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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

It may be time to give Fallout 4 the 2023 AE treatment

I love my janky, crazy-quilt Fallout 4 built that I made for Charley's story. It contains tons of custom assets, lots of playthrough-specific details and tweaks, and it was a solid learning experience that directly informed the development of my highly stable 2023 AE build for Skyrim. And, no small detail, it gave me the platform for a 94-chapter fanfic that dwarfs any of the other stories I've written for this blog.    Unfortunately, it's also become super unstable. I booted it back u

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I was kind of burnt out... but then Bethesda rekindled my interest

Hi folks, I hope everyone has been having a good winter season so far. You might have noticed that I kind of disappeared a while back. I'm sorry I abandoned you all - at first I'd planned on just taking a little break but then seasonal depression started to set in, and then my whole family got COVID. Jumping from one challenge to another, I never really had the energy to get the blog going.   However, today version 1.6.1130 of Skyrim dropped and it contained a very interesting change:

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Charley's Story Book 5 Poll

Hi folks. I recently posted the first half of Chapter 94. It ends on a bit of a cliffhanger where Charley has to make an important decision about how to split resources between two different operations. In this poll, you can decide which path Charley will take. The adventure will start around Chapter 100 and will last about 25 chapters, comprising the 5th book of the series.   This poll will run for 48 hours, closing on October 11th.   Without spoilers, a few broad factors in

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Distant Opportunities (Charley's Story, Chapter 94A)

Editor's note: this entry is only the first half of Chapter 94. After it was posted, I conducted a poll to determine the Charlie's decision about how to proceed after she reaches Beverly. I've moved this version to the "miscellaneous" section and will update the table of contents links once the complete chapter is posted in the near future.   "The Institute?" Quartercut said, working the words slowly. "This is the mythical group that engineered the Commonwealth Provisional Government m

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Charley's Story: Getting ready for more adventures

Hi folks, hope you've all had a good summer! I'm just winding up a round of playtesting on my Skyrim build and I'm starting to feel the itch to continue Charley's adventure. It'll still be a little bit before I can post new chapters because I need to reread where I was at to make sure I'm not forgetting key plot points. I'm also thinking that I might want to do some non-story articles recapping the key characters' backgrounds and plot threads. This won't just help me get my brain back in the sto

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A quick check-in: Skyrim build progress and future plans

Hi folks, hope everyone is having a good summer so far! It's been a while since I've posted to my blog, so I wanted to take a moment to check in with you all about what I've been up to.   I finished my initial Skyrim build at 618 mods and 479 plugins. It runs great! There are a few lingering large reference-related visual glitches which I'll be cleaning up as time permits, but otherwise I've had something like 2 CTDs in 20 levels of play. Fantastic! I'm generally getting above 60 FP

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I tried to do the Valerica test run on my 1900 mod build... it didn't go so well

Hi folks, I was planning to use my giant 1900 mod build to run a test of the controversial Valerica romance mod. Unfortunately, it didn't go quite the way I expected. I've rolled up this fellow for the quest, and we'll start by traveling to Fort Dawnguard and joining their ranks.     This session will be running on a very slightly updated version of my main build, using 1906 mods. It's not perfectly up to date as many elements have been updated while I was off playing Fallou

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Programming Note - Spending Some Time In Skyrim

Hi folks, I'm going to be delaying the second half of Book 4 to make time for a little Skyrim project. I'll probably share some screenshots but I do not plan to blog the story. Basically, a new and surprisingly controversial mod has come out and I'm interested to see what all the hullabaloo is about. According to some, this mod has really superb synthesized voice acting... but it sample it I need to play through a good chunk of Dawnguard, so that'll require my attention for a bit. Depending on h

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Settlement Update Tour - Part 3

Yesterday we visited the core of Concord's territory: Quarrytown, Concord, Abernathy Farm, and Ridge. Before we head south towards Red Tourette's territory, we have some business to do east of Concord. First we'll visit the Drumlin Diner and make sure it's not blocked in terms of progress. Then we need to set up the Minutemen base at Bedford Station. Finally, we'll check in with Graygarden to make sure the robots are doing OK.    After arriving at the Diner and fighting off a random gh

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Settlement Update Tour - Part 2

Welcome back, everyone! Our tour got a little delayed by technical issues, but now we can continue visiting the settlements and getting them up to date. If you recall from last time, our next settlement is The Slog. It won't be getting any major updates except for defense, since we founded it relatively recently. The big development is that the prisoners were locked up here a while ago have reached 100 submission, so we can treat them like regular settlers as far as jobs go.    

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Settlement Update Tour - Part 1

Hi folks, hope you've been enjoying Charley's story so far. She just reached level 47 at the end of chapter 88, and we're a bit past due to make sure the settlements are all up to date. If you've played Fallout 4, you know that by the time you have this many settlements active, it can be easy to get out of whack with resources and start losing a lot of happiness - especially when Sim Settlements 2 is part of the equation.   Additionally, many of the settlements are ready to grow and ne

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Quick Visit (Charley's Story, Chapter 82 - Original Version)

Editor's note: This is the original version of Chapter 82 that I published roughly concurrently with my play through these events. In my original outline for Book IV, I didn't plan for Charley to start the mission "Dangerous Minds" until some time later - roughly around chapters 88-90, depending on B-Plot elements - but the game started the quest automatically with a cutscene when I reunited with the relevant characters. At first I thought I could just roll with it and rearrange the sequence of

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Charley's Story Book 4 Preview Pictures (Updated March 9th)

