Re: Skyrim mods. I've nearly completed my 3-month long vanilla Skyrim slog (only got the Companions to complete), and it's a good thing, because this version of Tamriel's about to undergo gravitational collapse under the weight of all the mods I've got on it. There's some WEIRD stuff happening, man. Dragon skeletons falling from the sky. Genuine body horror stuff going on with the NPC models. The same thief keeps getting murdered in the Riften markets over and over again. TBH I've never gotten this far in the game now, and I'm not sure what to do. How do people get to level 100? I'm only on 37 and can basically destroy any dungeon enemy I encounter. Am I meant to spend the rest of the time maxing my cooking skills?
Yes. Yes you are. Chase down butterflies, and eat them. Pick pretty flowers, and eat them. Gather sketchy materials that have been lying around in tombs for 3000 years...and eat them. Just killed a vampire? Eat the dust left behind. Sabrecat eyes? A delicacy. Eat everything. Assuming you don't die from the seventeen kinds of poison you just ingested, you might level up your alchemy a little.
Build up your blacksmithing skills. Make seventeen million iron daggers.
Learn every type of magic, run around with a self-damage spell in one hand and a self healing spell in the other. Constantly cast light. Stand around in a giant camp hiding behind a shield while wearing every type of armor. Level up Light Armor, Heavy Armor, and Blocking all at once!
Buy things. Sell things. Intimidate and influence people.
If you have one of the more recent versions of the game you can make your skills legendary (basically resetting them back to zero so you can level them again, while also leveling up even more).
As for falling skeletons, body horror npcs, and murdered thieves, that's par for the course in a Bethesda game. It's really fun when one of those falling dragon skeletons gets halfway stuck in the ground and starts flopping around, or when mammoths spawn twenty stories up in the air and fall to their deaths.