Who needs Bethesda? Oblivion Remastered modders have cooked up FO4-style settlement placing even without official support

Hirtel, an elf, looks shocked — (Image credit: Bethesda)

It is June 2025, and Oblivion Remastered has no official modding support from Bethesda. But who cares? Because I guess modders never needed any of that stuff anyway. It was just holding them back, man. In the two months since Bethesda and Virtuos' re-do of Oblivion came out, modders have managed to create a whole range of Oblivion Remastered mods even without an official creation kit, like making the Dark Brotherhood last forever and finding ways to make the whole thing play nice with lua scripts.

Modders' latest miracle? A kind of pseudo-settlement building system, Fallout 4 style (via RPS). It's catchily titled Oblivion Settlement Building – Spawn and Place Objects and it lets you do, well, exactly that: spawn and plonk down new stuff in the world like some kind of idle god.

It's not just tiny stuff, either. In the examples on the Nexus Mods page, you can see a player—presumably author MadAborModding—spawn huge walls, rocks, and beams and pop them all across Skingrad. It's kind of wild to see, as if modders have gotten so bored of not having a proper creation kit for Oblivion Remastered they've just decided to give themselves the tools of one in the game itself*.

Placing a spawned environment object in the Oblivion Remastered settlement mod. — (Image credit: Bethesda / MadAborModding)

But MadAborModding is kind of hoping someone will get a bee in their bonnet to make those systems now that this mod exists. "I hope someone expands this into an actual settlement system. My goal with uploading this is hopefully to bait someone into doing that," they write, adding "I want that kind of mod, but I don't want to be the one to make it," which is the most relatable sentiment ever published on Nexus Mods dot com.

Even as-is, though, I'm still impressed by just what dedicated modders are able to do in the absence of official tools. If you want to muck about with settlement building yourself, you can download the mod, install the Unreal Engine 4/5 Scripting System, and whack the contents of the mod download into OblivionRemastered\Binaries\Win64\MadSpawnFiles.

*There is a lot more to a creation kit than placing objects. Please do not email me.

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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.

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