Bethesda to release Skyrim modding tools and patch 1.4 fixes as early as next week

DragonRoar

The updates and improvements to Bethesda's already amazing Skyrim just keep coming. The latest additions: The Creation Kit and Steam Workshop (to be bundled in patch 1.4), and they're almost ready to be unleashed, amidst a plethora of other game-related fixes. More details within!

The Creation Kit (referred to as the Construction Kit in previous games) makes the process of modding in Skyrim far easier for less tech-savvy folks. As such, we expect to expect to see the number of Skyrim mods and tweaks increase dramatically once the Creation Kit goes live. So now you can finally fulfill your life's destiny of turning arrows into missiles made of kittens!

Valve's Steam Workshop is planned to be used for mod hosting and distribution - the same system used by the Team Fortress 2 community to share and vote on hat and other gear mods. That means that if you do forge those kitten doom arrows, and share the mod on the Steam Workshop, others can download and automatically install the mod from there as well. Nice.

On top of all that, Bethesda has put together a batch of general performance enhancements (including some memory and scripting adjustments), fixed almost two-dozen quest-related hiccups, and squashed a respective number of random bugs, including problems overwriting existing saved games and crashes "related to giant attacks and absorb spells."

You can read the official blog post and catch the full patch 1.4 details on Bethesda's official blog. Thanks to the developers and one of the best mod communities around, it really is an exciting time to be Dragonborn. Just don't wield those kitten-rockets indiscriminately.