As any rural American knows, hordes of swine can cause quite the issue, especially if your children are playing outside and you don’t have an assault rifle to hand. If you’re in a city, chances are you’ll never experience the sheer terror of 30-50 wild pigs charging at your beloved offspring – but as ever, Skyrim’s modding community is here to plug the gap.
Skyrim’s wildlife is already diverse, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t some room for improvement. As a result, modder Mihail has added Wild Hogs to the game. According to Mihail, the animals are “a type of big feral swine native from the fallforests of the Rift in Skyrim.”
The Wild Hogs aren’t the same as Skyrim’s pre-existing boars, as they hunt in packs. Mihail says that “the Wild Hog is not a solitary pig, but lives in groups of 12/15 individuals. The groups commonly prefer to live close to small puddles of water, and will attack if you get too close.”
Most of those groups will be made up of female pigs, but a few males – which are larger and have bigger tusks – will be scattered among the herd. It should be easy to fight off one or two of the animals, but the mod trailer below suggests they opt for a strength-in-numbers approach to overwhelm their prey.
As Mihail points out, these pigs live in groups of only 12-15, so if you want to capture the full effect of 30-50 wild hogs charging you down, you’ll need to aggro at least a couple of those larger groups at the same time. I’d also recommend ensuring you’ve got the Hearthfire DLC installed, so you can have a home and family to defend.
As a potential alternative, you can also check out the Hogs Gone Wild! mod over on Nexusmods, in which wild pigs will actively seek out and raid NPC settlements for specific items. When it comes to defending yourself, I suppose you can wade into the fray swinging a big sword, but I think a good bout of destruction magic should help do the trick.