For those wanting to change things up and introduce challenge into the game, turning Skyrim into a survival experience might just be the solution. Countless of mods out there change the gameplay in a way that makes it essential for players to focus on details like hunger, diseases and even temperature changes.

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Updated on August 14th, 2021 by Anastasia Maillot: While fans are antsy to hear more about The Elder Scrolls 6, Skyrim continues to remain a popular game. Much of its popularity and longevity is thanks to a budding modding community, which has introduced countless gameplay-enhancing mods.

If challenge is a concern to players, this comprehensive list of some of the best survival mods for Skyrim is a great place to start. From introducing basic needs to changing how enemies work, pairing this mods with Legendary Difficulty will make Skyrim into a totally different and brand-new experience.

20 Fast Travel Costs

Fast travel is one of those gameplay features that makes traversing the open-world easier, but it also really breaks the immersion. Moreover, it can be easy to abuse to get out of sticky situations by running far away from an enemy and then fast traveling away.

The Fast Travel Costs mod tweaks fast travel so that every time a player uses it, they lose a bit of gold. The amount depends entirely on the distance traveled. This makes fast travel a more strategic choice and forces players to consider when to use it and when to not use it. It also ensures players can’t escape the harshness of other survival mods by just skipping any travel time.

19 Vitality Mode

There are many great mods that introduce basic needs in Skyrim, and Vitality Mode is just one of them worth mentioning. The mod makes eating, sleeping and drinking a necessity in Skyrim, which players will now have to take into account.

Moreover, this mod also takes into account vampirism, lycanthropy and cannibalism, which are all three parts of Skyrim’s lore. Vampire characters will need to drink regularly, werewolves get more energy from raw meats and cannibals must consume food from bodies or raw meat specifically.

18 Requiem

If having too many mods is a concern, then Requiem is an excellent choice for players who want to start small and expand from there. Though, Requiem is anything but small. It changes many aspects of the game, making Skyrim much more lore-friendly, immersive and realistic.

The most important change Requiem introduces is to stop the scaling the enemies in Skyrim. This means that early on, some areas in the world will feel incredibly difficult and will encourage the player to engage in combat with a more strategic mindset.

17 Advanced Cooking

While other mods on this list will make cooking more interesting with new recipes and ingredients, Advanced Cooking tweaks the actual mechanics of cooking to be more skill-based. After all, why would the Dragonborn know instantly how to cook the heartiest, most powerful meal?

Advanced Cooking introduces a sort of cooking skill system. The higher level the player is, the better recipes they can cook. This prevents players from abusing how overpowered some of the recipes in Skyrim are and just how easy they are to make.

16 Keep It Clean

When it comes to survival, basic needs are often the main focus, along with enemy difficulty tweaks. However, an ingenious mod called Keep It Clean addressed the hygiene aspect of survival, which is equally important when realism is involved.

The Dragonborn can now become dirty during their travels. Dirtiness results in poor Speech and Sneak skills due to a horrible stench. Moreover, players will be more susceptible to contracting diseases. The various inns of Skyrim are luckily now upgraded with bathing rooms, and dipping in lakes and rivers works, too. There’s even various soaps that provide great temporary buffs, and can be crafted with ingredients found in the game.

15 Immersive Horses

With some survival mods and the principles of survival gameplay, fast travel is a big no-no, as it allows players to go past the hostility of the wilds. Due to this, having a good mod that overhauls the horses of Skyrim is a necessity, and there’s no better one for this than Immersive Horses.

Not only does it add a bunch of commands and a whole system for summoning a specific horse to the player’s location, it also brings in a few new breeds. Moreover, horses won’t just be docile vehicles from now on. They can also attack and move in different ways, making them more adjusted for combat.

14 Survive The Night

Night time in Skyrim isn’t all that scary. However, what if it was made to feel like a game of Amnesia: The Dark Descent or Minecraft? Survive The Night introduces a terrifying alternative to a regular night outside in the dark forests of Skyrim, forcing the player to find shelter.

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It will become incredibly difficult to remain outside in the dark between 9 and 5 at night. The Dragonborn will risk going insane and even witness strange creatures lurking in the shadows that might suddenly find them a great target to attack.

13 Simple Taxes

Survival isn’t just about living and camping in the wilds. It’s also about managing money and economy in an era of medieval cities and merchants. Without making things too complicated, the mod Simple Taxes introduces the burden of taxation on the Dragonborn’s shoulders.

With money already scarce, the player now also has to budget with taxation in mind. Property like horses and houses will need to be paid for, although their respective cost and whether these systems are active can be tailored depending on the player’s wants and needs.

12 Wearable Lanterns

One of the most annoying features of Skyrim is the inability to carry a lantern on one’s belt for some extra light during the night or in dungeons. Instead, the player is forced to sacrifice either hand in order to carry a torch or cast a mage light. Wearable Lanterns changes this.

