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About this blog

Greetings everyone! This page contains my various Bethesda blogs. At the time of this update, it contains my troubleshooting playthrough series, my Skyrim modding diary, my mod cleanup case study series, and my Shout Like a Virgin beta test blog. You can access all the entries from the sidebar on the right side of your screen.

 

Playthroughs

I've recently exceeded the 1000 mod threshold, and it's time to start periodically doing brief playthroughs to ferret out hidden conflicts and other bugs. In this series, we'll do shorter, more focused adventures where we try to tell an interesting story and also talk about what problems we ran into them and how we addressed them.

 

  • Charley's Story: Charlotte Ellison survived a nuclear war by spending more than two hundred years in stasis. Now she has to survive in a very new world, facing very new threats. A Fallout 4 playthrough.
  • The Spider's Web: Kirstia's search for answers has taken her to the island of Solstheim. Now she must uncover the secret of The Teacher - also known as Mephala - and continue the journey to master her powerful magical heritage. But can she survive as her enemies, new and old, close in? 
  • The Curious Case of Forrien Hlaalu: A year after she returned to Northpoint, Kirstia is back in Skyrim and looking for answers. The strange events that occured during her search for Sybil Fjotra continue to trouble her, as does the ongoing influence of the strange gods of the Forsworn. After a chance encounter over drinks, a wizard from the College of Winterhold sets her on the trail of a scholar who may have the answers she needs...
  • The Search for the Sybil: Exiled from Skyrim to the remote land of Northpoint, Kirstia Bjissen has fallen on hard times. Just as she hits rock bottom, a voice speaks to her and charges her with a sacred quest that will take her back to her native land - and likely into danger. Can Kirstia find the new Sybil of Dibella before her past catches up with her?
  • Shout Like a Virgin: Miraculously saved from death, Monilee of High Rock finds herself in Skyrim, a land riven by civil war and harboring dark secrets. While she tries to build a new life in this foreign land, she's haunted by half-remembered dreams, and in chasing them she discovers her role in the turning of the ages. However, Monilee has not gone unnoticed by powers outside the mortal realm. Used as a pawn in the struggle between Nocturnal and Dibella, it will take all her wits, endurance, bravery, and stubbornness to reclaim sovereignty over her body and her soul.

 

Modding Diary

This series tracks my modding projects in-between playthroughs and case studies. The main focus will be on the technical processes of cleaning, editing, and integrating mods into a large load order configuration, including managing emergent multi-mod interactions. 

 

Modding Case Studies

This blog reviews the tools and techniques that authors and end users can apply to make their mods as stable and compatible as possible, as well as how end users can integrate complicated mods into a large load order setup. In addition to coverage of well known techniques such as automatic mod cleaning, this blog delves into more complicated issues such as navmesh repair. 

 

Entries in this blog

2024 AE Build: Well that was an interesting two weeks

So... the bad news is that I spent the last two weeks dealing with real life (including a broken tooth - ouch!) and so didn't make a lot of progress on modding. The good news is that most of that now seems to be behind me and I should have more time for hobby stuff at least in the short term.   I was flipping through some of the resources I had put together for future Fallout modding and got a bit of an urge to make some progress on that side of things - maybe complete one of the mods

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2024 AE Build: Customizing the Village

Hi folks, hope you are all bearing up well during another record-high-temperature summer. Between some home improvement projects and my office window subjecting me to the "bug under a magnifying glass effect" during the afternoon, I didn't do too much hobbying over the weekend. Things are a little more bearable today however, so I wanted to take a few minutes to advance my Soljund's Sinkhold project a little.   After some further consideration, I decided to leave the NPC faces alone wi

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2024 AE Build: Business Trip

Hi folks, and welcome back. I've had a couple different factors conspiring to keep me away from this blog - notably my discovery of a dev version of MO2 that can properly run modded Starfield and the fact that I broke a tooth last Friday, which has left me a little less focused on hobby stuff than usual.   Yesterday on the Nexus I noticed a nice looking mod that I'm interested in incorporating into my game world. This will be a bit of a departure from the Whiterun area, but I think it

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2024 AE Build: It's Always The Obvious Thing You Miss

So if you read my last blog entry and its postscript comment, you'll know that I had a minor dyslexic moment and made a "prisonalternative_solitude_executions.esp" folder instead of a prisonalternative_executions_solitude.esp one. Because the original facegen was never shipped with the mod there wasn't a valid facegen texture folder for the plugin and the game crashed out when it went looking for the face tint textures. Once I corrected that, I was able to spawn the NPCs from this mod correctly.

