General Information

Bears in Skyrim have always been small and disappointing to me. I have had several people comment that they feel like vanilla bears are harder than vanilla dragons. I'm not certain why, but my experience has always been that bears hit like wet cardboard tubes, and there attacks where easy to avoid in the first place. There is also no denying that they are not a realistic size. That's why I wrote this mod.

There are a few different versions of Bigger Badder Bears. If you don't like any of the Standard versions there are a few non-standard versions you can choose from as well.

Standard Edition

Bigger Badder Bears
Regular Bears (Black Bears) have had their size, weight and damage increased by 10% roughly.
Cave Bears (Brown Bears) have had their size, weight and damage increased by 30% roughly.
Snow Bears (Polar Bears) have had their size, weight and damage increased by 50% roughly.

All of their power attack damage has been increased by the same percentage, in addition to the damage it normally did. Meaning that Regular Bears now do 60% more damage on a power attack (instead of 50% more), Cave Bears do 80% more damage on a power attack and Snow Bears do a whopping 100% additional damage on power attacks.

In other words... getting hit by a bear WILL hurt, like it should!

Ranger Edition

The Ranger Edition changes where suggested by 101VRanger!

Ranger Edition - Bigger
Ranger Edition - Bigger reduces the size and damage of the bears as compared to the Standard Edition.

Regular bears (black): size increase 7%, damage increase 10%
Cave bears (brown): size increase 9%, damage increase 25%
Snow bears (polar): size increase 17%, damage increase 38%

Ranger Edition - Smaller
Ranger Edition - Smaller more significantly reduces the size and also reduces the damage of the bears as compared to the Standard Edition.

Regular bears (black): size increase 5%, damage increase 10%
Cave bears (brown): size increase 7%, damage increase 25%
Snow bears (polar): size increase 15%, damage increase 38%





To install simply download with NMM or Mod Organizer and install as normal. You can also install manually by downloading the file and extracting Bigger Badder Bears.esp to your Data directory in your Skyrim folder. Don't forget to enable the esp file after installing!

If you want one of the Optional Ranger Edition files please note that you do not have to download the Bigger Badder Bears Standard file.

Compatible and Recommended

Realistic Wildlife Loot & Recipes - Alters the loot tables for animals making them more realistic. Also alters and adds recipes to the game.

Compatible

Compatible with all the official DLC, no patches required.
Compatible with all of the USKP patches including the DLC patches.

This should be compatible with anything that does not modify any of the bear NPCs or Races. (Yes bears have races!)

I don't have a conclusive list but, if you suspect a mod of modifying the above, and you would rather use my mod. Simply place mine last in the load order. For the most part it should play nice with any other mods, specifically those that may increase or decrease the number of bears in Skyrim, alter loot dropped from bears etc. It may not work with mods that alter the AI of bears.

If you find a mod that doesn't play nice with Bigger Badder Bears let me know the name and as many specifics as you are capable of and I will create a compatibility patch for it!

Compatible via Patch

SkyRe - Vastly alters the game in more ways than can be described here easily. You should just go check it out for yourself! For full compatibility please download the version marked SkyRe for your favorite Bigger Badder Bears file. Place the Bigger Badder Bears esp after the SkyRe esp files in your load order.

Incompatible

Bigger Bears - This only alters the size of the bears, which this mod makes redundant.
Stronger wolves and bears ! - This alters the size and damage of bears and wolves, but the size and damage is different. Both mods alter the same bear records with different values so they are not compatible.

Anything Else?

This is just me dipping my toe in the modding pool. Next thing I intend to do is a complete overhaul on all of the predators and prey of Skyrim. Essentially I would like to add additional creatures such as wolverines (the animal not the Marvel Comic Book Character), weasels, badgers, beavers (including beaver dams that are breakable and the beavers will rebuild!) and more. I would also like to create some additional fantasy style animals such as dire wolves, wyverns (they existed in Daggerfall as "dragonlings" and High Rock is just to the west!), dire bats and dire rats.

I would also like to improve upon existing creature AI. Predators should hunt and kill prey. Most species of rabbit should belong to a warren and scurry toward a rabbit hole when in danger. Foxes should have fox holes they can run to. Some animals should have young and become insanely aggressive if you get near them.

That's just the tip of the ice berg! If you have suggestions please let me know. I'm always willing to help work on a great idea.





I got the idea for this mod from the following two similar mods

Bigger Bears
Stronger wolves and bears !

Thanks to Xion209, author of the brilliant Realistic Wildlife Loot & Recipes mod, for suggesting improvements, pointing out that our mods are compatible (and since they add realism are extremely fit for each other) as well as informing me of an embarrassing spelling error in my description text. OOPS!

Thanks to 101VRanger for the idea to offer a couple of reduced sizes in order to fit others tastes.

Also a HUGE "Thank you!" to both Bethesda for a great game, and Nexus for creating such a wonderful repository with all the tools any author could possibly want for custom modding!

The All Important Change Log

0.3
Altered the weight and size of female bear versions. Didn't realize there was an option until recently. Not sure if this will affect anything or not either way though. If not at least it's there for completeness.
Modified the sound volume of Cave Bears and Snow Bears in the CK. Volume modifiers seem to have an effect for louder roaring goodness to match their new intimidating size.
Increased the health slightly for all bears. They should not only hit harder now, but will take a few more well placed blows/arrows to kill.
Modified the weight in the NPC record for each of the bears, so not only are weights modified in Race, but now NPC as well. I'm hoping this actually has some effect on speed. Maybe not. If it doesn't I'll have to fix the odd looking speeds the old fashioned way.
Found and fixed an error in the weight of the Snow Bear.
Added Patched in SkyRe support for each mod, now you can select the SkyRe version and enjoy the bigger SkyRe bears with higher damage and all of the SkyRe goodness implemented for bears

0.2
Altered the compression method due to complications using WinRar to uncompress

0.1
Initial Release