Skyrim is great. You can kit out and customise your character to make them the kind of warrior you want them to be. With the game’s thriving modding community still going strong, your options for picking out the best gear, clothes, and stuff are increasingly impressive. Have you ever wondered, however, why all that shiny Stalhrim armour, plus the 57 Eidar cheese wheels you’re probably carrying, don’t sink you as soon as you take a dip? A new mod is here to address this very question.
The Realistic Swimming and Drowning mod, by creators Duke Patrick and Paradoxnrt on Nexus Mods, adds a whole new level of realism to your Skyrim swims. The mod’s page says “I find Skyrim’s swimming to be immersi[on] breaking in the extreme. Even while wearing heavy Plate Armour, you can swim faster than Olympic swimmers. So, this mod is for those of us who like things (a lot) more realistic.” The mod adds this extra dimension of realism by looking at your current armour and inventory weights, and adjusting your experience of swimming accordingly – in four key ways.
Going for a paddle will now cost stamina, influenced by how much stuff you’re currently carrying. The creators have scaled this, based on bands of weight and how much stamina your swag will cost you for each second in the water. You can check out the chart on the mod’s page.
On top of this, swimming speed will then also scale based on your current stamina – basically, swim for a while and you’ll start to tire out. For every 25 stamina points you drop you’ll be slapped with a penalty until you eventually hit a 90% reduction in speed at zero stamina. Gulp.
As would probably be the case in real life, go swimming with an inventory weight of more than 50lbs and you’ll start to suffer some consequences – the much-dreaded over-encumbered status greedy Skyrimmers trying to take too much plunder from tombs will be familiar with. You’ll only be able to swim very slowly.
Finally, take a plunge wearing armour that has a combined (unmodified) damage resistance (DR) value of more than 50 and it’ll all be over – you’ll sink and drown. Trying to take it off mid-sink will be futile – you’ll just have to think pretty carefully before deciding to jump in.
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If the idea of taking a riskier dip in Skyrim’s rivers, lakes, and northerly ocean makes you want to seas the day then head over to the mod’s page. Just be sure to follow the creators’ advice for getting it installed and ready to sink you smoothly.