Index
Introduction
BallOfFire’s Recommended Modlist
Top 10
Essential Mods
Almosts
Load Order
Updates
Credits


Introduction


►My list is also here on the Official Elder Scrolls Forums here, if you wish to comment on it.

►If you are seeking any information about Oblivion mods whatsoever, I suggest starting with the Oblivion Mods FAQ by dev_akm. Anything information that it lacks it provides links to, so make sure you at least skim it!
►If you want Oblivion to run better on your computer with or without mods, check out The Oblivion Performance Project (TOPP).
►For a similar, more comprehensive but less discriminating modlist, check out A's List of Recommended Mods by Aelius.
►I’d also like to mention that mod “conflicts” are often mod “overlaps:” what is listed as conflicts is often not a problem at all, it is just two mods doing the same thing or different things to the same object. Thus, manipulating load order can avoid most compatibility problems. Check out this Load Order Guide .
►Furthermore, I’d like to note that I do not have Shivering Isles, so my list does not include any mods for it.
►Check the Updates section near the bottom of the page if you want to find updates without reading through the whole list each time.
►The criteria for this list are simple. These are all the mods that I consider, in my humble opinion, to be worth downloading and installing. If they are barely worth the effort, they are here. If they are barely not worth it, they aren’t. Thus, all of these mods should be compatible with each other (or at the very least manipulating their load order should allow you to get some good stuff out of all of them without any problems). You should be able to download every mod in this list, play them together, and have an incredible Oblivion experience. If I have overlooked any significant compatibility issues, please point them out to me. Also, if any links do not work or if I made any mistakes, please let me know. It should also be noted that this list is particularly useful for making the most out of FCOM.



BallOfFire's Oblivion Modlist


Annoyance Remover/Convenience

►Actors in Charge: Lets you assign animations to the PC or NPCs for them to perform immediately. Great for taking screenshots.
►Alternate Start Arrive by Ship: Let’s you skip the tutorial dungeon while providing multiple roleplaying options that effect your starting items.
►At Home Alchemy: Lets you use alchemy equipment while it is sitting down so you can leave it at home and use it without having to pick all back up again.
►Bag of Holding: Adds a bag that can hold infinite items without increasing in weight. Purse of Wonders is a better alternative, but I use both to reduce delay in opening both.
►Char-gen With Numbers: Adds numbers to the CharGen screen; makes remaking characters easy.
►Chase Camera Mod: Makes the third-person camera less annoying.
►Coloured Enemy Health Bars: Colors enemy health bars based on the proportion of their health remaining.
►Denock Arrow: Allows you to denock arrows after drawing your bow by pressing a hotkey.
►Enchantments Restore Over Time: Enchantments slowly restore based on your Mysticism skill.
►Encyclopaedia Cyrodilica: Adds reference books with info on Alchemy, spellmaking, trainers, codes, etc..
►Expanded Hotkeys and Spell Delete: Allows you to delete spells and adds 20 new hotkeys.
►Fame Indicator: Lets you know when your fame, infamy, or bounty changes.
►Guild Map Markers: Adds map markers for the guilds that let you fast travel to them.
►Hear-Me-Not: Quiets sounds that you make when you are sneaking for more immersion.
►House Map Markers: Adds map markers for each house so you can fast travel to them.
►Khajiit Nighteye Toggle: Makes Khajiit's "Eye of Night" toggleable instead of a duration spell.
►Landmarks With Wells: Marks wayshrines, doomstones, etc. on your world map.
►Less NPC Conversations: Makes NPCs initiate conversations less often.
►Map Markers: Lets you mark locations on your map with 5 tags to choose from.
►Menu escape: Does more than the name suggests- this mod lets you press either the right mouse button or the space bar to simulate the button presses necessary to quit menus and dialogue, as well as accomplishing other common tasks with one button, like saving in a new slot and quitting when on the save game screen.
►Message Remover Pack: Removes annoying messages.
►No Merchant Barter Chatter: Removes merchant comments when buying and selling. Optionally included in Living Economy.
►No More Annoying Comments About Your Skills: Removes NPC comments about your skills.
►Purse of Wonders: Adds a purse to your inventory, which when activated allows you to open one of three separate containers (junk box, purse, and alchemy stuff), gives an option to move all your alchemy items automatically, and retrieve alchemy ingredients by effect.
►Quest Award Leveler: Makes quest awards upgrade as you level, so you aren’t punished for completing a quest at a low level by getting a permanently weaker version of the award. Don’t confuse with Quest Award Leveling.
►Quick Wardrobe: Use hotkeys to equip sets of equipment instantly.
►Realistic Physics and Force: Makes the physics more realistic and makes moving bodies easier and more realistic.
►Reusable Oblivion Gate: Adds a reusable Oblivion gate to an Ayleid ruin in case you closed them all already and want to revisit Oblivion.
►Stat Restore: Gives the option to restore attributes, skills, health, magicka, fatigue, and encumbrance. Mods can sometimes get them stuck partway restored, so you may find yourself needing this.
►Toggleable Quantity Prompt: Lets you move either one item or an entire stack of items with one click. Disables the confirmation screen.
►Tweaked Generic Faces: Resets all the FaceGen sliders to 0, making the default for each race look more attractive so it is easier to make a better-looking character.
►Vampirismless Vampires: Removes the ugly aging effect from ALL vampires, but makes you have to equip an amulet to feed. An adequate temporary fix until a better one is developed.


