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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 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

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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

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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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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

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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

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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

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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

2024 AE Build: A Small Country Store

Hi folks, and happy Friday! Yesterday we took a bit of an unplanned deep dive into multi-mod compatibility as we integrated a small quest mod with a pretty significant location overhaul. Today, we're going to continue our journey back to Whiterun with a stop off in Riverwood. While we'll be customizing all the remaining areas in the zone during this trip (Riverwood really is that small - four houses, the store, and the tavern), the focus today is going to be on the Riverwood Trader and its inhab

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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

2024 AE Build: The Cabin In The Woods

Welcome back everyone! Last time we did a nice expansion of Bleak Falls Barrow, and while some of the mods I had hoped to incorporate didn't seem like good fits (the Dungeon Darkness mod for example). It was pleasing to find that Bleak Falls Revisited preserves all the vanilla coordinates, which is a really nice compatibility decision and something the author Cooleoj deserves praise for doing.    Today we're going to leave Bleak Falls through the back door, walk through the mammoth gra

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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

2024 AE Build: Our First Real Dungeon Crawl

Welcome back, everyone! Yesterday we did some work bugfixing as well as enhancing the mountain path that leads up to Bleak Falls Barrow. We also took a look at a nice environmental mod that would have been a great fit but just presented too much work to properly integrate - but who knows, maybe we'll give it a second look in the future?   Today, we're going to overhaul the interior of Bleak Falls Barrow and then look through it for opportunities to make smaller tweaks and improvements.

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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

2024 AE Build: Onward to Bleak Falls

Hi folks, welcome back! When we last left off, we had just delivered news of the dragon attack on Helgen to Jarl Balgruuf and been introduced to Farengar. Let's walk through what's going to happen next. In the vanilla game, Farengar will encourage the player to travel to Bleak Falls Barrow and retrieve the Dragonstone. Over the course of the Bleak Falls adventure, the player will also get the quest "The Golden Claw" if they haven't already, and since the exit to Bleak Falls will push the player

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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

2024 Skyrim Build: Inner Whiterun

Hope everyone is having a good weekend! Today we'll cross through the city gates and work on Whiterun proper, along with the Jarl's palace Dragonsreach. If you were reading the comments thread on the previous post, you already know that I had to delay this segment a little bit in order to do an integration of Hydragorgon Slave Girls that kind of grew into a side project of its own. You'll see some of the fruits of that in this volume, and continue to see more of it in future segments.  

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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

2024 Skyrim Build: Whiterun OR It's always bikini season if you're a werewolf

Hi folks, welcome back! I originally planned to cover both the Whiterun exterior and also the interior in this volume, but I'm still wrapping up some final details for WhiterunWorld and Dragonsreach, so we'll split those up to give me a little time to complete my work. Today we'll focus on the walk from Riverwood to Whiterun, the Whiterun exterior, and of course the iconic fight between the Companions and a local giant.     In keeping with our approach to selecting mods, we're going to

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2024 Skyrim Build: Riverwood

Happy Thursday, everyone! Last time we reviewed customizations of the elements of MQ101, the first segment of the main quest. This mostly focused on the courtyard scene, but it also flowed down into the Helgen Keep adventure to a small extent. Today, we'll cover the walk to Riverwood and customization of the town itself.    So, let's leave Helgen and start our walk!     The first point of interest that we come across on the road out of Helgen is the Guardian

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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

2024 Skyrim Build: Kicking Off The Main Quest

Welcome back, everyone. Last time, we talked about customizing one of the NPCs in pre-destruction Helgen, as well as sprucing up the Alternate Perspective starting room. Today, let's take a look at the opening scene of the main quest.    Needless to say, this requires us to trigger the main quest, which results in a lot of actors spawning into the game world for us to look at. If you recall the punchlist on the first post, we're going to look at customizing a lot of these characters. 

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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

2024 Skyrim Build: There is such a thing as too long a blog OR Customizing Helgen

Hi Everybody, hope you are having a good winter so far! A while back I posted about how the release of Skyrim 1.6.1130 - and in particular, the doubling of the ESL cap - got me interested in modding Skyrim again. If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I had a very successful build in 2023 that met all my expectations and proved really satisfying to put together. Originally, I had thought about doing another build from scratch using the new version, but as things have devel

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gregaaz in 2024 AE Build

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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gregaaz in Miscellaneous

Distant Opportunities (Charley's Story, Chapter 94)

"The Institute?" Quartercut said, working the words slowly. "This is the mythical group that engineered the Commonwealth Provisional Government massacre, correct?"   Despite the support the power suit gave me, I could still feel my shoulders weighing heavily on me with fatigue. Our escape from the fishery in the wee hours of the morning had left me with precious little energy, but I felt the news of our discovery couldn't wait.    "Far from mythical," I corrected. "I suppose

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gregaaz in Charley's Story IV

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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gregaaz in Miscellaneous

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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gregaaz in Miscellaneous

Fishy Business (Charley's Story, Chapter 93)

"You can't just ignore the threat. As long as they're still there out there, they're a threat; and on top of that, they have the Vestments."   We'd awoken to a rainy morning, though fortunately Quartercut's people had put down the sleeping backs well away from the open part of her hall's roof. Heather was up before me, scanning the near distance and rather pointedly ignoring the argument that was happening upstairs - but very much in earshot.     "Ugh, what's the r

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gregaaz in Charley's Story IV

Anna's Legacy (Charley's Story, Chapter 92)

"Got a second, Charley?"   I'd awakened just before dawn, and with Heather and Piper flanking me in bed I quickly started to feel uncomfortably warm. After a quick shower, I left the Paisleys' house and started walking around the perimeter of the settlement. Red's people had done a good job building up the defenses, but other aspects of the project seemed to be lagging a bit behind. Of course, the one we noticed most acutely was that the main house hadn't been repaired. So I had a bit

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gregaaz in Charley's Story IV

Religious Experience (Charley's Story, Chapter 91)

The next morning, while Piper went downstairs to give Tony Savoldi the bad news about the mattress and pay him for a replacement, I thought more about how we were going to track down Cabot's package. I assumed it had already been missing at least some time before Deegan met us at Bunker Hill, and in turn several days had passed since that meeting. That meant that unless the courier was dead in a ditch and the package just abandoned, we weren't going to find it in the immediate area of Lynne Wood

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gregaaz in Charley's Story IV


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