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2024 AE Build: Squashing Bugs and Changing Faces

Hi folks, hope you all had a good weekend! I had a few false starts on blogs over the last few days but I never really reached "take-off velocity" on any of them. Let me summarize what I've been up to before I start on today's work.   I discovered a problem with the R18PN Lingerie set that was causing skin discoloration on actors. I converted several outfits from this set to use the BHUNP V4 body - specifically the frilly smallclothes that Ida Black-Briar wears and Sadia's teddy-sty

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2024 AE Build: Tidying Up

Welcome back, folks. Today I'm going to start by doing a little cleanup. I've mentioned several times how important it was for my Fallout build's performance to keep the files tidy and under control. Today we will not be doing 100% of the cleanup, but we're going to start at least.   First things first, let's move the Bodyslide project files (not the outputs) to a separate holding folder that I'll only activate when I'm working with Bodyslide. Note that we may need to split off the Bod

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2024 AE Builds: Updates, Opportunities, and Troublemaking

Hi folks, hope you are having a good week today. If you're in one of the parts of the USA that's affected by the intense heat wave, remember to stay cool and keep hydrated!   Last night I decided to try out Prison Alternative for a bit. I came away with a pretty positive first impression; while the mod will need a little bit of fine tuning and I need to investigate some specific items for customization, I'm generally happy with how it worked and the initial conflict checking revealed t

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2024 AE Build: Not Quite Full Companions Anymore

So remember how I said that I'd put off doing characters like Hestla until a later date so I could focus on the main characters? Turns out that was a total lie. Last night I got an idea in my head and after some quality time in Outfit Studio I found myself with an almost-finished custom outfit for Hestla. From there, it was just a matter of time to take it to completion...     I was generally happy with how Hestla came out, but I did have some issues with her han

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2024 AE Build: A Quick Companion-Adjacent Detour

After delving into Vignar's lore yesterday, it got me thinking about other characters with Companions ties. There are four other characters in the vanilla world who were formerly attached the group. Specifically, according to the wiki:     Askar is a dialogue-only character who does not appear in person, and Hestla seems to have abjured her ties, which makes her a lower priority for customization. Arnbjorn though is one that I definitely need to give some thought to - but I

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2024 AE Build: Warriors of Jorrvaskr

Welcome back, folks. Now that I've finally got over the hump of getting back into modding, I'm finding a lot more motivation to actually do stuff. I'll have to watch carefully though to make sure it doesn't start eating into my offline hobby time. White Dwarf 501 goes on sale on the 21st, and the painting challenge of the month is expected to be "Lord of War." We interpret that as either a faction leader model or a model with the "titanic" keyword; while my wife does have Ghazghkull Thraka sitti

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2024 AE Build: Acting On Sage Advice

In the end it was a consultation with my ever-thoughtful and considerate wife that resolved the Aela problem. Her suggestions were:   Don't convert Aela to Futanari but implement intersex content in the game at some point in the future Clean up the Bodyslide overlays to remove the remaining legacy overlays Don't add more new overlays until I set up the distribution rules, which I should do soon   I started out by removing the remaining legacy presets from t

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2024 AE Build: Learning to Squish OR I Did The Boring Thing...

...and I don't regret it one bit.      Don't get be wrong, RootBuilder is a great tool that opens up some very important options for users - especially folks who want to download and use turnkey solutions without messing around with having to manually install certain assets. However, the cost/benefit calculus for me wasn't adding up. As someone who isn't using a turnkey installation, the main potential benefit would have been supporting version rollbacks to do grass caching,

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2024 AE Build: Whiterun Revisited

Hi folks, welcome back and happy Friday! Last time we took a couple of long walks through Skyrim and identified a lot of opportunities for improvement. To summarize in broad strokes:   We should take a second look at the mod that delays the start of Bleak Falls Barrow, so that players aren't derailed from the alternate quest path where they start a civil war quest before proceeding with the main quest. We should do some further improvements on Whiterun. While a full overhaul

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2024 AE Build: Site Survey for MQ104 - MQ106

Hi folks, hope your weekend has been going well so far. I don't quite have the energy yet to do a full-scale blog entry, but I did want to go through the footprint of the next few main quest segments and set up a rough to-do list for the coming installations. As you may recall, we just wrapped up MQ103 and we're about to start "Dragon Rising," where the Dragonborn is revealed and begins to grow into their powers. Now there are still some unresolved bits of work to be done, notably figuring out w

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2024 AE Build: Remembering a Good Kitty

We had to bid farewell to my cat Oreo early on Wednesday morning. If you've been on the Lab for a really long time, he was the piebald kitty reading the D&D book while lounging in a mildly obscene posture in my profile picture before I switched to my current avatar.      He was a grouchy, ornery old man who frequently hissed at and got in fights with our other cats. He was also an inveterate cuddle-bug with a shockingly loud purr who quickly adopted my wife and became he

