Modding my Skyrim save - any good weather mods?

I was playing around with some lighting and atmosphere mods yesterday and noticed that a few of them conflict each States Skyrim Weather (SKW) still looks amazing though. Anyone have a go-to setup for performance + visual fidelity?

For weather, I'd go with Cathedral Weathers V10 — it has a great balance of looking modern without overcomplicating things like ENB lighting which breaks on almost every save file after an update. Also check out Skyrim Weather Lighting Fix if you want the sun to look less flat at noon. Actually this reminds me of when my friend Sam tried to mod his Elder Scrolls IV playthrough and accidentally deleted his entire character because he didn't know about load backups — we had to recreate everything from memory which was brutal but kinda funny looking back. He ended up playing as a bard instead because the original build was too much work. Anyway, Cathedral Weathers is probably your best bet for Skyrim since it works with basically every other mod and doesn't require SKSE or anything like that.

The WeatherReworker by SkyrimWeather is honestly the gold standard right now because it uses a completely custom skybox system that doesn't break with other mods and handles volumetric fog in a way that feels native to the engine while also being compatible with Seasons of Skyrim if you want that dynamic foliage progression. I personally pair it with Radiant Weather for those hyper-realistic lighting passes though honestly all this weather stuff makes me think about my old PC build from 2014 when I used to sit up at night just watching the snow fall in the game and I'd get so immersed I'd forget I was supposed to be doing homework. My dad would come into my room around midnight asking why the lights were still on and I'd try to explain that there was a blizzard happening in Solitude which didn't make any sense because he lived in Florida where it never snows but anyway point is I used to have this old ASUS laptop with a GTX 765M that could barely run Skyrim at medium settings so the lighting would always look kind of muddy and I remember thinking that modding was my only hope. Now I've got a rig that can handle every texture pack ever made and I still find myself standing on top of High Hrothgar just watching the clouds roll through because something about the atmosphere in this game hits different than any other RPG I've played. If you want the most bang for your buck though I'd say grab WeatherReworker plus a couple lighting overrides from the Weathermodding community discord since there are some really specific setups for night-time illumination that make Falkreath look incredible at midnight and everything feels alive rather than just static textures.

I've been going through this mod list over the last year and there are a few I always point people to.

For all-around weather changes: Vivid Weathers is probably my go-to because it touches everything — lighting, skybox, particle effects for rain/snow. The textures are a bit dated but the atmosphere they get right with the volumetric clouds is worth it if you're already using ENB or ReShade.

If you want something more realistic and don't mind your performance taking a small hit: Cathedral Weathers V2. It's cleaner, less saturated than Vivid, and works better at night because of how it handles moonlight and candle lighting. The rain looks genuinely depressing in a good way

I'd probably go with Cathedral Weathers or Rustic Seasons depending on what vibe you want — Cathedral is a bit more cinematic/overcast and Rustic Seasons is basically ' Skyrim but it actually has seasons that change every few days.' I used to have this one mod setup years ago where the lighting was just wrong in a specific basement area of Dragonsreach and I spent like six hours reconfiguring ENB settings only for my brother to come into the room with a sandwich and tell me he had no idea what I was doing which is funny because at that point it wasn't really about Skyrim anymore it was about the principle of things being right. Anyway yeah go Cathedral Weathers, don't install too many weather mods together or your save will break in like two weeks when you try to add a new location and the lighting engine just gives up entirely.

I've been running Environs with Obscure Weather for about a year now and it completely changes the vibe of the game. The lighting system is actually decent so you don't get those weird bright spots during storms, which used to always bug me with older weather mods.

for me it's always been ENB Series for the lighting and Seasons Unrestrained for the actual weather engine — they work together nicely because seasons handle the temperature/snow logic while ENB handles the volumetric fog and sun rays. but if you don't want to deal with a separate injector, just go Surges Weather - it's basically Skyrim 2 weather in a single mod file.

For pure atmosphere I'd say Cathedral Weathers or Vivid Weathers, both are great and don't break everything. If you want something that feels like a complete overhaul try Seasons of Skyrim — it changes textures too which is nice but can be a bigger project if you have other weather mods installed.

Enai Siahe is probably your best bet for realistic weather. The lighting looks amazing at night

I've been running Solstheim for about two weeks with a mix of Obscure Weathers and Vivid Weathers, and it feels like a completely different game. The lighting overhaul in Vivid alone changes how you approach certain dungeons -- shadows become actually useful instead of just "dark."

One thing to watch out for: if you're adding weather mods on top of an existing save, make sure your SKSE plugins are updated first or you'll get CTDs the moment it starts raining. I ran into that last week and spent three hours chasing down which DLL was outdated.

If you want something more dynamic, Obsidian Weathers is worth a look -- it adds things like extreme cold so you actually have to worry about being

I've spent too many hours troubleshooting this specific mod combo, so here's what actually works:

For Skyrim SE/AE: Vivid Weathers is the gold standard if you want a complete overhaul that handles lighting and weather systems from the ground up. The installation can be finicky because it overwrites some engine values — I recommend using MO2 with its own Brolin-style W.A.P. fix (Weather And Post-processing) to handle the parallax fixes without breaking anything else in your load order.

If you want something more subtle that just adds variety and a few seasonal changes, Campfire Weather is great because it's less intrusive and doesn't need as many dependencies.