Hi folks, I'm going to try and consolidate all the previews and spoilers for book 4 as I prep for it into a single thread, and just manage the publication date to manage visibility. Hopefully this will avoid proliferating too many blog posts and make it easy to look over everything as it becomes develops.   March 9th - The Custom Magazines Are A Fun Diversion   March 7th - Red's Rangers & Minutemen Leveled Lists (Phase 1)   March 6th - Museum of Freedom Prog

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Building the Fort Hagen mercenary camp for Charley's Story

If you've been following Charley's Story, then you know that Book 3 is building up to an assault on Fort Hagen by the Minutemen to take out Kellogg's mercenaries. In the vanilla game, Kellogg doesn't have this entourage, and so we'll need to build the mercenary camp ourselves and then turn it hostile using Hostile Workshops. Let's take a look at what we have in terms of terrain.   Here's the north part of the base:      I've already done a little bit of ground work

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The Road to Chapter 70 - Building up the background of the Eastern Commonwealth

Hi folks, as I mentioned in the comments for Chapter 69, today is going to be an in-service day where my gaming time gets used to work on some aspects of the Fallout campaign that are happening off camera: notably, building up several sites on the Vault 81 side of the Charles River so they not only look right in the story but also behave properly in terms of game mechanics.    Before we head down that way, let's take a quick look at our current settlements and how they're doing. I'll f

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You're probably noticed my absence...

Hi folks, if you're a regular reader of my blog, you've probably noticed that I haven't been active for the last couple weeks. Part of that is just the normal holiday season workload, but I've also had some challenging family developments recently that have diverted a lot of my hobby time onto filial responsibilities. I'm not going to say that I won't be posting anything - writing is a good outlet for stress relief after all - but I wouldn't expect any regular tempo of content until after the ne

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Interlude - A Patch On The Nexus

Hi folks, today was originally going to have a short blog post for the 1900 Mods Shakedown project (I had pretty limited time because of work commitments) but I got side tracked answering a question on one of my old blog posts which ended up sending me down a rabbit hole of the good kind. The end result was me publishing a "new" mod on the Nexus. I use quotes on 'new' because this is a cleaned up version of some of the work I did for the mod diary back in June.   Still, if you like tre

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Bethesda Modding Diary Special Edition - Real Estate Recon

Hi folks, it's been a while! Star Citizen 3.17.2 is really solid and it's been eating up a lot of my free time. On top of that, my wife and I have recently started watching the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise in chronological order. It turns out that almost all the Gundam blu rays were on sale on Amazon, so we were able to fill in the gaps of what isn't streaming right now. Finally, I discovered and briefly binged Frostpunk, which I highly recommend. Long story short, I've had a lot of competition

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Programming Note - Upcoming Star Citizen Patch

Hi folks, I just wanted to check in with you and let you know that I probably won't be posting blogs for the next few days. As I write this, we're waiting for a major patch to drop for Star Citizen that will introduce many new features. This drop will also be coming with a progress wipe, so in addition to trying out the new content I'll also need to be doing some re-work to renew my bounty hunter licenses and so forth. As a result, that game will be my main focus at least through this weekend.

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Gregaaz Modding Index

Hi folks, it's been a while since I started the mod diary series and recently I went to look up a mod... and realized that I had no idea where it was located. So I think today's project is going to be to make an index of all the mods we've covered so far. This blog post will stay at the top of the table of contents on the main blog page and will be kept updated as more mods get reviewed and integrated. I'll also include a brief summary of the contents of each link. All mods will be here in alpha

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PSA - Racemenu Memory Leak Fixed on SSE

Hi folks, I realized that I had forgotten to cover something in today's modding diary. If you've been in the hobby for a while, you probably know that for some time there have been suspicions that Racemenu contained a memory leak in its DLL file. This was recently confirmed by the community and it was subsequently fixed in the version of Racemenu for version 1.6. However, the author did not provide an update for the 1.5.97 runtime.    There is now a community developed hotfix you can d

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Quick Programming Note

Hi folks, you may have noticed that I never got around to the next volume of my modding diary about Immersive Jewelry compatibility. I've had a little bit of a real life surprise (a moving truck full of furniture is arriving on Wednesday instead of in a few weeks because of a change of plans that wasn't communicated to me earlier  ) and I'm franticly getting ready for this. I don't plan on making any blog posts until Friday, 6/17, as a result.    Just wanted to let everyone know that I

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Mini Case Study: ESL Flagging and Legacy of the Dragonborn

Welcome back, and hope you're all having a nice relaxing weekend. Instead of a normal modding diary today, we'll be doing a special mini case study focusing on one objective: cutting down the number of hard load order index reservations in SSE by compacting mods associated with Legacy of the Dragonborn.    So why is this an issue? If you're familiar with ESL flagging, you know that often you have to change the form ID structure of a file to apply the ESL flag. That's because ESL-flagge

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Meanwhile, in Skyrim...

Hi folks, I hope you have all been enjoying Charley's adventures. Meanwhile, I'm a little embarrassed to say that I think I've burned out a bit on Kirsti's adventure. I have only myself to blame: I launched into her latest adventure with a less clear idea of what I wanted to do than before, and especially with the more focused Fallout playthrough running in parallel, I'm just not mustering the energy to dive into her game for now. On top of that, I'm fast accumulating a pile of interesting mods

gregaaz

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Programming Note - Super-Robot-Wars-induced delay

Hi folks, hope you're enjoying Charley's adventure so far! I'm excited to get rolling with her next chapter, and also with Kirstia's ongoing adventures. However, Super Robot Wars 30 just dropped its expansion pack today, so I anticipate that I won't have much to post here for the next few days as I check out the new 'mech content. Thanks for you patience, and see you all soon!

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