UESP Forums

I noticed some of the lighting/shadowing in Skyrim can look a bit unpolished at times. Examples of this are the occasional shadow jittering on NPCs' bodies, the occasional rock you'll walk past whose shadow will flicker once or twice, the odd lighting shift on building roofs every now and then, etc.

I was wondering if there were some recommended lighting/shadow mods that increase the overall quality without being too drastic. It should probably be noted that I am running the game the maximum settings as well.

May I ask, what do you mean by drastic? The shifting light may be because of the sun position update. I think that can be tweaked to happen real-time, instead of once per in-game hour, in the .iniprefs file. Set fSunShadowUpdateTime and fSunUpdateThreshold to 0.

As for mods, Realistic Lighting Overhaul and RCRN are both very good. Both do make big changes to lighting, but to a good direction IMO. I saw in another thread you wanted the "feel" of the game to stay the same. In that case I'd recommend RCRN. It makes dungeons and nights darker but with Legacy settings it's not too extreme. Also, colour saturation can be customized if you like the vanilla washed-out look. Some dungeons don't look as good as vanilla (case in point, Eldergleam Sanctuary) but compared to the improvements it's not a big deal.

Thanks for the recommendations. What I meant earlier about the changes in lighting/shadows being too drastic is that I've seen some lighting mods that think 'realistic' lighting is just blasting you with as much sun and glare as possible. I'll certainly check out the mods you've listed.

Well, if you don't like glare, then Realistic Lighing Overhaul might be a better choice. RCRN does have a bit of a problem with some surfaces being shiny in direct sunlight. This is only noticeable in nearly cloudless weather, though, and that is no more common as in vanilla. Plus it can be lessened at least by setting saturation lower in the mod's customizer and toggling injection on in-game (Pause key). RLO doesn't have this problem. I use rather RCRN, though, because RLO can be much too dark during overcast and rainy weather and in some cities' interiors, notably Solitude. It comes down to personal taste ultimately.