Holds The City Overhaul

Holds is a city overhaul project which focuses on what I think are the weaknesses of Skyrim compared to the older Elder Scrolls titles. The mod expands upon the cities of Skyrim and adds more settlements, architecture, outfits, books and named characters with their own backgrounds, homes and daily routines while ensuring they feel natural and realistic.

Falkreath, Winterhold, Morthal and Dawnstar have been rebuilt from scratch with their own unique designs. The mod also adds a bundle of new settlements like Amber Guard and Black Moor. Most of these new settlements have been placed far out of the way and hidden from view to not ruin the expansive wilderness theme of the game. The aim of all of this is to create a more memorable and diverse experience, making the cities actually feel like cities hopefully without ruining the natural and realistic design of the vanilla game.

This is not a botanical garden mod, nor is it a beautification mod. Holds aims to stay as lore-friendly as possible and at the same time expand on the backgrounds and stories for its locations.

I started working on this project late November 2012 and have devoted averagely two hours a day to the creation kit. One of the reasons I felt this project was necessary was the announcement of various modding projects adding new content to the game. The problem, for me was how expansive their cities looked compared to the cities in Skyrim. Coming into Skyrim from Oblivion I was expecting there to be a 'Better Cities' mod available early on, but there wasn't and I missed the features the Oblivion City Overhaul brought to the game.

The mod adds a variety of new books written by myself and Alfredasl which attempts to flesh out the land and history of Skyrim. They are spread to three locations: the Book Store in Falkreath, the Haafingar Library in Solitude and The Palace of Kings Library in Windhelm.

Any criticism, questions, and help will be greatly appreciated, even the criticism. However I will have to ask that you make constructive criticism; your opinion does matter and could very well inspire me to make changes, however I have designed this project with myself in mind.

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Installation and Requirements

Make sure that you have a stable and performance friendly game.

I advice installing the mod manually. I have no experience with the mod installer tools and therefor I cannot be much help, and there have been reported many problems from mod users when installing with these tools. What is important is that Holds is loaded last, the only thing that should be loaded after Holds.esp should be its compatibility patches and alternative performance patches. So an example:

Dawnguard.esm

Hearthfire.esm

Dragonborn.esm

SkyrimFlora