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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

Bethesda Modding Diary - 20 July 2022

Hi folks, and welcome back. I hope you enjoyed yesterday's dive in to the ships of the 22nd century Deep Space Fleet - I'm looking forward to doing the next volume, though I need to do some research first, especially into Brad Torgerson's studies into the actual size of 23rd century Drells compared to the notoriously flawed FASA art. Even as I wrote the last article, I learned some new things "in progress", such as about the existence of the LD5 in Star Fleet Battles and the specific differences

Trek Lore Special Edition: Klingon Fleet Evolution

Hi folks, I've been struggling to get motivated to do modding for the last few days (might have something to do with how hot it's been... I should have put a heat pump in my office when I did my HVAC refit a few years ago! However, my brain has kept flitting back to the different takes on the Klingon Deep Space Fleet from the Star Trek expanded universe, and I figured I'd exercise my fingers a little by writing on the subject. We'll be back soon with some navmesh repair and a lot of catchup on t

Mod Case Study: Sexy Bandit Captives (Part 1 - Initial Review and Cleaning)

Happy Saturday everyone! Our snap poll yesterday ended with Sexy Bandit Captives winning, so we'll focus on getting this one up and running today. If you recall our last look at this mod, we found a lot of technical problems in it that we're going to need to address before the mod can integrate into my build. We'll be doing this is a full-scale mod case study, so I'll be breaking down the process step by step and going into more detail than usual.   Nerd Time   Getting Star

Bethesda Modding Diary - 15 July 2022

Welcome back, everyone! I was very disappointed to discover that, despite producing enough content to have a new episode every week, Paramount has somehow managed to schedule six weeks with no new Star Trek episodes! Fortunately, The Orville is still airing new episodes on Hulu, but I'd really got used to a steady stream of new Trek. Today is going to be a light modding day, because I've got a lot of conflicting demands on my time, but I do still want to make some progress at least. By the way,

Bethesda Modding Diary - 14 July 2022

Hi folks, welcome back! I can't speak for how in depth today's diary will be, since I'm in the middle of a fairly involved project at work, but I didn't want to completely neglect hobby time either. Fun fact, by the way, Loverslab is really good at caching unfinished posts. I started writing a Charley chapter yesterday, but quickly ran into runner's block and ended up just turning on god mode and doing some free-building instead. However, when I came back today and started this post, Loverslab p

Bethesda Modding Diary - 12 July 2022

Welcome back, folks. I hope you enjoyed our little trip to Qo'noS yesterday - as I mentioned in the comments, one of my key reference books is MIA right now but once I find it I may come back and expand on that some more. In the meanwhile, let's do some Skyrim modding!   Lucky Numbers     The Easy Stuff First   Sprucing Up Blackreach   Choo Choo!   Well, I was expecting Blackreach Railroad to require a lot more work, so this wrapped

Trek Lore Special Edition: History of the Klingon Empire

Hi folks, hope you all had a good weekend! I don't have time to do a full diary entry today, because of the scope of our Trek Lore segment, so today we'll just talk about Klingons and get back to modding stuff tomorrow!   Sourcing Klingon History   In The Beginning   The Depths of Prehistory   The Coming of the Hur'q   The Brink of Collapse   Slow Recovery   The Old Kings Arrive     A New Kahless F

Bethesda Modding Diary - 09 July 2022

Happy Saturday everyone, and welcome back. Yesterday, @Talesien posted a question about the Old Kings and how they relate to the Klingon Empire. The Kings are "deep lore" from the Star Fleet Battles materials, and to discuss them properly it's important to understand the geopolitical situation in and around the Klingon Empire. So today we'll start that conversation.   Of course, this is the Bethesda Modding Diary, so we'll also be covering some Bethesda mods. I didn't really see anythi

Bethesda Modding Diary - 08 July 2022

Hi everyone, hope you've been having a good week so far. I've been dragging my feet on updating Fallout 4 and I think that'll be my focus today, though I'll also add in one or two small Skyrim mods.    As an aside, is anyone familiar with the website DDS Workshop? I only learned about the site today, and it seems to have some interesting material - including a complexion mod that includes options for creating characters with vitiligo. Apparently these mods were previously paywalled (bo

Bethesda Modding Diary - 07 July 2022

Welcome back, everyone. Season finale for Strange New Worlds is tonight... that series has really exceeded expectations, hasn't it? To be fair, it's kind of the "real" Discover season 3, and by that metric it's due to grow the beard and get its space legs. Between that and a new Orville, I think I know what my wife and I are going to be doing over dinner     In the meanwhile, as I mentioned yesterday I decided to shelf The Seamstress Guild until I have the time to give it a step-by-ste

Bethesda Modding Diary - 06 July 2022

Happy Wednesday, everyone! I hope you're having a great day so far. I, for one, spent most of my day sitting in the lobby at my IT office because half the staff was on vacation, leading to huge delays on service. Wheeeeeee! But all's well now, so I guess I can't complain too much. Today is going to be a pretty quick session, I basically have a quest mod, a gear mod, and an NPC enemy mod that I want to get installed, but unless I find myself with a lot more free time than I'm anticipating, that'l

Bethesda Modding Diary - 05 July 2022

Welcome back, folks! Yesterday turned into a rather involved exercise, so today I'm going to try and catch up on some lighter-weight mods. Notably, a new statuary mod has come out that's causing me to reconsider an earlier mod that at the time I skipped. We've also got some new Trek lore to delve into.   Fallout counts are unchanged from last time, Skyrim counts are 1745 installed, 1693 plugins, last load order index EC.   Starship Histories   Think Of The Childre

