Skyrim Together Reborn, a co-op mod for Skyrim Special Edition, is already a hit

Play together online with your pals and try not to drive each other crazy

I’m a firm believer that co-op makes just about any game better (or at least more… “memorable”), and for Skyrim fans looking to squeeze every last drop out of the hard-to-put-down game, there’s a new co-op mod in town. Skyrim Together Reborn lets you play Skyrim Special Edition (1.6) online with friends on Steam. Think of the RP potential!

Following its Friday debut on NexusMods and a weekend’s worth of word-of-mouth, Skyrim Together Reborn is nearing 100,000 downloads. The mod community has been down this co-op road before, but Reborn represents a fresh start, and people are into it.

“The code has been rewritten from the ground up, since the old codebase was too messy to work with,” according to the mod’s creators. “This decision has paid off big time, since Skyrim Together Reborn is significantly better than old Skyrim Together.”

Skyrim Together Reborn recommends two to eight players for the “best experience,” but there isn’t a hard limit “in theory.” It’s also worth stressing again that you’ll need Skyrim Special Edition version 1.6 on Steam to use this mod — “VR, console, Legendary Edition (aka Oldrim), and the Game Pass version are not and will never be supported.”

The setup and house rules

At the moment, you’ll need patience to get everything up and running — not just in terms of setup, but also in figuring out what is and isn’t allowed. Expect some troubleshooting.

The mod team shared general guidelines for “optimal questing” in Skyrim Together Reborn, which includes quite a few caveats. Big picture, the party leader is thought of as the “host” for the whole Skyrim co-op playthrough, while everyone else who’s tagging along is merely considered a “guest.” So in practice, this primary player will be the one to chat with important NPCs — and loot quest-related items — on behalf of the group.

That said, the other co-op players can:

• Kill quest monsters and bosses.
• Clear quest dungeons.
• Do quest puzzles.

For more information about optionally hosting your own server, head over here.

As for mixing in other mods, it’ll generally be hit-or-miss, and it’s up to your “discretion.” The Skyrim Together Reborn team “cannot make any guarantees that these mods won’t cause stability issues, play nice with our systems, or that their features will sync.”

As it stands, “for the best, most stable experience, you should not install other mods.”

Skyrim Together Reborn 1.0 is a “solid base for a lot of future expansion,” and on that note, the ball is now in the community’s court — we’ll see where it goes next.

Now that the mod is out, the creators are stepping back to focus on other other projects

“We are excited about the future of Reborn,” developer Robbe wrote on Reddit.

“With thousands of man hours of work put into the project already, we have done most of the heavy lifting for you. With the mod going open source, it is now up to you, the community, to step up, and further develop Reborn. The current dev team is very tired, and frankly, is simply interested in branching out and doing other projects.”

“We will still be here to guide new developers, review code, and perhaps occasionally implement features and fixes. As for right now though, we need a break. After working on this project for one and a half years nonstop, I will take a hiatus from the project for a few weeks. The community has all the tools available to them to install and run Reborn. We are excited to see new people step up, and seeing what the community will do with it!”

I love to see a single-player game like Skyrim become multiplayer compatible thanks to modders’ efforts, even if the experience is finicky and caveat-filled. It’s a great way to make a familiar experience feel fresh again, and when it all clicks, it has that “Wow, they actually pulled it off” appeal. So many mods fail to come together. This one made it.