Skyrim mods fix its most glaring realism error: Your disturbingly immortal food

The Dragonborn ponders some mouldy bread in Skyrim. — (Image credit: RavenKZP / Bethesda)

The problem with Skyrim is that it's all too permanent. Your swords, your armour, your sweetrolls, they all just hang around forever until you drop them, sell them off, or eat them (not the swords and armour; don't eat your swords and armour). It's a plastic-fantastic world where nothing ever ends, and buddy, I've had just about enough of it.

Thank goodness, then, that an enterprising modder named RavenKZP has created the Simple Spoilage series of mods, which subject all the spoilable goods in your inventory to the horrible, horrible passage of time. The modder divides each spoilage system by item type, so you have Simple Food Spoilage System, Simple Ingredient Spoilage System, and Simple Carcass Spoilage System, which collectively work to ruin basically anything you can ingest (after a suitable period of time).

It's honestly pretty impressive, and targeted at people doing survival runs of the game. As you can probably guess, it means any food you leave out and about or in your inventory will eventually turn old and gross, gaining a patina of mould that renders it either utterly inedible or strangely appealing depending on whether or not it's some kind of Italian cheese.

Of course, adding entropy to Skyrim is easier said than done. If you want to play with these mods yourself, you'll first need to install a few prerequisites you can find on each mod's page. Once you've got them all loaded up, though, you can make life even harder for yourself by installing Base Object Swapper and Container Item Distributor, which will make it much, much less likely for you to find unspoiled food in Skyrim's myriad dungeons. After all, the corpses in there are rotted, so why not the grub?

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One of Josh's first memories is of playing Quake 2 on the family computer when he was much too young to be doing that, and he's been irreparably game-brained ever since. His writing has been featured in Vice, Fanbyte, and the Financial Times. He'll play pretty much anything, and has written far too much on everything from visual novels to Assassin's Creed. His most profound loves are for CRPGs, immersive sims, and any game whose ambition outstrips its budget. He thinks you're all far too mean about Deus Ex: Invisible War.