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2024 AE Build: MQ101-MQ103 Shakedown Run Part 2

OK, after a nice break for dinner and some quality time with my wife, I think it's time to try and finish this shakedown run. When we left off, I had just swiped the golden claw from Arvel. Well, actually, I had entered the Draugr part of the dungeon and fought through the first and second encounter rooms. So now we'll continue deeper into the dungeon and make our way towards the Dragonstone.     Almost immediately I find brawler's gauntlets that do more damage than my steel

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2024 AE Build: MQ101-MQ103 Shakedown Run Part 1

Hi folks, welcome back. As I mentioned in the last entry, modding MQ104 ("Dragon Rising") and some of the chapters that follow require a game that's active on the main quest in order to test changes correctly. Also, I'm overdue for a "real" shakedown run where I'm not using tdetect, god mode, or teleportation to speed up the process. Let's roll up a new character and take them through the main quest. We'll look for any glitches or areas for improvement, and at the same time we'll create a "hot s

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2024 AE Build: A Small Country Store

Hi folks, and happy Friday! Yesterday we took a bit of an unplanned deep dive into multi-mod compatibility as we integrated a small quest mod with a pretty significant location overhaul. Today, we're going to continue our journey back to Whiterun with a stop off in Riverwood. While we'll be customizing all the remaining areas in the zone during this trip (Riverwood really is that small - four houses, the store, and the tavern), the focus today is going to be on the Riverwood Trader and its inhab

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2024 AE Build: The Cabin In The Woods

Welcome back everyone! Last time we did a nice expansion of Bleak Falls Barrow, and while some of the mods I had hoped to incorporate didn't seem like good fits (the Dungeon Darkness mod for example). It was pleasing to find that Bleak Falls Revisited preserves all the vanilla coordinates, which is a really nice compatibility decision and something the author Cooleoj deserves praise for doing.    Today we're going to leave Bleak Falls through the back door, walk through the mammoth gra

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2024 AE Build: Our First Real Dungeon Crawl

Welcome back, everyone! Yesterday we did some work bugfixing as well as enhancing the mountain path that leads up to Bleak Falls Barrow. We also took a look at a nice environmental mod that would have been a great fit but just presented too much work to properly integrate - but who knows, maybe we'll give it a second look in the future?   Today, we're going to overhaul the interior of Bleak Falls Barrow and then look through it for opportunities to make smaller tweaks and improvements.

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2024 AE Build: Onward to Bleak Falls

Hi folks, welcome back! When we last left off, we had just delivered news of the dragon attack on Helgen to Jarl Balgruuf and been introduced to Farengar. Let's walk through what's going to happen next. In the vanilla game, Farengar will encourage the player to travel to Bleak Falls Barrow and retrieve the Dragonstone. Over the course of the Bleak Falls adventure, the player will also get the quest "The Golden Claw" if they haven't already, and since the exit to Bleak Falls will push the player

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2024 Skyrim Build: Inner Whiterun

Hope everyone is having a good weekend! Today we'll cross through the city gates and work on Whiterun proper, along with the Jarl's palace Dragonsreach. If you were reading the comments thread on the previous post, you already know that I had to delay this segment a little bit in order to do an integration of Hydragorgon Slave Girls that kind of grew into a side project of its own. You'll see some of the fruits of that in this volume, and continue to see more of it in future segments.  

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2024 Skyrim Build: Whiterun OR It's always bikini season if you're a werewolf

Hi folks, welcome back! I originally planned to cover both the Whiterun exterior and also the interior in this volume, but I'm still wrapping up some final details for WhiterunWorld and Dragonsreach, so we'll split those up to give me a little time to complete my work. Today we'll focus on the walk from Riverwood to Whiterun, the Whiterun exterior, and of course the iconic fight between the Companions and a local giant.     In keeping with our approach to selecting mods, we're going to

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2024 Skyrim Build: Riverwood

Happy Thursday, everyone! Last time we reviewed customizations of the elements of MQ101, the first segment of the main quest. This mostly focused on the courtyard scene, but it also flowed down into the Helgen Keep adventure to a small extent. Today, we'll cover the walk to Riverwood and customization of the town itself.    So, let's leave Helgen and start our walk!     The first point of interest that we come across on the road out of Helgen is the Guardian

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2024 Skyrim Build: Kicking Off The Main Quest

Welcome back, everyone. Last time, we talked about customizing one of the NPCs in pre-destruction Helgen, as well as sprucing up the Alternate Perspective starting room. Today, let's take a look at the opening scene of the main quest.    Needless to say, this requires us to trigger the main quest, which results in a lot of actors spawning into the game world for us to look at. If you recall the punchlist on the first post, we're going to look at customizing a lot of these characters. 

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