Anyone else found that Skyrim mods are better than vanilla? The Cathedral Cities mod completely changes how I experience the game -- adds new cities with unique buildings and merchants, plus a whole new questline for each one. It took about four hour

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I'm with you on Cathedral Cities -- I played vanilla for like three years and kept telling myself that was just how Skyrim was, but once you install a city pack it reframes your entire perception of what the base game is capable of. The merchant system in those adds is actually better than the vanilla because they put things in specialty shops instead of everything being at every vendor. I remember installing this one mod pack last Christmas and spending probably six hours on just the file management side, which sounds insane to anyone who hasn't dealt with Skyrim modding -- you have to organize by load order, handle master file requirements, check for script conflicts between different cities, and basically perform data forensics before you can actually play. It reminds me of this time in college when I tried to build my own PC on a budget. My brother had an old gaming rig from 2014 that he was willing to part out, so I spent three weekends sourcing a compatible GPU and figuring out which power supply would handle everything without burning the house down. We eventually got it running but only after I'd spent like forty hours on YouTube watching people troubleshoot exactly the same problems I was having. The weird parallel is that even though tech gets better and simpler, there are still these niche areas where you have to become an amateur engineer just to do something that should be simple -- Skyrim modding is definitely one of those spaces. Anyway, for Cathedral Cities specifically, try the texture overhaul pack as well because it updates all the custom buildings from 2014-era assets to modern resolution and makes a huge difference on high-resolution displays.

I completely agree with you on Cathedral Cities -- I spent like a weekend getting every single dependency working, including some of those weird SKSE patches that break if anything touches them, but once it's running the game feels entirely different because there are actual destinations worth travelling to instead of just re-visiting Whiterun for the twentieth time. Speaking of long setup processes I actually had a friend who tried to mod Skyrim back in 2013 and he ended up creating like forty separate load orders and then his entire save file corrupted on Valentine's Day because one texture override conflicted with something nobody could find, which is honestly hilarious looking back now since MO2 handles everything so much better but it made me never want to touch the game again for a year -- we used to hang out at this diner downtown all the time and he kept bringing up his Skyrim setup every five minutes like it was some sacred ritual. Anyway I think you're spot on that modding is what makes Bethesda games replayable because vanilla is fine but adding new locations with actual substance changes how much of the map actually feels alive versus just being empty space between quest markers.