Modders have put a lot of effort into making sure Skyrim has continually evolved and expanded in the eleven years since it was first released into the world.
A lot of these efforts have focused on making the game’s combat a lot more interesting and in-depth, with new weapons, spells and animations helping to spice things up, while fresh enemies and quests provide challenges for those who’ve seemingly done it all in Tamriel.
If your Dragonborn’s primary focus is alchemy and you’re starting to feel like you’ve exhausted all of the vanilla potion-making possibilities, a new mod might be exactly what you need to make sure things don’t get too monotonous.
Have you ever wanted to dish out healing blows and sample your own deadly brews in Skyrim?
The mod in question is called ‘Alternate Alchemy’, and is the work of modder JakeAlaimo. Some of their previous work has brought the concept of honourable duelling to Skyrim and enabled your character’s signature weapon to scale with them as they level up.
This time, they’ve decided to remove some of the restrictions the game puts on what you can do with the various potions and poisons you can find during your adventures or craft at an alchemy lab.
In vanilla Skyrim, whether you can imbibe these concoctions or coat your weapon in them is dictated by how positive or negative their effects are. With JakeAlaimo’s mod, the choice over which option to take is yours, with the left-hand input on your controller or mouse now triggering whichever option is the opposite of the default for each concoction.
While this may sound a bit outlandish at first, as you can see in the clip below, it can be pretty useful depending on your playstyle. The primary example is healers now having the ability to craft a syringe as a weapon, lather it in health potions, and heal their comrades with a quick stab.
You can of course simply apply the same potions to your sword or axe and attack people to apply them, but visiting a forge and making a syringe will assure you don’t accrue any bounty or incur any wrath in your efforts to help out.
On the other hand, if you’re desperately looking to avoid taking damage and don’t fancy using the ‘become ethereal’ shout, downing a paralysis poison will reduce you body to a limp ragdoll that’s better suited to barrelling down mountains without dying from the fall.
If you’re already planning out cruel experiments to conduct on your Dragonborn and their followers, you’ll want to grab the Skyrim script extender, as this is required to get the mod working as it should.
Regardless of whether you’re now planning Skyrim’s first ever poison tasting party, make sure to follow us for more updates on The Elder Scrolls 6 and the interesting world of Skyrim modding. You can also check out our mods of the month for November.
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