Combat/Stealth Mods

►Deadly Reflex: Adds new combat moves that both the player and NPCs use, including shield bashing, punching (with the hilt of the weapon), dodging, flipping, even balanced decapitation and slicing in half, and more.
►Stealth Overhaul: Makes stealth more realistic and balanced.
►Sudden Violence - Combat Moves: Adds new combat moves like sprinting, charging, and pushing, and adds new effects to spells.


Compilation Mods

►A's Tweak Collection: Random tweaks, I only recommend the one that makes unconscious NPCs remain unconscious for longer.
►Less Messages: Removes annoying messages in the game.
►Unofficial Oblivion Patch: Fixes things the official patches didn’t.


Gameplay

►AF Leveling Mod: New intuitive and far more fun leveling system that takes place largely in the background so you don’t have to worry about the game mechanics.
►Bob’s Armory: Adds new weapons, shields, and helms to leveled lists. Works with other overhaul mods if you use FCOM.
►Chameleon Rebalance: Makes chameleon no longer overpowered by reducing the power of chameleon spells, replacing chameleon enchantments with sneak enchantments, and no longer allowing items to be enchanted with chameleon.
►FCOM Optional Plugins: Tweak various things, not all of which require FCOM. Especially useful are the plugins that apply MOBS balance to quest mods.
►Immersive Health Indication: Blurs your vision more the less health you have.
►Legendary Mastery: Makes fortify attributes and fortify skills useful late game by making them actually do something when above 100. Gives the option of allowing base attributes and skills to go above 100.
►Living Economy: Gives Cyrodill a realistic economy. Very impressive mod, but it sacrifices fun for realism in my opinion. I only use it to increase the barter gold of all merchants. Comes packaged with OOO.
►No Psychic Guards: Makes guard behavior more realistic. If you use the hard version, get the No Psychic Guards Harder Fix.
►OOO Level Slow: Comes with OOO RC3 as an optional add-on which reverts skill progression to its values in OOO 1.3. It causes EXTREMELY hardcore level slowing, which makes for a MUCH longer game in which you can fully appreciate all these other mods.
►Persuasion Overhaul: New role-playing persuasion system. New OBSE version that I haven’t tried yet here.
►Running Revised: Improves the running system, including making running actually reduce fatigue and allowing for balanced sprinting. Be careful not to specify that you have Frans running installed if you don’t have that .esp activated, or it causes crashes.
►Smarter Mercantile Leveling: Reworks the horrid mercantile leveling system to instead level mercantile based on the value of transactions.
►Supreme Magicka: Improves the magic system to be more balanced, diverse, and fun. Adds new effects and spells. Crash to desktop issues are now fixed!
►Stealth Entrances: Adds alternative ways in and out of cities for stealthy characters so you don’t have to sprint from guards every time you enter a city if you are wanted.
►Zumb’s Lockpicking: Replaces the lockpicking minigame with Morrowind’s chance lockpicking system.


