It's hard to make faces look really youthful in Starfield, in part because its optimized around older characters and also because there are some odd quirks of the face graph (notably, one muscle in particular seems to have been omitted, which makes some of the facial expressions look odd), but overall I'm satisfied with how the up-aged Cora came out. I created her by blending the

version of Cora with her child self, and after several rounds of trial and error I arrived at a pretty good in-between stage. 

Here's our brave captain, Grace Varley (in some of her lives she's been Grayson Varley, but I usually roll her as a woman). Seeking a break from her

, Grace has fully committed herself to exploration, even going so far as to allow Walter Stroud to take apart her priceless ship, the Guardian in order to reverse-engineer it's exotic technologies. Between that and a generous (and very much under the table) funding stream from UC SYSDEF, Constellation preparing for the launch of her first super-long-range exploration ship, the Intrepid. 

At this point I've finished building the Intrepid and now I'm working on assembling her crew and decorating the interior. She's a mostly conventional design, though she does have a Class M power plant to allow her to get up enough thrust to lift off with her big side-saddle cargo bins. Intrepid was mostly built by Stroud-Eklund, but a elements of the design were outsourced to Matilija Aerospace, notably the large observation dome on the rear hull. The only part of the Guardian that remains intact is its forward command module, though the interior is mostly gutted.

(fun fact, I had to save scum after I took these pictures because the mere act of painting the outer hull caused the game to delete most of my interior decoration work... so when Intrepid launches she'll be painted in her default and somewhat mismatched paint scheme rather than this nicer and more uniform look 😠. When I do her sister ship, the Dauntless, in the future, I'll have to remember to paint her before I do any interior fitting-out)

Maybe don't ask too many questions about how this highly classified UC Navy surveillance module ended up bolted to the side of Intrepid. It's a long story.

Our cozy little med bay, one of the more complete areas as far as decorations go.

Chief Lin, our ground ops lead. She's going to mostly be a passenger on the first leg of Intrepid's maiden journey, but she'll be critical when the time comes to set up ground support stations. At a bare minimum, we'll likely need to set up a fueling station at some point along the trip.

Most of the rest of the gang hanging out in the ops center. In addition to the usual suspects, you can see Heller (with the ground support team) on the left and Otero, our weapon systems officer, on the right. We still need to recruit a few more people, notably Andreja, Rosie Tannehill (who will be an actual doctor in this game), and a certain talented engineer, the rumors of whose death are greatly exaggerated. 

But there's still a good amount of off-camera work for me to do before Intrepid is ready to actually start on her story. Hopefully you'll all enjoy it once the stage is set for the writing of it.

Incidentally, this was all done without any cheating (except for injecting a few outfits onto characters for purely aesthetic value). All the cash for building Intrepid was earned fair and square in-game, and I'm pretty proud of that accomplishment  

My current project stemmed from the small customization job I did on Magnolia using an outfit by DX. I decided that rather than doing a simple outfit swap patch, I would use some of the skills I developed in my most recent round of Skyrim customization to do unique art in The Third Rail without messing with any other game stuff - so players' general replacers (or lack thereof) wouldn't be impacted outside that one location. This was a good learning experience for me and I developed much better familiarity with material swaps, BGSM files, and the way some textures in FO4 are shared between multiple art objects through the use of offsets.

I'm pretty happy with how the art swaps came out, and as you can see from how I have to use the flashlight on most of them to really see them in detail, under natural lighting they're subtle enough to blend in with the surroundings pretty well. I also learned about how to use the "cloud" filter in Gimp to apply random looking dirt to the posters, which makes them fit in better than just having them be totally clean. 

While I was working on this, I learned the basics of rigging up fully functional skill magazines, so if you get sticky fingers (no double-entendre intended) with the magazines on the table, the Sole Survivor will get some very small stat bonuses from them.

The last part of this mod, and what I'm working on now, is setting up a small fetch quest to track down and repair a ruined poster in the VIP room. I spent a bunch of time yesterday rigging up the dialogue, and it more or less worked when I tested it. I'm still learning some of the intricacies of the the Creation Kit's quest dialogue manager - not the most intuitive and user friendly system ever designed! However, the UI wasn't the real problem last night. The real problem is that The Creation Kit helpfully deleted all my material swap edits when it loaded my plugin. This was an issue in the Skyrim CK as well, and its a reason you have to do certain Texture Set edits (like for the 1st person models) in xEdit exclusively, but I was really annoyed to see just how pervasive it was with FO4. The CK wiped out essentially 100% of my art edits. 

So it looks like I'll be starting from scratch, doing the quest in a completely separate file and then merging it with the art edits file. That's going to increase the time to complete the mod, though fortunately all the aliases are going to be on vanilla characters and objects so I won't have to touch my art edits any further in the CK.

Still, it's super frustrating and it just underscores that the CK should ask before it "helpfully" fucks around with your work on loading a plugin. Surely this must be just as frustrating for the Bethesda folks using the CK internally, right?! 

I considered uploading a beta version with this blog, but it contains enough art assets in it that I don't really feel comfortable sharing it without a proper credits page connected to it. I will however keep sharing progress as it moves forward. I still need to ponder on whether or not I'm going to make a "less NSFW" version for the Nexus, but I'm leaning towards this particular mod being Loverslab-only, if for no other reason than I have my doubts about whether or not the Nexus would tolerate linking directly to the source artists' Patreons or other monetized platforms, and I think its important that I create an opportunity to drive traffic back to their sites since I sampled their artwork.

But I digress. Just wanted to give folks an update on what I'd been up to since I know I've been quiet for a while. 

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 that I got permission to overhaul right before the big "next generation engine" update came out. Unfortunately, Buffout 4 is still being updated to the new version so my FO4 build isn't currently playable and I just don't feel like downgrading back to the old baseline. I've got plenty of other things to work on.

On the Starfield front, the mod situation seems to be stabilizing quickly (though it still requires a dev build of MO2 for it to run properly). I am starting to come up with a general idea of an adventure that might be fun to blog, but the NSFW scene for Starfield is still in its earliest days, and while I've encountered some concepts that might be fun to play with in Starfield (note that you probably need to translate this document if you can't read Japanese, but machine translation seemed to work pretty well when I used it), until foundational elements like good quality body replacers and animation resources are available it's kind of looking like that might be an SFW blog which I'd post on a different platform.

So that brings us back to Skyrim. When we last talked about Soljund's Sinkhole, we'd been running into some technical difficulties with porting a Celtic themed outfit replacer into the game. Since then, I spent a little bit of time consolidating a number of low-impact bug fixing mods that contained a lot of plugins and loose assets so that they weren't contributing to excessive load times. This didn't solve the load times overnight, but its a step in the right direction. I also developed a few ideas for fixing the commoner outfits - I'm not quite fully ready to give up on that resource I found - but those are going to wait for another day. In the end though, if it doesn't work out I have come up with a "plan B" option for the baseline appearance of rural Reach folk... so that's something at least. I also sketched out some ideas for Larza and Billiam, and I'm now gathering resources to use in realizing my idea.

Meanwhile, I want to spend a little time fine tuning the Lawbringer add-on for Soljund's Sinkhole. Currently it has four options: Reach (does very little), Empire (turns the mine into a Thalmor labor camp), Stormcloaks (adds a Stormcloak garrison but no other real shenanigans), and Forsworn (I haven't tested this thoroughly because of access conditions but it seems to add a bunch of Forsworn tribal decorations and stuff). What I'd like to do is expand these so they are similar in content density and also align with other resources we have available to us. I discussed incorporating this content with the Quaint Soljund's Sinkhole author and she indicated that her vision for any of the non-Reach scenarios would be, and I quote:

Quote

No more happy village, only suffering.

I think I can work with that. Basically what I've got in mind is:

• Reach Version: The exterior still only gets the one guard and no fortifications, but it also gains some Sacred Band warriors for additional protection. Similar to the Empire version, it would gain some prisoners working in the deep mine under the eye of Markarth guards. These will be Forsworn prisoners with the appropriate templates. I need to recreate my previous Sacred Band setup anyway for other purposes, so this is a good excuse to do so.
• Stormcloak Version: I'm not sure what I want to do with this yet. Maybe burn down the village and have the inhabitants become refugees in Markarth? Maybe just quarter Stormcloak soldiers in the homes and displace the original inhabitants? I need to think on this one further. 
• Empire Version: Perth has a shrine of Dibella in his house. I'm thinking that I'll change that to shrine of Talos and have him and his sister imprisoned by the Thalmor in this version. Exactly how I change it beyond that I need to think on further.
• Forsworn Version: Let's force-trigger this outcome and take a look at the changes it makes.

Outside it adds Forsworn guards and a few decorations. Like the Empire and Stormcloak versions, it adds some tents that might need to be moved slightly to line up properly with the landscape.

Inside the mine, there are a few Forsworn workers actually mining, as well as some guards and boss types. Forsworn decorations, too.

I'm kind of thinking that the approach here may be to replace the two Forsworn miners with Prynn and Midelle, forced to work in the mine, adjust the vanilla miners' packages so they sleep in the mine instead of going home at the end of their shift, and lock up Larze and Billiame in cages (perhaps some of the uncomfortable small ZAZ cages like the ones shown below). 

There might be some more options, but the ZAZ test cell always gives me motion sickness so I didn't delve too deep. Either way, I think I have a basic conceptual approach for the different scenarios. I need to do a little bit of research about the best way to accomplish these - especially in terms of altering the actors' behavior and packages. I think superficially the idea is to either add more conditions and then lock them up behind packages, OR to just straight up clone the actors and lock them up behind enable masters tied to the different scenarios. The latter should be a bit easier to execute in some respects, but it wouldn't be sensitive to alive/dead states without more work, leading to actors dying or resurrecting based on which scenario is chosen potentially. On the other hand, adding the extra package conditions shouldn't be too bad, but I might have some issues managing outfits. This warrants further research.

For today, let's actually hop over to Hydragorgon and customize the Sacred Band. I have a few things I want to do and that'll involve a few prerequisites.

1. Add a few more body types to the randomizer. The Sacred Band is fairly exposed, so having more variety is important for them.
2. Rebuild the outfit I created for last time.
3. Adjust their weapon selection for a more Markarth theme rather than the Imperial theme they have in the vanilla version.
4. Test against the existing instances of the Sacred Band, and if things look good then add Sacred Band to the Reach scenario (probably starting by cloning the Thalmor operatives from the Empire scenario).

For the first item, we're going to be looking for BHUNP V4 presets that lean towards athletic body types. After a little fishing I decided on:

• Dibella's Strength
• BHUNP V4 Custom Natural
• Artemis BHUNP (this contains 5 presets)

With those installed, next let's update the OBody configuration files to only pull from those choices when assigning bodies to the Sacred Band. Hydragorgon has them all share a specific faction, which we'll key in on.

That should take care of the overall body shape. What about the faces and hair? Hydragorgon certainly comes with some options already, but it's mostly just "vanilla plus" type quality, and I think Dibella's gorgeous defenders will benefit from some further prettying up. 

Deadly Wenches is kind of a timeless classic, and it's been stable for a long time which helps facilitate customizations and patching - no worries about it radically changing tomorrow. While this does add a few new NPCs to the game world (via its prerequisite, Immersive Wenches), in my experience it isn't enough to really contribute to NPC-driven performance degradation. Let's go install those two now, and give them a quick once-over for compatibility purposes.

I loaded them above my custom patch for Hydragorgon just to facilitate easy patching - I don't want to create a second layer of patching just for this change. Unlike my bespoke edits to the main hydragorgon file, this custom patch isn't being "stage managed" to reduce dependencies.

An asset scan already confirmed that IW isn't conflicting with anything outside its own ecosystem, now let's open these files in xEdit and make sure they aren't touching anything they shouldn't.

For Deadly Wenches I just needed to do some limited lightweight patching of the leveled NPC records. 

The core IW mod was almost exclusively top level cell data edits. This does mean that I need to keep an eye out for stray objects or confused NPC pathing when I overhaul interiors (taverns mostly) but that's a pretty standard "due diligence" requirement anyway.

With those records patched, now we need to decide how we want to integrate the DW faces into Hydragorgon. Let's start by finding the Sacred Band characters. Initially we'll work with them in a working file just to keep the clutter under control.

Here they are. They actually already obtained a template from my earlier efforts to push more diverse faces out to them, but now we're going to make them more distinct rather than just using bandit faces.

Next I copied the Imperial Soldier Deadly Wenches leveled list along with the "all humans" list and did some tweaking. Basically, I replaced excess Nords with unused Breton faces. Then I made that edited version into a new record for the Sacred Band.

I then injected it into each Sacred Band NPC and pushed those edits back to the main customization file.

We'll save both the customization patch and also the working file, since we're not quite done here. However, before we do more xEdit work let's pay a quick visit to Bodyslide. Just like last time, COCO's Goddess of War is going to be the foundation of our Sacred Band costume. The basic outfit for the Band will be the arm protectors, boots #1 (the tall version), the non-SMP version of the body harness, the gloves, the waist piece, and the SMP version of the ribbon. They will have the gold version of the armor (in keeping with their Markarth origins) and the blue-dyed leather for their outfit. This is going to be a bit of a divergence from the red I used last time, so we'll see how it looks... we might go back to red if the blue doesn't look good.

Whoops, just kidding, the blue textures don't appear to come in the vanilla download so I went with gold and black instead. In any event, now it's time to build the outfits. The Sacred Band has two different outfits: one for melee and one for archers. Both will be based on the notional outfit I first put together, with a couple of tweaks for customization.

I also went through the equipment for each NPC and made sure they had dwarven, rather than steel, weapons. After I pushed all those changes back to main Hydra patch, the last thing to do is assign SOS factions to these actors. That final edit went to my overall Actors patch because the SOS assets are down-load-order below my Hydra patch, but that's actually fine for a few different technical reasons (not the least of which being avoiding a situation where it overrides SOS MCM settings if I ever share this patch with someone else).

Last but not least, I need to run the NPC facegen patcher on Immersive Wenches and Deadly Wenches to fix any skin mismatches. This was mildly annoying because I had to extract the BSA files for patching (that took a while) but otherwise it went smoothly.

Now let's visit one of the shrines and see how the Sacred Band looks.

I saw this on the way there, and I guarantee you the problem is that Immersive Wenches is depending on a hair texture that's not installed. Let's fix that real quick before we jump back into the game.

Much better. Though as I look at this mod I do realize that I'll need to either install iNova NPC to balance the sex distribution on random characters, or I'll need to peel back some of the Deadly Wenches contributions. I suspect that most combatant leveled lists have a significant female skew that, while aesthetically pleasant, isn't very realistic of "immersive."

OK, so while for the most part things are OK, there are three deficiencies I'm noting:

1. The outfits are not consistently morphing, almost certainly a sign that the Goddess of War outfit isn't fully BHUNP V4 compatible and needs to have some of its parts updated for the V4 body.
2. The default body textures' painted-on hair is making he custom-added 3d meshes irrelevant. This may prove slightly tricky to work with since these characters have randomized baseforms, so I'll need to think about how I want to overcome that issue.
3. The feet are not rigged for Racemenu high heels, so I'll need to add the offset text files. 

On the other hand the faces and skin textures all look good, so at least we aren't running into any issues on that score. I need to do a little research into the best way to address issue #2 - it might just be to remove the SOS factions - before I proceed to work on fixing this stuff, but I guess we know what I'll be working on in my next session!

After some further consideration, I decided to leave the NPC faces alone with the exception of the Ork blacksmith, for whom I had already picked out a custom face. I used the same technical approach I had previously applied to the male vampires for the cannibal banquet scene, which involved grabbing the source mod, then changing the form ID numbers on the replacers so they are standalone (and unconnected to anything), then I changed the form ID (again) on the one face I wanted to override the custom NPC. Once that was done, I merged the appearance data on her record with the original modded version. I also went into the all the custom NPCs and patched their facegen data so that it used the proper skin textures and would avoid tint mismatches at the neck.

While I was getting resources for this project, I noticed another interesting new mod: an overhaul for The Taste of Death. Based on the written description, this sounds like a good addition to my game, though I don't know if I want to start messing around with overhauling the Markarth area just yet. Still I'm putting it in my proverbial back pocket for more attention in the near future. Actually, the Soljund project will be a good foundational exercise for that one, since I'll need to put some thought into the Reach "look" for characters as I move forward with this integration.

Before we patch the other actors (the ones whose faces I'm keeping), let's make sure this custom job is working properly in-game.

OK, tint issues and all her custom face geometry is loading in without problems, so looks good.

I wonder if I should customize her vendor list to include some of the weapons from Armoury of Tamriel that are made in the Ork style but using conventional materials. I think that would be a nice little extra benefit to come from visiting her, especially at lower levels.

First things first though, let's patch the rest of the new NPCs from this mod.

While it's not the worst mismatch ever, there's definitely a difference between the vanilla face textures (which in D&D are the Nord textures) and the Breton ones. We'll fix this by opening up each of the face nifs and changing the texture path to the custom ones from D&D. 

Now the skin tones are consistent with the bodies. That pretty much completes the most basic level of integration. I could walk away from this mod at this point and it would be a fully functional extension of the game world. But I want to put some more effort into it before I do that. The next logical thing to look at is clothing. For the Reach region, which basically covers everything west of Fort Sungard and south of Druadach Redoubt, I envision there are basically three general clothing templates:

• Urban Elites: These are the people who live in the upper class areas of Markarth, as well as artisans and village chiefs throughout the Reach who have the resources to imitate their affectations. The "Urban Elite" style is influenced by the Temple of Dibella and tends towards visible skin and comfortable materials. Jewelry and adornments are common in this style (though not so common in the 'poseur' subclass). Billiame, the village chief, belongs to this class, as does his wife Larza*. 
• Assimilated Commoners: Many non-Bretons and especially Nords in the Reach fall into this category, but so do Bretons who may have moved to the region from elsewhere and who are not deeply immersed in Reachman culture. Their outfits will reflect Nordic styles or, in the case of upper class people who aren't tied to Markarth, Cyrodiilic styles. Tuthul's wife Midelle belongs to this class.
• Native Reachmen: Breton commoners who are native to the Reach fall into the category, especially those who live in isolated rural areas. I kind of envision them having a bit of a Celtic look and I'll likely try adapting this mod for the baseline outfits. The miners Perth and Tuthul, as well as Perth's sister Prynn belong to this class.

* if Larza's backstory bears out her having any kind of meaningful Orkish cultural heritage, we'll want to reflect this in her outfit as well.

Before I start putting together I want to go back into the game to talk to these characters and get their stories. This'll require a quick run through the dungeon to unlock the relevant dialogue, after which we'll have some discussions to learn more about these characters.

That turned out to be a bit of an anticlimax - other than unlocked a few small side quests, the characters in the Sinkhole don't actually have a lot of dialogue beyond greeting lines. This does kind of make my job easier though since I'm not getting stuck having to adapt to a ton of detailed background.

Since Midelle is in the "assimilated commoners" class, we're going to just leave her outfit alone. She'll get the nord-style (albeit cut for more coverage and protection from the elements) outfit that she'd get in most other holds. 

Tuthul, Perth, and Prynn will get an outfit adapted from the Celtic Reach outfits if I can get them working right with the appropriate bodies. Let's grab the assets for that mod and then do some Outfit Studio work. For this mod we won't be activating the plugin files or actually going into the game with any replacer nifs - though we will be loading the textures of course. We'll be looking to use the bare-chested male outfit for both Miners (relevant to some later work I have to do) and the "kilt and sash over clothes" outfit for Prynn. By the way, as we get into these outfit tweaks I do have some bad news - most of the mods I've been looking at for customization assets all have varying levels of closed permissions, so while I do hope to share some of the products of this work, the custom outfits probably won't be one of them.

Before I even hit Outfit Studio, I started by tagging all the plugins as "optional ESPs" so they won't load into my load order. I won't be using any of the plugin data from this mod. 

