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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: It's Been A While...

So you might have noticed that I kind of disappeared a few months ago. The reasons were complex, but they basically boiled down to:   My wife had a big falling out with her sister, which really undercut my motivation to build now and improved builds that I could share with my sister in law; and, My wife and I really got into miniatures painting, something we've been spending a lot of time on and getting a great deal of satisfaction from.     Between tho

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 13: Customizing Outfits

Hi folks, hope you are all having a good week. The pollen count is finally starting to drop and its time for me to get back to work on this Skyrim build. As I mentioned in the last chapter, I have a few specific things I need to knock out before I spend some time playing, and today I want to do one of the more "hands on" items: I want to customize some equipment for the game to look the way I want it to.   Part of this is the elven/glass/ebony swapouts I've talked about before, but I'm

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 12: Retreading Old Ground

Welcome back, folks! I've played Skyrim dozens of times and there are few, if any, vanilla quests I haven't played yet. For this new build, I want to mix things up a bit, and for today we'll focus on installing vanilla quest overhauls.    I want to be clear that we're not talking about vanilla quest tweaks that just add time or skill gates or slow down quest chain progression. I may yet add some of those, but for today we're looking at mods like Extended Cut: Saints and Seducers, which

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 11: The Textures of The World

Welcome back everyone. I'm still feeling a little allergic, but the worst of the pollen has passed and the landscapers have moved on to greener (or at least more overgrown) pastures. Today we'll continue working on the creature integration, but to do that we'll need to swerve a bit into the world textures. Why? Because Dwarven machines share there texture set with a lot of architectural stuff.   Still, you might be asking, wouldn't it be easier for me to just grab the dwarf textures an

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 10: I Hate Allergies

Well, it's May. Pollen is in the air. Neighbors are mowing their lawn (I guess they missed the memo about not mowing early in the the growth season to protect the pollinators ). My eyes are swollen up, my tear ducts are itchy, and I have a constant low-level headache. So as you can probably guess, I'm not going to be writing a lot of eloquent prose this time. However, I wanted to keep everyone up to date on how the build is going.   Today I focused on overhauling the monsters in the ga

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 9: The Life of The Mind

Hi folks. Yesterday we took our setup from "vanilla with better graphics" to "NSFW Vanilla+" by incorporating needs mods and Sexlab. Today we're going to focus on polishing some rough features and generally getting the game to a more efficient place. After that's done, and if time permits, we'll also look at doing some enhancements.   One little warning about the schedule: Games Workshop has managed to get its hooks into me again, so Bethesda has some competition for my hobby time. Thi

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gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 8: Hierarchy of Needs

After seven sessions of step by step work, we've achieved a stable, beautified vanilla Skyrim experience. With that accomplishment under our belt, now its time to start moving beyond the vanilla experience and genuinely enhancing the game. We'll begin that process with needs mods. Skyrim AE contains some rudimentary handling of this gameplay in the form of the Survival Mode DLC, but in my experience the Survival Mode gameplay is uneven, never quite sure if its trying to enhance immersion or just

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gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 7: Purge The Unclean

If you've been following my self-narrated comments in Part 6, you know that as I tried to discover the source of an issue with patching the diffuse maps for character faces I discovered some fairly serious deficiencies in several NPC mods. I won't name and shame them here - I already reported the worst offender to its author - but after spending a bunch of time thinking on how to fix the mods myself, I realized that I was falling into the sunk cost fallacy. The whole purpose of using Easy NPC wa

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gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 6: All The Differences Between Us

When I wrapped up yesterday, I had intended this session to cover a review of my various SKSE enhancements and patches, including a discussion of which one's I'm adding immediately and which ones are going to wait until later. However, after reviewing them I realized that I just didn't have anything interesting to blog about on that score, so I went ahead and took care of those off the record. Today we'll get back to the NPCs - and in particular, building our EasyNPC population. If you followed

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 5: The Sculpting of The Clay

Welcome back, everyone! Last time we replaced the vanilla bodies for male and female humanoids with the bodyslide-friendly HIMBO and BHUNP bodies, then rebuilt all the vanilla clothing to support their body morphs. Today we are going introduce some features to take advantage of those capabilities - though before we start on that we need to get at least a basic install of Schlongs of Skyrim going first. We won't be doing any customized variations or intersex support yet, but we do need to have SO

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 4: The Forms of Flesh

Well, we made it past our first milestone - Patrician ENB is up and running with no unresolved deficiencies other than that fishing error (which fortunately seems to be benign). However, as you've no doubt observed from the screen shots, we have some issues with potato people in the game world. In this session, we'll focus on making our NPCs more realistic.   Laying the Groundwork First things first, we need bodies. We will be using BHUNP for females and futanari, and HIMBO for ma

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 3: The Weather

Welcome back! Yesterday we got water, fire, and lighting updated, as well as a number of collateral benefits to the outside world from Lux Via. Today, the goal is to get as close to possible to installing the ENB preset - and ideally to actually achieve that milestone. This will start with installing the ENB Particle Patch as well as several environmental mods that will support an installation of SOLAS Weather. Before we do that, however, let's check out Papyrus log from the last session and sno

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 2: The Waters and The Light

Welcome back, folks. Yesterday we set up the bare bones for the new AE build and tested it to make sure everything was working properly. After giving it a clean bill of health, I spent some time going over the papyrus logs and resolved several script errors in the Creation Club content. I also pruned out some unimplemented features from Alternate Perspective that were causing errors in the Papyrus log. All that's left now are some false alarms (FNIS complaining that it doesn't have any animation

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build

New AE Build Part 1: The Immaterial

I decided to start building my new AE setup today since I found myself a little fixated on the idea after the aborted launch from earlier. As I mentioned in my last post, the goal here is to get a lo of the richness and nuance of my last version without the bloat. I will eventually lean on certain elements of the old setup, but other parts will be all new, using the latest tools that have become available rather than the patchwork I assembled in the past.   I started by doing a clean i

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2023 AE Build


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