Wyrmstooth Is a Full Bethesda Expansion Hiding on a Mod Page

Seven posts into this Nolvus playthrough and I finally have a new number one.

I’ve been working through the big content mods Nolvus quietly installs and writing about the ones worth your time, starting with Sirenroot and running through Moonpath to Elsweyr, Carved Brink, The Gray Cowl of Nocturnal, The Wheels of Lull and Identity Crisis.

Sirenroot has been the benchmark that whole time. Wyrmstooth just took the belt.

I stumbled into it the same way I’ve stumbled into most of these, with no idea it was a mod at all. That’s the Nolvus experience in a sentence, and this time it handed me roughly fifteen hours of content I’d put next to actual Bethesda DLC.

A dragon hunt that turns into a boat trip

A courier named Theodyn Bienne hands you a letter, and the letter points you at a man in a tavern. That man is Lurius Liore, an executive with the East Empire Company, and he is having a very bad quarter because a dragon keeps eating his shipping caravans.

What I love about this setup is how mundane it is, in the best way. Dragons came back, dragons are now a logistics problem, and a shipping executive did the most realistic possible thing and put money on the table for five mercenaries to make it stop.

You meet the crew, you hike up to Ancient’s Ascent, and the dragon does not fight you. Vulthurkrah looks at the six of you, essentially says come find me at my house, and flies off north to an island called Wyrmstooth.

So you get on a boat.

I cannot stress how much better this is as a hook than another radiant dragon mound outside Rorikstead.

The island is the actual mod

Wyrmstooth is enormous. It’s a full worldspace north of Solitude with its own biomes, its own weather, its own mining town in Stonehollow, and a coastline you can spend an afternoon walking without touching a quest marker.

The design quality is the thing that kept getting me. Where Moonpath reads as a 2012 hobby project and Carved Brink reads as gorgeous and alien, Wyrmstooth reads as professional, like a Bethesda level designer built it on the clock.

The credit goes to Jonx0r, who first released this thing in October 2012, pulled it from every platform in 2016, and brought it back to Nexus in February 2021. It sits at over 26,000 endorsements now and it’s still getting patches.

The music deserves its own line. León van der Stadt wrote a 20-track original score for this, and tracks like “Dimfrost Region” and “Journey To Wyrmstooth” do a huge amount of work selling the island as somewhere real.

The four mercenaries carry the whole thing

You don’t do this alone, and that’s the best structural decision in the mod. Your crew is Athir, a Redguard who dual wields, Daenlit, a Bosmer archer, Elmera, an Altmer spellcaster, and Shargam, an Orc who wants to hit things with an axe.

Shargam was my favorite by a mile. He’s uncomplicated, he’s loud, he’s happy, and after four playthroughs of morally conflicted followers it’s genuinely refreshing to travel with someone whose entire philosophy is that the axe should meet the dragon.

They all have real personalities and real combat roles, and the voice work sells it. The mod credits over 30 voice actors, and it shows in the banter between dungeons.

One honest note. Jonx0r used AI-generated lines for some vanilla NPC voices, which caused a stir, and recent versions have been pulling those out at the community’s request.

The payoff is that after the main quest, each mercenary has a favor quest, and finishing it unlocks them as a permanent follower. Athir wants a sword called Embersunder out of Hag’s End, Shargam wants a debt settled in Markarth, and Elmera sends you after spiddal sticks, which is exactly as tedious as it sounds and worth it anyway.

Dungeons that keep opening up

This is where Wyrmstooth beats almost everything I’ve covered in this series. The dungeons are huge, and they constantly surprised me by breaking open into new areas with multiple exits instead of dead-ending at a boss chest.

My complaint about The Wheels of Lull was that it ran on a room-key-room loop with a load screen between every cell. Wyrmstooth is the opposite, with big connected spaces that make you feel like you’re descending into something rather than clicking through it.

Then there’s Dimfrost. It’s a magma chamber under the island that you first pass through on the main quest, and it’s so large it nearly spans the island’s entire length and width.

I went back afterward and spent a long time down there, and I am certain I still missed things. That’s not a complaint.

The night Stonehollow burns

Spoiler note: this section describes how the main quest ends.

The main quest tracks Vulthurkrah through a chain of dungeons that push deeper and deeper into the island, and it ends with a siege on Stonehollow. At night. In a thunderstorm.

Vulthurkrah perches on the rooftops, throws fire and frost, and calls down lightning while you and four mercenaries try to keep the town standing. It is easily the best encounter I’ve had in this entire playthrough, mod or vanilla.

The island has other tricks too. At one point I was just wandering and ran into two special dragons at once, which regular Skyrim never does, and it turned an idle exploration walk into a genuine fight.

I was around level 70 to 75, and thanks to Nolvus level scaling the combat actually landed in the right place. Not a walkover like Gray Cowl was for me, not punishing either.

The main quest ends about halfway through

Here’s the part I want to hammer on. When the credits roll on the main story, the mod is maybe half done, and the game tells you to go check in with everyone back in town.

Do it. There are 15 side quests waiting, and they take you to dungeons and corners of the island the main quest never touches.

My favorites were on opposite ends of the tone dial. The Naked Nord is a genuinely funny errand about getting a man’s pants back from a witch, and the vampire bounty at Bloodfrost Burrow is a straight infiltrate-and-kill-the-master-vampire job that I had a great time with.

You also get a player home, Fort Valus, a run-down imperial fort you buy for 30,000 gold and then repair, expand and staff. I did every upgrade and every quest for it, and then kept living in the Legacy of the Dragonborn museum safehouse anyway because it’s more convenient.

Speaking of which, the loot haul here is absurd. I donated somewhere north of twenty Wyrmstooth items to the museum, which has a dedicated Wyrmstooth Room in the Hall of Oddities with displays for things like Goreduster and Embersunder.

What Nolvus does with it

Nolvus Ascension ships Wyrmstooth in its DLC-sized mods section along with Wyrmstooth Optimized Textures and a Wonders of Weather dragon mound CTD fix patch. That last one matters more than it sounds, because this mod’s finale happens in heavy rain.

I had zero glitches across fifteen-plus hours, which is only the second time that’s happened in this series after Identity Crisis. No console commands, no no-clipping past a dead script, nothing.

Worth knowing if you’re installing it yourself: the quest starts by default at level 10 after you finish The Way of the Voice, and the MCM lets you push that gate wherever you want.

Verdict

Wyrmstooth is my new favorite mod in this playthrough and it’s not a close call. It has the scale, the companions, the dungeon design and the single best set piece I’ve seen from a mod team.

Sirenroot still edges it on pure puzzle craft and tightness, and if you want a perfectly shaped four-hour experience, that’s still the one I’d hand someone first. Wyrmstooth is the opposite pitch, a sprawling expansion that asks for fifteen hours and quietly punishes you for stopping at the credits.

If you’re running Nolvus, you already have it installed. Get on the boat.

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Screenshots in this article were captured by the author and are used under Fair Use.