As you can see, the mod itself is overwriting some of the vanilla nifs. After we've finished working with the mod we'll need to move or hide these conflicting files. It's slightly frustrating that the mod author chose to also replace the vanilla dds files, which is going to be more work for me in terms of making these standalone. But hey, good news! On further review all the replacer stuff seems to just be minor tweaks of the vanilla versions. The new models are indeed separate files, including their textures. So that's a nice relief.

This one appears to just be a reskinned mage apprentice robe, which makes me wonder... can I load up my existing BHUNP mage apprentice outfit and just drop this texture on top of it? Let's find out.

Kind of, but not exactly. So we'll still need to do something with the modded mesh to start. While we're at it, what's with this low resolution texture on the shirt material?

Yuck! Look at those muddy textures. We'll want to clean those up before we finish implementing this outfit. For now though, let's first get the geometry working for BHUNP.

Digging deeper behind the scenes, I keep finding little defects in this mod that are making the conversion more difficult than it needs to be. I tried a few other technical approaches but they too had complications that, the of the day, traced back to the assets from this Scottish clothing mod. So I'm going to shelf that one for a while and start looking for different options.

As I reach this point, the sun is starting to hit that point where it gets uncomfortable to work in my office, so we'll call this one a day for now. I'm going to do some research into alternate asset sources and see what we can come up with when I return!

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 will be a nice opportunity to stretch my character's legs. Soljund's Sinkhole has always had a special place in my Skyrim experience because it was the first town (and dungeon) I visited long, long ago in my first build to use an ENB. In addition to the town overhaul, we'll be installing the Lawbringer patch and, by extension, Lawbringer itself. 

So... Lawbringer first. Right away, I see something I like - you can pick and choose which core modules the new version supports, which means that if something doesn't want to cooperate I should be able to just remove Lawbringer support from that location rather than have to fight extensively with the mod.

Let's check these out first to make sure nothing problematic appears in the files.

We do have a lot of conflicts, but I suspect most of them will be pretty easy to patch out. In fact, most of it was, but we did have to do a little bit of xEdit ninjitsu to account for some modded changes. Here you can see that Cheesemod replaces the vanilla cheese at Stendarr's Beacon with a custom version. LCO adds an enable parent based on who controls the site. To make this work, I needed to transfer the enable parent from the LCO record to the Cheesemod record, and then patch the Cheesemod version of the original piece of cheese (which disables it) over the LCO one.

Most of the conflicting edits involved Lux stuff, so while I patched up the obvious conflicts I'll need to check Lux to confirm if it has a more comprehensive patch in its archive. There was indeed a patch for Lux Orbis, along with one for the Bleak Tower mod that we installed way back when we were working on Whiterun. With those installed, now let's get the Soljund's Sinkhole mod installed and then take a quick tour.

The new NPCs need to have their facegen patched, but the architecture looks good. 

A quick run through the dungeon showed that everything seemed to be in good order. I think we can declare the bones of the overhaul to be good, now we can look at fine tuning it. First, let's get the LCO patch installed and running. 

Immediately I can see there are landscape and object ref edits here that I wasn't really expecting, so we'll need to go back and examine the area to make sure nothing is screwed up. 

We also need to extend some faction membership to the new NPCs.

As soon as I get into the game I see this fuckery. Let's try moving the LCO patch ahead of the overhaul mod. The issue, by the way, turned out to be an unexpected landscape override coming from the LCO patch, so doing this switcheroo returned it to the correct data from the overhaul mod. 

Better. 

Groan. NOT BETTER. I just straight up deleted those objects, but I have a bad feeling there's going to be more of this shit. I may have to pull this mod and wait until there's an OEM patch, because I don't have the energy right now to go through and hand-patch every last little bit of it.

Removing those records got rid of the duplicate well. Now let's change the alignment a few different ways and see how it looks.

The Imperial version actually looks OK - a couple of slightly floating beds, but they are hidden in a tent. I'll need to go in and fix them eventually, since one of the tents is interfering with some actors moving around, but I'm no longer contemplating immediately uninstalling. 

Weirdly, he didn't actually arrest me. Also, I'm not sure why he even confronted me. Also, Perth (the quest NPC) is hiding inside his house and refusing to come out. I'm pretty sure this stuff is all linked to the LCO mod, which isn't even wholly working right anyway. OK, we're going to dump that mod for now. But it was fun to try.

I think that's it for today, but when I come back I need to finish cleaning up this location and, in particular, I need to patch up the NPCs. I might just do their facegen, but I'm kind of tempted to do some more in-depth work on them. I'll think on that before we return for the next session.

I toyed with giving them custom outfits, but after consideration I decided that was too much effort for some NPCs who will only be seen during a single "bad end" scene - the custom faces were enough. So I restored their templating data (which included inventory) and moved on to the male half of the party.

I'm going to pull the male vampires from a different replacer set, but I'll apply the same methodology (just without the typos!). Since we won't be using every character from this resource, we'll also start out by changing all the Form IDs for these actors so they don't replace their vanilla counterparts. We'll hold the rest of them in reserve for other uses.

Here we have the form IDs remapped to the mod itself; I also renamed the main FaceGen folder. Now let's pick out who we want at the party. We need 4. 

We'll do these guys.  Disappointingly, "Mister Moustache" isn't in the version of the mod I installed and I don't feel like installing more of its stuff right now, so we'll use Malkus instead for the last slot.

With the form IDs remapped, we'll strip out the non-appearance aspects of these characters in favor of what was in the underling mod, then we'll move the facegen to the new folder.

One thing with these guys is that they do not have custom bodies, so I'll have to go back and update their face textures most likely, lest we suffer from the "vampire orc face" bug. That took a little extra work but nothing out of the ordinary; I just looked up their face textures and made sure they were properly reflected in the face texture paths within each nif. Let's see how these guys look in-game.

Something's busted with the Orc's eye textures but otherwise the characters loaded in just fine. I have mixed feelings about them all being in Volkihar regalia. On one hand, it makes more sense for Sybille to be in league with "civilized" vampires than with just some randos, but on the other hand I don't really see these guys wearing their faction colors to a party in Solitude, no matter how exclusive. I'll have to put some further thought into doing custom outfits for them.

Malkus' eyes call for a diffuse map out of TEOB that is indeed repackaged with this mod but isn't in the texture path that the author entered. I grabbed the correct texture path from file explorer and pasted it into the nif.

Now let's go get arrested in Solitude and see how the scene looks with the new faces loaded in.

After making the chance of the vampire feast event 100%, I went and got myself thrown in jail.

It's too dark to see for sure if the guard's templated face loaded in, but it looks like the tip of his nose at least matches the bit of illuminated bicep. I'm pretty sure we've got the jailer working right. Sybille, of course, has always had her custom outfit and face working right, so nothing new there.

Transfer to the holding cell worked fine. Interesting detail that when I went in without a follower, the game spawned a random additional prisoner so the whole scene can play out.

All the characters loaded in OK but it looks like maybe I forgot to restore the outfit records to the two female attendees. No real problem though, I'm kind of already half way through talking myself into doing custom outfits for this scene, so we'll come back to that later.

Most importantly: no black face overlays! The spitroast scene itself worked pretty well with only minor issues that are about what I'd expect from doing this with a male character (the schlong not shading with the rest of the body and the pole being slightly out of alignment).

Now that we've fed the vampires, let's switch gears and address the other noticeable black face overlay issue: the two guards from the outdoor event pack. They have a somewhat more complex issue, in that they also use a faction outfit that won't necessarily match the location they're working in. So we'll also do an outfit swap for them - and I know exactly what outfit to use. But first things first, the faces. We need to pull templates that use the Male Guard voice, so we're going to dip into the same leveled NPC list we used earlier on the main Prison Alternative jailer.

Easy edit there, though we'll actually make this a patch rather than committing an edit directly to the mod's esp file. That'll fix the black face overlay. Now the other part is the outfit. The Riften Guard outfit only really makes sense in... Riften. So we'll use the executioner outfit instead, since that's location and faction agnostic. Moreover, considering how this scene goes, let's get the exposed version of that outfit and save it as a standalone clothing item.

Now I'd thought that Kreiste had included a version of this in his HIMBO exposed outfits pack but I don't see it. Fortunately, I know The Isle of Mara includes a version of this so I'll import that into Outfit Studio and just convert it to use the HIMBO body.

LOL hang on, that's a bit more exposed that I remembered. Not saying I can't work with it, but... let's look at our alternatives. Further review revealed that this one is identical to the outfit that ships with SOS Revealing Armor, and the vanilla HIMBO armor, while it might have had some potential, swings the other way in terms of coverage (and it's a single-piece outfit so chopping it up would involve more work than I really want to do right now).

After some cogitation however, I think I figured it out. The execution party's outfit will mix Fur Armor 2 (no changes required - just the vanilla one) with the harness and executioner mask as separate items. The latter two will have the SOS No Strip keyword on them so they stay on when the kilt comes off for "fun" with the prisoner.

I also moved the straps to Slot 56 so they won't conflict with the fur armor. Then I made a quick outfit and hooked it up to the guards. Now let's roll a new character and get in trouble with the law.

The guard's template is working right - no more black face. Though in retrospect I should have given him the modified outfit, too.

After a little "softening up," the execution scene started. 

Haha, I'd forgotten how - being Nord - the guards would automatically use the skimpy versions of the fur armor. That kind of works, though!

The straps successfully stayed equipped when the guards' pants came off.

This is what happens when you don't use your Sexlab animation filters...

I think we can declare success on today's work. On further consideration I decided to not do the custom outfit for the vampires right now - I'll just fix issue that was causing them to spawn with no inventory and go from there.

I'm not sure what the next topic to work on is going to be. Might be finishing up the companions, might be doing more facelifts on Hydragorgon actors... I guess we'll see what takes my interest in the days ahead.

1. 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-style one-piece. Because of lighting conditions in the zones where these NPCs are located I didn't immediately notice the problem until just recently - both of them had noticeable discoloration between their torso and their hands, feet, and head. Further investigation revealed the problem: the NAM1 and NAM3 fields in the Armor Add-on records were populated with the vanilla female skin texture.
   
   
   
   On a vanilla build, this would probably go totally unnoticed, but since I have tons of custom skins in my game it stood out. These fields let you define an override for the normal skin texture and they can be very useful in some circumstances. However, this wasn't one of those use cases and so I removed those entries from the ARMA record. As you can see below, Ida's skin now looks consistent and doesn't have texture seams.
   
   
   
   By contrast, here's Ingun using the Northbourne NPCs of the Rift head:
   
   
    
2. On the topic of Ida, I did a face transplant on her. Because of my initial use of easyNPC I have tons of unused facegen files lying around in my Mod Organizer tree from various replacers who "didn't make the cut" in easyNPC. So I took the Courageous Women version of Ingun Black-Briar and re-used it for her sister. This basically just involved renaming the files and then going into the nif to also make sure any internal mappings were also updated; then I copied the face-related data from Ingun's CW NPC_ record to Ida's and... well, you can see the results above. I'll likely use this technique in the future for other NPCs that have more vanilla-like face geometry which might look out of place in a game with lost of mod-enhanced NPCs.
3. I identified more problematic morphs from the UNP Minidress Collection. These aren't defects per se but instead they're a consequence of the slider changes between BHUNP V3 and BHUNP V4. I haven't fixed all of these yet, but the main takeaway is that you can't count on UUNP bodyslides to morph properly with BHUNP V4 anymore. These outfits will require conversion to the new reference body. Fortunately, the shapes are essentially the same, so for most outfit it just requires conforming sliders and re-copying bone weights, which doesn't take too long to square away. 
4. I started creating a registry of janky Sexlab animations that I need to eliminate from this build. For example, "aggressive doggy", one of the built-in default animations, has a longstanding alignment issue in its first stage. Having said that, as I've progressed with this effort I'm leaning more and more towards just entirely removing the vanilla Sexlab animations, either through a hard remover or through using a "default-disabled" tool to soft remove them. I've seen all these animations a million times and many of them are less well put together than the newer alternatives that exist.
5. I experimented with tweaking the outfits in Prison Alternative to be a little closer to my current worldbuilding. I had mixed results and rolled back that first attempt at a patch. I'll revisit this work after some further analysis; there aren't too many edits I need to make in this vein and most of the issues actually have to do with unplanned interactions with "3rd mods" - for example, adding prison rags to the NPC prison outfit causes Immersive Equipment Display to render the imprisoned follower's weapons. I suspect that the real solution to that problem will actually be to add exceptions to IED so it doesn't render weapons on the prisoner rags rather than making outfit adjustments. But yeah, further analysis required but the door is definitely not closed on this customization work.
6. I installed the new dialogue expansion mod for Uthgerd the Unbroken. This was a completely uneventful installation so nothing to really talk about here. I did find it interesting to see the mod author's take on Uthgerd, which was actually kind of similar to the one that I came up with (albeit a little less exposed). Notably, he went with the same chest piece.
   
   
    

For today, we're going to start out by doing some more face changes. First things first, you may recall from before that the NPCs from Prison Alternative were displaying the Black Face Overlay. This means that those actors aren't loading facegen and indeed, a quick check of the data folder reveals that facegen files are not present.

Now some people might say "oh, just get Face Discoloration Fix," but I have three issues with that:

1. I don't really like highlighting FDF too much, because it's a crutch tool that prevents users from learning how to mod properly. And correctly integrating NPC changes is an important skill to learn. If nothing else, the black face overlay may be a warning sign of deeper problems with an NPC_ record. For example, if an NPC overhaul includes skill, faction, or AI changes in addition to a face change and the face is getting conflicted out, then the end user might be losing those other changes, too. The black face overlay is a valuable warning sign, and disabling that function isn't actually a good thing.
2. FDF does increase game load and can have a very noticeable impact on performance, especially when loading multiple actors at the same time.
3. Using FDF deprives me of the opportunity to further customize my game!

So the first question we have is: do we want to use templates or do we want to use defined faces? This is actually a little more in-depth than just asking if it's more immersive to have randomized faces, because the other thing that might get inherited from a template is the sex and the voice type of the actor. PA comes with spoken dialogue and if we want to open up the door for templates then we should make sure that the relevant voice types are supported.

The core PA mod seems to support all the basic male voice types, so we can use a template for the jailer as long as it's all-male. We'll plug in this leveled NPC list below and set the "use traits" flag on the jailer.

We may be back to do some further work on this guy's outfit, but one thing at a time: let's look at the other PA mods that I have installed.

The Riften pack already uses templated actors so there's no problem there.

The Solitude add-on uses templated NPCs but it doesn't have the "use traits" flag checked. This mod also has more narrowly defined voice data rather than recording many different voice types. Since all the actors portrayed in this one are 'unique' in the sense that they appear in one location only and play a role in a narrative scene, these characters are candidates for receiving custom faces.

We have seven actors total: one guard and six vampires. There's a leveled list suitable for the guard, but as expected the vampires don't have a similar option.

So what's a good source for vampire heads? There's two female heads in this mod that might be a good starting point. Let's start with them. I might as well grab their take on Harkon too while we're at it.

I'm going to take a slightly different approach to this one compared to how I did Ida; rather than copy the data over, I'm going to tailor the mod's OEM plugin and just change the Form ID numbers of the NPC records so they override the PA versions. That way I won't have to screw around with all the head parts, jewelry, and other stuff and I can just forward the relevant parts of the PA records. I will still need to rename the external files to match the facegen naming conventions that the game will expect.

That's a nice feature. OK, we'll just take the ladies after all.

Both ladies already have custom skins so I don't believe I'm going to have to do any further tweaking of either their face textures or their WNAM records, but let's load them up quickly to make sure they look OK. One minor disappointment is that this mod doesn't ship with the custom outfits shown in the Nexus page, but that's fine. Their faces should still look good.

Just kidding, I screwed something up. This is going to require some further research, but now I have a headache and so I'm just going to deactivate this mod for now and then give it some more attention later. So I guess this is going to be a short entry for now - I'll try and get another one up soon continuing with this work. 

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 Bodyslide preset folders to ensure OBody isn't disrupted.

Here I've created an empty mod folder for the ones I pull out of mods I downloaded as well as a separate folder for my custom projects. I started by going into the Overwrite folder and dragging the CalienteTools folder from there into my custom folder. While I was at it, I deleted a bunch of working files that I'm not doing anything with anymore.

OK, so that's the fast and easy part. Now we need to move on to our "live" mods. Now we're going to go into the data tab and look up which mod is providing each project, open up that mod, and drag its CalientTools tree into the project holding folder.

This took a little while and it wasn't totally an "autopilot" job since certain things needed to get retained, like some of the core files for BHUNP. As you can see below, the ShapeData folder in the virtual file system is now empty, so all the project files are stowed. Before we proceed further, we'll double-check the holding file to make sure no slider presets accidentally got grabbed.

Just one, and it's not one I want anyway... so I think we got that cleanup job done correctly.

Next, let's take a moment to clean up some of the really big folders. Let's roll up these static mesh overhauls into a single packed archive.

Next, we have a couple mods that this rollup is overwriting. Let's make sure those mods are packed in BSA files so they don't spring ahead and overwrite this resource pack we're making.

Legacy is in a BSA, but the Legacy patcher isn't. Neither is SMIM or Noble Skyrim. So it looks like before we do anything else we need to hop back a few steps and address these resources. We'll just keep rolling these back up towards zero priority until we start getting ones that aren't conflicting with anything other than SSE itself. If we get individual ones with only minor overwrite cases, we may hide those individual files in lieu of rolling back the packouts (i.e., the Legacy Patcher stuff). In the course of doing this I also had to add a master flag to the particle patch for ENB so it could be properly overwritten by the handler file I created for this rollup file. Note that I only added the ESM flag to the file header, I did not change it from a .esp file to a .esm one. 

The rollup of my low-priority replacers will load right after these two plugins. In the course of doing this I checked the particle patch to see if any new conflicts were created by this move and I discovered a small unmanaged conflict which I patched up, so that was a nice added bonus. I was also rather surprised to find a single unpatched Top-Level Cell Data record which would have caused ugly visuals had I not taken care of it here. So here's to happy accidents!

Next we'll create a BSA file of the first pack and then confirm the overwrite relationships have remained the same as before after we switch over to the archived version.

I kind of paused and backtracked a bit at this point, because I realized that many - even most - of the assets in this pack are being overwritten by higher priority mods. So I took a moment and cleaned out all the overwritten assets from this rollup. I did this by hiding all the conflict losers and then deleting all files in the folder with the .mohidden extension on them. That removed about 3.3 GB of redundant files.

And no, before you call the FBI, the "Jihad Campaign" folder isn't anything sinister. It has files for an old BattleTech campaign I ran a few years ago. I was recently flipping through them and reminiscing about that fun campaign, hence why it appears in the recent folders list.

Now that we're "all winners," let's repack the BSA files, which should be considerably smaller.

Look at those nice and tidy file sizes! I activated the BSA loader and refreshed the asset list to confirm I hadn't introduced any new conflicts. As you can see, the only "losers" were BSA vs BSA conflicts where I actually shouldn't have been winning before. 

I added an MO2 note about the contents and then moved the parent files to my mod archive on my much larger conventional hard drive, reclaiming about 4.5 gb net of the packed up version.

The downside is that this transfer operation will take a while, but I want to retain these unpacked mods in case I want to go in and cherry pick individual textures for specific purposes or creating custom texture sets. Archiving them on the conventional drive keeps that resource available to me.

All neat and tidy! Let's repeat this procedure for the original selection of mods I picked out earlier. Having learned from my previous experience, this time I started out by removing all the conflict losers once I briefly scanned them to make sure I wasn't pulling out anything I actually wanted to keep. Then I reviewed the conflict winners to make sure nothing was going to become a loser after I packed them up when I wanted it to win.

All the remaining winners are versus other BSA mods, so as long as I load this one's controller ESL after these other files it'll continue to win those conflicts. Speaking in which, I made the controller ESL next and then packed up the BSA files. On some of my FO4 packs I used the existing plugins as controllers, but that sometimes became clumsy and confusing, so I am not continuing that practice here.

