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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

Skyrim Modding Diary - 07 March 2022

Hi folks, thanks for your patience while I took some sick time. I'm feeling better now and looking forward to getting back to full speed with the modding work. For today, we'll be mostly just catching up on some new items that came out while I was taking it easy. Tomorrow I'm planning to resume the case study for Groot's Solitude and I'll also be starting to plan out the path to our next adventure, which I'd like to start later this month or at the very start of next month.   Right now

A Quick Programming Note

Hi folks, you may have noticed that we didn't get a modding diary yesterday and that I haven't posted anything today. I've had an upset stomach all day and as a result I've been taking it easy and not working on any hobby stuff. The next blogs will come out soon - tomorrow or Sunday at the latest. Thanks for your patience, I look forward to sharing more of my modding experiences with you all soon!

gregaaz

gregaaz in Miscellaneous

Modding Case Study: Grroott's Solitude (Part 4 - Physician's Office)

Welcome back! Yesterday we toured the modded area and identified a number of items that we need to address in order to properly integrate the mod. Today's we're going to focus on the two "big rocks" - the conflicted buildings used by Books of Skyrim and Imperial Physician. In today's blog we'll look at the physician first, relocating the entry to his interior so it's not conflicted anymore. We'll also start working on the bookstore, though that will spill over into tomorrow because of time const

Skyrim Modding Diary - 02 March 2022

Hi folks! In addition to my ongoing case study of Grroott's Solitude, I've got a few other mods to integrate today, including another standing stone overhaul from Ryn2g.   We're starting the day with 1,425 mods installed, 1,467 plugins active, and a final load order index of EA.    New On The Nexus   Big Fish, Little Fish   More Fishy Business   Knocking Out The Backlog I have a large number of mods from a previous major build that are

Modding Case Study: Grroott's Solitude (Part 3 - The Grand Tour)

Welcome back, folks. Now that we've gone through Groot's Solitude in MO2 and xEdit, it's time to see what we need to do in the CK. We'll start out by taking a tour of the city, starting at the outer gates and working our way down to the Blue Palace. What we're looking for today are any overlapping meshes, blocked passageways, or visual irregularities (Z fighting, texture issues, etc). This stage is important because it helps us plan out the best way to fix the issues, rather than just tackling e

Skyrim Modding Diary - 01 March 2022

Welcome back, everyone! I hadn't been planning on doing a whole lot of modding today, but Ryn2g has posted three new mods in the last 24 hours which I think we'll integrate.    We're starting the day with 1,420 mods installed, 1,464 plugins active, and a final load order index of EA.   A Quick Texture Upgrade   Two Stones   Robber's Gorge   One thing that was really apparent with the Robber's Gorge mod as well as with my ongoing case study

Modding Case Study: Grroott's Solitude (Part 2 - xEdit Conflict Resolution)

Welcome back, everyone! Yesterday we took Grroott's Solitude through installation and cleaning, and we did a bunch of navmesh repair. With that taken care of, now we can move on to conflict resolution.   Finding and Resolving Conflicts in xEdit Before we start looking for problems in the CK and in the game itself, we'll review this plugin in xEdit. The goal is to find records that more than one mod are trying to edit, and make sure the "winning" entry allows all the content to wor

Skyrim Modding Diary - 28 February 2022

Hi everyone! The next few diary entries are going to be shorter, since my main focus is on the case study of Groot's Solitude. I hope you'll enjoy reviewing that project and maybe learn some tricks that will help with your own modding projects.   Including Groot's mod, we started the day with 1,417 mods installed, 1,462 plugins active, and a final load order index of E9.   More Horseplay Some idle browsing yesterday ended up taking me to this mod by vivi. It's a pretty h

Modding Case Study: Grroott's Solitude (Part 1 - Getting Started, Mod Cleaning, Navmesh Repair)

Hi everyone, and welcome to our second Modding Case Study (formerly known as "Mod Cleanup Case Studies"). I changed the name because the emphasis will be as much if not more on integration than on corrective action. This time we will be reviewing Grroott's Solitude, which adds additional streets and buildings to the city. When I pre-screened this mod, I was expecting a lot of problems integrating Legacy of the Dragonborn, but the author has subsequently produced a patch, which is good.   

Skyrim Modding Diary - 27 February 2022

Hi folks, hope you all had a good weekend. Today is going to be a bit of a cleanup session as we get ready to launch our next case study tomorrow. We'll be addressing a couple of small issues I ran across yesterday, revisiting a change I made during a previous session, and doing our usual daily scrape of the Nexus.   We're starting the day with 1,412 mods installed, 1,459 plugins active, and a final load order index of E8.    Incidentally, the "next adventure" poll closed tod

Skyrim Modding Diary - 26 February 2022

Happy Saturday, everyone. As we get ready to transition into our mod cleanup case study on Monday, today we'll be focusing on cleaning up some lingering items that need some attention. We'll also be doing some work on unannounced content related to the upcoming third adventure - though probably not too much today.    We're starting with 1,405 mods installed, 1,458 plugins active, and a final load order index of E8. Why did this go up overnight? Because when I did my grass cache a few d

Skyrim Modding Diary - 25 February 2022

Welcome back, everyone. Today is probably going to be a fairly short entry as it's a busy day at work and I won't have the usual amount of downtime. We're also getting close to starting the next mod cleanup case study, so this weekend our remaining focus is going to be on some cleanup activities and generally getting the mod into configuration where, once the case study is done, we can fairly quickly roll into the next adventure. Speaking in which, if you haven't voted yet on which lead Kirstia

