"Castilleja coccinea, the argonian paintbrush, is a hardy, colorful flower found across Tamriel but especially prevalent in Skyrim. Its two distinct color morphs seem to depend on quality of the soil, although more study is needed to confirm this theory. To be sure, the red morph is far more plentiful in the fertile southeastern county of Skyrim, known as the Rift. Educated botanists will notice that the bright color of C. coccinea does not come from its flowers, but from modified leaves called bracts. The true flowers are small, oblong, and nestled close to the stems."

Castilleja coccinea is native to much of North America, in varying degrees of rarity. A couple folks have pointed out that it may be what the vanilla mountain flowers are based on, and I'm inclined to believe they're correct! As usual, Cathedral 3D Mountain Flowers by DrJacopo and optionally wskeever's Base Object Swapper update are necessary in order to see the snow variants (although the only ones I know of for red flowers are the ones south of Lake Yogrim.)

There's an optional file under downloads to also replace the yellow mountain flowers with the Castilleja model in yellow; which as Narrelia mentions is a color morph of the original plant.

I started this model back in March after Capripunk mentioned them, and then completely abandoned modeling for months due to a lack of motivation until ronhirzel also commented about it. I'm publishing it more to get it out there now that it's in a stable form and maybe get my own ball rolling again than out of total confidence in how it looks. This mod is the first of my flora to have proper vertex alpha paint for leaf animations, though, which I'm relatively happy with! This mod also "completes the collection" - I've now created a unique replacer for every mountain flower color. Chamerion for purple, Scilla for blue, this mod for red, and I've taken to using Primula for yellow. I'm working on some updates for Primula, but my next most likely mod will probably be some Cathedral retextures.


Performance Impact: Moderate-to-light. Obviously quite a bit beefier than vanilla, but if you don't have any issue with Chamerion, you won't have trouble with these - they're roughly the same tri count.

Q: How do they look with grass mods?
A: Pretty good! They're tall enough to be visible, unlike Scilla. Depending on the grass mod their color may seem too bright; I've noticed it in certain lighting with Freaks Floral Fields and Cathedral 3D Landscapes (which is visible in most screenshots.)

Q: ENB? Reshade?
A: All screenshots are taken with Community Shaders and it's add-ons (Screen-Space Reflections, Grass Lighting, etc) and Azurite Weathers.

Q: Other mods in screenshots?
A: Cathedral Everything, Happy Little Trees, Shrubs Redone and Skyland AIO in some shots. The shot of Lake Yogrim has one of Ryn's Dragon Mounds visible, and you can see M.O.I.S.T's swamp trees in shot near Katla's farm. Finally, Khajiit Has Wares is visible in the Riften Gate shot. (I've been playing Skryim more than modding lately, and didn't want to trash my load order disabling mods for screenshots!)

Q: Yellow Mountain Flowers for Skyrim (Fields)?
A: Yep, that's the name of the mod.