Looking good. I'll leave a contents note and then archive the originals. The originals came to 2 GB and the packed files came to 1 GB, so that's another gigabyte clawed back from my SSD. Let's boot up SSE and see if there's a noticeable improvement in load time.

It still took a noticeable amount of time to load into the main menu, but that's not a big surprise: compared to my FO4 build, I'm just scratching the surface of the loose file mountain. I'll have to keep working at this, crunching down and isolating the current overrides a little at a time until everything is packed up in nice and neat archives. In the meanwhile, I should start timing the different major loading milestones - boot, new character, transition to tavern, transition to open world - and see how this project is impacting things.

Once I was in the Tamriel worldspace I felt like I was getting less stutter and slightly higher FPS - though I'm not sure if this is really attributable to the packing job. I did however encounter a crash near the Guarding Stones so we need to take a quick look at this. 

It looks like the crash occured while the game was doing something with the No Grass In Objects DLL file, which is a little concerning. It won't kill be to deactivate the mod for now but eventually I'll want to do stuff with it. Let's see if NGIO has its own log that might shed more light on what happened.

Raycasting was also mentioned in the crash log. This is the mod's core feature so turning it off would be pretty pointless. After a bit of further consideration I decided not to dump NGIO right now but I did enable its extended debugging feature to hopefully get a more informative log in the future. Additionally, deep in the log I found an explicit file name for a grass nif, which I localized to Seasonal Landscapes. I had limited time to investigate but a post on the Nexus page for Seasonal Landscapes alluded to SL, NGIO, and DYNDOLOD needing a little bit of assembly to work together optimally. I'll need to investigate that in the near future when I reach the point where I want to get the grass cache set up.

In the meanwhile, I took one more brief jump into the Skyrim world and walked around a bit. Not much to do tonight because of time constraints, but even though I may have unearthed a new problem to contend with in the days ahead I feel like I made some good progress in elevating my build to the next level of quality.

No crashes on the second visit. If I'm lucky, maybe the issue was just a transient glitch. While I won't count on that, I also won't complain if the problem maintains a low profile for now. I walked around a bit more and killed some bandits, then called it a night. This was definitely a more technical focused blog than what I've been posting lately... hope you found it interesting to delve into the fiddly bits of cleaning up an already-complex mod list.

See you all soon!

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 that the mod seems to have a pretty light touch. During integration testing, I was able to trigger the different scenarios without any major problems - though I encountered a transient animation-related crash in the Riften area which I'm still tracing. I don't believe it's actually related to PA however. 

While I was spinning up test characters for the mod, a thought crossed my mind: maybe I should customize the presets that get presented during character creation. I need to do a little further research into the exact limitations of those records, but I can imagine some potential for doing cool stuff with that. That'll have to wait for a bit but it's definitely another thing to put on the "future opportunities" list.

I started out my modding time today with a little more testing in PA, mostly making sure the Solitude and Windhelm events are working - especially the latter since it involved navmesh changes - while also verifying that some updates I made to the game are working. And by "some updates" I mean half or more of my mods that ship with DLL files - it seems a lot of things have been updated while I was taking a break! I haven't pulled the trigger on going to 1.6.1170 yet, so I'm still running 1.6.640, but based on this round of updates I'm not seeing a whole lot of reasons to not bring this build up to the latest executable in the near future.

I started by spinning up a test character and setting up the MCMs before I saved and restarted to ensure OBody was randomizing bodies. On the way down from Helgen I encountered some unusual weather - gusting winds blowing snow down off the mountains. Even though it kind of reveals the degree of scale compression that Bethesda did with Skyrim, it was an interesting little deviation from what I'm used to seeing in this area. I helped the Companions defeat the giant and got the usual recruiting offer, but my plan was a little different - in particular, I was planning on doing some troublemaking at points north. Still, it was nice to see the outfits all working perfectly and also Aela's scars not being covered up too much by her armor.

Once I got inside the walls, I proceeded to seduce Uthgert. A lot of the Prison Alternative scenes support a follower, so I needed someone along to share in the adventure.

This test character is quite the social butterfly... very good at making friends 😉 We started out by going to Morthal and causing a bit of a ruckus to get thrown in jail. 

A couple of things I need to look into further - Prison Alternative by default has prisoners kept naked. This isn't a problem per se, though it would call for some 'consistence' changes for other characters in the different jails if that's a hard and fast rule. The other thing is that the BHUNP female pubic hair meshes have a tendency to "catch" the light in a way that causes the hairs to be a little reflective, causing the pubic hair to look slightly white, regardless of its color. This will require some further examiatioon, as it might be an issue with the mesh, or the color management spell effect, or both. Not a "drop everything" type priority but worth keeping in mind nevertheless.

One other little detail - not a huge deal but still might be a sign of other issues - Uthgerd was initially not visible when I was jailed. She should have been located in the shackles you can see on the wall behind me, but she didn't appear until I slept for the first time.

The beating event worked smoothly - not a big surprise but still good to see. As it progressed I picked up body overlays on my back - this is pretty common on ZAZ based whipping events but its good to know it was implemented on PA as well. Being a first level character, he almost beat me to death, but the mod halted the attacks when I got right to the edge of my hit point bar.

Jeez, man... at least put her face down. Pressing all her fresh welts and bruises into the stone floor can't be comfortable. But then again, I suppose the jailer looks at that as a feature rather than a bug. 

An interesting little outdoor punishment session. I don't believe I've ever seen the out that my character is getting subjected to show up in the game before. I do wish that Sexlab animations aligned slightly differently than the way they do in-game. If penetrating objects - whether SOS parts or animation objects - aligned with the target "hole" rather than the actors aligning spatially with one another, then I think they would be fewer issues with mesh violations in the case of different-sized actors. I know I could get around this by ensuring every actor was the same height, but I really like having variety in actors' heights... enough so that  I can tolerate some minor clipping issues. It's a bigger issue though when it comes to static animation pieces... in the final image, the dildo is supposed to be left lodged in my character's ass, and instead it's kind of protruding out of her back. But I digress - that's a technical issue that won't be solved any time soon other than just by making sure everyone is the same size the animation expects.

Uthgert, being a Nord, doesn't have the same issues with sizing and her part of the scene lines right up. This is a small consolation since I generally play Nords in Skyrim and therefore in a real playthrough my character at least won't have any big issues with sizing.

One thing that is working right in this scene is the mod No Overpenetration, which dynamically shortens large penises so they don't explode through the receiving character's body. Of course, the longer term solution is to keep working with SOS to get realistic cock sizes in the game, but having this mod as a fallback has helped quite a bit with that particular little immersion breaker.

Interestingly, the guards seem to be suffering from the Black Face Bug. I think I know what the underlying problem is, but I'll definitely have to give it some attention sooner or later. That's probably something that can wait until I get around to working on Morthal however, unless I notice it impacting other PA guards.

Abandoned by the guards in a rather precarious position. I notice that there's a third rope on this tree. I wonder if this scene still works if you have a 2nd follower? I'll have to test it out at some point. 

I also need to think a bit about the bondage options here. There's nothing technically wrong with it but I'm just not a huge fan of the wooden bit that PA uses pretty consistently to gag characters with. I think there have got to be some better options out there (see my previous remarks about ball gags a couple blogs back). I'll need to investigate this further and see if that's an option for customization down the road.

A protracted suffocation sequence follows, where the player can mash the space bar to escape. For testing purposes I just let my character expire. Incidentally, this scene is part of a relatively new mod, the Outdoor Event Pack, and while aspects of it are still clearly under development I'm impressed with it so far. Other than the "large animated object vs. small anus" issue I discussed earlier, the Riften pack was similarly well designed. While I don't regret waiting to make sure it was going to be a good fit for my game, I'm quite happy with Prison Alternative and while some features I liked about Prison Overhaul are absent, overall it's a much cleaner and better-performing mod.

A little sprinkle of ZAZ fluids at the end, which points to some good attention to detail by the author. While it's not as protracted and fetish-y as in Fallout 4's Bad Ends pack, it does add a little more depth to the scene as the character expires.

OK, with our little tourist trip to Morthal completed, let's head to Solitude and check out the law enforcement system over there. I took a little 'naturist walk' down the road and then got myself arrested by the Solitude guards. On the way there I saw some further evidence that I need to fine-tune the SOS distribution globals because while the nif scaled well, the level of endowment we found on a captured bandit in Dragon Bridge was... exceptional. Fun fact, by the way, the guards do not accept surrender if you interrupt the execution scene when you first enter Solitude  

Fortunately they were perfectly willing to arrest me for pickpocketing. Transition to jail worked correctly, and because I goosed the percentages a bit I'm pretty confident that I'll be sent directly to the Solitude-Specific PA Scene. And indeed, that's just what happens. Let's see how the scene unfolds.

I see the mod is either directly using or templating the regular NPCs so, for example, my customizations to Sybille are carrying through into the game. Once upon a time, a lot of mods just cloned the vanilla character, which was a bit immersion breaking when someone who you were used to seeing with a different face and outfit showed up in a mod event with their original look.

I see Uthgert got bound up more thoroughly than I did. 

Sadly, after this point the scene derped out and even removing geometry and moving actors around with the console didn't help. Let's try it again - maybe this was just a transient glitch.

Sybille's friends almost all have coloration issues. It'll require a little more analysis to see if this is black face overlay or if its Vampire ork face bug, but whichever one it turns out to be it'll be easy enough to fix when it comes time to overhaul Solitude. So far the scene is progressing smoothly. That gives Prison Alternative a much better track record in terms of performance than Prison Overhaul ever had on even the best of my runs.

For whatever reason, spit-roasting scenes like this have always been technically difficult for Skyrim to handle. In the past I've frequently encountered either positional desynch, jerky or unreliable animations, or both. PA's take on this concept went very smoothly and my character stayed consistently in place on the spit - I didn't see any geometry poking out of her body, nor did she start moving body parts that should have been pinned in place. The only issue, if you can call it that, was that as her body browned her face geometry remained the same color, which gradually resulted in a very noticeable neck seam on her character model. Compared to the other issues and jank I've encountered with others modders' attempts to capture this iconic bad end, I think that's pretty good progress.

That was a rather sophisticated scene that, notwithstanding the glitch that happened during the first run through, seemed to function smoothly from start to finish. Obviously the vampire faces will need some attention, but worse come to worst I can just slap templates on them to push random vampire faces that I know will work. I do need to look into why my character's face didn't update. I suspect there's something I can do to fix that but it'll require a bit more analysis to understand the underlying problem.

So now that we know what awaits criminals in Solitude, what about Windhelm? I headed over there and stabbed the racist guy, then surrendered to the guards. Initially I should get the city's special interrupt event.

So that's interesting. Zeroing out the other options does not, in and of itself, guarantee the remaining option will happen. There's a fallback event where either nothing happens (while serving time) or where you get unceremoniously released at the end. So let's try this again, this time also setting the Windhelm special events to 100% chance.

Even at 100%, the scene still didn't run. I'll have to investigate that further, but for now let's manually trigger the scenes to confirm they work.

Tied up with different devices than the other scenes we've seen so far. I appreciate the variety they're demonstrating. 

The way the mod places the huge gallows in downtown Windhelm kind of caused a traffic jam with the Hydragorgon hostages. A factor to consider is whether or not this mod substantially increases the value of the Windhelm prison experience, especially if it's going to take up all this space. I wonder, will the outdoor hanging mod pick up prisoners in this one's absence? I think that'll call for some experimentation because I'm not sure this one will make the cut for this build.

Disabling the hostages and even console-moving the guard around did not get the scene moving again, so this one seems to be fragile in the same way the old Prison Overhaul scenes were... and since it's not even triggering during normal gameplay, I'm going to remove the Windhelm expansion from the lineup for now. Let's do a quick test to see if the outdoor executions trigger for Windhelm and then call it a day. Before we do that we'll roll back the conflict resolution patching I did for the mod so that the navmesh reverts to its normal configuration, and we'll also rebuild the animation registry.

OK, first we'll commit a crime in Windhelm and see if it sends me to the Outdoor Event. We'll also roll a male character this time to see if there's any issues gender-locked content. 

Well, let no one say that the guards aren't equal-opportunity abusers.  The "player gets molested by the jailer" scene appears to be working just fine with a male chracter.

Very minor positional issues, notably some clipping with the wrist equipment, but those are issues with ZAZ (no HIMBO bodyslides that I'm aware of), not with Prison Alternative. Otherwise the beating scene functioned correctly.

The outdoor release event can indeed trigger from inside one of the city worldspaces, which is good. This also means that if I have issues with the other packs - especially if I localize the animated related crashes I was getting in Riften to PA - then I can fall back on the outdoor events to preserve function.

The guards were very... enthusiastic. I couldn't quite pause the animation in time, but the final facial correctly triggered Cumshot's projectile feature, which confirms that mod is working properly. I was getting somewhat ambiguous results with it earlier, possibly related to inadequate tagging of the animation files. I did notice that this event picked a female-victim animation, but I think that was just because I forgot to set my Sexlab filters when I rolled this character. Still, I'm going to have to verify that I have at least a minimal number of animations to cover these interactions. Usually I rely on the M2M Animation Pack for gay sex stuff, but I've temporarily removed that mod because there seem to be tagging issues on that one and it tends to force itselvf into non-gay scenarios to the exclusion of other options, which in turn causes issues related to the Sexlab strap-on functionality where strap-ons appear on entirely submissive female chracters because the animation is expecting a male character in that position. But I digress. Let's see how the hanging goes.

There's a little bit of positional desynch where the noose is too far down, but it seems mostly hidden by the actor's body and hair. The struggle animations look fine and the feet are positioned properly on the log. The face graph is properly deforming around the wooden bit. So the baseline Zaz stuff is all operating more or less as expected. I'm not sure I'm a big fan of the blood splats that appear late in the whipping scene though. They just feel kind of "off" and I'd expect like bruises or skin inflammation rather than being completely splattered in blood. 

That appears to be the blood texture. The console doesn't trace it to any specific mod but MO2 should help me with that once this scene is complete.

I can't confirm if the erection is part of the hanging sequence or not - it might just be from me going into Racemenu while I was investigating the blood splats; I'll need to trigger another one of these hanging scenes to investigate that. But I can confirm that as my character struggles his scrotum displays physics behavior while his erect cock stays... rigid. So when a male character is disposed of by Pamas furniture their native physics still works, whichi s a nice contribution to the immersion of the scene. While it's likely that my next character will be female, if she gets in trouble with a male follower in tow, I'd want for the scene to have maximum realism within the constraints of the system.

If any Zaz fluids emitted, they were the female variety and hidden by the test character's thighs. So that's another factor to look into - seeing if we can get this mod (or the underlying deadly furniture mod) to substitute in the male fluids when a male character is being executed. I might just want to talk to the author though before I try a DIY solution.

Meanwhile, to test for erection behavior, I went to Rorikstead and punched a guard. Let's see how things go for my poor test character. Before the inevitable abuse of my dude started, I went into Sexlab and activated the filters, so if it still picks female-victim aggressive animations then it probably means I don't have adequate options and need to find some more animations to add to my registry.

I know that some people really dislike the NSFW Skyrim modding scene and hold it up as a sign of deep seated mysogyny in the gamer community... and given the prevalence of female player characters and the subsequent presumption of a default female protagonist/victim in the content I can understand where that comes from. I mean, who am I kidding - a lot of the fantasies that drive this site do have an aspect of victimizing women. No big surprise there, either, since power exchange scenarios (civilized man acts out role of uncivilized man and/or woman in a relatively safe and secure society acts out the role of a woman in an unsafe and often cartoonishly hostile society) are a recurring top fantasy whenever psychologists study these sorts of things. But one thing about Skyrim, at least on the Sexlab platform, is that unless the author actively takes the time to code in gender locks, the world can be just as cartoonishly hostile to male characters. I do wonder if it would behoove people who enjoy the whole "victimizing women" part to play through the same content as a male player character and see how their perception of the scenario changes. Might make for a consciousness-raising experience.

But I digress. While I was waxing philosophical about the benefits of experiencing non-traditional gender roles in porn, the Whiterun guards were showing my character their famous hospitality. I'll have to look at how the actors for these scenes are generated. I know they're procedurally generated because they have FF form IDs, so it might not be too hard to include some female guards in the leveled list (or just peg them to the normal leveled list for the region's guards) to get some good femdom stuff going from time to time. It should also fix the blackface bug that the executioners were demonstrating by ensuring they pull their appearance data from valid templates.

That's an interesting and somewhat unexpected actor alignment issue there. The guard's cock is just kind of thrusting into the top of my cheeks and into my lower back rather than slipping into the back passage. I wonder if this animation is still in a "foreplay" type stage, or if there's actually an alignment issue in the animation. I'd understand this if I was shorter than the guard, but we're both Nords without (as far as I know) any adjustments to our heights. This animation is from Anubs, which is a slightly older pack, so its possible the level of precision wasn't as high as we're accustomed to - might have been no or at least less developed orifice collision physics at the time it was created.

Ah, I see the problem now. The guard's cock is a bit too rampant. Since Loverslab struggles a bit with video you'll just have to imagine the visual but the guard's hips are moving almost horizontal with very little upward thrust. In other words, his cock is angled about 30 degrees higher than it should be if it's entering my character's anus, creating the illusion that he's hotdog-bunning my cheeks instead. Sexlab has always been a little dicey about cock angles (and that's not even starting to get into the insanity that is most implementations of SL Aroused... that however is a topic for a different day, and I'm told SLA has a new version in development that's supposed to behave itself better). 

The physics package "captured" the guard's cock in the final stage (but it was quick and I wasn't able to get a screen shot) so there's some functionality in that vein at least... it was just those intermediate stages where the angle was wrong. I wish I knew a bit more about hkx animations, but that's one of my blind spots and I'm kind of helpless to DIY animation related stuff.

Meanwhile, I have a hunch that the blood splats are coming from Dirt and Blood, and I disabled the "blood on player" function after reading how it works. It seems kind of backwards - I'd expect it to trigger when I score an unblocked hit on an enemy - especially one who isn't wearing heavy armor - but instead those splats... which look like splats from an exterior source... get populated when the player fails to block a hit. I'm not sure I'll get a beating this time, but if I do we can assess if that fixes the blood overlays issue.

Looks like we're going straight to the execution scene this time, so I'll have to wait for a future chance to test the blood splat hypothesis.

These scenes, incidentally, run much more cleanly than their XPO equivalents. Once or twice my character has gotten a little "lost" and needed to be goosed in the console, but most of the time he or she makes it to the punishment spot with no special help required. The only issues I've observed are cosmetic: the player's walking pace is slightly faster than the guards, which makes the player stop and start a lot, and you lose lateral camera control during the scene so you can't spin the character to watch from the front of the procession. Neither of those are game breakers and if the scene drags on too much the game offers you a chance to skip the walking part entirely.

I realize now that the guards not only have blackface but they aren't using the regional outfits. That's not too bad - I didn't really even notice it until now - but it's something to look into further for opportunities to fine-tune.

Some odd positioning here. I wonder if the actors are misaligned or if it's related to the guard's OBody preset - he's a pretty chonky boy. I have a suspicion however that it's the latter and the whole "rubbing sticks together" action going on downstairs is entirely coincidental and unintended. 

Ah yes and in fact here we are again with the whole "enthusiastic rimming" scene that popped up last time. This may be a sign that I don't have any MMM aggressive animations in my current (rather slim) animation load and the game is overriding the filter in order to find an appropriate scene to play.

The guards proceeded to have their fun, including some teabagging action, before making a mess in the Dragonborn's hair.

Looks like the erection we saw last time was indeed from Racemenu. No Zaz fluids observed this time... might need to investigate what the conditions are for them appearing. I almost wonder if it was actually drippage from the earlier sex scene rather than a true fluids event. Either way though, I think we can officially say that other than the issues we had with Windhelm - which I did not troubleshoot thoroughly enough to say for sure it wasn't a mod interaction problem of some sort - Prison Alternative is looking pretty solid. I'm looking forward to watching the further development of this mod, since scanning the title lines in the author's Subscribestar suggests there are a lot of features under development which aren't in the public release just yet. Anyway, that's it for today - with that distraction more or less squared away, it'll be time to get back to work on Whiterun (unless I find some other new distraction!)

