Can you believe that Skyrim has been out for over seven years at this point? Despite being old enough to ride a bike, Bethesda’s open-world RPG has remained alive all this time thanks to the achievements of the legion of modders on PC. However, the trouble with a lot of the graphical enhancement mods out there is that there’s often a cost in terms of PC performance – so it’s impressive that there’s a new mod out that claims to overhaul Skyrim’s visuals without costing a frame.
The Cathedral Weathers and Seasons mod is part of the Cathedral Concept, a “comprehensive visual overhaul” of Skyrim by the modding community – with the goal of enhancing the game’s looks without impacting performance.
We’ve previously talked about the foliage side of Cathedral Concept, now the team has released the latest update to the weather enhancement side of the mod. It offers improved textures, startling season changes, brightness and bloom settings, and more impressive weather effects – all without any noticeable performance decrease.
Possibly the most exciting part of the weather mod is that you, the player, has full control over the weather changes. While there is an MCM version of the mod that allows players to drily select and change all the various new weather systems, the more fun route is to take the regular version of Weathers and Seasons – and turn your character into a weather wizard.
This version gives the Dragonborn a new spell called “Cathedral Meditation power,” which brings all the power of nature directly into the player’s hands. This power gives the player “control of brightness, saturation, contrast, bloom, and tint” in real-time, seasonal perspective changes, alter the darkness of night-time, and increasing the probability of fog, overcast, rain, snow. If you’ve ever wanted to be a weather god, now’s your chance.
Related: Check out our list of the 100 best Skyrim mods
You can find out how to get the mod, as well as everything it changes and the list of everyone who worked on it – it was a collaborative effort in the modding community – over at Nexusmods. Now please excuse us while we go touch the sky.