Skyrim Modding Diary - 24 February 2022

Welcome back, folks. With everything going on in the world today, I'm not sure how much modding I'm going to be in the mood for, but I'm sure I'll do a little and hopefully by sharing it I can at least offer up a little distraction from all the bad news.    We're starting the day with 1,386 mods installed, 1,437 plugins active, and a final load order index of E8.   Harvesting The Nexus   Horny DAR   Tamrielic Grass?     I think that's

Skyrim Modding Diary - 23 February 2022

Welcome back everyone. Today's entry may seem a little shorter than usual, but that's because I'm anticipating I'll be spending most of my time completing the patchup of Lux. That requires edits to every single vanilla interior top level cell record, so it's a bit labor intensive.    When we wrap up with that, we'll be at 1,379 mods installed, 1,429 plugins active, and a final load order index of F0.   A New Start   Crunching Down   Unique Skulls

Skyrim Modding Diary - 22 February 2022

Hello everyone! I hope you all had a good weekend, and to those of you in Ukraine, I hope you are staying safe. We've got about one week before I start my next series, which will be a mod cleanup case study. After that, we'll do a little more modding (mostly final setup stuff) and then kick off Kirstia's third adventure.    Today we are going to update a few mods and also install some 'unannounced content' related to our next story blog. After that, if time permits, we'll keep knocking

Skyrim Modding Diary - 21 February 2022

Welcome back, everyone. Hope all of your in the USA had a good President's Day! Today's going to be another fairly short entry as I've been following the news pretty closely and that's distracted me from hobby time. However, we'll at least get finished up with Frostfield and then take a look at what's new on the Nexus.   We're starting today with 1,365 mods installed, 1,379 plugins active, and a final load order index of EF.   Finishing Frostfield   On The Nexus T

Skyrim Modding Diary - 20 February 2022

Welcome back! I hope you're having a good weekend so far. My original plan for today was to finish polishing off Raven Rock and then maybe look at some more landscape/location integration work. However, my review of Fresh Women Darkness yesterday got me thinking, and I kind of feel like tackling TAWOBA instead. This probably won't lead to an install today, but I want to at least review the latest versions of the assets to understand what they have to offer.    What do I mean by 'fixed'

Skyrim Modding Diary - 19 February 2022

Welcome back, everyone. Today is going to be a shorter entry as I ended up mostly taking it easy today. I did however get some very good advice from @OsmelMC regarding my SOS issues from yesterday and we're going to see if we can get everything - as Commander Data would say - "fully functional"     So What's The Issue?   Mod Recon - Fresh Women of Darkness   What's New On The Nexus Today?   And with that, I think we'll call it a

Skyrim Modding Diary - 18 February 2022

Welcome back everyone, we survived to another Friday! Today we've got a few different projects on our plate. As I touched on at the very end of yesterday's diary, we'll be installing a selection of wildlife mods today. If time permits we'll also be taking a crack at Fresh Women of Darkness, though no promises on that one - it may end up sliding to the long weekend since integrating this one the way I want will actually take some time.   We're starting the day with 1,343 mods installed,

Skyrim Modding Diary - 17 February 2022

Well, we made it to Thursday! As an aside, isn't it great that we live in a world where there's going to be a new Star Trek episode every week for at least the next two years? Say what you will about streaming TV, but it seems to have been just the medicine that franchise needed to come back from the brink of death and into an incredible renaissance.    But you aren't here to hear me ramble about Star Trek (I assume) so let's switch focus to Skyrim modding. Yesterday I'd resolved to fi

Skyrim Modding Diary - 16 February 2022

Welcome back, folks! Yesterday we had a pretty productive run where we installed two different texture-versions of the same creature mod, made some custom outfits (including a bit of a brawl with WACCF's scripted distribution process), and added a lot of detail to the outside world. Today, we'll start by doing some surgery on Skyrim At War in another attempt to fix Grass Caching. Then we'll add some shrines to secret (and not so secret) places and overhaul a few NPCs' appearances.   We

Skyrim Modding Diary - 15 February 2022

Happy Wednesday, everyone, and happy middle-of-the-month! Hopefully you were all able to view yesterday's blog in a timely fashion - for some reason it got flagged as requiring moderator approval, and I inadvertently extended the posting delay by making proofing edits after committing the first version. Given that the moderator wasn't sure how my post got flagged, I'm hoping that was a transient issue (possibly related to Chrome crashing while I was composing the blog?) that won't impact us toda

Skyrim Modding Diary - 14 February 2022

Hi folks, and welcome back to the Skyrim Modding Diary. I hope you all enjoyed Kirstia's latest adventure! If you haven't already done so, please visit the Epilogue and vote on which path her next adventure should take. My goal is to start the next adventure in mid-late March or in April, with a new case study happening in early March (maybe kicking off late February if I'm really productive!).   If you're new to this series, the Modding Diary is a daily report on my modding progress f

A Letter Home (Kirstia's Second Adventure, Epilogue)

Dear Mother,   I hope this letter finds you well. When we parted company earlier this year, I was eager to discover the secret behind the strange forces influencing my fate. I'm pleased to tell you now that while I haven't unraveled the mystery, I may have at least found a thread to start tugging on.    I think you would have enjoyed the adventure my search took me on. I met a number of interesting people, overcame difficult challenges, and set my eyes on some truly wondrous

Final Examination (Kirstia's Second Adventure, Chapter 15)

The sky was starting to shade into dusk as I crossed beneath the gate of Larak's fortress. As before, I found him near the entrance and waved in greeting.   "Chief Larak," I said, "I trust all is well?"     "Aye," he grumbled, "little has changed since you left. Were you successful in your quest?"   I gestured towards my pack. "I was. I'm on my way to tell Millonce the good news right now."    "And the cave, did it offer you a suitable challenge

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