See you then!

I was generally happy with how Hestla came out, but I did have some issues with her hand not behaving right. There were a couple of related causes at work here, one of which being a mod that adds claws to vampires. I removed the bare hand and nails from Hestla's left hand and reassigned the body slots to resolve the issue. I also experimentally removed the glove of her right hand without removing the armored parts to see how it would look; this way, her claws would be exposed on that side too. If you look very carefully you can see that nothing is holding the armor piece on her thumb in place, but that's a pretty small detail to pick up on, and I think we can give it a pass.

As a nice added bonus, while I was fine tuning her I figured out why Vilkas' face texture was messed up and I believe I addressed the root cause of the problem for all remaining NPCs that use data from the Pandorables series of mods. I also tried something new here, using Outfit Studio to substitute in diffuse textures from Armoury of Tamriel 2 as a way to get different material colors from what you'd normally see. In the vanilla game, Hestla wears red Vampire armor and carries a weapon that can be up to Elven in quality. For her custom armor, I used a mashup of Shinshi, Elven, and Wolf armor pieces, and I applied the AOT2 alternate daedric (red) textures to the armor parts to echo her normal outfit color. I'm pretty happy with the results. Finally, by leaning on Shinshi for the torso pieces, Hestla somewhat subverts the normal bikini armor schema by having panties but using such a low-cut bra that there's some significant peek-a-boo going on up there. All in all I think it succeeds well in creating something that looks very similar to Wolf Armor but is at the same time a significant departure from it. 

With her hands working, the other thing I wanted to consider was whether or not to give her a helmet or a mask. As with Athis I designed a custom headpiece that uses the circlet slot so her hair is still visible. 

Not bad, it adds some character to her face without hiding any of her main features or messing up her hair. 

OK, so what other ex-Companions (or at least retired/semi-retired members) do we have to look at? Lets do the two easy ones first: the Gray-Mane brothers. Earlier I decided to leave Eorlund as-is for now and equip Vignar with the vanilla Wolf armor. We'll accomplish this for Vignar by just editing his outfit. I did make a custom skin for Eorlund with battle scars on it since his outfit leaves a lot of skin on display. I tentatively kept the DND face normals, which hopefully will be a good match with the Virtuvia skin.

Why give Vignar armor, you ask? A couple reasons: first, it links him much more closely with the faction if you encounter him around town or when he shows up at the funeral scene during the Companions quest. Second, the companions are all getting custom armor, which means that if I don't put it on someone else, that vanilla armor will only appear in the world if the player wears it (and that's a whole other topic of discussion - after I make the character versions, I also need to make a couple custom sets to put in Eorlund's store!)

LOL whoops! I think I have a typo in my texture set path somewhere!

His face looks good, though. Vignar looks fine too. And as you can see below, fixing the typo on the texture paths resolved the purple skin problem:

So that just leaves the assassin, Arnbjorn. He's an archer, so let's start with the KSO sleeveless shrouded armor and then add on a few Wolf armor parts. 

Here's the initial design. We'll see how the KSO cock sock works out - if it has too many issues with clipping I might need to find a different solution. Arnbjorn already kind of has custom armor, so rather than going in and making a whole new record we'll just update his model path. Down the road, if some other mod uses his costume, then we can always split the two records.

Looks like the outfit is pretty much working right out of the box, including the custom skin normals and the cock ring/cock sock pieces.

So I think we can officially declare success on our custom characters for the day! That's about half of the remaining characters with ties to the Companions, so we'll have just a few more work complete - at least without drilling down into NPCs that appear during the faction's quests.

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 can defer him until I decide to focus on the Dark Brotherhood. That does however leave Uthgerd, who I'd already been planning on customizing. She's kind of an interesting case; on one hand, she isn't actually a Companion and wasn't a member for long so I don't want to lean on Wolf armor at all. On the other hand, she was clearly a contender for membership and likely belongs to the 'berzerker' school of combat. If nothing else, her aggression that got her in trouble is a strong indicator of that. I'd like for her custom look to bestride that line a bit. She's also a two-handed weapon wielder, so like Farkas her main armor protection will be on the left side rather than the right.

My first inclination was to use some parts from the Practical Pirate outfit for her, but I quickly ran into a technical blocker that I didn't really want to deal with - that outfit is all a single mesh and doesn't have individual parts that I can trim back. Going in and painstakingly deleting vertices just doesn't sound work the time and effort.

Since that won't work, I need to regroup and think about what I want. The armor parts are pretty easy to envision. Shoulder protection on both sides, at least the left hip and maybe the left leg protected. The whole left arm protected. She'll also need a belt. If she has clothes, they'll be light - she's a Nord anyway and the berzerker armor profile skews towards the bikini side of things. Let's take a quick look at the Shinshi bodyslides and see if any good options jump out at us.

Farm Clothes 2 has some potential, so we'll start with that I think.

In the end I ended up dumping the farm clothes and ended up with this:

Let's see how she looks in game (with a custom skin of course - the BI Phenotypes "barbarian" skin in this case)

I think we pretty much got it right on the first try! I did forget to delete her breast bones, so I'll do that before I wrap up, but generally this is looking great. 

That'll be it for today - this was just a quick detour to fiddle around with a character that I kept thinking about overhauling but didn't - until today - have really clear vision for. We'll get back to our Companions members next time!

But what about Skyrim? Well, last time we fixed up Aela to have a unique look and then down in the comments section I overhauled the interior and the exterior of Warmaiden's, as well as giving Ulfberth War-Bear a unique armor set and a custom skin. I'm pretty happy with how that turned out, and I learned some general practices for compatibility on custom interior that don't have Embers XD patches. The short version is that reverting Embers' changes to a cell is generally all you have to do. Older versions had a lot of problems with floating meshes, but I didn't see this in Warmaiden's so I think the newer versions may address this. Worse come to worst, you just need to offset the Z coordinate a little bit in xEdit.

I considered just plowing down the street and doing each dwelling or store as I hit them, but I do want to work on those custom Companions outfits and so I decided to skip ahead to Jorrvaskr, which is what we'll be talking about today.

On the way there, I did take a moment to gag the two hostages, since when you try to speak with them their dialogue indicates they're gagged. How I want to gag them does call for some thought. My first thought is ball gags.

Credit: https://www.deviantart.com/twinphoto/art/Realisation-349876737

Let's not kid ourselves, there's something a little sexy about how a well-fitted ball gag can look, but Skyrim has two problems when it comes to these accessories. First, in my experience the sizing of Skyrim gags is very hit or miss. They're almost always too far forward in the mouth and they tend to be too small to really stretch the jaw at all. I'm pretty sure this is because of issues with modifying the face graph, which is fine, but it takes away from the potential of these accessories. The second issue is that most of the ball gags that don't cover up a lot of the actor's face are in Devious Devices or mods that depend on DD. Now don't get me wrong, DD is a solid mod that has enabled a lot of really impressive developments in this community, but I'm trying to avoid using it in this build if I can. Some of that is just a technical challenge for me, and some of it is that I want to keep the background load on the engine relatively low. For better or for worse, DD can be a kind of heavyweight mod (though as I understand it there are efforts moving forward to optimize it, which is great). 

Since I don't have a ton of options I like in the ZAZ animation pack, I'm going to use a more conventional gag, seen below.

This is the ZBF Leather Panel Gag, and we'll add it to both actors' custom outfits.

Let's quickly check on those two before we move onto the Companions' hall.

Looks good. OK, back to the Companions. There are a ton of options for customizing Jorrvaskr itself, but most of them are either quite limited in scope or involve lore-unfriendly elements that I just don't have the patience to fine-tune right now. This Is Jorrvaskr has kind of grown on me, and I'm going to give that one a spin. This took a moment because it did require a Lux update, but that went pretty smoothly. The main thing I had to do was compare some new patches to the existing 3rd party ones I had an decide which ones to keep; in at least one case I kept the legacy patch because I didn't feel like redoing ESP compacting. I might still loop back for this in the future, but not today.

In terms of compatibility work, a bunch of mods touch Jorrvaskr, including some of the usual suspects like Cheesemod and LOTD. I put together a list of references of interest and checked on them inside the game. Ultimately, I determined that this update was going to actually take quite a while, so I tabled it for the time being. The issue was not so much the upstairs part of the hall as it was the basement, which a number of mod do extensive things with. I may need to loop back and choose an overhaul that is less intrusive in terms of editing the basement. That's not to say that this was a total waste of time - the Lux update connected me with several patches for existing mods I had, so we'll get some enhancement on that score.

OK, if we're not going to do the hall itself, let's proceed to customizing the Companions. Let's start with Athis and Njada since they do that brawl scene at the beginning.

Athis is a Dark Elf who considers himself - whether it's an adopted identity or rooted in his origins - an Ashlander. In the vanilla game he wears light armor but has heavy armor skill; USSEP gives him light armor skill as well. He's a sword and board fighter, so like Ria he'll have armor on his right arm and hand, and a pauldron on his left arm, though the armor will be lighter. He should also incorporate some kind of Dunmer armor into his outfit, I think.

Njada a Nord sword and board fighter who wears light armor. While her armor should incorporate some Wolf parts, like Athis we'll use light armor materials in general for her. 

I made this rough cut shown below for Athis, which I think works for a good starting point. This goes with the lighter armor but still follows the general arrangement for sword and shield fighters that we established with Ria.

I'm somewhat on the fence about what to do with the tender bits. There are certainly plenty of underwear options, but I'm also kind of kicking around using one of Vivi's cages, perhaps in conjunction with the sorely underused ZAZ ball stretcher.

I kind of liked toying with the idea of the token elf getting some "trick" armor as a hazing prank, and I did have some success spinning up the geometry for device. If I'd proceeded further forward with it I would have done some additional cleanup used the "squish" techniques I talked about earlier to get the presentation looking a little better. However, after further consideration I decided to not go this route with Athis. If nothing else, it doesn't fit the concept of the armor being easy to shed when turning into a werewolf. So we'll go with a more conventional bottom part on his from the TAWOBAE studded set

After a little cleanup to keep the straps from overlapping oddly, I was ready to generate his custom nifs and create his custom outfit. I won't be giving him a custom body texture, so we just need to rig up the armor and then create his custom outfit. In addition to the armor and helmet, we'll be giving him normal boots (per his vanilla outfit) and also a Companions cape from Cloaks of Skyrim.

I mostly got it right on the first try, though I think the cloak makes the outfit a little "busy" and I forgot to add the ARMA slot references for the leggings. After another round of tweaks in xEdit we're looking a lot better:

OK, so Athis is all set. Now let's do Njada. Originally I was going to mostly draw on TAWOBA pieces like with the other characters so far, but I just discovered that there's now a BHUNP v4 version of the TES Bikini Armor set, and in general I really like it. I started out by mirroring the armor along the X coordinate so the right arm rather than the left arm would be protected. Then I removed the bottom part, so this was the starting position:

On small annoyance with mirroring it this way is that I'll need to redo the squeeze slider, but that won't be too much of a problem. Below you can see it with a little bit of additional geometry added on.

Now let's add the squish to the top, then mirror the glove before we set up the rest of the outfit. 

Well, at least that's where I was yesterday. Fast forwarding to today, I got rid of the mirroring on the armor because it was messing up some of the settings for the body. Let's hop into the game and see how it looks. Njada is another ARIS body, so we'll want to pay attention to whether or not we want to do a custom skin as well. 

I hopped into the game and spawned a copy of Njada to look at, but the game crashed as soon as OBody touched her. The issue was definitely related to her morphs, so I'll need to drill into this a little to see if there's an obvious issue.

I refuse to believe that this is actually the morph that is crashing the game. This has to be a red herring, right?

The problem does seem to be rooted in the reference body, and just to be safe I rebuilt all its bone weights off the standard BHUNP V4 reference body. I also removed the breast bones per my normal squish procedures. OK, let's try this again.

OBody seems to be playing nice now, but we still need to do a little work. I kind of expected the issue with her hand not appearing - there's an issue with the vanilla bodyslides that I thought would do this but I left alone for testing purposes. Also, the squish sliders on this model are pretty aggressive (provided by the author) and I think I need to done them down just a little to give the top a more natural shape. 

The other thing that's a little less obvious is Njada's hair. When I was looking at her records it seemed like she was supposed to have a different hair color, so I need to check on what's happening there. 

So she is indeed programmed to have hair color #14, which is like a white/gray tone. The screenshots gave her sort of an auburn color. 

Kind of looks like her custom hair texture isn't inheriting its color from the NPC_ record. I guess that's fine. I do want to confirm that color #14 is correctly rendering on normal hairstyles. There's always the possibility that the color is just screwed up.

Njada's geometry looks right, but I was getting odd results in Racemenu looking at the hairstyles. I checked the page for the hair color mod I was using and I found something interesting: 

So year, it seems like there might be some issues with the hair definitions. Let's load in a different set of definitions and see if things look better. 

Replacing the mod fixed the player hair colors in the character creator but it didn't change hers, so I'm pretty sure her custom hair just doesn't inherit the color from the NPC record. So now let's do something about that ARIS body. In theory at least I could probably leave it as-is, but I kept this body for Ria and I don't really want duplicates of bodies for characters who are going to be pretty exposed in their bikini armor (with the exception of Farkas and Vilkis, for reasons that should be obvious). I decided to try the custom skin from this mod. I also rigged her up with some body hair for color matching. I also updated the head textures.

The skin texture looks good, but there's a bit of mesh intrusion with the thigh boots. Let's see if we can fix that so we don't have to resort to doing a whole new setup for the feet.

Her boots are still screwed up. The answer is probably going to be to make them part of her body mesh and then remove the parts of her legs underneath. Let's give that a spin and see if it works better.

Looking good! I think we can officially declare these warriors as complete. So who else hangs out in Jorrvasker? Let's take a quick survey. We know about the members of the guild of course but there seem to be some other people here too.

Not to toot my own horn, but I'm really happy with how Adrianne came out. She's definitely a standard I aspire to with my other custom NPCs.

Interesting, I hadn't realized that Nazeem's assistant (ex-slave from Hydragorgon) could come up as male with the edits I made. That adds a whole creepy new layer to his hydragorgon dialogue.

These characters are all members of the Companions - and the people who I need to do custom armor for. 

Tilma, Brill, and the generic housekeeper are servants. I expect to leave them with their vanilla outfits, if for no other reason than to contrast with the fancy bikini armor.

That leaves Vignar. He's a civilian, but he's a former Companion according to his lore. Currently he wears generic upper class clothing, but I wonder if I want to give him a custom look that incorporates some Companions touches. Maybe use that cape that was a bit too busy for the armor. I'll have to think on that.

In any case, I think that's a good place to stop for today. Despite a false start with the Jorrvaskr overhaul, we generated two custom outfits that I'm very happy with and I think I have a good idea about where to go with the rest of the Companions characters. Once they are done, then I'll loop back and take a second look at overhauling their building. Perhaps I'll only do an exterior edit if the interior is going to be too finnicky.

• 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 the main BHUNP slider xml file and then I restored the Zero Sliders option so I don't have to activate an external file (and then remember to deactivate it afterwards) when I build new meshes.

Next, I used the lessons I'd learned about squish to compress the bust on her armor; then I deleted the breast bones from this mesh.

After that, we need to move our focus a little further down to the loincloth piece. This doesn't strictly fit the guidelines for berzerker armor, and in a lot of ways the Companions are the exemplars of this style so I don't want to stray too far. The hip plate on the left side should be sufficient for attaching weapons, but lets go into the game and make sure the right hip isn't getting used for anything. Note that the screen shots that follow show the original armor mesh and not the updated one.

Here you can see that her blade goes on the left hip, as planned. Let's give her another weapon just to make sure it doesn't get put on the right side. 

OK, so going on the right side is exactly what happens with a secondary one handed weapon. This means that just removing her belt for "the full Kofman" won't work. Leaving the belt and loincloth certainly is an option, but let's see what other resources we have to work with in the Wolf set and also in the Ancient Nord set.

Wolf Armor has a harness that might work and the hide set has a belt. The Ancient Nord set does have alternate tassets that cover both sides, but I like the one she already has so that's a non-starter. Let's see how these two options look on her model.

Neither piece is completely perfect. The belt sits too high for the weapon attachment point, and the harness doesn't match textures. However, let's see if we can do something about that.

A straight-up texture swap looks OK at a distance but is kind of funny up front. The alternative is to just remove the tasset strap, but that feels kind of counterproductive since the whole reason I picked that piece was that I liked the way that strap looked. I think in this case the loincloth will get a "pass" - it's just the best match of the available options. So I think we can mark down Aela's armor mesh are complete. 

But I don't think we're quite done yet. Aela uses the same ARIS custom body texture as Ria, and I'd like to get a little bit of variety here. There's an old LE mod called BI Phenotypes that has some good options. Let's see if we can port this over to SSE and lean on its resources.

This mod was packed in an unconventional way, so first I had to set it up in a playable folder structure. Next, I ran the mod folder through Cathedral Asset Optimizer. With that done, let's hop into xEdit and create a custom skin for Aela.

Before we go further, we also need to patch Aela's facegen, since now she'll use the textures from the mod instead of the ones from ARIS. I made a quick backup of the original, then switched the skin textures. Note that BI Phenotypes didn't ship with subsurface (_sk) textures, and so we left the ARIS ones in place.

Let's see if the LE to SSE port worked on this mod.

She mostly looks OK, though there's something slightly off about her face tint. However, I want to put her under natural lighting before I assume it doesn't look right; the problem may be more related to this particular image space rather than a defect with her textures. Before we do that, I also need to rig up her SOS pubic hair. We'll want to choose a style that doesn't rise up about her loincloth, so let's do some measuring in Bodyslide. 

Natural will definitely fit, and Wild is such a tight fit that with some very minimal adjustments to the loincloth it might give a cut "peek-a-boo" effect. Let's actually go with that solution. We'll go in with a very fine expand brush and just increase the bulk of the loincloth a teensy bit so the stray hairs in the corners don't poke out but the ones that rise up just above the waistband are visible.

Next we'll apply the revealing keyword to the armor and add Aela to the appropriate SOS faction. Let's find a less darkly-lit place to test things out.

Her face looks better under normal lighting, but there do seem to be some signs of a possible neck seam now. 

With her undressed, there's no doubt about it. I went back and checked the texture paths and it looks like a stray _5 made its way into the normal map, probably left over from the ARIS path. 

After correcting that error (fun fact, it only actually gets corrected if you save the file after making the edit!), we can see that things are almost perfect. We need to pull the loincloth out just a little further to account for how it flexes as she walks, but the neck seam is gone and in general both the outfit and her new skin texture are looking good.

That final tug on the front of the loincloth seems to have done the trick, and now we're getting the effect I was going for with this setup. I think we can officially declare victory with the Aela overhaul.

Since Farkas' outfit was in good shape and didn't require any further customization, that just leaves 7 more members (and one pseudo-member) to overhaul. Of those, Kodlak will use the full Wolf armor and so doesn't require a refit. There's also the Companions servants, who may or may not get further customization; I still need to think about that for a bit. Still, we're making good progress!

One final thought, I noticed this while I was repositioning the camera... looks like I need to confirm the BHUNP bodyslides for the female pubic hair are actually built, as it seems the game is currently using the standard meshes.

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, but that's no longer version-bound and so I don't need to do that. On the other hand, it dramatically increased the turnaround time when switching between various editing tools such as xEdit and Bodyslide, and if you've read my previous work you know I use those extensively for customizing my game.

So today when I had a couple minutes of downtime I pulled the plug on RootBuilder and I immediately saw a marked improvement in the operating speed of MO2's virtual file system. I didn't see any obvious in-game changes, but that's expected. Still, now that I can move back and forth in my tools so much faster, it'll be a lot easier for me to work on those outfits I wanted to mess around with.

And while we're talking about outfits, let's start by taking a look at Ria's custom outfit. 