Bethesda Modding Diary - 04 July 2022

Hi everyone, and happy 4th of July to my readers in the USA! Today I'm going to finish up with my Sanguine related modding and maybe some more stuff too, it time permits. We didn't update our Fallout mod count last time but our starting counts for Skyrim are:   Mods installed: 1743 Plugins active: 1692 Final load order index: EC   Nerdy Stuff   Wrapping Up With Sanguine   Unfortunately, that actually required a fair amount of wrestli

Bethesda Modding Diary - 03 July 2022

Welcome back, everyone! Today we're going to customize a mod that normally wouldn't be a great fit so that it meshes better with the game world. We're also going to add some more defensive options to Fallout in anticipation of the next chapter in Charley's story nope, ran out of time  . Fallout 4 already picked up another mod when I installed Guard Posts and Spotlights while I was writing Chapter 42, though it didn't make it into the final cut of the chapter. Here's our starting mod counts:

Shock Therapy (Charley's Adventure, Chapter 42)

By now we'd learned through long experience that the grip we wanted for Concord started with walls. After a rather lively debate, where I had to throw cold water on the idea of fortifying all of Concord - and even building an Athenian style long wall down Route 62 all the way to the Red Rocket or even to Sanctuary - we settled on starting by walling off the city blocks immediately adjoining Route 62. This would give us more than enough space to start our work in, and ensure we controlled the cit

Bethesda Modding Diary - 01 July 2022

Welcome back, everyone. Today we're going to take on a few different goals - installing a couple new quality of life mods, fixing a few glitched interactions I've discovered over the last couple weeks, and integrating some Khajiit themed mods. I've also got a new Fallout 4 mod to add. Since we haven't reviewed the Fallout 4 mod count for a while, let's look at where both games stand going into today:   Skyrim Mods installed: 1735 Plugins active: 1680

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

gregaaz

gregaaz in Miscellaneous

Bethesda Modding Diary - 30 June 2022

OK, I'm back. Yesterday we started going through some mods that covered LGBT themes. We got to the "G" and "T" parts, but we ran out of time before getting to the rest of the content. We'll wrap up that series of mods today.   Our starting counts in Skyrim are:   Mods installed: 1728 Plugins active: 1673 Last load order index: E9   Those Naval Contracts   Alternatives to the Amulet of Mara   Romantic Correspondence  

Bethesda Modding Diary - 29 June 2022

Hi folks, hard to believe we're already at the end of June! Since this is Pride Month and we're wrapping up, I figured I'd revisit a few LGBT themed mods that have been on my to-do list for a while so they can get some exposure. I think I've mentioned in the past that while I'm a fairly boring cis/hetero guy, I think it's important for immersive world building to reflect a diverse world, and since this is a NSFW setup that includes sexual orientation and gender expression. That, and I won't lie

Bethesda Modding Diary - 28 June 2022

Welcome back, everyone. Anyone curious what this mysterious new evidence that's going to be revealed this afternoon is all about? It'll be interesting to find out. In the meanwhile, let's finish integrating Immersive Jewelry and The Gemstone Collector. As you might recall from a while back, we've gone through and addressed several specific conflicts between the two mods and also between these mods and Legacy of the Dragonborn. Now we want to address some of the more straightforward conflicts suc

Bethesda Modding Diary - 27 June 2022

Hi folks, welcome to another new week  I was pleased to see Westworld Season 4 managed to survive HBO's culling of sci-fi that caused the premature death of Raised By Wolves. Hopefully their management will come to see reason and stop killing their good content. As for modding, I kind of got an itch today to check a specific item off my Skyrim to-do list: Missives and The Notice Board. Both of these mods add more radiant quests to the game, outside the faction system, which allows for more adven

Concord Hymn (Charley's Story, Chapter 41)

In the end, taking over Concord was an anticlimax. A week had passed since we seized the quarry, and our outposts did their job well: they intercepted several raider groups of different sizes, all making their way towards the city. I'm told that nowadays the historians call it Operation Concord Hymn and make it sound like a well-oiled military operation, but the reality is we just walked in and set up shop. True, Preston and his folks had to go through some of the buildings to clear out feral Gh

gregaaz

gregaaz in Charley's Story II

Bethesda Modding Diary - 23 June 2022

Welcome back, folks. Today we'll be installing a couple of Fallout 4 mods that will soon be needed for Charley's story. I've also got a few Skyrim mods, including some monsters, that I need to get up and running. We're starting out with the following mod counts:   Skyrim Mods installed: 1709 Plugins active: 1658 Last load order index: E7 Fallout Mods installed: 488 Plugins active: 547 Last load

Anxiety Relief (Charley's Story, Chapter 40)

The next morning, the heat of the moment had worn off and I felt like crap. In the time since I'd escaped the vault, I'd killed people, sure. But it was always in self-defense. Even when Jake and I attacked the raiders in Concord, there was no question that it was us or them. But this time, I'd killed three helpless people. And I'd done it in a way that was designed to humiliate them. I'd stripped them naked, tied them up, and made them watch as I hanged them one by one. I even made sure to kill

gregaaz

gregaaz in Charley's Story II

Rough Justice (Charley's Story, Chapter 39)

The process of building up Drumlin Diner into a more defensible position proceeded at a good pace. Seth pretty quickly concluded that the pond out back wasn't a good candidate for a full-scale water purifier, but he did manage to run a pipe down to the pond that he hooked up to a mechanical pump to draw water back up to the Diner for purification on site. When he was done, we buried the pipe and finished walling up that side of the Diner's parking lot.   Two days later, Preston's guard

gregaaz

gregaaz in Charley's Story II


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