Trees & Grass Overhaul

[BlueBangkok]

Hello,

I am looking for the highest fidelity flora mod(s) out there, for trees and grass. By fidelity, I mean very high detail, realism, poly counts & textures. I would also love it to at least somehow work out within the context of the scale of Skyrim (i.e. trees taller than some hills in the game are immersion breaking for me, even if they are realistic).
I don't care about performance - I want the meshes and textures look as photo-realistic as possible.

What I tried so far:
Veydogolt trees, they are OK, but some of the trees have ugly textures up close.
Flora Overhaul I've always played with, and I probably like it the best overall from what I've tried, but it starts to show its age - better than vanilla but still low poly meshes and low res textures.
I tried Ulvenwald, it's probably closest to what I am searching for, but I dislike how gigantic some of the trees feel compared to the rest of the game even with default settings.
Veydosebrom for grass has been OK for me but again, looking for higher res textures if possible.

Any recommendations?

[matt]

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/32973
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/46217
Tamrielic Textures. These mods, which cover landscape and grass, were designed to work together by the same modder. They come in 4k versions, so won't look blurry up close. They're older now but still a good combo if you just want to start playing the game without hunting for a bunch of textures that work well together. I used them for a long time myself after trying several different combos of mods back around 2021.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/125349
Freaks Floral Fields. Some really nice looking grass. I haven't tried it yet, but it's on my list of mods to check out in-game. Looks like it will have a performance hit, so not for potato PCs. Of all the high quality grass mods, this looks like it's probably the most detailed.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/63604
Nature of the Wild Lands. This is the tree mod used in screenshots for Freaks Floral Fields. Haven't tried it yet, but it will presumably look good with the above grass mod. Not sure how I feel about the idea of someone reworking the entirety of Skyrim's forests, so it might take a little exploring in-game to see how it works out.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/28406
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/44600
Myrkvior gets recommended sometimes when people talk about tree mods. There isn't a high res version, so I haven't tried it. However, there's an AI upscaled version, linked above. Maybe try it out and tell us if it's worthwhile.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/50961
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/81822
Happy Little Trees. There's a photorealistic bark plug-in for this mod, linked above. Like so many other mods, I haven't checked it out in-game yet. The screenshots look nice, though. This mod has popularity on its side if you ever have problems or need patches.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/40264
This looks like it'd be nice for fans of Skyrim 3D Trees and Plants. Presumably, you get the same (or similar) from Skyrim 202X by Pfuscher.

Some more replacers that might interest you:
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/131964 Diverse Downed Logs
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/113578 High Quality Ivy Replacer
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/116248 High Quality Ivy for Tree Stumps and Logs

[BlueBangkok]

Thank you very much, I will try these.

[Bad Distraction Carnifex]

Suggestion: look into a framegen solution if you're going balls to the wall fidelity since you're going to eventually choke the engine.

You can use a DLSS mod if you don't use ENB and if you do use ENB then I suggest a program on Steam called Lossless Scaling. The caveat to Lossless Scaling is that the CPU is used to framegen and it needs the program to run in bordeless windowed which means your max frame rate will be capped to your monitor's refresh rate.

Personally, as someone who has the paid DLSS mod for ENB and ReShade, I still use lossless scaling because it's just better with more use cases outside of Skyrim too since it'll framegen anything that doesn't run in full screen including streamed videos.

[Blake]

You want to keep frame rate at 60 no higher as there are scripts that are dependant on that. Can cause issue at higher fps if I remember correctly for this game.

[Blake]

I use a lot of these

https://next.nexusmods.com/profile/Skyking2020/mods?gameId=1704

Plus nature of the wildlands linked above

[BlueBangkok]

Originally posted by Blake:

You want to keep frame rate at 60 no higher as there are scripts that are dependant on that. Can cause issue at higher fps if I remember correctly for this game.

Yeah, I hope it will stay at 60, if not, I will reduce some mods.
Right now it's at 60 with around 20% GPU usage (RTX 4080) so I am looking to take advantage of more GPU.

[Bad Distraction Carnifex]

Originally posted by Blake:

You want to keep frame rate at 60 no higher as there are scripts that are dependant on that. Can cause issue at higher fps if I remember correctly for this game.

That's only true for vanilla skyrim, the issue of scripts and physics being tied to 30-60 fps was solved a long, long time ago. Framegen is also different and doesn't impact the baseline frame rate. It just created new ones which bypasses the issue entirely.

[Hypertext Eye]

I like Cathedral 3D Landscapes for grass
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/80687

To go along with that, there are several Cathedral 3D plant mods that I like, too many to list individually so I will link to the mod author's page (DrJacopo)
https://next.nexusmods.com/profile/DrJacopo/mods?gameId=1704

And the tree mod I use was already mentioned, Nature of the Wild Lands

[BlueBangkok]

Thank you all, in the end I settled for Nature of Wild Lands and Freaks Floral Fields. I will see how it goes because Nature completely changes the layout of the forests, but they do look amazing.