielic Grass.
This exceptional grass mod by Ciathyza overcharges Skyrim’s grass placements, making it lush, vibrant, and thick in all regions – while also increasing variety.
It’s not even limited to fields and gardens, because you’ll find new plant life thriving underwater as well!
Stop mixing and matching other grass mods, just give this a try and see what you think.
Getting a good graphics card and a fast processor without scalpers bleeding you dry can be tricky in this day and age. So I always keep our less technologically blessed readers in mind when crafting a ranking.
Johnny Wang’s Cathedral Landscapes opposes the myth that beautiful landscape mods are only for people with monster gaming rigs.
Despite being vastly more performance-friendly than the average grass add-on, this mod makes grass and low-lying foliage lush and three-dimensional.
There’s also much more of it, even in places like The Reach.
A long-time favorite of mine is Veydosebrom Regions by Elyern, which bolsters Skyrim’s vegetation with new grass types and other leafy friends that give each region its own distinct appeal.
In vanilla Skyrim, it can take a while before you notice the change in vegetation and natural features while traveling between holds.
With this mod, it’s like crossing from Morrowind to Cyrodiil.
Folkvangr is one of those mods that make me happy Skyrim keeps being released repeatedly.
It was released by Ababmer in 2021, yet it competes in total downloads with mods that have been around for ages. The reason?
It’s on another level.
It introduces unique new grass to every hold, with high-quality textures contributing to a more realistic environment.
Something else that sets it apart from most grass mods is the addition of plant-based litter around the map, including fallen branches, patches of fallen leaves, and pine cones.
Nelson Chitty is a Venezuelan expat living in Argentina. He’s a writer and translator passionate about history and foreign cultures. His ideal weekend is spent between leisurely playing games of Civilization VI and looking for the next seinen anime to marathon.