Here's how we left it last time. In theory, it doesn't look too bad, but as we know in game the top is actually very shiny and it doesn't have enough "squish" to convey the sense that it has some tightness to it, which is important to convey the sense of it being "rational bikini armor" that prevents soft bits from going all over the place.

If the texture was a better fit, I might just take this as-is and try to get the squish sliders going, but I don't really feel up to trying to do a retex. Let's start by looking at the various wolf armor bikini tops and see if there's a good option in that selection. While we go through these we should keep in mind that the functional goal here isn't to add armor protection - it's to work like a sports bra and secure the bust - so the replacement piece doesn't have to be metal. 

There are four bikini tops in the TAWOBA remastered Wolf set, and only one of them departs from the metal look. The second and fourth ones have potential, though on #2 the shininess is a factor that I have to really look at.

Thematically, I think #2 looks better than #4. Ria isn't a Nord, and the micro-top is a little at odds with the rest of her style. 

So what about the issues with excessive shine? By default this piece uses the guard cubemap instead of the Wolf Heavy cubemap. This is a fairly common issue with TAWOBA Wolf Armor pieces and it results in excessive shine when dynamic cubemaps are enabled. We'll go ahead and change the cubemap, which hopefully will significantly turn down the reflectivity of this top.

Now how about squish? I watched a tutorial by SunJeong that covered the basics of setting this up, and replicated its steps for the revised Ria outfit.

Now of course with the chest strapped down tight we also want to suppress the jiggle physics, so we'll remove the breast bones. Before doing this I forked the project file so I can easily recover if I screw things up in this stage.

Finally, let's take a look at our pubic hair options. SOS Natural and SOS Untamed both have some clipping with the harness straps, but Very Bushy fits her body perfectly. 

To ensure that color matching will work properly, and to ensure her body appearance is consistent when she's undressed, we won't make the hair part of the armor mesh. Instead, we'll get SOS Female Pubics up and running, though we'll initially start it with zero distribution and manually put Ria on the distribution faction for this particular style. 

At the same time, we don't want the built-in pubic texture showing through Ria's 3D mesh, so we'll need to do some customization of her body texture. Let's switch out of Outfit Studio and work that angle for a little bit. D&D uses Mature Skin for Imperials, so we'll start by grabbing the installer for that one and extracting the hairless version. Then we'll repeat what we did earlier for our muscular Adrienne and create a custom skin for Ria. In fact, as I think through this, I should probably also apply a muscle normal to Ria while we're at it. We can start by copying the custom Adrienne skin to a new record and just changing over the main body texture to the hairless one. 

But wait, there's a catch!

Ria already has a custom body texture, so applying the Mature Skin won't actually be as simple a solution as I'd hoped; instead it'll cause us to lose other customization we did earlier, and I don't want that. So we'll undo our changes and roll the dice with using the ARIS custom skin along with the SOS hair mesh. Let's see how it turns out... maybe it'll be fine. 

So! Time to install SOS Female Pubics. Right away we can see there's a potential challenge; this mod makes changes to the SOS main script and while it has a patch for the PapyrusUtil versioning issue, it's unclear if it contains the other SOS tweaks. We'll need to compare the two script sources side by side to determine if this will be a problem.

First I want to compare the vanilla SOS script with the Sexlab Tweaks version and see if the SL Tweaks makes any changes or deletions, since these might not be obvious when I compare the SL Tweaks with NPCFP; I don't want to accidentally revert to problematic scripting from the original SOS. Fortunately, there are only a couple of things I need to look at. 

All the other changes are purely additive and will be easy to deconflict versus the female pubics version.

Now comparing those two we can see there are a bunch of conflicts. Before we go further, let's ensure we have the latest version of both script edits. This might save us a bunch of time and frustration. It turns out there are in fact updated versions for both, so we'll install those and compare again. At the same time we'll grab the latest version of female pubic hair, just in case it has some tweaks that might be helpful. 

And would you look at that... no more core asset conflicts. I went into xEdit and changed the probability floats for all the female SOS options to zero for now. Then I manually assigned Ria to the "Very Bushy" faction.

While I was at it, I removed the heavy fur cloak from Ria's outfit. It's mesh was designed to go with an armored outfit and it never quite looked right the way it floated out and away from her body. Finally, I created a custom skin for her that used the ARIS assets but added a muscle normal.

Having saved those files, now let's loop back to Bodyslide and rebuild the mesh for Ria's armor. We'll enable the presets and then build the set with the zero sliders. I'll need to manually enable the squish slider, I suspect, so this might require a little bit of experimentation to get right.

The squish appears to be present in the nif file. Now let's try it in the game!

I spawned in on a rainy day and headed down towards Riverwood. Like last time, we'll tarry a bit in town to help all the game functions catch up, then proceed to the giant fight to see how Ria looks with her new outfit. I chatted with Alvor for a little bit, then went on my way.

By the time I got to Whiterun, grass was spawning in in real time, so the inital lag had passed. The distant drop-off did remind me that at some point I need to get the new version of NGIO running so I can create a grass cache for distant LOD.

Her outfit and custom skin are looking good. Squish is functioning properly. 

One small problem cropped up after the fight however - despite her SOS faction, Ria didn't have the 3D pubic hair. I immediately realized the problem - I hadn't added the SOS_REVEALING keyword to her custom armor. I went into xEdit and fixed that issue. I also felt that her musculature was a little too pronounced, so I dialed her back one step on the normals.

Now let's head back into the game and see how she looks.

Much better, though I do observe a small issue with her left hand not catching her custom textures. The problem persists after removing her outfit, so it's not a problem with the armor, per se. Let's take a look at her hand and body textures and see if anything's missing - it might be a case that one of the texture components isn't filled properly; close examination shows that the texture on the hands isn't a solid color, but it's clearly interacting very differently with the light and the environment compared to her body textures.

A review of xEdit didn't reveal any wrongly-named or otherwise defective textures, so next let's hop into SSE and see if the right textures are actually getting assigned by the game. 

So the textures are there and they're loading from the right data paths. So what's going wrong here. I don't see anyone complaining in the ARIS forums about the hand textures not working right, but let's equip her with a different hand and body skin set and see if it still is glitching out.

Her hands look right when I force her to equip D64, but they are busted when we go back to the ARIS based body. Forcing her to equip the unmodified ARIS body also resolves the problem, so there is something specifically wrong with the modified body. Now let's compare the custom body records with the modified ones.

The only difference I can see is the normals. Unfortunately, I'm starting to suspect that the issue is the normal maps. The early screen shots where she had the level 10 musculature seem to look OK, so perhaps its just the _9 normal for the hands that is messed up. 

Ugh... I think I see the problem.

UNP Muscle Solution only has 6/8/10/11 hands instead of separate options for each musculature increment. Let's roll her back to level 8 hands and see how it looks. This, kids, is why you measure twice and cut once. I verified that the body texture had the level 9 texture present and then I just assumed the matching hand file existed.

Sigh.

But nevertheless, we're successful at last! Ria's bra texture matches up, it keeps her boobs in place (even when OBody was generous with what preset it gave her) and her pubic hair has a bit more depth and nuance to avoid looking flat when the natural framing draws the eye to it. Speaking in drawing the eye, dumping the cloak makes for a much nicer view of her rear end, as well. Better yet, her Wolf Armor parts still have a little half-cape on them, so that aspect of her aesthetic isn't totally lost after removing the cloak.

So I think we can score that one as a full win. It would have been nice if I had time to do Aela at the same time, but that'll have to wait. Not so bad I suppose, as I still have to decide the whole intersex question when it comes to her. Integrating futanari support into the game at this juncture would involve a bit of scut work, but it would get that work out of the way for future characters. On the other hand, it appears that the successor mods to SSS have moved away from the whole futanari focus aspect, and so a heavy level of integration for certain key NPCs may no longer be relevant. 

There's also the bigger "do I even need to mess around with Aela" question. Further investigation has pretty definitively nailed down her problem to certain residual presets like BHUNP 7Base that are invoking sliders which are supported for the reference body but not the armor. Since this problem affects a number of other items as well, it might be a more productive use of my time to revisit OBody, dump the remaining legacy presets, and then get at least a basic distribution list set up so we can steer the more muscular bodies towards combat classes and the softer bodies towards non-combat types.

But that'll have to wait for another day, as my hobby time is up for now. I'll look forward to sharing my next work in the days ahead!

• 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 those two drivers and some other factors, I just haven't felt very motivated to do computer gaming for quite a while. Recently, I've felt the itch a little, but I expect that I'll be moving forward at a much more relaxed pace. Looking at the current state of the hobby, I think I'll be mostly working with Skyrim for the time being. Consider:

• The Starfield CK hasn't been released yet, and Elminster's commentary in the xEdit patch notes has given me some concern that despite Todd Howard's promises Starfield may have some significant blockers to the kind of high-level modding we're accustomed to in Skyrim and Fallout 4. While I do want to finish the last 3 steam achievements for Starfield before the DLC drops, I'm not going to dip my toe into the Starfield modding pond just yet. 
• Fallout 4 recently had a major version roll, comparable to the big AE update that came out last year. I haven't taken stock of how the DLL-based mods' updates are going, but even if everything is updated I'll need to do a lot of work to get my current build converted over, and I do want to convert it because of the engine performance improvements in the new version. I also have to resolve some dilemmas with the worldbuilding. My concept was to continue the 'oral history' aspect of Charley's world but switch to a new POV character; this idea still feels good for me, but I had reached a point developmentally where I needed to do a bunch of modding in order to get the world up and running. The good news is that I obtained permissions to publish most of the fruits of that effort, but the bad news is that it involves a level of effort that I don't feel motivated to carry out yet.
• Skyrim, meanwhile, has overcome the last of the lingering gaps from the AE release and seems to be continuing to produce high quality content. While I do need to do some technical work at some point (see my 'lessons learned' below), I left my current build in a state where there are lots of opportunities for small easy wins where I can do some modding without sinking hours and hours of work into it at a single sitting before I can see results.

Going back into Skyrim, I need to keep in mind some lessons I learned when I was working on Fallout 4:

• There is a strong relationship between the proportion of files which are packed in archives, and the game's load time. I need to spend some time consolidating files for the 2024 AE build and packing them. This in turn is going to lead to a lot of stuff being moved off my SSD and into long-term archival on my large conventional hard drive as it gets consolidated. This is super, super important, but on the other hand it's the kind of technically heavy work that I don't want to make into the focus of my modding time. Something to work on when I'm multi-tasking other activities perhaps.
• There are aspects of Skyrim, both in terms of the depth of assets it enjoys and also certain aspects of how its game systems are implemented, that allow for a lot of high value bespoke modding that is harder to do in Fallout (at least without a ton of technical effort). Several times during the 2024 FO4 build, I ran into technical blockers that essentially amounted to "I can't do this thing I do easily in SSE because things about FO4 that are also genuine improvements get in the way." 
• Putting off deficiency correction is not worth it. I left certain problems unresolved in the Skyrim build because my interests wandered, but during the FO4 build (I'm not sure how much I documented this in the blog) I ran into a number of cases where I'd back-burnered something early on, only to find myself doing more work to fix it when it because a real problem because it forced downstream changes or patch revisions. 

Since I'm not making this as a "blind play experience" for my sister in law anymore, I don't obliged to closely follow the path of the main quest anymore, and I need to think about whether or not I want to realign my approach to the game. Gently expanding the game bit by bit worked really well on the earlier phases of the 2024 AE build, but I may want to course-correct a little. For example, I never finish customizing the Companions because the characters I didn't touch weren't involved with the main quest path. I had a lot of fun making the custom armor for the Giant Fight vignette and I think one thing I'd have fun with would be revisiting the rest of the characters in that faction.

I'm also interested in learning more about voice synthesis technology. As I understand it, this has continued to evolve quickly in my absence and I think it would be fun to add more dialogue to the game, as well as filling in silent content that I previously either didn't use or that I left as-is for lack of supporting assets. I feel like this might be another one of those things that I could do in the background while multitasking other things - for example, if I'm painting some models, when I put them down to dry for a few minutes I could knock out a few lines of dialogue or box up some assets before I go back to the main activity.

Finally, I have a couple of projects that I never quite finished, the big one being my lightweight edit of Hydragorgon. I was extremely happy with how that effort had been proceeding and I'd like to continue moving forward with it. 

But what about today? I know I don't have a ton of time to put into the game today, but I'd like to at least get a feel for where we're at. I think I'm going to revisit Whiterun and take a deeper dive into what opportunities I might have missed because of my earlier, narrower scope of work, as well as any issues that I need to squash during a renewed focus on the city. Let's hop into the game and see what we've got.

As I go into the game, another lesson learned strikes me immediately: the build/unbuild time of Root Builder, at least the version that was around back in February, isn't worth it. I'll need to set some time aside to unwind that program from SSE just like I did with Fallout 4. On the other hand, I also got a nice reminder of one of the more subtle advantages of SSE -- I can alt-tab out of the boot sequence without the game hanging up, whereas in Fallout 4 I had to wait until I got past the initial logo and lead-in video, and if I forgot I ended up having to kill the process... quite a pain in the neck when I want to do something (like type in a blog) while it's loading!

The current build is running 1.6.640, which shouldn't post a problem since even recent releases like NGIO support it. At some point I'll consider going to 1170 since it seems to be stable now, but that's note a high priority project. I was able to load into the starting room pretty quickly, which was good. If I recall correctly, the first long loading screen doesn't hit on this build (as its set up right now) until I enter the exterior Tamriel cell for the first time.

The transition into the inn also took a while, which underscores the need to optimize the loading-up process. This will translate into long load times after my first save, which was what drove me to be so aggressive with BSA files in FO4. I need to think about how I want to structure the archives in Skyrim. There will be a lot of file replacements and I want to minimize asset duplication since keeping file size under control will be useful in its own right.

Once I got out of the starting room, I saved my game and then restarted SSE to ensure that second-load features implemented properly, such as body randomization. This reminded me again why I wanted to dump Root Builder, since I had to wait quite a while while it deconstructed the dynamic root folder. Almost more annoying is that this behavior also applies to xEdit and Bodyslide, which really slows down the process of making edits and tweaks. 

After I got back into the game, I turned on god mode and walked down to Whiterun. I did observe some of the early-game terrain pop-in once I left the initial grass loading area. I suspect that this particular challenge will be overcome by progenerating the grass cache, and its very possible that asset optimization will also help with this. Speaking in optimization, I need to really think about ensuring that all my textures are appropriately compressed down. I'm running on a 1080p display and will probably continue to do so for the foreseeable future, so I don't think there's a lot of need for me to have any super high resolution uncompressed textures beyond a few specific, and narrow, cases. One thing I learned on the Fallout 4 build was that I did not, in fact, need to run super high resolution skin textures for the game to still look good during sex scenes. 

As expected, the initial loading-in time was a bit long, though not as bad as on some previous builds. Framerate was high coming out of Helgen - higher than I remembered before, and I suspect that's at least in part from having far fewer browser windows open in the background. Those things, it turns out, use huge amounts of memory.

I couldn't test it because I didn't start the main quest, but as I reached the crossroads north of Helgen I remembered the odd pathing problems I'd encountered earlier. That's one of those things that I should try and sort out sooner rather than later, since broken pathfinding on the road to Helgen will surely cause more problems than the fairly benign glitch it introduced to the main quest.

I encountered a few frame hiccups on the road as well, and if I recall my previous work I'd largely isolated that to early-game NPC polling/cloaking for things like Fertility Mode and SOS. Testing with the previous build showed that those generally only caused a noticeable performance degradation during the first visit to a particular cell, but I should revisit the state of "decloaking" mods and see if (for example with SOS) they've addressed the issues that caused me to eschew some of them previously.

Nushassa seemed to spawn without any problems, though it looks like her face texture may be mismatched with her body texture. There might be some characteristic about her that caused the facegen patcher to skip her, so we'll need to revisit her at some point. She could also benefit from a custom outfit, I think. I'll have to refresh on her lore and see what her background is. Might be a good opportunity for some Summerset Isle fashion to appear. I seem to recall I had some High Elf but non-Thalmor options in the past and maybe I can reuse those assets.

Speaking to her it seems she's a bit of a vagabond, but also a Dibella worshipper. Not a foreigner though, so we'd be looking more for Skyrim attire than Summerset. I can definitely work with that... but let's not get side-tracked just yet.

At least through the hill down out of Riverwood, the talk with Nushassa has given the game enough time to catch up on the early-game processes. Grass, SOS assignments, and quest scripting all seem to be working so far. The grass spawn-in continued to function in a timely manner coming into the Whiterun exterior area and I saw that my earlier customizations seemed to be functioning properly.

The giant fight was in progress when I reached it, another sign that all it took was a fairly brief pause to ensure the early game lag evened out. Aela was still having some bust scaling issues and I think I might take as second crack at her outfit. I'm also still not 100% happy with Ria's outfit. Her top is still too shiny and the hair on her default texture doesn't quite work for me. I think I need to fiddle around with her outfit as well, though I doubt it'll be a full revamp like I suspect Aela is going to pull me into. I've heard that some newer outfits have a slider option for "squish" to simulate the appearance of tight clothing on soft body parts, and I suspect that something like that might help give me better top options for Aela and Ria both. 

Of course the real issue with Aela's top is just that the source geometry isn't scaling right, and I probably just need to write off that particular top in general until I elevate my Outfit Studio skills further. I've already taken several cracks at it and I just can't get it to behave the way I want it to. Ria's case is a little easier, I think the main thing I need to do is give her a custom skin and then rig her up with 3D pubic hair rather than relying on the flat texture on the basic body. Honestly, I probably need to do this for a lot characters who will be exposed most of the time, and then just lean on the texture as a fallback and as a resource for characters with tight-fitting but inadequately-covering underthings.

I probably also need to revisit my deviation from the original concept of "secure the balls for men, secure the boobs for women" on the berserker style armor for Aela. The original concept was that she was going to be intersex, but I need to either fully embrace that and give her a tighter-fitting undergarment like the male berzerkers or I need to table that option and go Kofman style with her outfit. I'll probably address both Aela and Ria at the same time I do the rest of the Companions. 

The game crashed out loading into Whiterun, looks like a Racemenu related crash.

PROBABLE CALL STACK:
    [ 0] 0x026F7902EAB4   skee64.dll+001EAB4
    [ 1] 0x026F7902DA81   skee64.dll+001DA81
    [ 2] 0x026F7901C3FE   skee64.dll+000C3FE
    [ 3] 0x026F7901BF38   skee64.dll+000BF38
    [ 4] 0x026F7908EC67   skee64.dll+007EC67
    [ 5] 0x026F790183E2   skee64.dll+00083E2
    [ 6] 0x7FFF07281D32    OBody.dll+0001D32
    [ 7] 0x7FFF0728741E    OBody.dll+000741E
    [ 8] 0x7FFFA9599333 ucrtbase.dll+0029333
    [ 9] 0x7FFFAAF4257D KERNEL32.DLL+001257D
    [10] 0x7FFFABF0AA48    ntdll.dll+005AA48

One user on The Nexus suggested some ini tweaks, which may also offer a clue to some of the morph related issues. One of the recommended changes is to turn off BodyGen - which should be off since I'm using OBody - and it turns out that feature was still enabled. Its very possible those two functions were fighting with each other or, at the least, messing with actor weight assignments because of the well documented deficiency with BodyGen where it sets everyone's weight to 100.

Some of the recommended setting changes weren't in my ini file, so its also possible that the fix for this issue is in a newer version of Racemenu. If so, that might push me to updating my runtime if this problem persists.

Despite an uncomfortably long load time to get in, Whiterun custom assets seem to be working properly. Let's start with a walk around town, and then check out the interiors. 

No big surprise that the customized areas still looked pretty good. I was very happy with how those tweaks came out and nothing's changed there. I did discover a technical error on some custom costumes that I'll need to address - it seems the two hostages are supposed to be gagged.