Graphics (Also check out The Oblivion Texture Overhaul (TOTO))

►Atmospheric Dark UI Loading Screens: Gives the loading screens beautiful scenic pictures with a Dark UI texture, with optional random quotes. OBMM had trouble installing this for me; on the off chance that you also have this problem, try doing it manually after activating the OMOD, so it is installed properly but can still be uninstalled with ease.
►Atmospheric Weather System: Adds more than five times the weather types of standard Oblivion. Adds a seasonal weather system and improves night and water appearances.
►Bomrets Detailed Normal Maps for Vanilla: Improves upon the vanilla textures, making them look better without hurting performance whatsoever.
►Book Jackets: Gives book covers much better textures.
►Cyrodiil Terrain Map: Extremely detailed and attractive map that accurately shows the geography.
►Darker Dungeons: This mod makes dungeons/sewers/ruins etc. to be pitch black, as they should be.
►Female EyeCandy - Body Replacer (underwear): Improves female bodies. There is also a nude version. Also grab Stock oblivion Clothing Replacer for Exnem Female Body.
►Immersive Caves: Makes cave entrances look like pretty cave entrances instead of doors.
►Improved Facial Textures: Improves NPC facial textures. Use this OR Natural Faces.
►Improved Water: Makes water prettier in Oblivion and optionally in SI, while making it clear enough that swimming isn’t a chore.
►Initial Glow: Makes enchanted items only glow when you first equip them.
►Koldorn’s LOD Noise Replacer: Improves the noise effect on LOD textures.
►Life Detect: Makes Life Detection look better by giving NPCs and creatures a red blurring light effect.
►New NightEye and Light Look: Improves the look of Nighteye and Light.
►No Glow Grass: Gets rid of the glow effect on grass that some people get.
►Natural Faces: Improves NPC facial textures. Use this OR Improved Facial Textures.
►Original Colour Darker Nights: This mod makes nights much darker than the pathetic excuse for "darkness" that is vanilla nights.
►Real Lights: Makes light come from realistic light sources instead of thin air.
►TNR (Tamriel NPCs Revamped): Improves the faces of all NPCs and makes the races’ faces look more distinctive. Now includes every single playable race.
►Unique Landscapes: Modular, greatly improves upon the look of different areas while maximizing compatability. A couple cause strange graphical glitches when used with other mods in my list, but these are noted in the readmes and possibly worthwhile anyway.
►Visually Realistic Lava: Gives lava a better texture.


House (Check out Oblivion Real Estate and SD's House Tweak Mod List)


Overhauls

►FCOM (Francesco's + WarCry + OOO + MMM): Allows the best and largest four overhaul mods plus Bob’s Armory to work together. It combines the best aspects of each, creating a balanced, integrated, and vastly improves gameworld.
►Francesco’s Leveled Creatures/Items
►Martigen’s Monster Mod
►Oblivion Warcry
►Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul.


Performance Enhancers (also check out The Oblivion Performance Project (TOPP))

►De-Parallaxer: Removes the parallax effect from many objects, increasing performance but making objects look flatter. Use if desperate for FPS.
►LowLowPoly Grass - LowPoly Grass - LowLowPoly Grass for SI - LowPoly Grass for SI - LowPoly Grass for UL: The Dark Forest: Reduces the ridiculous amount of polygons in grass.
►No Lights Flicker: Removes the flicker from every light source in the game to improve performance. There is a Real Lights compatability version, but it caused me major problems so I don’t recommend it.
►Oblivion Polygon Overhaul: Reduces the polygons used in rocks to a reasonable amount for a performance boost without visual loss.
►Oblivion Script Optimization: Optimizes in-game scripts to improve performance.
►Operation Optimization: Greatly improves performance by optimizing meshes, with no quality loss.
►Quiet Feet: Removes the sound of footsteps from animals to reduce stuttering on some systems.
►Streamline: Increases performance by clearing memory buffers intelligently and safely. Also allows you to specify your desired FPS and graphics, and it constantly makes adjustments to graphical settings to accommodate them. Also includes many more incredible features you should check out.