The Dragonborn can now carry a lantern at their belt, one which they’ve crafted themselves as well. This becomes especially useful in Campfire as well, since the two mods complement each other when making a campfire or paper lanterns.

11 Hunterborn

Survival deals a lot with cooking food in Skyrim, which is a generally underappreciated mechanism of the game. As such, it’s nice to have a few additional recipes with new effects to make survival a bit more plausible. Slaying a dragon will now not only yield a bit of loot but also some ingredients for hearty food.

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It’s not just new recipes that the mod Hunterborn introduces. The process of actually hunting and preparing the animal for cooking is more complex as well. Foraging for foods in the forests of Skyrim has also been changed to feel more realistic, so there’s a real reason to get cooking.

10 Diseased

If the diseases in Skyrim feel far too easy to deal with, rest assured there’s a mod called Diseased that addresses this flaw to perfection. Rather than having diseases just be temporary negative status effects, this mod actually makes players care about diseases as they can even present life-threatening symptoms.

Players will have to learn from books how to make cures and appropriately take care of themselves when they eventually do come down with a sickness. In the first care scenario, players can even die if they’re not treated in time.

9 Chasing The Dragon

In The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, the concept of toxicity was introduced as a gameplay mechanic. The use of potions would yield some negative effects on top of the positive ones, which made the whole system feel much more realistic and with concrete stakes.

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Now, a similar mechanic has been introduced with the mod Chasing The Dragon. Overuse of potions will now have some much-needed risks, rather than just being an easy thing to do. Higher toxicity levels will actually stop the player from regenerating any of their attributes. Players can also become addicted to some potions.

8 Exhaustion

Not all mods need to actually do something concrete to have a significant effect on the feel of the game. The Exhaustion mod for instance is incredibly simple, and yet it adds that extra bit of realism that feels right at home in a game like Skyrim.

Whenever the Dragonborn’s attribute, whether it be health, magicka or stamina, goes low enough, the player will be able to hear an audible breath from their character. In the vanilla version, a breath is only played when the Dragonborn runs out of stamina entirely.

7 Mealtime

When thinking about survival, food is one of the first things that come to mind. There’s not a huge amount of variety in Skyrim as it is, which is why mods like Mealtime are absolutely crucial in making the game feel a bit more immersive.

With over a hundred new recipes added to the game, each food item provides a unique value of health to the player. Some even have special effects that players can discover as they learn all different recipes.

6 iNeed

Paired well with the Mealtime mod, the iNeed mod is a must-have for anyone who wants some basic survival in their game. The Dragonborn will now have to think about three sets of needs: hunger, sleep and thirst. All of these have to be addressed roughly three times a day, with the exception of sleep that only needs to be filled once at night.

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Thirst in particular is a really interesting mechanic, as it introduces waterskins as items, which can carry some water and which need to be periodically refilled. Not tending to the needs will make the character weaker, whereas being well-rested, fed and hydrated gives positive status effects.

5 Art Of The Catch

Gone are the days when players could simply walk into a river and fish with their bare hands. With the Art Of The Catch mod, the Dragonborn will actually have to make their very own fishing rod if they wish to catch fish to make some food.

Fishing has its own unique animations, and with the right technique, the player needs to find a spot where fish are plentiful before casting their line. Making noise or moving around will also scare the fish off.

4 You Hunger

Skyrim is a game famous for having a ton of clutter just about anywhere the player goes. This makes it easy for players to play the game, even with a mod like iNeed activated. Due to this, it’s important to have You Hunger in the game, which is a mod that remedies this situation.

The mod drastically reduces the amount of random food stuff that can be found lying around everywhere. Moreover, players can now starve to death in the worst-case scenario, which just ups the stakes.

3 Scarcity

Part of survival that’s easy in vanilla Skyrim is just how easy it is to find almost any type of loot and sell it for money. When managing needs like hunger, as long as the player has money they can simply buy all their food. However, with Scarcity, this becomes trickier.

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Loot of all kinds is now much rarer and when the player does find something truly exceptional, it makes that find even more rewarding than usual. It’s a necessary fix to the bloated economy of the game, which gives players incentive to really go out and hunt food on their own when in a pinch.

2 Frostfall

Previously, crossing a river in a frozen environment or swimming in a cold ocean wasn’t a problem at all for the Dragonborn. However, with this mod, things change drastically. Frostfall makes the weather of Skyrim actually mean something to the player.

Depending on the location the player is in, the mod will introduce various temperature effects on them, including hypothermia. It also forces the player to consider what kind of clothing they’re wearing in each area.

1 Campfire

It’s pretty surprising that a game like Skyrim, with so much nature, doesn’t have a camping system. Camps can be found all around the world, but actual camping isn’t an interaction or a gameplay feature that’s really available to players.

The Campfire mods finally makes this possible. Players can set up their own camp by gathering resources and buying tools needed for camping. It even introduces a brand new skill tree that has to do with all things camping.

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