Meanwhile, I think I figured out why some characters like Aela were exploding out of their clothes. It looks like the legacy UUNP presets might have accidently been left turned on last time I was building stuff in Bodyslide, leading to morphing issues. So Aela's top might be safe... need to think on that. More to the point, I probably need to start thinking about setting up a more nuanced distribution of body types instead of just having it be full random. I have a small enough selection right now that if I get ahead of the game now before I add more stuff it shouldn't be too much of a lift to accomplish.

The residential sections all look pretty solid. Custom NPCs are working well, house edits look nice. The main thing that's jumping out at me as an opportunity is to look for more alternate roof tile textures so we can keep expanding on the work that I did earlier with the colored tile mod. Also, the Hall of the Dead and Jorrvaskr haven't been touched at all, and I should check to see if either of them have enhancements that are available.

OK, so we have a few opportunities in the exterior but for the most part it's looking good. What about the interior zones? Let's turn off detection and check out each location. 

I already did a couple of these, such as the clan houses and the Drunken Huntsman, but we've got plenty of other opportunities. Right away the shops all have multiple overhauls, and I'm sure I can find some good fits for them. A few of the NPCs already have tweaked outfits, like Jenassa, but I'll also need to be on the lookout for other opportunities in that vein.

One thing I don't really anticipate the need to customize are the guard barracks, but I still gave them a walkaround to check for existing conflicts, such as with treasure mods. The one by the gates came out clean, as did the slightly larger one on the east side of town. The Dragonsreach dungeon had some leftover special effects from a Diabloesque Decorations static that I removed, and I need to think about how I want to deal with it. I actually kind of like the puddle, so I might remove the rug and the book rather than removing the pool of water.

Visiting the shops, there weren't a ton of great opportunities for character customization but I do wonder if I want to put Ulfberth into some skimpy berzerker armor similar to the Companions. Maybe something with nice high quality steel stuff instead of the Wolf Armor based Companions outfits.

Arcadia is a native of Cyrodiil, so she might be a candidate for a custom outfit, perhaps incorporating some southern styles; something cribbed from Beyond Skyrim perhaps.

A fun little fact about Forgotten Art; all the drawings are pre-rendered so they don't reflect custom NPC replacers. I chaulk it down to the Dragonborn not being a really great portrait artist and just getting the details all wrong.

Lots of opportunities in the Mare, of course. I noticed a few existing object collision issues, but since I'm likely to customize the interior we can hold off on those and just tackle them as part of mod integration. It seems I already did Saadia, but the rest of the regulars could use some attention. Given her backstory, Uthgert certainly seems like a candidate for berzerkerizing her armor.

Mikael might benefit from some Bard garb, just need to double check his lore to confirm he's actually a member of the College.

Got another crash going into Jorrvaskr, citing morphs. I suspect this is the legacy UUNP morphs striking again. However, as I finish looking through that crash log I note that I've been typing up this blog for 2 hours and kind of used up my hobby time for the night. So I guess we'll wrap it up there. The main takeaways:

• There are further opportunities to improve the polish level on the Whiterun buildings
• There are a couple of consistency issues, one with the hostage outfits and one with the Dragonsreach dungeon, but overall the state of the world is pretty good with no major deficiencies
• In addition to the Companions, there are a few other opportunities for creating similar custom outfits

Right now its the outfits that I'm finding most interesting, so I think that's what I'll focus on for the time being. It might be a little while before I feel motivated to hop into Skyrim, but when I do I'll look forward to sharing my latest creations on this blog!

Once I fixed the strings and interface issue, I ran through a quick test run of the game up to that point, and I was able to get AAF Violate to trigger a scene with no problems, which tells me that the passthrough there is working right. Currently, I have pretty limited AAF integration; just AAF Violate, Commonwealth Captives, and of course manual activation of animations through the AAF UI menu. But that's fine for now - if other mods are going to expand on that, I'll be adding them at a later stage in that build. With the AAF install complete, I got a bit side tracked turning the magazine add-on I made during the midst of Charley's Story into a standalone mod, which you can download at the link below.

As I proceed with building up the custom content for the world in the future, I'll try to continue spinning the different modules into their own mods so that everyone can enjoy those bits of Charley's world. Unfortunately, I do perceive some permissions related barriers that may require me to downgrade some features for use in the public version, such as bespoke builds of TheKite's outfits. Its possible I may be able to get permission for the BodyTalk3 conversion based on TheKite's FAQ, but even that's kind of iffy. That's one of those things I'm going to have to take one step at a time and I can't make any promises about being able to fully share that content. 

Today my big goal is to integrate Sim Settlements 2, especially in light of the release of Chapter 3. I'm eager to finish the Sim Settlements story, since I've only played the entirety of Chapter 1 (I had planned to play Chapter 2 later in Charley's story, but that build ran out of steam before I could reach that point). Today we'll begin by getting the mod's underlying framework installed and then loading up the core files for each of the three chapters.

And of course then I wasted a bunch of time, because it turns out that Chapter 3 actually contains an AIO download that contains all three chapters, and for the sake of tidiness if nothing else I'd rather use that version  Fortunately once I sat through the extra download time, almost everything installed smoothly. There's one little thing I'm seeing that I need to keep an eye on, this asset conflict here:

If I observe issues with ZaZOut, I'll need to take a look at these text files and see if I can merge them, but I'm not going to get too worried about that for now. As far as plugin conflicts, it was almost entirely top-level cell data, and benign TLCD issues at that (some previs data from one of the DLC was getting its version control data rolled back - I patched it to be safe, but I'm pretty sure this wouldn't break anyone's game).

Once we got back to Chapter 2 (I was doing conflict resolution in reverse order) there were a few object reference issues, mostly involving UFOP changes being reverted, so I patched those to ensure full compatibility.

Finally, the original SS2 also had a few little quirks that needed patching. It was almost exclusively cases where SS2 made an object persistent and reverted its other attributes back to the vanilla FO4 master data. Patching these records resolved the issue.

One thing that really stood out - especially with the interior cell records - was that partial forms cause xEdit 4.0.4 to generate false-positive conflict status. I believe I read that 4.1.5 is a bit better on this, but that experimental branch is still a little rough in some areas so I haven't updated to it yet for FO4. I'll use modgroups to prevent these false positives from coming up on future conflict resolution passes, but I still need to look at them all at least once to ensure nothing else is awry with the records.

Let's hop into the game real quick to make sure everything is working. Initial boot time and new-game start time were both long, which I believe is a consequence of adding substantial new mods to the game (and in turn thwarting private profile redirection's normal salutary effect on load time). I'll only be concerned about that if it persists over multiple starts in the same configuration.

AAF started up fine, always a good sign. I do think I need to install Start Me Up Redux after this test so on future runs I can bypass the pre-war sequence and get to testing faster. That'll be good for my new playthrough, too.

Looks like some MCM translation data inadvertently got packed in the BA2 for AAF Violate. I'll go check on that once I'm done with this test.

I observed some NPC blackface issues during the opening sequence, which as I'm sure I've said a million times is related to memory issues. I'm not too worried about this currently, but I do need to monitor how frequently this happens during normal gameplay (and not a highly scripted opening sequence with lots of startup activities happening in the background at the same time). And since I canceled the starting video, there was even more startup stuff going than strictly intended. But I digress. The TL;DR version is that hopefully this won't be a big problem in-game, but if I can keep load times under control, saving and reloading will fix it anyway by flushing the memory.

Saved and reloaded once we reached the Vault. Load time = 5 seconds, well within tolerances and actually a little better than some of the ones I'd timed earlier, which were coming in at 5.5-6 seconds.

Further examination revealed that saving and reloading did not fix the blackface and it was affecting all female characters and no male characters. So this may actually be a texture mismatch issue, which we'll need to investigate once we're out of the game. Though I have to say... I'll actually be happy if this does turn out to be a texture issue. The memory related black face bug is so frustrating to deal with, and a texture issue is the sort of thing that can be fixed through good asset management in one fell swoop.

Frame rate is good outside and complex parallax is working, so no signs of problems or overload on the rendering front. Let's go into town and start the Sim Settlements quest.

I had a little bit of a WTF moment finding those black and white background swatches in the build menu. I may end up pruning those out as I suspect they're not intended for normal gameplay. Otherwise, SS2 started up without any problems. 

The SS2 tutorial plot built out just fine - no issues there.

I ran down to Concord next and deliberately botched the combat to trigger an AAF Violate scene. I found it interesting that the raider females also had messed up facegen, even though the screwed up face and body textures were both different. There's definitely something funky going on here.

On a brighter note, the collision and placement of the Vioxis strap-ons is much better than my last build. That mods seems to have evolved considerably since the earlier verision I'd used. Real Handcuffs integration is also working well.

Male NPCs are sill having some issues with properly animating the erections. Requires further troubleshooting.

Handoff to AAF Bad Ends worked correctly, as did rendering ZaZ fluids. So it looks like gameplay is working properly, but we need to put some time and effort into resolving the face texture issue. First things first though, let's find the over-packed files for AAF Violate.

There's the interface translations. I'm only going to unpack the English ones so that I can keep my overall loose file count as low as possible.

And there's the missing descriptions for the MCM, so it should work better in the future. Now let's investigate this face texture business. The Vault-Tec staffer with particularly swarthy skin in the intro is CB1D5, let's open up her facegen mesh and look at the texture paths. 

Her diffuse map is using a custom texture rather than the facegen texture that my body texture replacer uses. While the game does theoretically generate facegen "live" on entering a cell, it has premade facegen like this loaded into the vanilla BSA files, probably as an optimization measure. I'm going to try a little experiment - let's load up the CK with our character appearance stuff loaded (we'll force the BA2s to load using the CK ini file) and regenerate just her facegen. For now, we'll leave it in the overwrite folder.

Hmm, the FO4 CK might actually correctly loads archives and doesn't need a manual override, because there isn't an ini field for forcing archives. Let's try it out.

No, that doesn't seem to be working. I think we'll have to manually load the assets loose to get it to play nice.

Now there's a visible difference. Let's see how this looks in the game. Incidentally, as expected (hoped) boot time was much faster on this session compared to the one that followed the big configuration change.

That's better, but still not quite matching up. It's particularly noticeable when the actor's clothes are removed, causing a "bib" of darker skin that runs quite a way down the throat and upper chest. 

Then again, I'm not using the latest version of the asset so maybe I should update it before I get too concerned. This mod is also built upon the Ruby Skin mod, so I might also consider rolling back to that version and building against it to see how it looks. 

That's a bit more extensive of a change than I was expecting. I knew it was intended for use with the Gappy Overhaul mods - and indeed I'm interested in using some of the assets from that series - but I don't think this will fit in very well with my worldbuilding plans. How about with the original Ruby Skin? Though I'm starting to get a bad feeling that I'm going to be forced to switch to the high poly head and just use a different skin than the one that I'd been hoping to go with.

Still got a very visible neck seam. Let's try one more thing, which is using the vanilla facegen with the Ruby body texures.

No luck with that approach either. Next stop is to read through the Fusion Girl support thread to see if anyone else has solve this issue. I seem to recall this was a problem with the previous version as well and I fixed it that time by using the high poly face meshes. 

Fusion Girl 1.8 skins with vanilla facegen almost look right. I want to try one more thing before I resort to using the high poly face. But nope, I won't bother sharing the shots as they're basically identical to the ones above. They didn't look any better.  I think I'm going to call it a night for this session and when we return we'll be drilling into these face texture issues more vigorously. I have a few more things I want to try that might save my ability to use the skin I want, and at the end of the day if those don't work, it won't kill me to use the high poly head - I just wanted to avoid the extra overhead of using it (and the reduced compatibility with some skins).

See you all next time, folks!

I started with Vivid Fallout and its suite of LOD and complex parallax add-ons. Installing these was pretty painless - they were already pre-packed, didn't have any unexpected conflicts, and generally behaved themselves well. From there, I moved on to scrutinize some of the suggestions in this Nexus collection for ideas on other enhancements. Some of the items like True Storms were also in my previous setup, while others are ones I haven't tried before. For example, I had a different suit of grass mods on my last build. 

I started with Grasslands. I always found the "everything is dead" aesthetic that Fallout goes for to be a little hard to swallow. If the game was set right after the war, it might be more credible, but from what we have learned from the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone and Fukushima, the "On The Beach" scenario of a permanent, lifeless hellscape isn't accurate and it tugs at my immersion sometimes. While the jury is still out on Fallout Seasons, since its an older mod and lacks some of the sophistication of the much more recent Seasons of Skyrim, doing something to improve the grass in the world seems like a reasonable step to take. 

Grasslands is another loose-files mod, so we'll pack it up before we proceed further. 

Now let's look at it in xEdit.

No conflicts, which is good. I was a little concerned this would have extensive landscape edits that would conflict with the landscape mods for Vivid Fallout, but that fear proved to be unfounded.

The companion mod, Grass Reworked, is one I used previously for True Grass with good results. Let's see how the Grasslands version of this mod stacks up. 

Once again, heavy landscape changes aren't getting made here. Instead, these mods are editing the grass and landscape texture records. This is a good approach from a compatibility standpoint, so I'm happy to see this. I did not have to do any patching for these mods.

I decided to skip Lush Landscapes. It seems really geared towards the "dead wasteland" look of the vanilla game, which as I mentioned earlier I'm not super excited about. I did install Gloomy Glass, which seems to fix some vanilla issues with material emissiveness, a problem that crops up sometimes in Skyrim as well. This mod overwrites some material files from ELFX, but I let it prevail to ensure consistency in the textures. While I was working on these files, I also ESL-flagged the Grasslands replacement esp that Grass Reworked provides. No reason for that one to be gobbling up a load order slot.

The Fallout 4 Particle Patch did require some minor patching of the top level cell data to ensure it wasn't wiping out changes from ELFX, but only six records needed this treatment. The last item on that list is True Storms, another mod that I have some experience with. It's a good mod and it has compatibility patches for NAC X, but I don't really feel like I need two weather mods running side by side. We'll skip that one.

The other source for potential baseline mods is the recommended mods list for Reactor. However, before I start working on those I want to test how things look inside the game. I also need to hop into xEdit and see if I can manually set the NAC X settings for Reactor in xEdit my modifying global values. 

As I expected, the mod settings are indeed controlled using global values. Let's identify the values that NAC X recommends disabling and change their default settings.

I had planned to open up the script source for NAC X and look up the proper values to set these globals to, but it seems that the mod is closed-source, so I'm going to have to guess that a "0" value equates to disabled. Let's try it out. If that fails, I may just have to set the values in-game, then save and examine the ChangeForm records for the globals in the saved game.

OK, time for another test run! Before I get out of xEdit I'll update my modgroups, then we can jump into the game.

In the future, I need to remember to use this patch to house keywords rather than building hard dependencies for keyword injection in my other patches. That should help reduce the number of master files on my patches when it comes to basic keyword patchups like defining AAF No Stripping items. In fact, let's change the name of that plugin so I remember.

Much better! Renaming those early before we reach a level of complexity where some patches have other patches as masters will avoid a lot of legwork since once one of these is a master file, renaming it becomes a lot more fiddly.

The game reached the opening cinematic and achieved BethNet login much faster than before - comparable with vanilla. I think this partially validates my theory about the ENB Shader Cache being a factor in last night's slow launch, though likely those SKSE utilities I installed last night also helped. Actual new gam initialization took a little while - maybe a minute - but once I reached the bathroom it performed smoothly. Unlike the first time, where I was getting seriously impacted by high FPS breakdowns in the vanilla engine, I didn't experience any microstutters or accelerated animations and UI.

For better or worse, ENB isn't catching the player character in the reflection. I wonder if there's a mod like Capture Warmer - probably still won't capture moving actors very well but it would be a step in the right direction. In any event, that's something to investigate later. So far the game looks good - even the characters and clothing which are still vanilla textures. Framerate remains high and consisent.

The High FPS Physics Fix makes the UI behave properly. While I'll want to install *some* additional UI functionality before I'm done, I'm generally happy with the vanilla experience and I don't think I'll be installing tons of sorting or categorization stuff, since those are inherently unfriendly to mod-added items and don't add a ton of utility (at least without not poking the bear that is Fallout 4's very fragile implementation of ScaleForm). 

Incidentally, further examination of Codsworth reveals that he is actually using vanilla "fake" cubemaps, so I may need to do some manual tweaking to get the ENB cubemap feature going (if it even exists in FO4 - but I think it does). 

I know I mentioned this before but I really love how vivid the prewar world looks with this ENB and lighting setup. 

I wonder how much effort I should put into customizing the pre-war scenes. Like, should I replace the canonical Overseer with Valerie Gray? Should I customize the outfits? I think I'm starting to get a feel for what I want to do as far as storytelling, and if I take that route I won't be blogging the main quest at all up to the stage that the current story has already reached... but if I am able to keep this mod in "shareable condition" I may want to include the early game customization for others to enjoy; but there's another path where the person playing this isn't Charley or a Charley-equivalent, in which case the early game customization becomes a little tricky. I need to think on that further. 

I also wonder how mature the state of AI Voice Gen is in the Fallout side of the hobby. If this is going to be shareable, I think I'd want to make dialogue edits to reflect the Charley continuity and voiced dialogue is so much more immersive than reading silent subtitles. 

The Vault 111 tutorial sequence generally looks good. I saw a few areas where lighting was causing an interference pattern on certain statics at certain angles, so I'll need to mind that and possibly tweak a bit, but it wasn't anything that adversely impacted gameplay.

OK, let's see if those NACX settings carried over properly.

Global Value 0 does indeed seem to be "disable," and the NACX script didn't reset these globals to defaults on game start so my edited values got loaded in without needing to take any special action. Let's step outside and see how the world looks with our recent edits.

There seem to be some vanilla-like reflection issues visible here (see the puddle in the bottom right abruptly getting darker as I walk forward). I'll need to monitor that as the build takes shape to see if this remains an issue. If it's really pervasive I might need to investigate options to improve it. 

The trees are still dead, no big surprise there as I haven't really messed with them, but the grass looks better now and in general things look pretty sharp. The water flow direction is screwed up, but that may be a vanilla problem. We'll need to see what kind of water options are available for FO4 these days. 

One kind of dumb thing about the Reactor ENB is that it changes or disables the keybind to access the ENB menu in-game. I reverted it to the OEM ENB setting but that required a restart of the game. I wouldn't mind this too much except the new keybinds aren't documented on the Reactor ENB front page, a rather meaningful oversight. Fortunately, load time was extremely fast (almost no delay - I counted 6 seconds total).

Once I had the menu enabled, I could activate a few features that aren't in the native Reactor ENB preset such as Complex Parallax. Take a look at the ground texture between the first (default setting) and the second (Parallax activated) below.

The difference is subtle, but the textures definitely have more, well, texture to them in the parallax mode. I was also intrigued to discover that the ENB control panel now contains controls to modify the length of the day. Someone really should make a mod that dynamically changes these values based on the in-game date. It's beyond my skill level but it would be a great immersion feature. 

Some of the vanilla occlusion planes aren't placed perfectly - see the clutter inside this house which isn't visible in the first image but pops in in the second image. I'll need to check to see if there's a mod out there that optimizes the occlusion planes. They're an important optimization feature but they can also be a big pain in the neck under certain circumstances. Fortunately, further walking around Sanctuary didn't reveal any more problematic window occlusion, so I think it might just be that one particular plane. Worse come to worst, I can just remove it. 

Most of the minor deficiencies we've seen so far are just that - minor - and I expect they'll largely resolve themselves as the build matures. However, the water flow thing annoys me a lot and I'm going to attack that first. Let's install Wasteland Water and Real Water for ENB and see if that helps. I packed up Real Water's textures in a BA2. Since it doesn't have it own plugin, I keyed it to Wasteland Water's ESP file.

For Wasteland Water itself, I put an ESL flag on the plugin and then applied a conflict filter. I'm expecting a bunch of top level cell data conflicts related to the water flow characteristics conflicting with ELFX, but let's see what we get.

