Years ago after installing and playing Bruma, I decided to swap out the skeevers for the Bruma style Rats. Its my own personal mod and I have never shared it as it was a simple mesh and texture swap. I never bought into skeevers as rats thing. Skeevers are not rats, they are more closely resemble opossums than rats. Rats do not have sharp meat eating teeth, opossums do of course. The best BGS rats ever made were the ones in Oblivion, hyper realistic in shape and movement, if a bit slow at times.
If you would like to build a Skyrim replacer mod for the skeevers, I would be willing to share my mods folder structure, both meshes and textures, as a means of getting you started. Of course, you then have to enter patching hell, as so many mods add various versions of skeevers, and they all have to be changed out.
I've thought about this as a "quick" way to do it, like just swap the Skeever model for the rat, rename the spawns and charred skeever hide to "rat" and kinda just do it that way since replacing every instance of Skeever spawns with rats would be so... tedious... they're seriously everywhere and that wouldn't fix the skeever cooking pots either (which luckily Solstheim doesn't seem to have any of)
But yea, you're right, it'd be a huge compatibility nightmare. As would editing all the cells with Skeevers to rats. There isn't really a good solution I think that isn't a big ordeal
With the mods I've made, all of them were things I personally wanted to change in the game, and I more or less just package them up and share them because the work is done anyway. I don't really mind Skeevers on Skyrim, so I wouldn't make a mod for my own personal use and share it. Given the work involved with replacing all the Skeevers, I'm just not sure it's something I'd find the drive to work on given it's not something I'd personally use
The reason I made this mod was mostly because I see Skeevers are exclusively a Skyrim thing, and while Solstheim is a mix of Skyrim and Morrowind, in the 3rd era it was basically just Skyrim's climate and it had rats, not skeevers. In the 4th era, with Solstheim at its Morrowindiest, somehow now Skeevers live here. One could say they came on boats from Skyrim or something and killed off the native rats, but from how there's only 2 actual Skeevers and a very very low chance of seeing one in a forest as a random spawn, they're not exactly having a great and successful time on Solstheim as a species. It just feels more likely that rats would remain on Solstheim even if a few Skeevers came on the island, mostly because the rats live in outskirts and holes on Solstheim and seem like they'd adapt more to the ashy lands than the more temperate forest Skeevers. We know rats tolerate ashlands just fine because they're native on Morrowind, Skeever have no such adaptation
The weird thing about Skeevers is that there's no rodents in Tamriel, they're all "Skeevera" which includes Skeevers, rats and rabbits (???), so them being more possum like fits within that order alright I guess. I mean they're including rabbits in the same group, so the order is a little strange anyway. With their relative size and how they're a major food source for not only predators but also humans in Skyrim, it seems like they fit the same sort of niche that a beaver would
I've spent waaaay too long thinking the lore implications of extremely rare rodents on a DLC island nobody mods and people barely remember is even in the game just to swap out not even a half dozen creature spawns lol
Hmm, I wasn't aware that BGS took all rodents down that hole, what a huge mistake. Rabbits are not even true rodents, they are more closely related to deer then rats are any other rodent. Alas, this is one of the main reasons, although I like playing the game, I personally think the lore to often sucks eggs. One must keep in mind that a great deal of the lore was made by one man in a heavily drug induced state. The rats in Morrowind are certainly skeevers, as they too have sharp teeth like opossums do, so you can say they are the same thing. But BGS made it clear in Oblivion, that the rats there are different. For me personally, the mesh swap was pretty easy, and having the local nords call the rats skeevers is something I am fine with. I just never liked the look of the skeevers in the first place. Again, like you, a personal choice. I also hate the way the elk look, and I made a mod years ago to fix that. The elk in the game are supposed to be megaloceros giganteus, or the Irish elk, but they did the mesh a real disservice, and made it really bad. So I change the antlers and released it as a mod. I have taken it down and then back up a few times, mainly due to Nexus and various waves of mod thieving that went on. But took it down the last time due to Nexus taking ownership and locking us out dealing with our mods our own way. I do have a mod still up that fixes the Skyrim elks badly shaped antlers, but am hesitant to put my bigger mod back up on the site in its original state. I ended up building an all new mod, and just replaced all the elk and deer with far superior meshes from other games, mainly Conan Exiles, and that alone means I can't post it. So yeah, my mod making days are pretty much over, except for personal use.
Skyrim has waaaaaay more hand placed Skeevers to change, though, but I could probably pretty easily change out any leveled list the Skeevers are on to randomly pick between rats or skeevers.
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If you would like to build a Skyrim replacer mod for the skeevers, I would be willing to share my mods folder structure, both meshes and textures, as a means of getting you started. Of course, you then have to enter patching hell, as so many mods add various versions of skeevers, and they all have to be changed out.
But yea, you're right, it'd be a huge compatibility nightmare. As would editing all the cells with Skeevers to rats. There isn't really a good solution I think that isn't a big ordeal
With the mods I've made, all of them were things I personally wanted to change in the game, and I more or less just package them up and share them because the work is done anyway. I don't really mind Skeevers on Skyrim, so I wouldn't make a mod for my own personal use and share it. Given the work involved with replacing all the Skeevers, I'm just not sure it's something I'd find the drive to work on given it's not something I'd personally use
The reason I made this mod was mostly because I see Skeevers are exclusively a Skyrim thing, and while Solstheim is a mix of Skyrim and Morrowind, in the 3rd era it was basically just Skyrim's climate and it had rats, not skeevers. In the 4th era, with Solstheim at its Morrowindiest, somehow now Skeevers live here. One could say they came on boats from Skyrim or something and killed off the native rats, but from how there's only 2 actual Skeevers and a very very low chance of seeing one in a forest as a random spawn, they're not exactly having a great and successful time on Solstheim as a species. It just feels more likely that rats would remain on Solstheim even if a few Skeevers came on the island, mostly because the rats live in outskirts and holes on Solstheim and seem like they'd adapt more to the ashy lands than the more temperate forest Skeevers. We know rats tolerate ashlands just fine because they're native on Morrowind, Skeever have no such adaptation
The weird thing about Skeevers is that there's no rodents in Tamriel, they're all "Skeevera" which includes Skeevers, rats and rabbits (???), so them being more possum like fits within that order alright I guess. I mean they're including rabbits in the same group, so the order is a little strange anyway. With their relative size and how they're a major food source for not only predators but also humans in Skyrim, it seems like they fit the same sort of niche that a beaver would
I've spent waaaay too long thinking the lore implications of extremely rare rodents on a DLC island nobody mods and people barely remember is even in the game just to swap out not even a half dozen creature spawns lol
Skyrim has waaaaaay more hand placed Skeevers to change, though, but I could probably pretty easily change out any leveled list the Skeevers are on to randomly pick between rats or skeevers.
I'll look into it if I find some time
Here you go! I popped some rats into various leveled lists so there's some rodent variety in Skyrim now