Optimising Oblivion v3.0: Into Modblivion

About this guide
This guide is a tribute and acknoweldgement to the talented lads and lassess responsible for giving their own free time to making Oblivion a better place. The guide is broken down into three parts:

1) Oblivion mods and how to use them (if you're 1337, you can skip this)
2) A collection of the best, most brilliant mods, categorised by type
3) Atomic's recommend mod configuration, including levelled list mods

Further, this guide will be dynamic. We will update this almost on a daily basis as new, exciting, mods come out to play, so check back often!

Oblivion mods and how to use them
Let's get the basics out of the way first:

* Mods for Oblivion are (optionally) built with Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls Construction Set (download), and made freely available on a variety of fan sites.
* Mods can be installed and used by anyone with the original game.
* Mods come in the form of .esp files when they modify game data, or raw content in the case of textures and sounds.

Mods that come as .esp files need to be placed in your Oblivion/Data directory. Mods that come as textures or alter other raw files need to be installed in your Oblivion/Data directory as is, keeping their directory structure. Then, simply start the Olivion launcher, click on 'Data Files', and tick the mods you want to load.

A quick discussion about levelled lists
In v2.0 of the Optimsing Oblivion guide we touched on the most important and beneficial of mods: those that enhance the core gameplay experience itself. For better or for worse, Bethesda has tailored the game world of Oblivion to pander to the player, with creatures and items levelling in tandem with the player, resulting in a fun but ultimately un-rewarding experience that gets boring quickly. To this end the very first mods, and the most highly developed mods, are those that aim to fix this. They can be broken down into three neat categories:

* Player levelling
* Creature levelling
* Item levelling

Player levelling mods change how and when you raise in skills and levels. Many players don't mind the default Oblivion player levelling system, and alternative systems from mods usually revolve around automatically raising both attributes and level based solely on the player skills and how they use them. The result is a smoother levelling curve that is directly reflective of how the player plays. Some of the best include Auryn's levelling mod, Kobu's levelling mod, Vehem's mod and more.

Creature levelling and Item levelling mods are two sides of the one coin - how Oblivion adapts to the player. Generally these mods provide a rewarding gameplay expeirence by ensuring the player is actually able to develp and become powerful within the world, whilst still maintaing a challenge. Items that should be rare are made rare, and the drops from creatures and loot are more appropriately scaled. Because these two sides are closely linked, some levelling mods now deal with fixing both sides in the one package. Some of the best include Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul, Sagebliv's Creature Balance + G_'s Loot Mod, Francesco's levelling and more.

All of these mods can be found on the following page. So speaking of which, onto the mods!