The author did it the clean way and edited the vanilla water flow data instead of making new ones and subbing them in. Of course, this is in part because FO4 already has more nuanced water data than SSE, but its still nice to be once again spared the need to fight with tons of top level cell data conflicts. I patched these together with NAC so that WWR wins any conflicts where it's providing new parameters but otherwise we forward the details of NACX. 

The water itself looks a lot better, but it's still flowing in an inconsistent and weird way that looks fake when I closely scrutinize it. The problem is also visible on the south side of town. All the water appears to be flowing directly south instead of following even the general course of the river. I don't remember if this is a vanilla problem or not but its more noticeable with the improved lighting and textures.

A quick look at the relevant water flow data (from both post-war Sanctuary and from the pre-war version) reveals that in many ways teh changes to these areas have been light so far, so this is probably a vanilla problem getting carried forward. To understand which parts of the records are more relevant, let's take a look at this mod and see how it approaches fixing the Charles river. 

It kind of looks like wind direction is the the property that's defining the flow characteristics. Let's try something real quick. I copied the Wasteland Water noise values for Sanctuary's water type so they override NAC's changes (which zero the wind values). How does that affect the game?

Now the water is flowing to the southeast, which is roughly what I expected to see and, considering the constraints of the engine's water rendering, this is about the best we can expect. I checked the rest of the water flows that NACX touched but Sanctuary was the only one that it completely zeroes out. I'll leave my patch in place for now and otherwise not make further changes. Now that I understand the underlying problem, I can go back and fix further issues if and when I identify them. With regard to Flowing Rivers, I'm going to keep that one in my back pocket for now. It sounds like its a good mod, but I'm not sure if it will really add a lot to the game experience.

OK, with that said, now let's move on to the recommended mod list for Reactor. Right off, they have their own recommended texture mod, FlaconOil's Complete Retexture. This is a nice looking mod but it probably mostly overlaps with Vivid Fallout. Let's see how extensive the differences are. We'll grab the 1K version and see how many things in its texture set don't get replaced by Vivid when I give Vivid higher priority. If there's a substantial difference, I'll give FlaconOil a spin. If there's only a small difference, I won't load 1.5 GB of textures just to harvest a few items. 

OK, out of about a thousand texture files, only 100 are conflicted by Vivid, so this one does offer a pretty comprehensive expansion to the texture overhauls. We'll keep this mod for now and see how it looks in-game.

The bridge definitely looks sharper except when scrutinized up really close, but it's painfully obvious that this texture overhaul doesn't include parallax. Let's try out this mod and see how it compares.

This one catches a few more items but is about 1/3 overwritten by Vivid. We'll add on the other two extensive Parallax texture replaces, with their load priority based on their release date, and see how much we can cut into the non-parallax texture replacements.

What an awful idea. The author of this one assigned an ESL extension so as shipped its impossible to properly manage the asset load order. Let's fix that. 

Yeah, yeah, whatever. I know what I'm doing.

FO4 complex parallax mostly loses its conflicts but it does provide some files that were previously strictly vanilla. Kind of the same deal with NXGEN. FlaconOil is still getting most of its files to the actual game. Let's load back in and see if the parallax stuff looks better.

Load time was still 5.5 seconds, so no impact on load time from adding those BA2 files full of textures. Let's look around a bit. 

The parallax is much more noticeable on the ground textures than on the walls. I think for the moment I'll call this a win and just watch for further opportunities to improve in the future. I'm going to bump Flacon up to 2K quality and then move on to the rest of that recommended mods list. Ultimately I grabbed Lowered Weapons (I used that on my previous build and liked it) but rejected the rest of the list. At this point I think we're ready to move onto doing the character models. 

As with my previous build, I'm going to be using Fusion Girl and Body Talk 3 as my baselines. This will help enable porting of my custom outfit studio items to this new build. Since the base mods are both missing in action from the Nexus, I'll be using the ones from my previous build as the baselines.

Needless to say, this is a pretty big stack of mods. Some of them definitely won't be making the cut, like 8K skin textures. I'm pretty sure those were "part of the problem" on my last playthrough and they never felt like they made a big difference in practical terms. We'll start with the female side and set up which items seem essential. On my previous build I liked the look of this skin texture, but it was incompatible with the high poly face mod so I couldn't use it. We'll give it a spin on this build. The bad news is that these mods are all loose files so I'm going to want to pack them up. 

To prepare for this, I created three empty mods in MO2: One for the core Fusion Girl mod, one for the collective add-ons, and one for the bodyslide projects which I won't have active during normal gameplay but that I want to be easily accessible. 

Now we'll pack up these files using Archive2. We won't archive F4SE stuff and I trimmed out excess loose files like the TEOB documentation (it'll remain available in the separate TEOB folder).

I keyed the BA2 files to TEOB's plugin since it already existed. No need to add another plugin that way. Now let's build the bodyslides and pack them up in their own file; we'll also copy over (but not pack) the slider presets for Bodyslide as we want them available for body randomization purposes in the future.

Nora looks pretty good. Her body physics are a little floppy, but we'll address that when we get to, well, the physics. The male body mod, Body Talk 3, doesn't really have any add-ons in this part of the mod list, so it'll require a bit less work to integrate. The procedure, however, remains essentially the same.

Nate's body replacement is working right, though his junk will be misaligned until I install skeleton and body physics mods. One thing I did notice right away was that load time increased by about two seconds - I had forgotten to turn off the bodyslide project folder, and this seems to be a data point in favor of my hypothesis that loose files very significantly contribute to load time.

Now let's get the physics and skeleton stuff taken care of. 

The payload from my previous build looks good, but we need to pack these assets. I did end up dumping the two weapons animation mods for now as I'm not sure how much they'll really contribute. We can always consider them in the future.

As was the case previously, I didn't pack up the F4SE ini files. This will ensure F4SE can access them consistently and also allow for much easier maintenance and tweaking of their settings. The remaining item that I haven't touched yet is the pubic hair file. As you recall, this was something that I heavily customized from its original form. Unlike my Skyrim game, where I chose to use texture-based body hair for technical reasons, I plan to keep using the 3D hair in FO4. However, I need to get color matching working properly on it. While I was able to successfully port manual hair color adjustments (which required the use of the Armor Workbench), I never quite got automatic color matching of the sort Skyrim had to work. 

The first thing I need to do to work on this problem is to strip the dependencies out of my underlying mod. We can add them back in later in some form or another, but for the moment the only dependency I want for this one is the Pompadour Wig mod that I cribbed the color system from. That meens we have to go and redo the AAF No Stripping keyword so its a native keyword in the file. Keyword detection is generally string based, but if we run into problems with that we can always just add the other instances of the keyword to AAF's XML files.

There we go, much better. So now we've got our last progress from the old build, just with the dependencies on most other mods peeled out. We've got two other issues facing us now:

1. Color matching remains a possible problem
2. Distributing body hair and getting NPCs to consistently "wear" it

In Charley's story, most NPCs had their hair manually provided to them when they received a revealing outfit like the Vault Suit; some NPCs received hair automatically, but this was limited to actors whose lower body was exposed at all times, such as some Minutemen or naked non-citizens, and it did not have color matching. On the distribution side of things, that might still end up being what happens - otherwise it might not be possible to hide the body hair when those NPCs wear more clothing. But first let's see if we can get the color matching working right. 

Let's hop over to our Skyrim client for a moment and take a look at the color matching pubic hair mod on that platform to see what technical approach they used.

We can see here that the Skyrim mod uses an object effect to accomplish the color change. That object effect connects to a magic effect, and that fires off a script. Here's the effect script shown below:

I don't really know enough about the best way to achieve some of these functions in FO. Are these dye and texture layer functions present in the base game or in a mod? This is going to take some research to figure out. Some snooping around confirms that the NiOverride function is part of RaceMenu. Is the same function present in LooksMenu? Let's find out.

Nope. Nothing. And porting NiOverride to Fallout4 is way out of my comfort zone - to say nothing about my tim budget. And while several Skyrim mods seem to come close to what I'm looking for without a RaceMenu dependency, none of them quite hit the mark. RobCo Patcher might offer a path forward on color matching - I can imagine a potential patcher configuration that looks at the NPC's hair color and injects an appropriately colored hair item into their inventory, but it would require a lot of back-end work to set it up. And that still doesn't address the equip/unequip logic, to say nothing of how some outfits need custom hair meshes. I think we'll table the pubic hair mod for now and revisit it one the setup has matured a little bit.

With the decision to put the pubic hair "back on the shelf," I think we can declare all our goals for this session achieved: we've finished our foundational installs for the world and got the body replacement mods up and running. While sadly I think we're already in "can't make this a Wabbajack list" territory with the asset packing we've been doing, I'm happy with how the game is performing so far. 

When we return, the next step will be to get Advanced Animation Framework up and running. 

Some general principles I plan to follow:

• I'm only going to add mods that contribute content that actively enhances the game. Increasing the density of scenery generally doesn't fall into that category, so mods that just add trees or other clutter won't make it in.
• I'm going to try to avoid screwing with the vanilla settlement system more than I absolutely have to. I won't be disabling precombines, installing Scrap Everything, or starting the game with a ton of new settlements added. While one or two may start loaded in just for compatibility's sake (the Mechanist's Lair comes to mind specifically), in general new workshops are something I'll be adding in on an as-needed basis.
  • As much as I dislike the heavy use of precombines in FO4 and the way it makes it hard to clean up settlement sites, this is a big part of the problem when it comes to sandbox behavior breaking in settlements. I've decided that sandboxing is more important than tons of fiddly customization, especially since I got a hearty does of customization in my previous playthrough.
  • On the topic of customization, I will be largely outsourcing settlement customization to Sim Settlements. There are one or two specific settlement decoration mods I do want to use, notably VTAW and a couple of expansion kits for Vault modules, but I'll be setting a very high bar for including content. Game balance will be a substantial consideration: mods like Northland Diggers that let you circumvent the normal settlement resource creation game loop won't be included in this one.
• To the greatest extent possible, I'm going to be packing the game assets inside BA2 files. FO4 (and I suspect Skyrim as well) is highly oriented towards using BA2 archives and now that Buffout 4 has overcome the arbitrary 256 BA2 limit, there's no reason to take risks with excessive amounts of unpacked files. 
• I'll be applying the same high level of patching and conflict resolution that I've been doing with Skyrim.
• I'm not going to use RootBuilder for my FO4 instance. While that tool has some useful functionality, it has some technical aspects that I'm not happy with. I'll likely also phase it out from my SSE build in the future. 

To facilitate this I already updated my modding tools to the latest versions (though I kept xEdit on version 4.0.4 because 4.1.5 has a couple of minor hiccups that interfere with the operation of one of my go-to conflict resolution tools) and investigated some of the most up-to-date ENB options. I keep seeing Pilgrim and Reactor getting recommended a lot and of the two Reactor looks like its closer to the aesthetic I want. This visual baseline will established the first few elements that I'm going to install here.

But before we start with that we have some utility mods we need to either install or update. Right off the bat, the Unofficial FO4 Patch needs an update. Believe it or not, Charley's build was created originally back in 2020-2021 and some of its foundational mods haven't been updated in quite a while. Creation Club Delayed and F4 Revisions also need updates. 

These mods should generally play nice with each other, but let's review them in xEdit just to be safe. I loaded up the UFOP profile in xEdit to eliminate any false positives and we've still got a couple of items standing out.

The locations are basically all false positives. These Creation Club DLC items use partial forms to add some additional info to the locations, and then the UFOP comes after them, creating the illusion of a conflict since some fields are missing from the partial forms. But they're all benign and all just get overwritten by the UFOP. As for the cell conflicts, they're just an issue related to the top-level cell data for the navmesh generation cell in one of the DLC, which gets fixed by the UFOP. This is another benign conflict where the UFOP can just passively win.

I created a ModGroup in xEdit to ensure I don't have to re-review any of these conflicts, then I dropped back to MO2. Next we'll start installing the requirements for our ENB. 

Needless to say, the unspoken first requirement here is to install the latest version of F4SE. I may actually be up to date on that one, but I'll double-check Silverlock just to be safe. 

Here you can see that we've got the latest FO4 runtime and also the latest F4SE, so that's all good. We're also going to want the latest Buffout 4 which I know I already have since I updated it in a vain attempt to stabilize my previous build. Neither of these mods require any xEdit review, so we'll now move on to the Reactor ENB requirements.

Here's our first mod with a big pile of loose files. Let's pack these up using Archive2. For a full rundown of which settings to use for which file types, see this article on the Nexus.

There we go, all packed up. Now we'll finish installing the last few items and hop over to xEdit for conflict resolution.

We've got a few conflicts here, let's see if any of them need special attention.

If had to forward the UFOP's fix for this texture path typo, which officially became the first entry on a custom patch for this build. The light conflicts were all benign conflicts between ELFX and NACX where ELFX was getting intentionally overwritten. 

ELFX did contain some cell edits. The conflicts here were almost all benign - the only patching I had to do was to forward some cell name clarifications from the UFOP. 

Reactor ENB is a little unusual because you have to go into the Pip-Boy to make some changes to NAC X for it to work right, so let's load up the game and take care of that. Hopefully these settings will "stick" once we enter them into the Pip Boy so I don't have to do this every time I start a new game.

oh, lol I guess I should install a UI mod, shouldn't I? After fixing that I proceeded into the game.

Out of the box with just ENB and a lighting mod the game didn't look too bad. I had a weirdly long loading time initially, but I think that might have been related to ENB building up its shader cache. Still, I'll need to keep an eye on that. There's also signs that the in-game frame rate is way too high and its causing issues. I have some fixes from the previous build that I'll slot in once I finish this test run.

The color in the prewar world is very vivid. I'm interested to see how the postwar world compares. 

The ENB cubemap improvements for water that make such a big difference in Skyrim are apparent here too. This will hopefully put to bed the longstanding issues with ugly water reflections in the vanilla game.

The colors look pretty good in the postwar world as well. Switching to the recommended settings makes everything look a little more realistic but doesn't cause any huge changes in how things look.

I think we've got a good start here. Let's add in some of the foundational engine fix type mods we've got to ensure everything is working as intended.

These should help. There are probably a few more out there, but these are all up to date and ready to go, so it's a logical starting point. And sure enough, the game loaded up much faster and no longer displayed the high FPS timescale issues, so I think we're now poised to move forward with the build. Next time, we'll install a suite of texture improvement mods such as Vivid Fallout to bring the graphics up to date and then install our body replacer mods. We'll also investigate the options for body randomization - back in 2021 they were very limited, but perhaps some new options have become available since then. See you soon!

Unfortunately, it's also become super unstable. I booted it back up this weekend to try and write some more for Charley's story, and I was shocked by how badly it was performing. Not only were the load times prohibitive and the actual game performance kind of weak, but I was encountering serious problems like infinite loading screen from the main menu or signs that the game was getting close to overflowing its memory constraints almost as soon as I loaded in (even though I was nowhere near my full memory capacity). Of course, FO4 has always been a little janky when it comes to memory handling.

With a real sense of regret and disappointment, I think it may be time to pull the plug on Charley's story and build a new world to play with. Of course, this won't be an overnight process. I have no intention of deleting all the custom assets and other work I did for Charley's world, so I'll need to take some time to carefully go through all of that material and sort it out, and ideally peel apart my big patch plugin at the same time so I won't have to reinvent the wheel in terms of the database. 

And I can already tell some changes I'll want to make in the new world. First and foremost, we won't be starting up the game with a million settlement add-ons active. I learned very pointedly in Charley's adventure that not only was there no reason to start the game with those loaded, but that at times it was actively counterproductive to do so. Case in point, Salem and its whole loyalty cascade problem with the gun turrets. There's also a lot of bloaty mods that, while they were superficially good ideas, I've learned my lesson about and won't be including again. One example is Boston Natural Surroundings, which adds tons of trees that cause all kinds of geometry conflicts and also add to the draw call load. Another example is High Poly Faces (and indeed, 8K skin textures in general), which are surely "part of the problem" for memory-related breakdowns in the facegen system.

Of course we'll want to get Sim Settlements 3 installed and running, and we'll want to lean on it more for our settlement building, with far fewer manual-placement type mods installed. There'll be a few certainly for the NSFW stuff or for narrative purposes, but settlement add-ons are definitely "part of the problem" when it comes to bloat in this current build, something that shows with occasional resource related script lag weirdness. Most that add random new weapons will also be on the chopping block; I keep trying these out and they never live up to expectations. On the other hand, clothing mods like VTAW's and TheKite's stuff will definitely be staying, since making fun custom outfits was a very satisfying part of Charley's playthrough.

The process of building the next world will probably take a while, in no small part because many mods have been updated or developed alternatives, and everything is going to need to be scrutinized carefully for what it adds. Still, that should be a fun process in its own right, and I'll look forward to sharing my progress with you all as that starts to take shape.

Finally, in wrapping up Charley's story, I'll share with you my notes for what would have happened next. I had kind of roughly outlined where the story would go through Book 8, and while the technical limits of the engine mean that story won't be written in full, I'd like to share at least a glimpse into what I was planning on writing. So stay tuned, Charley's story isn't quite done yet.

• 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 would be out of scope for what we are doing here, we'll want to add some more colored roof tiles, consider customizing a few additional NPCs, and make Lydia a custom outfit. We should also review the mod options for Breezehome to see if we want to do anything with that location or leave it vanilla. 
• There are also some outlying locations we'll want to look at in Whiterun. Loreius Farm and Whitewatch Tower have several overhauls available, we'll want to put custom roof tiles on Battle-Born Farm (if I can get them to seamlessly replace the thatch roof), and we want to assess if the cannabis farm can be installed with a minimal amount of work.
• On the road to Ivarstead there are a couple of sites we want to look at customizing, notably including Valtheim Towers and a shrine of Dibella. I already did a couple of these locations, like the Ritual Stone during some hobby time that I didn't blog but there are several other items to look at.
• I want to overhaul Ivarstead and look at customizing some of the NPCs there. I also need to decide if I want to install Cocksmen Village on this build. That mod requires Sexlab Aroused so there's more thought involved than might appear since I've tried to avoid installing pervasive behavioral mods when I can avoid them.
• There are a couple of opportunities for work on the road from Ivarstead to Morthal, but not too many - I don't want to add a lot of POIs to the frozen area that much of the route winds through, which somewhat limits what mods I'll consider.
• Finally, I'll want to overhaul Morthal, the adjoining swamps, and the dungeon of Ustengrav.

Let's start by taking a second look at "Don't Rush Me: Bleak Falls Barrow." When I was evaluating this mod the first time, I viewed it as kind of a 'nice to have' that was not entirely in scope for my current project, and that might post some technical challenges. However, during the shakedown run I discovered a branch of dialogue that I hadn't really been aware of before where Hadvar (and I presume Ralof, too) steers you towards going to join a civil war faction after talking to Balgruuf. This recontextualizes the way the game rushes you into starting Bleak Falls Barrow, and I think now that the option to delay the quest is much more relevant to this project. So let's take a close look at this mod.

The mod itself is an ESL-flagged ESP file. In terms of assets, there is a single script conflict with the USSEP that we need to take a look at.

Comparing the scripts side by side we can see some structural differences. It's pretty clear that we also need to compare with the vanilla version of the quest though as I believe part of the changes are related to Don't Rush Me removing some of the functional elements that push forward into the next quest. The actual comparison provide a little tricky because all three versions of the script (vanilla, USSEP, and Don't Rush Me) all make changes to the order that the properties and fragments are listed in. I suspect that's the CK at work being silly. So let's manually put everything in order and then compare them again.

Now that we've conformed the fragments and props we can see that there are a lot fewer changes than we first thought. In the end there was only a single change I had to forward from the USSEP along with an added script prop (USSEP adds a check for an Imperial race related function that was getting applied to everyone previously). This is exactly the kind of bugfixing edit that I try to preserve when mods conflict with the USSPE so I recompiled the script and then moved forward to examining the plugin. 

No big surprises in the plugin file. I needed to merge some conditions on one AI package and also forward the USSEP edits to MQ103, but otherwise the records were unconflicted.

