Better males - Beautiful nudes and faces - New hairstyles

skyrim — Mods & Enhancements

This mod overhauls all male humanoid NPCs (including Altmer, Bosmer, Imperials, Nords, Redguards, Bretons, and Orcs) with high-resolution skin textures, cleaner faces, improved hands/feet meshes, and optional body hair options. It replaces the default nude body mesh with a more detailed, realistic one, and adds dozens of new hairstyles for male characters. Players install it to eliminate the vanilla 'pudding face' look and give male characters more rugged, defined appearances, especially for follower overhauls or screenshots.

Syntax

Models and Textures

Example

Downloads: 8,806,277

💡 Notes

By Chris57 and FavoredSoul

🎯 Tips & Tricks

Select body hair variants via texture swap

After installation, navigate to your Skyrim Data folder: 'Data/Textures/actors/character/male' and look for 'malebody.dds'. Replace it with 'malebody_heavy.dds' (full body hair) or 'malebody_light.dds' (light chest hair) to change the look without re-installing. Use Mod Organizer 2's 'Hide' feature to toggle between them.

Apply new hairstyles to follower mods

If you use 'Inigo' or 'Lucien', open the console, click on the follower, type 'showracemenu' to edit their appearance. Under 'Hair' tab, you'll see the new styles (e.g., 'Long Shaggy', 'Warrior Ponytail'). Be sure to save after editing, then use 'setnpcweight 100' to avoid neck seam issues.

Fix neck seams with 'Face Discoloration Fix'

This mod's face textures are higher resolution than vanilla. If you see a visible line between head and body, download 'Face Discoloration Fix' from Nexus and place it AFTER Better Males in your mod order. Also ensure your 'SKSE.ini' has '[Display] iTintTextureResolution=2048' to match the mod's texture size.

🔧 Troubleshooting

Incompatible with 'SOS - Schlongs of Skyrim' (the popular male body mod) causing missing body parts or crashes.

Better Males and SOS both overwrite malebody.nif. Use 'SOS - Better Males Patch' from Nexus, or in Mod Organizer 2, put SOS's meshes AFTER Better Males but keep Better Males' textures. If using Vortex, set a 'Replace' rule where SOS wins for meshes, Better Males wins for textures.

Hairstyles don't show up for NPCs like 'Farkas' or 'Vilkas' if you have 'USSEP' (Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch) which changes their facegen.

USSEP overwrites NPC facegen records. You need to run 'SSEEdit' to copy the 'HeadPart' records from Better Males' ESP into a new patch, or use 'EasyNPC' to merge the facegen data. Alternatively, reinstall Better Males AFTER USSEP in your load order so its facegen wins.

⚠️ Common Mistakes

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👍 Pros

148,825 endorsements

👎 Cons

Requires correct game version

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