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SPOILER INFO
No spoilers. This article tells about the workings of a few mods.
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I have mentioned elsewhere that some aspects of the Skyrim game resemble a rudimentary framework Bethesda created for the modders to develop properly. One of those is physiological needs.
Vanilla Skyrim has a lot of food and drink everywhere (in fact, most vendors sell little more than food and drink) as well as beds you can sleep in and chairs you can sit on, begging the question – what for? All right, various food items are supposed to restore your health by 1 or 2 or 10 points, but you can just wait for your health to get restored – probably in less time than you'd need for eating. Well, eventually you will find that in the menu of your magical effects there are entries like Well Rested and Balanced Diet which apparently give you a 10% increase in this or that. Phew. Those "effects" will be barely noticeable in the game and hardly justify spending your thoughts and mouseclicks on eating and sleeping, and it most certainly doesn't justify the time and effort Bethesda spent on creating all those beds and consumables.
That's why one absolutely needs a mod for simulating physiological needs. There are several, but they leave much to be desired.
For example, there's a mod misleadingly called Realistic Needs and Diseases. One line from its description is quite sufficient:
"Drinking river water directly can cause diseases, boil before drinking."
I had to pinch myself to make sure I wasn't dreaming. That is one of the most staggering examples of what kind of pampered and sterilized sissies the Western people have become. That imbecile calls it realistic! I'm speechless. Does he put on rubber gloves before touching his dog?
As I found out after a lot of searching and testing, the only acceptable physiological needs mod is iNeed. It makes you hungry, thirsty and sleepy in a quite realistic manner. At the same time it's unobtrusive – you have to eat and drink occasionally, as well as sleep something like 7 or 8 hours every 24 hours, but you can go on without it longer if necessary. The mod is not without shortcomings, though.
Firstly, the vanilla game lets you sit down and rest on chairs. iNeed is supposed to let you sit down anywhere – so you can rest a little bit even in places where there are no chairs. Unfortunately, it doesn't work. You can sit down all right, but you will never be able to stand up, meaning your game is broken and you'll have to reload a previous save – and again find yourself faced with the problem of getting some rest. That bug was pointed out a long time ago, but unfortunately the author has stopped maintaining the mod.
There is an option in iNeed 's MCM which is supposed to prevent you from harvesting crops that don't belong to you. It doesn't work. No matter if it's enabled or disabled, you are still able to clean out other people's fields. However, this seems to be more the fault of the Skyrim game itself which does recognize it as a theft when you take an item from someone's house, but not when you harvest edible plants on their fields. Except that I can't understand why the mod author created an option he is unable to make work.
Another small problem (but this is not iNeed 's fault) is the unrealistic abundance of food and drink in Skyrim. Fortunately, iNeed lets you choose "food removal" in the options to significantly diminish food supply. Even with "food removal" enabled, I ended up having far more food and drink than I needed and throwing away most of it because of overweight.
An irritating problem of iNeed is related to the drinking hotkey which does not work in the way any sane person in the world would assume. When you go into a river and press the drink key, you would expect to get your waterskins filled up (or your taking a drink from the water in case you're not carrying any non-full waterskins). What happens instead is that YOU WILL CONSUME A RANDOM DRINK FROM YOUR INVENTORY. Really. You stand in the middle of perfectly good drinking water, and the pressing of the drink hotkey results in wasting a drink from your inventory. Believe it or not, the author said in a forum post that this was "expected behavior". What an imbecile!! I had half the mind to take back my endorsement.
You might want to know how do you get water from the river then. You can do it by pressing and HOLDING DOWN the drinking hotkey. Hold it until you see the message "waterskin added" or "you take a drink from whatever" in the upper left corner. Then you can safely release the key. After you've done it a few times, you'll get used to it.
Also, the author of iNeed has a very strange idea about the water quality in various bodies of water. Many rivers are not considered good water sources. You stand in a river, press and hold the drinking hotkey, and the mod tells you "there are no water sources nearby". The author explains it with those rivers being too close to the ocean. That is so retarded. Does he believe rivers flow from the ocean into the interior??
On the other hand, there are little stagnant mudcrab-infested pools (to not say puddles) from which I couldn't make myself drink unless I was literally close to death, but the author of iNeed considers them to contain perfectly potable water.
That said, iNeed works satisfactorily and is far better than any other mod of its kind.
That the Skyrim game virtually lacks non-alcoholic drinks (in fact, "milk-drinker" is a common insult) is, of course, utterly unrealistic, but obviously not iNeed 's fault. It just dimished greatly my respect for the Skyrim civilization when I realized that all its adult males are intoxicated virtually all the time.
Fortunately, there are mods which create non-alcoholic drinks in Skyrim. The best one I've found is Drinks for the Thirsty.
Added in 2021:
In my most recent game, I discovered that iNeed 's sleepiness calculating formula is very faulty. Time and again, I slept 7 hours and found a little time later how my sleepiness indicator changed suddenly from white to red. That blatant nonsense would happen regardless of the value of the parameter that is supposed to affect how quickly you get sleepy. Eventually I just disabled getting sleepy entirely and just remembered to sleep 7 hours in every 24 hours.
What about the physiological needs contrary to eating and drinking? Well, I'm sorry to say that in this respect, Skyrim mods are a dismal failure.
Take the mod Alive Peeing. It could hardly be more absurd. When my character's bladder got full, he threw his armor onto the ground, placed the shield in front of his penis and pissed through the shield onto the armor. Afterwards, he remained standing there with no clothes on.
The other pissing and shitting mods are no more realistic. Most absurdly, they allow you to take a piss in the middle of someone else's living room, or even piss on another person while he continues to talk to you as if everything was normal. Those mods are obviously made for voyeur skeezes who play a female character to enjoy the sight of her stripping naked and relieving herself. In terms of adding realism to your game, they are completely useless.
[originally published 2017-01-09]
