Better Smithing has quickly become one of my favorites. You can bulk craft, smelt, and refine with it, which I love. When you go to smelt, anything you have locked in the inventory wont even show up by default as well. You can't really do anything you couldn't without the mod (unless you turn off smithing stamina), it is just a nice time saver. Although, you can save your builds as well, so if you craft a certain weapon for each party member, you don't have to remember what it was, you just click on your saved build and it shows up in the forge screen. Also, if your just building a weapon to sell for cash, it will show on the forge screen how much the weapon should be worth (provided you don't botch the forge)
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/4318?tab=posts&BH=0
Auto Equip Companions is another favorite of mine. It does pretty much what the title of the mod says. After a battle or just anytime you close the inventory screen, if there are weapons or armor that are an upgrade to the type the companion already has equipped, they will equip them. It does go by what is worth the most, so it is not 100% fool proof, but works pretty well. And you can lock items so the companion wont change them.
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/4489
Better Time. Gives you another arrow on the bottom of the campaign map that moves time along faster than vanilla.
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/2849
Useful Companions. Does a pretty decent job of putting skills and perks in areas that make sense. No more 180 skilled, one handed weapons, but no attributes to support that skill level.
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/1033
Bannerlord Auto Trader. Doesn't do anything you can't do on your own. Just saves you from having to look at each item to see if it is above or below the average price. Can set a food level you always want on and when you click auto buy (or whatever it's called, forgot offhand), it will show how much that will cost and you can just click done to buy it. I typically run small parties for a long time, so it is nice just to set it up to keep all food levels between 5 and 10. Can also set it up to automatically sell weapons and armor below a certain level, so you can easily sell the trash loot. Wont sell anything you have locked.
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/135
Encyclopedia Extender shows a lot more info in the encyclopedia. You can actually see the skills of wanderers before hireing them along with some other stuff.
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/3721
I do believe most every mod I listed has the dependencies you mentioned. I just grabbed the latest ones and everything works for me on the latest buid.
Don't know about must have, but I do like Kill Counters. Just shows the amount of bandits/troops characters have killed.
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/3793
Ones that are fun and I use but don;t consider must haves:
My Little Warband. This allows you to create custom troop trees. This can be pretty OP if you let it, even if you keep the "cheats" turned off, since you can give your troops items better than the AI will have, along with slightly higher skills. So I usually just copy a vanilla troop and paste it into the custom troop tree and maybe do some tweeks, making some stuff a bit stronger and others a bit weaker. Also you can hire these custom troops from any town or villiage, so my personal rule is to only hire them from my home territory if at war. Also I do seem to get a bug with the mod that locks the game up if I'm running more than one campain at a time, but this could just be me as I've seen no one else complain about it..
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/3164
Take Hideouts is fun. You can buy or take over bandit hideouts. You can stash items or troops there, and send out bandit parties (though I haven't done that yet). It is a bit cheaty since any troops stationed there do not get paid (and they don't care). Last I read, paying garrison wages is on the to do list.
https://www.nexusmods.com/mountandblade2bannerlord/mods/2178
