SkyFix – Riverwood Redeveloped
An overhaul mod for Riverwood which strikes the optimal balance between overgrown/wild and urban/developed and stays close to the vanilla style. Also fixes environmental oddities.
4th in SkyFix series
THE DEFINITIVE VERSION IS OUT NOW!
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Riverwood Redeveloped
Current Version: 1.02
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Thanks for the mod showcase video MxR Mods.
Introduction
Riverwood Redeveloped is an overhaul mod of sorts. It redevelops vanilla Riverwood from a charming yet empty village full of odd characteristics, into a fully fledged ‘lived in’ village with all of the oddities fixed. It does this while preserving the unique natural charm and beauty of the vanilla style, which is something that all other Riverwood overhauls, in my experience, tend to lose sight of, even if the mod is still very well made. Riverwood Redeveloped aims to strike the optimal balance between making Riverwood wild/overgrown and urban/developed. It aims to take the best from these two extremes and add a bit of flavor to the vanilla layout.
Oddity Fixing?
Vanilla Riverwood is a beautiful village. Despite its minimalistic appearance, we all remember staring in awe at it when it was teased at us in the launch trailer for Elder Scrolls V. It is the first settlement you are normally presented with after Helgen at the start of a new game. It has always been my personal favorite village in Skyrim largely because of that nostalgic feeling and I often find myself going back there to recapture some of that feeling.
But it is a village full of oddities, which you may or may not have noticed and some are more subtle than others.
Here are some of the key oddities this mod fixes:
• As a Nord village founded by the ancestors of the lumberjacks, Gerdur and Hod, there are no Nordic visual details pertaining to this history in Riverwood.
• As a fishing and farming village, there seems to be almost no evidence pointing towards this fact.
• There are no chimneys on buildings which have fireplaces.
• Although there are half-built defensive walls around the village perimeter, these provide very little in the way of defending the village within. Even as a small rural village, Riverwood is in a dangerous spot in Skyrim, serving as a passage for travellers and mercenaries coming from the main road from Helgen and Falkreath on their way to Whiterun and the North. Wildlife is also always a threat to the villagers. Yet the walls do not surround the village completely and there are no gates to stop external dangers getting free entry into the village. No gates and unfinished walls make the vanilla walls fairly redundant.
• No stables.
• No public places to relax.
• An unnaturally subdued and quiet river even though the village is quite high in altitude as a mountain village and so near the rapids of the source.
• Alvor’s blacksmith does not have a smelter and so has no way of obtaining his own raw smithing materials.
• The guards have nowhere permanent to shelter and sleep.
• The cow and chickens on Hod and Gerdur’s farm never escape even though there is a large opening with no gate enclosing their pen.
• The long staircase leading to the secret room in the Sleeping Giant Inn is nowhere to be seen on the outside building model.
All of these oddities and many more are comprehensively addressed individually in Riverwood Redeveloped. In addition, the village is just made more social, welcoming, enclosed and ‘lived in’. Hopefully, Riverwood will be even more of a hidden gem in Skyrim than ever before. All of this while, hopefully, preserving Riverwood’s charming vanilla feeling we all love.
Features
• The optimal balance between a ‘wild’ overhaul (focusing on lots of flora and vegetation) and a ‘developed’ overhaul (focusing on man-made objects in the environment). Why not get the best of both worlds.
• Oddities regarding the lore of Riverwood in the environment are comprehensively fixed.
• Stables, chimneys (with smoke effects), perimeter walls, entrance gates, wood walkways, fishing decks, wood bridge railings, blue Nordic flags, public seating, flora and general clutter have been added in sensible and appropriate places in the village. The village is no longer so bare yet does not go so overboard so as to spoil Riverwood’s natural simple beauty.
• A new public square for the villagers to wander and relax in addition to the lounge hut at the new dock, fitted with interactive shutters you can open and close, depending on your mood.
• Alvor now has a smelter to obtain his own raw smithing materials.
• The guards now have their own dedicated rest area/lookout post at the Guard Treehouse built on the southern main wall (check screenshot below).
• The village now has a purpose-built Lumber Workshop for extra storage and space (check screenshot below).
• Rennovated and more welcoming layout for the traveller campsite outside the southern main gate coming from Helgen.
• Riverwood feels more well-maintained, enclosed and developed while still maintaining its natural rural origins as a mountain woodland village.
• More places for NPCs to sit and do daily routine activities. The village never felt more social and welcoming.
• The river running through the village now flows with white water rapids as a river high in altitude near the source should. More rocky outcrops also feature in the river flowing through the village with appropriate splash and sound effects.
• No scripts, quests, new NPCs or interior cells feature in this mod – just an environmental redevelopment staying within the vanilla flavor we are all used to.
• Although all new paths are fully navmeshed, this may be the area which brings up the most bugs as it is not my area of expertise. Please report any problems and hotfixes will follow.
Guard Treehouse
Lumber Workshop
Installation
Use NMM or if installing manually just drag the data folder into your root Skyrim folder (the one with the .exe’s).
Be a sir
If you like this mod, why not let others know and encourage me to do more like this. It helps more than you would think. If you left feedback in the comments section about future projects you would like me to work on as part of Skyfix mods, you would also be helping me out a great deal.
History of the mod / Plans
I will be releasing many more of these little oddity-fixing/facelift modifications to the towns and villages in the future as part of my SkyFix series,
which as the name suggests, tweaks the vanilla game’s environment to enhance its aesthetics, lore and convenience for the player. But I will always aim to stay within the vanilla style.
I was never going to release this mod because it started off as a huge (for me) project with new NPCs, questlines and a massive new interior cell which was an underground inn/auditorium underneath Riverwood but none of this came together how I wanted because I don’t have the quest making skill or recording equipment to create dialogue and new characters in the Creation Kit. I worked on it on and off over the period of about a year and decided to ditch the new inn as I am unable to create new NPCs and quality dialogue in the Creation Kit. An empty inn just feels odd so it has not featured in this mod but likely will appear in the next mod I make if someone proficient in this department is willing to collaborate with me on the project. I was pretty happy with how the final interior cell turned out and think it has potential to be an interesting new area in the game with all sorts of unique quest and custom dialogue/voice opportunities. That is, if I can get someone who can do that sort of stuff!
Here is a screenshot of the final cell which may feature in a future update for this mod or a different mod entirely, so stay tuned:
Credits
• No assets from other mod authors are used in this mod. Only vanilla assets are used.
