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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

Telling Starfield Stories: Division of Labor

Hi folks, I hope you are all having a great week! Some of the more observant folks here may have noticed a new link on the sidebar of my blog that doesn't correspond to a new post.      Grace's Story is the Starfield game-story blog that I recently started. It is going to be a SFW story and I don't think it's an appropriate use of Loverslab site resources to host it here and potentially take visibility away from other NSFW blogs in the blog roll, so I'll be posting it on int

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gregaaz in Miscellaneous

Messing around with Starfield while I battle low motivation

I've been struggling to get motivated to do FO4 for the last couple days so I've been working on preparing for my Starfield story instead. While it's definitely swinging in a more SFW direction (in no small part because of the lack of resources for NSFW storytelling of the sort that FO4 and Skyrim can support), I did embark on some contingency planning, not the least of which involved "aging up" Cora Coe an 18/19 year old young adult.     It's hard to make faces look really 

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gregaaz in Miscellaneous

2024 FO Build: Thanks a bunch, Creation Kit :(

So I've been slowly getting back into FO4 modding now that everything is up to date for the "Next Generation" release. There's even a new mod that finally addresses the FaceGen related memory leak that caused so many problems for me in the past! If you've been following the conversation in the 3D Pubic Hair thread, you already saw that I shared a cleaned up and improved version of the private pubic hair mod I used in Charley's Story, and hopefully in the days ahead I'll figure out how to get col

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gregaaz in 2024 FO Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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

2024 FO Build: Pain In The Neck (Seam)

Hi folks, welcome back. Last time I promised you that I'd take you through setting up Advanced Animation Framework as well as rebuilding the body replacers to use the newest versions. However, that experience turned out to be no very bloggable; it basically involved following The Fucking Manual, packing up the loose files into BA2 archives, then doing a quick test run to make sure everything worked out of a BA2. Spoiler, not everything worked. The English-language (or whatever language you're us

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gregaaz in 2024 FO Build

2024 FO Build: Textures and Bodies

Welcome back, folks. As I mentioned last time, my goal today is to finish the primary foundation for the game, which will consist of updating the vanilla graphics and also getting body mods running. Continuing with the principles I laid out last time, my plan is for everything at this stage to operate out of BA2 archives, so I may need to do some packing if individual mods are shipped loose.    I started with Vivid Fallout and its suite of LOD and complex parallax add-ons. Installing t

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gregaaz in 2024 FO Build

2024 FO Build: First Principles

Welcome back, everyone, and for those of you in the USA hope you are able to get some time off from work to enjoy the holiday. As you probably read last night, after over 177 hours of game time my previous build started to slide into terminal decline. While that's disappointing, that build also had some foundational problems that meant sooner or later it was going to fail. Fortunately, I've learned a lot since I made that last build, and the new one that will replace it is going to be faster, hi

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2024 FO Build

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

gregaaz

gregaaz in Miscellaneous

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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

gregaaz

gregaaz in 2024 AE Build


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