Just how many mods for Skyrim are there?

How many Skyrim mods are there? About a bajillion.

Okay, good night everyone. Thanks for coming. Drive safe.

No, but seriously. There are a lot. Barely a few days go by without me talking about some of the mods that are out there for The Elder Scrolls 5. Given that the game has been out since November 2011 – and given how tenacious the modding community is – it’s hardly surprising there’s so much content available, and has been since day one.

They range in scope as well, from funny ones to unofficial expansions to ones that attempt to undo the many, many bugs the game is plagued with. There are a host of highly recommended Skyrim mods to choose from. Personally, my favorite is the one that renames all the Frost Trolls to Tim Allen. Nope. I have no idea, either.

So, I think it’s time I make an attempt to tally up how many mods there are for Skyrim. As far as I can tell, we’ve never done this at Destructoid. There may be a reason for that, but we’ll see.

A few things to consider before we move on:

1. This will be a roundabout figure. Mods are being made and uploaded at an alarming rate, and by the time I finish writing this article (let alone it being published), the number will almost certainly have gone up.
2. I’ll be using a bunch of sources to try and get as accurate a number as I can. However, I accept there will be some mods that exist on more obscure or less obvious websites, which are more difficult to take into account.
3. There’s also the question of certain mods having more than one version, such as one for the Special Edition or Anniversary Edition. Not to mention, creators may well have uploaded their content to more than one site.
4. Just assume it’s a large number, and we’ll all be a lot happier.

Now that we’ve sorted out that little bit of housekeeping, let’s crack on with trying to ascertain how many Skyrim mods there are.

Nexus Mods

About a year ago, we did an article about Nexus Mods celebrating 10 billion downloads, which, according to a post on the site itself, would take an estimated 317 years to download. But why would you? Anyway…

Of these, a significant number of them were for Skyrim. At the time, Bethesda’s epic RPG was listed as both the number one and number two games that had the most downloads, totaling 5.7 billion downloads. Looking on Nexus Mods today, that figure has unsurprisingly gone up over the course of 11 or 12 months.

At the time of writing, the website is host to 102,366 custom mods for Skyrim. Now, it’s possible your mileage may vary. I’ve done my best to make sure the site shows as many mods as possible, so you might see a slightly different number, depending on what options you have checked.

Also, this number is specifically for the Special Edition of the game. If we move over to the vanilla release of Skyrim, we see this number is a lower 72,471. Again, at the time of writing. Why are there less for the original 2011 version? Best guess is most players have made the switch to the newer releases, so modders may be more inclined to upload for the Special Edition instead.

Also, this doesn’t take into account that some mods will exist on both versions simultaneously. Add onto that the fact that some custom content has multiple uploads for different language translations. As such, it seems pretty difficult to count all the unique mods Nexus has. But we do our best.

ModDB, Bethesda.net, and Steam

After Nexus, ModDB is probably the second-most used modding website on the internet. At least from my perspective, that is. It’s where I go for all my fan-made Doom content.

Much like above, there is a section for the standard version of Skyrim and one for the Special Edition release. However, one thing that becomes immediately apparent is the numbers are significantly smaller.

Vanilla Skyrim lists just 196 mods and 38 add-ons (I’m not even 100% sure what the difference is between the two), while the Special Edition has even less, with 39 mods and just four add-ons. Again, you’ll note that there are some crossovers.

Why there are less isn’t clear to me. It could simply be that Nexus Mods has carved out something of a large corner of the TES5 modding market, so that’s just where most people go.

Then we turn to “official” mods that Bethesda deems worthy to host on its own website. The developer and publisher actually refers to these as “Creations” for some reason, but they are basically just normal mods. One thing that does set them apart from those on, say, Nexus is they have been made compatible with console versions of Skyrim, so non-PC players get to enjoy them.

Essentially, it seems Bethesda wanted to have a say in some of the custom content that gets bandied around for its game. In this regard, many of the Creations could be considered of a certain standard, typically pretty high quality or making important changes to Skyrim. One example is the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, which fixes a shitload of bugs and glitches.

As of right now, Bethesda.net lists 49,149 fan-made mods on its website. Of these, 8,424 are for PC, 9,283 are for PlayStation, while Xbox takes the lion’s share, with a meaty 33,212 files.

As for Steam Workshop, the number is still pretty impressive. As of right now, it’s showing 27,559 mods in its database. And for some reason, the first one that’s showing for me is one that makes it so Nords emit chicken noises. I didn’t say every mod would be a game-changer.

What’s the total?

Even when you take into account that some mods will have multiple translated versions, files for the vanilla and Special Edition releases of the game, and may be available on more than one website, it’s still a pretty huge number of mods that Skyrim has.

If you take the numbers above at face value – and remember: this is as accurate as can be at the time of writing – we get a grand total of 251,822 overall mods and add-ons. That’s more than a quarter of a million ways you can enhance your Elder Scrolls 5 experience.

For comparison, CurseForge is showing 197,691 mods for Minecraft, which came out around the same time as Skyrim. And people may wonder why Bethesda’s game continues to hang around after more than 13 years.