site banner
PaperclipPerfector  12d ago (text post)   1731 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 2, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Just started Skyrim up again. Any recommendations for mods or fun things to try? I haven’t played in years.

Do a pure mage, no economy run. No items, no selling, no looting (except spell books), no buying. Maybe cheat in some spell books for yourself.

Just cast spells, kill things, and move on to the next quest. You'll never be interrupted by checking for the last couple gold pieces in a ruin, or have to run back to town to sell things since the rules ban you from picking it up anyways. It felt a lot smoother when I tried it, even if I did end up as a stealth archer (Conjure Bow, Muffle, and sometimes Invisibility).

No economy sounds horrid! I love making gobs of money. How do you play like that? ahaha.

Also of course, stealth archer is just OP.

Almost embarrassed that this is what pulled me out of lurkerdom, but when duty calls…

First, if you want to play Skyrim without actually playing Skyrim, try Enderal. It’s a free mod that changes it into an entirely new game with improved mechanics and good worldbuilding. I enjoyed it maybe more than Skyrim itself. There’s a few areas that you can tell were left underdeveloped, but it’s overall polished and has few bugs (for me at least).

For actual Skyrim, I last played a few years ago. Bethesda has continued to update the game by incorporating Creations into the official release, so no idea if these still work. Here’s my top few:

  1. Ordinator is a perk overhaul that makes things much more interesting than “expert level spells use less mana.”
  2. SkyrimSouls makes it so that opening a menu doesn’t pause the game (you can configure which menus). Prevents the classic cheese wheel spam (or at least forces you to bind it to a hotkey and make combat more reactive)
  3. Apocalypse and Summermyst add a bunch of new interesting spells and enchantments, respectively.
  4. SkyUI is the UI that should have shipped with the PC version, rather than just porting over a console-friendly UI
  5. Genuinely Intelligent Soul Trap is a small but massively nice QoL improvement.
  6. Inigo is a fully voiced companion that is fun to travel with.

There’s a burgeoning scene of AI NPC chat in Skyrim: speech to text or free-entry type your dialogue, it goes to an LLM with some prompt engineering to answer as the NPCs, then a text to speech model have them respond back. Obviously a lot of jank involved and there can still be latency issues, but it looks very cool. Mantella was the first big one, CHIM seems to be the most developed currently, and SkyrimNet is a promising up-and-comer. I haven’t actually used any, so do report back if you try them out.

This is awesome. I ended up getting this collection which has a lot of these. This is a blast so far. https://www.nexusmods.com/games/skyrimspecialedition/collections/qfftpq/mods

There’s a burgeoning scene of AI NPC chat in Skyrim: speech to text or free-entry type your dialogue, it goes to an LLM with some prompt engineering to answer as the NPCs, then a text to speech model have them respond back.

Ah-ha! I rambled on about something like this in a recent thread. In hindsight it was foolish of me to not consider the Skyrim modding scene was doing something, because of course they were. Thank you kind former lurker.

Link for me for later SkyrimNet does it all with an in-process DLL. Impressive.

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to play Skyrim with only 3 mods, I'd pick Sacrosanct(I like playing vampires, and this is the best mod for that), the Serana Dialouge Addon(probably has a new name - they've expanded that mod hugely since I last played it) and Forgotten Magic redone(which is the best magic mod I've seen for Skyrim, IMHO).

Take that for what it's worth.

I remember there being some fun magic mods that really opened up the variety of spells. That and I was always a pack rat so I liked having mods that increased carry capacity. Which led to stores running out of gold too fast, so I'd get a mod for "investing" in stores that would allow you to upgrade merchant gold capacity.

Half my modded playthroughs were abandoned cuz I just kept adding new mods to tweak things.

Stealth archer gameplay is fun. It's cliche too but whatever, lean into it.

I've seen enough Dagoth Ur companion mod footage to know that it's going to be a must have for any future replays.

Try Oblivion Remastered instead. :P

I did! Was not able to get back into it. Part of it is that I played Oblivion far, far more than Skyrim. It may be my most played single player game of all time, hah.

Oh. :) Well, not to harp on the 'not skyrim' topic, but have you checked out Tainted Grail: The Fall of Avalon?

I’ve seen it but I’m extremely cheap!

Fine. If you really can't be moved off Skyrim; the Dagoth Ur companion as mentioned by self made human does seem hilarious.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats