This mod adds a sci-fi city to Skyrim Special Edition

Plenty of Skyrim mods add new locations. Fantastical places like The Forgotten City, Falskaar, and Elsweyr. Fort Knox by Ripcat, a Skyrim Special Edition mod, adds a futuristic city complete with skyscrapers, neon signs, an industrial district, a shuttle to takes you to the beach, shops that sell guns and drugs, cops in riot gear, and, of course, a strip club with sexy robots. 

It's an update of an older mod called Aether Suite – Project KnOx by Halo, which was an empty cyberpunk setting designed as a backdrop for taking screenshots in. Unlike Aether Suite, Fort Knox contains NPCs spread across its five distinct areas. There are no quests in the city, and what little new dialogue there is comes entirely as text, but it's a fun place to explore when you've seen all of what fantasy Skyrim has to offer.

Installing Fort Knox adds a new spell called Log Out to your spellbook. Casting it transports you from Skyrim to a VR room, where your character finishes their long in-game session and finally walks out into the real world—while still being, in my case, a Nord wearing vampire armor with a quiver of arrows on his back. 

One of the first characters I meet is an android. Sitting in the lobby, she immediately took a loaf of bread out of nowhere and mimed eating it. Maybe she's been playing Skyrim too long as well. In the grimy streets outside I see several more robots of different kinds, including a dogbot I sadly cannot pat, though it does simultaneously woof at me and recite the generic Skyrim greeting, “You need something?” What a clever dogbot.

Fort Knox's accessible areas include an industrial zone, a wide plaza, a sewer system, a park, and Octo-8 Island, which has convenient beach umbrellas for those who are still roleplaying vampires. In the city's bars and strip club I feel like everyone's staring at me because I'm wearing armor, so I go shopping. There's a clothing store called Dibella's, named after Skyrim's goddess of love (other references to the original game include a corporate HQ called Psijic Systems). Dibella's sells more up-to-date outfits than even the most fashionable Forsworn wear.

What I'm really looking for is nearby in a shop called Hardware. Earlier I stumbled across a meth lab while exploring the sewers, whose guard carried an AK-47. Since then I've been in the market for a gun, and Hardware is the place to get one. An android in a strip club told me so.

While browsing the hardware in Hardware I also check out the clothes, which include a Hotline Miami-esque chicken head, cardboard armor, and gas masks. One of the gas masks is available in PC Gamer Red, which means I obviously have to buy and wear it. 

I grab a machine gun and some ammo as well, and test my new purchases out by immediately mowing down the guy who sold them to me—at which point the interface tells me my archery skill has improved.

Now fully geared-up, there's one thing left to try. While the flying motorbikes parked on the street are sadly not available to ride, I read in the mod's description that something called a “mini moto” is. Rather than continue hunting for one, I bring up the player cheat menu in Proteus and search for it, eventually finding a minibike key under weapons. When used, it summons a kid-sized motorbike I can silently ride—first directly into the air and through a wall, then into a pond from which it will not emerge. Ah, well.

When I return to the bar in my new getup, a drinker with a cybernetic eye is still staring at me, but that's probably just because they're jealous of my stylish gas mask and cardboard armor sleeves. 

Fort Knox is now available on NexusMods, after initially being released on the NSFW mod portal LoversLab. That explains why to run it you'll need to first install the ZaZ Animation Packs, which comes in two versions compatible with either of Skyrim's competing mods designed to make every woman's body look pneumatic. You'll als need either of Skyrim's competing animation mods, FNIS or Nemesis. Though it's not mentioned in the description you'll also want Fuz Ro D-oh – Silent Voice, without which unvoiced dialogue doesn't work.

Even with all of that set up in advance, most of Fort Knox's women were stuck in glitchy outfits that hung down weirdly, presumably because I hadn't installed the right mod for making them all boobier or whatever. Here's to Skyrim modding, hey?