Here's a mod that makes your Skyrim forests all dense and lovely

A dense evergreen forest from Skyrim mod Fabled Forests by Kojilama
(Image credit: Bethesda modded by Kojilama)

In videogames sometimes "forests" have like two or three dozen trees. That's too few trees. Or they have lots of trees, but the trees are really widely spaced out. Twenty or thirty feet apart. Obviously, all of these forests are nonsense. We won't even begin to address the forests where the trees are too dense to travel through except on the main path the developers want you to follow.

For all its strengths, Skyrim is a game without good forests. Too few trees, and they're too small. No more! Building on work done in earlier mods, Fabled Forests for Skyrim Special Edition gives you "tall, dense, FPS-friendly forests to get lost in." 

Modder Kojilama offers up two versions: One is just nice, dense, lush woodlands with tall trees. Not so tall that you can't have sunlight through the trees, however. Fabled forests also tweaks the sizes of the trees a bit, randomly, so that there's diversity in how they show up.

The other, Fabled Forests of Mythic Proportions, uses huge trees akin to those giants that populate the west coast of North America, turning your woodlands into "a dark and inescapable labyrinth." These are forest so dense, with trees so huge, that they're maze-like and dark at the roots. It transforms the area around Riverbend to be nearly unrecognizable.

What I think is specifically cool here is that the tweaks are from multiple other mods. The tree placements are drawn from other modders' work—Traverse the Ulvenwald and Nature of the Wild Lands. The tree models are from Happy Little Trees, but reworked to be taller and with deeper coloration.

The mod even has support for popular mod Seasons of Skyrim, which lets the seasons change in your now very rich forests.

You can find Fabled Forests on Nexusmods. Again, it's made specifically for Skyrim Special Edition, and on Windows.

Image

Skyrim mods: Questing forever
Skyrim Special Edition mods: Special effects
Skyrim console commands: Endless possibilities

Contributor

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.

Read more
Chief Hanlon sits in his usual spot at Camp Golf.
If you want Fallout: New Vegas to look a little more lived-in, these mods have you covered
A redhaired woman holds a sword in Maelstrom, one of the best Skyrim Special Edition mods
The best Skyrim Special Edition mods
A foppish figure stands in fine clothes and a strange red mask.
Hero modders take a break from their 25-year quest to make the rest of Morrowind to make the Oblivion we should have got instead
A screenshot of Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 using the ultra low graphics mode mod, depicting a blocky NPC's head and shoulders, with a textureless castle wall in the background, and behind that a tower on a smudged rockey outcrop.
Make Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2 feel even more like The Elder Scrolls 4: Oblivion with this charming potato mode mod
Ten planks of wood from Dark Souls, responsible for my nightmares in Blighttown.
The co-creator of Dark Souls' most ambitious mod resurfaces to inform me that Blighttown, source of my nightmares, was cobbled together with '10 bits of wood'
Skyrim warrior performing shout
A bizarre mod that adds human poop to Skyrim led me on an enlightening journey into Viking sanitation: 'Your world will certainly be more immersive, but it will also certainly smell worse'
Latest in The Elder Scrolls
Serana from Skyrim, modded to look like a desiccated corpse.
Skyrim realism mod fixes your vampire girlfriend, giving her a voice and look more suited to someone who just got out of a coffin after 2,000 years
Image of a sweetroll with a candle in it
Bethesda marks Oblivion's 19th with a sweetroll, a candle, and absolutely no happy birthday gift for fans eager for the still-unannounced remaster
Skyblivion
Fan remake of Oblivion in Skyrim has a new video, looks amazing, is set for release 'this year,' and I struggle to imagine the rumoured official Oblivion remake doing much better
Skyrim man fighting a wolf
Skyrim was 'personally rebalanced' by producer Jeff Gardiner just 2 weeks before launch: 'Well, I hope this is good'
Skyrim intro cinematic skill - Hey, you. You're finally awake.
A Skyrim dev broke the game before launch when they made thousands of tiny ants cast individual shadows: 'Why is the game running so slow?'
Gang wars in modded Oblivion
Bethesda refuses to announce that Oblivion remaster to spite me specifically, so I'm consoling myself with this gamejam based on its terri-brilliant persuasion wheel
Latest in News
A long bendy arm stealing money from people in a subway car
'You're a very long arm. You steal things. It's a comedy game,' explains developer of comedy game where you steal things with a very long arm
The heroes are attacked by monsters
Pillars of Eternity is getting turn-based combat to mark its 10th anniversary, and that means PC Gamer editors will soon be arguing about combat mechanics again
Image of Ronaldo from Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves trailer
It doesn't really make sense that soccer star Ronaldo is now a Fatal Fury character, but if you follow the money you can see how it happened
Junah beginning a battle in Metaphor: ReFantazio.
Today's RPG fans are 'very sensitive to feeling like they wasted time' when they die, says Metaphor: ReFantazio battle planner—but Atlus still made combat hard anyway
Image of Cersei Lanniser from Game of Thrones: Kingsroad Steam early access trailer
A new Game of Thrones RPG is coming to Steam today with a cast of 'familiar faces,' which is good because it's really the only way to tell it's a GoT game at all
The new Prime Asset featured in the upcoming update for the Outlast Trials.
The Outlast Trials puts its already paranoid players under surveillance for a time-limited story event