Quests (Also The Oblivion Quest List (TOQL))

►Thievery in the Imperial City: Adds a fence to the Imperial city, adds 11 thief quests, and adds 2 miscellaneous quests. Fully voiced.


Sound (Also check the TOTO site. Note: some of these mods may replace the default music. In those cases, you can simply change the name of the songs before copying them to the Music folder if you want it to randomly choose between new and old songs.)

►All Original Music Score for Oblivion: Includes 30 new songs for Oblivion, mostly classical and cinematic.
►Diverse Voices: Modifies original voices to give each race a more unique voice.
►Nehrim Soundtrack: These songs are meant for a total conversion being made called Nehrim, but can be downloaded and put in the proper music folders to give Oblivion an incredible soundtrack.
►Oblivion Stereo Sound Overhaul: Changes many sounds in game for more realism and immersion.
►Oblivion Symphonic Variations Music Suite: Adds four new orchestral songs meant to blend in with the original.
►Robert Hood's Silgrad Music: Music meant for the Silgrad tower project.
►The Daggerfall Music Project: Not exactly a mod, but you can download these beautiful arrangements of Daggerfall songs into your Oblivion music folders.


UI

►Phinix's Immersive Dark UI: Combines Immersive Interface, BTMod and Dark UI to make an appealing, non-distracting, and convenient interface. If you use SI or OOO then get Phinix's Immersive Dark UI OOO and SI Compatibility Fix.



Top 10


►AF Leveling Mod: New intuitive and far more fun leveling system that takes place largely in the background so you don’t have to worry about the game mechanics.
►Deadly Reflex: Adds new combat moves that both the player and NPCs use, including shield bashing, punching (with the hilt of the weapon), dodging, flipping, even balanced decapitation and slicing in half, and more.
►FCOM (Francesco's + WarCry + OOO + MMM): Allows the best and largest four overhaul mods plus Bob’s Armory to work together. It combines the best aspects of each, creating a balanced, integrated, and vastly improves gameworld.
►Phinix's Immersive Dark UI: Combines Immersive Interface, BTMod and Dark UI to make an appealing, non-distracting, and convenient interface. If you use SI or OOO then get Phinix's Immersive Dark UI OOO and SI Compatibility Fix.
►Purse of Wonders: Adds a purse to your inventory, which when activated allows you to open one of three separate containers (junk box, purse, and alchemy stuff), gives an option to move all your alchemy items automatically, and retrieve alchemy ingredients by effect.
►Running Revised: Improves the running system, including making running actually reduce fatigue and allowing for balanced sprinting. Be careful not to specify that you have Frans running installed if you don’t have that .esp activated, or it causes crashes.
►Streamline: Increases performance by clearing memory buffers intelligently and safely. Also allows you to specify your desired FPS and graphics, and it constantly makes adjustments to graphical settings to accommodate them. Also includes many more incredible features you should check out.
►Stealth Overhaul: Makes stealth more realistic and balanced.
►Supreme Magicka: Improves the magic system to be more balanced, diverse, and fun. Adds new effects and spells. Crash to desktop issues are now fixed!
►Unofficial Oblivion Patch: Fixes things the official patches didn’t.



Essential Mods


►AF Leveling Mod: New intuitive and far more fun leveling system that takes place largely in the background so you don’t have to worry about the game mechanics.
►Alternate Start Arrive by Ship: Let’s you skip the tutorial dungeon while providing multiple roleplaying options that effect your starting items.
►Atmospheric Weather System : Adds more than five times the weather types of standard Oblivion. Adds a seasonal weather system and improves night and water appearances.
►Bag of Holding: Adds a bag that can hold infinite items without increasing in weight. Purse of Wonders is a better alternative, but I use both to reduce delay in opening both.
►Chameleon Rebalance: Makes chameleon no longer overpowered by reducing the power of chameleon spells, replacing chameleon enchantments with sneak enchantments, and no longer allowing items to be enchanted with chameleon.
►Coloured Enemy Health Bars: Colors enemy health bars based on the proportion of their health remaining.
►Deadly Reflex: Adds new combat moves that both the player and NPCs use, including shield bashing, punching (with the hilt of the weapon), dodging, flipping, even balanced decapitation and slicing in half, and more.
►FCOM (Francesco's + WarCry + OOO + MMM): Allows the best and largest four overhaul mods plus Bob’s Armory to work together. It combines the best aspects of each, creating a balanced, integrated, and vastly improves gameworld.
►Immersive Health Indication: Blurs your vision more the less health you have.
►Landmarks With Wells: Marks wayshrines, doomstones, etc. on your world map.
►Legendary Mastery: Makes fortify attributes and fortify skills useful late game by making them actually do something when above 100. Gives the option of allowing base attributes and skills to go above 100.
►LowLowPoly Grass - LowPoly Grass - LowLowPoly Grass for SI - LowPoly Grass for SI - LowPoly Grass for UL: The Dark Forest: Reduces the ridiculous amount of polygons in grass.
►Menu escape: Does more than the name suggests- this mod lets you press either the right mouse button or the space bar to simulate the button presses necessary to quit menus and dialogue, as well as accomplishing other common tasks with one button, like saving in a new slot and quitting when on the save game screen.
►No Lights Flicker: Removes the flicker from every light source in the game to improve performance. There is a Real Lights compatability version, but it caused me major problems so I don’t recommend it.
►No Psychic Guards: Makes guard behavior more realistic. If you use the hard version, get the No Psychic Guards Harder Fix.
►Oblivion Polygon Overhaul: Reduces the polygons used in rocks to a reasonable amount for a performance boost without visual loss.
►OOO Level Slow: Comes with OOO RC3 as an optional add-on which reverts skill progression to its values in OOO 1.3. It causes EXTREMELY hardcore level slowing, which makes for a MUCH longer game in which you can fully appreciate all these other mods.
►Operation Optimization: Greatly improves performance by optimizing meshes with no quality loss.
►Persuasion Overhaul: New role-playing persuasion system. New OBSE version that I haven’t tried yet here.
►Phinix's Immersive Dark UI: Combines Immersive Interface, BTMod and Dark UI to make an appealing, non-distracting, and convenient interface. If you use SI or OOO then get Phinix's Immersive Dark UI OOO and SI Compatibility Fix.
►Purse of Wonders: Adds a purse to your inventory, which when activated allows you to open one of three separate containers (junk box, purse, and alchemy stuff), gives an option to move all your alchemy items automatically, and retrieve alchemy ingredients by effect.
►Quest Award Leveler: Makes quest awards upgrade as you level, so you aren’t punished for completing a quest at a low level by getting a permanently weaker version of the award. Don’t confuse with Quest Award Leveling.
►Quiet Feet: Removes the sound of footsteps from animals to reduce stuttering on some systems.
►Realistic Physics and Force: Makes the physics more realistic and makes moving bodies easier and more realistic.
►Running Revised: Improves the running system, including making running actually reduce fatigue and allowing for balanced sprinting. Be careful not to specify that you have Frans running installed if you don’t have that .esp activated, or it causes crashes.
►Smarter Mercantile Leveling: Reworks the horrid mercantile leveling system to instead level mercantile based on the value of transactions.
►Stealth Overhaul: Makes stealth more realistic and balanced.
►Streamline: Increases performance by clearing memory buffers intelligently and safely. Also allows you to specify your desired FPS and graphics, and it constantly makes adjustments to graphical settings to accommodate them. Also includes many more incredible features you should check out.
►Sudden Violence - Combat Moves: Adds new combat moves like sprinting, charging, and pushing, and adds new effects to spells.
►Supreme Magicka: Improves the magic system to be more balanced, diverse, and fun. Adds new effects and spells. Crash to desktop issues are now fixed!
►Toggleable Quantity Prompt: Lets you move either one item or an entire stack of items with one click. Disables the confirmation screen.
►Unofficial Oblivion Patch: Fixes things the official patches didn’t.
►Zumb’s Lockpicking: Replaces the lockpicking minigame with Morrowind’s chance lockpicking system.



Almosts (These are mods that I do not feel comfortable recommending because I decided not to use them for whatever reason (incompatibilities, bugs, unexpected complications, etc.), but that I want to keep track of due to showing potential of some sort. I cannot vouch for their compatibility with the rest of my list)


►Fake HDR Lighting: Approximates the HDR lighting effect for people who can’t use HDR or want to also use Anti-aliasing. Causes a FPS loss, but is easily turned on and off in-game. My computer couldn't handle it, and I got sick of deactivating it every time I loaded a game, so I deactivated it.
►Get Level Spell: Gives you a spell that can be cast on NPCs to tell you their level. Sounds great for not getting in over your head with FCOM, but I've never actually bothered to use it.
►Keychain: Adds a keychain to your inventory that stores all your keys to reduce clutter. Unfortunately it caused me immense inventory delay when I got enough keys for it to be useful. The new version here is supposed to eliminate the lag, but I haven't tried it yet.
►MD Saddle Bags: Adds functional saddle bags to horses, gives Lesser Powers that allow you to call your horse, and speeds their turning speeds. I don’t use simply because I don’t know if it is compatible with my other mods and the gain isn’t quite worth investigating it.
►Menu Video Scenery: Plays a video of beautiful scenery at the main menu when you first start up the game. Great little mod, but slightly too minor to make it on my list.
►Nords with Beards: Adds various beards to all Nords. Does so by making new races, and there is a better-looking mod that does something similar by making even MORE races, so I am hesitant to attempt these with the amount of mods I have because that is just asking for trouble.
►No Wind: Stops trees and plants from swaying to improve performance. Doesn't seem to work on many games, including my own.
►Oblivion Face Exchange Lite: Allows you to change your character’s face without starting a new game. I haven’t tried it yet as I haven’t needed it yet.
►On-Hit Shader Replacement: Adds visual effects when you get hit. Sounds good in theory, but I found it a little annoying.
►Qarl and Timeslips Depth of Field: Blurs far away objects. Great for disguising bad LOD textures. I couldn’t get it to work properly, and given that it causes a FPS decrease I didn’t quite find it worth trying to fix.
►Reneer's Guard Overhaul: Improves guard behavior to be more realistic, most notably making them no longer instantly appear when you commit a crime. I thought I ran into incompatibilities between this and other mods that I use, but in retrospect I may have been hasty to assume so.
►Spell Icon Replacer: Vastly improves spell icons. Comes with Sudden Violence.
►Thieves Arsenal Mission Zero: Adds new thieving tools and greatly improves AI relating to stealthy activity. This can be unbalancing with mods such as FCOM, so as intriguing as it is I choose not to use it.
►TTHudRecticle: Adds a third-person crosshair with activation icons. I don’t use third person, but for those who do it seems useful.
►WHOOSH: Lets you manipulate the game speed, thus allowing you to slow down the speed to stop stuttering and make gameplay smoother. I had it installed for a long time without using it, but then it got glitchy on me so I just deactivated it.
►wz_Inventory: Makes the inventory into a grid with collapsible categories. I stopped using it because it doesn’t work properly with Phinix’s Dark UI.
►Zeladin's Hairfix: A hair fix for graphic cards that don't have Shader Model 3.0. It made people bald on my computer.



Load Order (This is my load order.  I most of the same mods as I recommend in my list (I am testing some others), so if you use a lot of mods from my list then you can use this as a guide.  My load order is not perfect, but my current installation with this load order is pretty stable: I have the occasional freezes or crashes to desktop (CTD), but they infrequent.  Also refer to the [url=http://devnull.devakm.googlepages.com/loadorder]Load Order Guide [/url], which gives more general load order recommendations (that I only loosely follow because I am very familiar with most of the mods in my list).  I should also mention that I use an old setup of FCOM but with some of the new optional .esps, as I would rather wait until I start a new character to make a change to my setup as drastic as updating FCOM from the current version.)