The remaining change was just some light polish - the mod as shipped implies that the player received a summons to see Balgruuf and continue the quest, but this isn't actually the case - the player initiates the next stage. So I made a small change to the player's dialogue to remove the implications of a summons.

OK, so that should ensure the delay on Bleak Falls Barrow is properly handled without losing any features from the USSEP. But we've still got some more work to do in Whiterun itself. During the shakedown, I identified six landmarks that I want to look at overhauling in Whiterun:

• The Gildergreen and its surrounding square
• The Temple of Kynareth
• House Battle-Born
• House Gray Mane
• The Drunken Huntsman
• Breezehome

At a minimum, several of these will be getting colored roof tiles. Beyond that, let's look to see if any of these have overhauls that improve the exterior. We won't be considering interior-only overhauls at this time.

For the Gildergreen itself, GIRTH stood out immediately as a good option. Combined with Arthmoor's old Gildergreen Regrown mod and the GIRTH Seasonal Landscapes patch, this should give the old tree a very nice overhaul. Initial installation went smoothly - I hid a few conflicting files from Illustrious Whiterun but otherwise didn't need any special handling on the assets side. In xEdit, I had to forward one script attachment from The Curator's Companion but otherwise I didn't need to do any significant patching. I didn't see any comprehensive edits to the rest of the little park around the tree - at least not ones that weren't tied up in full-city overhauls, but I did consider a couple of mesh improvements to make things look a little nicer. After screening their contents, it looked like Illustrious Whiterun was already providing similar content and included Lux patches, so I left those be. 

The usual suspects have overhauls for the Temple of Kynareth, but none of them appear to touch the exterior of the building. HS has nice overhauls of House Battle-Born and House Gray Mane that include exterior enhancements. JK has a similar overhaul for the Drunken Huntsman. Of course there are about a million Breezehome overhauls, but we're only really interested in ones that preserve the vanilla decoration/buildout mechanic. This on here looks like a potentially good fit. Let's go ahead and get these installed then make sure everything is working right. 

I started with Breezehome and its Lux patch. These mods had no asset issues, though I did note that the main mod wasn't compacted. This might just be a result of it having too many records, but let's check.

Nope, size isn't the problem. Let's crunch this down and flow the new form IDs into the patch as well. Otherwise the mod looked fine; I didn't see any obvious problems or conflicts in the file that needed special attention, so for now we'll leave it be and move on to the Drunken Huntsman. As with most JK mods, this one is well supported with patches and doesn't have any problematic asset conflicts. 

The Drunken Huntsman does appear to have some treasure items that we might need to manually move. Since we're probably overdue to check on the parts of the city we've already done, let's go into the game and check up on the treasure while also verifying everything looks right.

Breezehome interior looks good.

Exteriors look good, though there seems to be a cow stuck in the Huntsman's back deck. Form ID noted for further research.

Gildergreen looks good. Now let's check the interior of the Huntsman and in particular inspect the various treasures and collectibles.

Gem and LOTD notes seem to be OK.

No issues with Cheesemod.

The Sotetta Huntress materials satchel is intruding on some static objects, but that's kind of a cheat item so I'll likely disable it. Additionally, I needed to install a few assets to get the Huntress crafting manual to show up. It's kind of blocking other items and also getting perturbed by the shop owner's animations. I'm going to change it to replace the ruined book on the bar (the one on the left in the image below)

The paintings from Forgotten Art also show up in the right places once manually enabled through the console.

After disabling the vanilla ruined book, I pasted its coordinates onto the crafting manual. That should address its positioning.

The cow is an interesting case. It shouldn't be getting stuck where it landed, but many users have reported that happening. It may be an issue related to SkyTEST's modified AI, but I don't really want to screw around with that right now. Since nothing seems to depend on that cow, I'm just going to disable it. There are plenty more cows in the game, after all. Let's hop back one more time to verify that the book is in the right place before we do the remaining buildings.

There we go, now everything's accessible. Now let's install the two HS mods and their Lux patches.

Both mods are mostly clean but there is one potential problem - they overwrite the vanilla versions of the houses. This could be an issue for mods that reuse those models. We might have to do some surgery on those... we'll find out more once we're in xEdit. Before I could look at the houses in more detail, I had to do a little bit of patching because this mod was stripping the persistent flag from certain NPCs who spawn inside the houses. This isn't a defect per se - those actors aren't persistent in the vanilla game - but it would have caused issues with other mods that relied on making those characters persistent. Let's also do a quick sweep of the locations to look for treasure that might need adjustment.

Cheesemod revealed a conflict that I was able to preemptively fix just by swapping out an analogous object. The cheese situation in House Gray Mane is a little more nuanced and it might require CK work to resolve.

Both mods also have items from Forgotten Art that are probably no longer placed right. Let's investigate. Before we go inside, let's capture the form IDs for the two buildings themselves so we can look deeper into their baseforms.

The exteriors look really nice. I captured their form IDs for further review. 

The interiors look great, though as I suspected the Forgotten Art items will have to be manually repositioned. Also, I spotted another Sovngarde statue which I want to replace.

The cheesemod stuff in the second house is less of an issue - while there is some minor intrusion by the platter, the main thing I need to do is just disable those two rolls of paper. I noted their form IDs for action. 

I may have spoken too soon, when I turned collision back on the platter shifted and sent a bunch of stuff flying. I may need to shrink the platter a little in the CK to ensure it works. So it looks like I've got a few things to do. First, let's check out the building baseforms.

As I expected based on my experience with the Bannered Mare, Falskaar uses both models. This will break their geometry since the doors are not in the exact same place, so we need to make some changes here. We're going to create a unique version of each model and remap the Whiterun versions to those, while also moving the HS geometry into a different folder.

While we're at it, let's make and apply the texture sets for the colored roof tiles. We'll use the glazed red tiles for the Battle Born (the faded red will go on their farmhouse later) and gray tiles for the Gray Manes.

I'll also disable those rolls of paper and scale down the platter to 80%. Hopefully that'll be enough to prevent it from ejecting its contents.

The model redirects and texture sets are working right for the exteriors, and 80% was just right for the platter. Now for the hard part - we need to move the statics from Forgotten Art. We'll do this by creating a working file in xEdit and then making the actual moves in the CK's GUI.

After some quick repositioning and disabling a few unneeded clutter items, Forgotten Art seems to be all fixed up. Now we just need to clean the working file and push its changes into my main patch. The technical implications of Forgotten Art are kind of interesting. I haven't really delved into this quest much but it appears that as the player obtains the different treasure items, copies of them appear in relevant interior locations. I'll have to fiddle with this mod some more in the future and learn more about how it works.

I'm pretty confident everything will be OK with these locations, so before we go to check them let's finish adding colored roof tiles to the other locations we worked on. We'll do blue for Breezehome, green for the Temple of Kynareth, and dark green for the Drunken Huntsman. That'll just leave the "normal" red which we're saving for battle born farm, so if we want to do more tile customization we'll need to find more colors to work with.

I realized at this point that I was making a serious order-of-operations error. To do the rest of the roofs I needed to go into the game to harvest their form IDs, so I should do any remaining work that I can do without logging in first. That's the statue customization. So let's grab some alternate statues. There are signs of Stendarr and Kynareth worship in the houses, but we don't have to use those deities. For the Gray Manes, I'll probably use the wooden statue of Talos model since it should be credible as a smaller decoration. The Battle Born statue is in their bathing chamber, and Dibella would certainly be traditional. TRX's bad girl might also be a fun alternative, especially if I can line up the waterfall effect properly. On a similar note, I did consider TRX's Champion statue, but that one is reserved for the statue of the Champion of Cyrodiil in Bruma.

Let's see if we can get the TRX Bad Girl statue working. We'll start by opening up the plugin and examining it. As packaged, the mod shows signs of overengineering by the CK but that won't be an issue as we'll be removing most of these contents. 

The key thing is to capture the objects it uses in conjunction with the statue its effect. Below you can see we've tailored down the plugin to just list those items. 

Next we'll copy these object references along with the statue I want to replace to a working file. Sadly, once we're in the GUI it's pretty clear this model won't work without big changes and this is far enough off-scope that I'm not willing to commit that time to it right now.

Dibellan Holds has some fun models also but these are used in the Sisterhood of Dibella quest which might make it into this build. So we'll leave those ones alone for now.

I went on to check a few more options, but reluctantly I concluded I'd need to just leave the sovngarde statue in place. The dimensions of the statuary grotto were pretty unforgiving on most of the options I tried, and messing with the interior dimensions of the house is beyond my scope of work. So we'll just do the Talos statue and leave the bath be. 

We'll give the Talos statue model a distinct name, and also create a baseform for it. After that, we'll use it to replace the Ysgrammor statue.

Oh, come on, really?! They had to put a huge base on it? OK, I guess we won't be messing with that one either. Sigh. I'll save this Talos asset for some other use but I'm not going to waste my time fighting with it at the moment. OK, I guess we're going into the game to get those building form IDs now.

While the temple is in fact unique, the other two buildings are used by Falskaar. So we'll start out by seeing if the custom versions I downloaded are replacing the exterior geometry. If they are, I'll need to move those assets to separate folders and remap with custom baseforms. In fact, I'll probably make custom baseforms for all three just to future-proof. Then I'll make the texture sets.

The Huntsman doesn't use a custom house mesh - the porch must be an add-on with its own geometry. Same deal for Breezehome. So that saves some time. Let's make our alternate baseforms and then apply the texture sets. Then we can take a nice walk through town to make sure everything looks right.

Those tiles are not on the roof. Looks like the 3D Index must be off. Some further snooping around in NifSkope revealed some extra BSTriShape entries nested under a NiNode that I hadn't noticed, which threw off my count by a little bit. Let's try again.

OK, the buildings are starting to look a bit more distinct. The last order of business for the Whiterun worldspace right now are the NPCs the player is likely to observe. Amren and Saffir already have customized faces, but we should look at their outfits. Amren isn't a Skyrim native but his default outfit is very light hide armor that's more suitable for the naturally cold-resistant Nords or at least someone who grew up in Skyrim. Let's see if we can find a better outfit for him. Dragonstar Armory is interesting but too fancy for Amren. I thought that with a little fiddling, Kreiste's Storm Tempest armor might work, but once I got it opened up it wasn't what I was looking for. In the end I decided to compromise a little bit on using fancy armor and equipped him with Dwarven Mail from the Alternate Armors DLC. I didn't mess around with Saffir's outfit at all as it seemed like a good fit. For Lars and Braith, I decided it was time to load up Realistic RS Children. I know this will make some more work for me in the future since I'll need to fix broken facegen in some mods, but I think overall it'll make the game look better. 

RS Children wasn't too hard to get installed since I had used it on a previous build and had all the latest files lying around, but I did need to regenerate my Synthesis patch to ensure the right face data was getting merged with the AI Overhaul edits. One or two characters needed manual patching to forward mod-specific edits, but those were a small minority. I also had to hide the Fjotra facegen from both RS Children and the Realistic Children add-on so that the "Young Adult Fjotra" mod would take provide its facegen.

Let's take one last visit to the game and see how the revised characters look. 

Braith is missing some hair textures (its missing KS stuff that I can fill in easily enough) and Amren's boots look profoundly stupid on him - I'm going to give him his hide boots back. But in general everything looks pretty good.

I think that about wraps things up for today. When we return, we'll move outside the city walls and spend some time working on the outlying sites around the city. See you then!

There are also some suspicious navmesh details in the area of Anise's cabin that look like they need some remedial work in the CK. I'll plan on doing these at the same time I investigate the navmesh near Helgen. After some thought I decided to defer customizing the two Thalmor soldiers at Helgen until we reach the Thalmor Embassy part of the main quest, since I can use that custom costume for the consular guards at the embassy as well. That just leaves one final unresolved punchlist item, which is fixing the texture lighting on the ZDD static objects. That will require further research so it's an ongoing project.

But what about MQ104? That quest begins with the report of the dragon attack, after which the player will follow Irileth down to the main gate to muster the guards. First things first I'll want to take a second look at quests that delay Bleak Falls Barrow. One thing I found during the shakedown run was that the dialogue kind of steers the player towards just warning Balgruuf and then going to join a civil war faction, but the forced segue to Bleak Falls spoils this gameplay path. If I can integrate a delay for that segment, I'd like to do so.

The walk with Irileth will take us back down through the square with the Gildergreen, past the Temple of Kynareth, House Gray-Mane, and the Drunken Huntsman. For these buildings, at a minimum I'd like to look at giving them colored roof tiles. If the player has not already done so, they are likely to witness Amren and Saffir's argument, as well as Braith being bullied. We should look at the options for customizing these NPCs. As much as I liked Wind District Breezehome on previous playthroughs, that mod isn't really suitable for the intended stage in the game when the player would purchase Breezehome. But we'll get back to the subject of Breezehome later.

After Irileth's speech, the player will follows the posse down to the Western Watchtower, where they confront the dragon. The Watchtower already has an overhaul in place, and this build already contains Diverse Dragon Collection. Unless we have problems with either of those mods I expect to keep them in place. I may also think about a certain light-hearted mod that adds a farm to the area the player will pass, but that's not a big priority if it needs any extra work. 

The road itself has a few individual segments that are showing noticeable grass intrusion, and I might 'mow' those areas in the CK a little. This kind of overgrowth doesn't make a lot of sense for an important trade hub and wagon stop. No Grass In Objects, of course, would fix this, but I really don't feel motivated to set up a separate 1.5.97 client just for running NGIO.

Since the West Watchtower will be destroyed in the coming fight, I don't see a big need to customize it. Much like the dungeon tower in Helgen, most players will never explore the inside of this location before it becomes inaccessible, and while I love easter eggs in principle, they are very much a "nice to have" feature rather than a must-have one.

After the dragon's defeat, the player is revealed to be Dragonborn and will have their third and final audience with Balgruuf. They will be elevated to Thane of Whiterun and Lydia will come into their service. Lydia already has a custom appearance from the 2023 build, but we'll customize her outfit at the same time. I'm somewhat inclined to use Knight of the Village for her basic outfit and then make a custom outfit for her upgraded appearance (unlocked by doing her romance quest in Amorous Adventures). At the same time, the player will gain the opportunity to purchase Breezehome. I'll want to look over the overhaul options - my main requirement is that they don't overhaul it too radically and that the mod preserves its vanilla upgrade process where it starts mostly empty and the player then has to furnish it. If the player has been following the main quest from the start, they'll be probably around 7th or 8th level at this point and it doesn't make sense to start them off with a palace.

Balgruuf will command the player to visit the Graybeards on High Hrothgar. Nowadays when I play Skyrim, I almost always take the mountain pass to Ivarstead rather than following the lowland route. However, I only learned about this path after I'd become pretty accustomed to the lay of the land, so we will proceed with the lowland route in mind. In general we will skip detours to dungeons unless it's likely the player would be called towards them, so for example we will not spend time overhauling the bandit cave just on the east side of the river.

The first exterior POI the player will pass is the Ritual Stone. I'll probably overhaul that one as part of this pass, since I know it has at least one good option that I've already integrated without problems in the past.

A bit further down the road, we'll encounter the bandit camp at Valtheim Towers. This region has a few different options for customizing it, which we'll review to see if any of them are a good fit. Since this is an iconic location that most early game players encounter it's a good candidate, but I want to be wary of any options that make the fight here too difficult by adding lots of additional enemies.

As an aside, frame rate was pretty good an consistent through this area, never going below the upper 50s. Looks like the occlusion data is doing its job and preventing overloading (though I'm running with TDetect turned off, so I'm not carrying any combat AI related load). The scenery looks really nice as well.

Without knowing and using the shortcuts, the walk to Ivarstead is a rather lengthy one, but there aren't any "hard stop" moments where the player can't proceed safely... and fortunately there are signs pointing the way along the main road.

Darkwater Crossing is down this way, but that's out of scope for this round of tweaking. We'll visit there at some point in the future though, most likely as part of Lydia's romance quest.

Here's the encounter where the "wounded merchant" lures you into a Bandit ambush. Since this encounter has a sense of urgency and a character who asks the player to help him, we'll review and overhaul the location as well as possibly customizing some or all of its elements. 

At a minimum, it needs some landscape cleanup - note the fire in the middle of tall grass. I'll probably also install Diverse Campfires are this time since I've been dragging my feet on it for quite a while now. In addition to being a good candidate for an overhaul on general principles, Nilheim tower shares a lot of common geometry with Valtheim, which might be noticeably "samey" to the player and hold back immersion a bit. All the more reason to customize it.

An observant player will be able to see Ivarstead from the top of Nilheim's tower, and might take a shortcut along the riverbank to reach the objective. However, let's follow the rest of the road just in case it offers up something interesting.

I met a Skooma dealer here. This is probably just a random world encounter, but I should look into customizing his outfit. Prison rags don't make a ton of sense for the dealer. This might be a good opportunity to add some Khajiit outfits.

This camp I passed reminded me that I should pick up the shell-textured rabbits mod.

This Dibella shrine and its sacred band attendants need some customization. I'd like each Dibella shrine to have unique geometry, and the Sacred Band members need costumes. On my 1800 mod build I used Goddess of War as the basis for the Sacred Band's outfits and that'll probably be my starting point, maybe incorporating some TEWOBA Imperial Bikini Armor pieces. 

This route takes us through the site of Cocksmen Village. That locale comes with its own cute and raunchy quest and I'll have to decide if I have the time to integrate it without slowing down the main project too much. The mod certainly offers utility by adding a place to rest along the middle of several long routes, but it makes a number of changes to other areas such as Windhelm, so I'll need to carefully review its contents to ensure it's not too much of a scope expansion.

Now we've reached Ivarstead itself. Like our visits to Helgen and Riverwood, we'll need to do a full review of the denizens to decide which ones, if any, need further customization to their appearance and their outfits. I'm a big fan of the Great Town of Ivarstead and I'll likely outsource all the building overhaul work to that mod. I may also dust off Uncommon Races of Skyrim to overhaul Temba. That mod is tragically out of print, but I have a copy of it in my archives and with some tailoring I think it could make a good addition for select NPCs. The main issues with it as it shipped were all minor deficiencies 'around the edges,' with the core functions working properly. But like Cocksmen, UROS will require some time and effort so I'll need to triage whether its worth it to customize one NPC in this area. 

The next stop will take us up to High Hrothgar, which I'm not going to actually walk in this survey since we all know the Steps well I'm sure. I'll look for customization opportunities, though Hrothgar and the Graybeards are so iconic that they may need very little attention. After the Dragonborn benefits from their tutelage, the quest for the Horn of Jurgen Windcaller (MQ106) will begin. The player will descend back down the mountain and head for the dungeon of Ustengrav. 

This is another pretty lengthy hike that will take us through some interesting locations. First we'll backtrack to Whiterun via the mountain pass and this time take the north bridge. Leaving town we do see a Hydragorgon character who hasn't been updated yet, so we will need to go through and do a similar treatment here to what we did in Whiterun.

After we cross the ford, there's a ruined building where a Wispmother consistently spawns. I believe we already overhauled most of the vanilla monster races in the 2023 build, but we'll have to double-check to make sure the wispmother looks good when she spawns.

The mountain pass comes out right near the Whiterun Stormcloak camp. I probably won't do any customization on this today because this is kind of out of scope for what we're doing, but at some point I'll need to check on this area to make sure everything looks right. 

There are a couple of farms immediately north of the Whiterun bridge that the player will pass. I'll want to do at least some mild customization on them and their denizens.

Tundra Homestead seems to have some broken geometry that we'll need to investigate.

Whitewatch Tower, Loreius Farm, and Cicero's Cart are all in close proximity and all areas of interest for customizing. There are lots of options for all of them, so I'll probably spend a little time here picking and choosing.

Past Loreius Farm, we're entering The Pale's cultural area, and going forward we need to keep this in mind as we look at things like outfits. Loreius gets a pass since he's so close to Whiterun that he's more in their cultural sphere, but once we hit the snow line we want the Pale to look a bit different.

If I had Rigmor installed, this is where the large Imperialcamp would be located. We'll leave this area alone for now, but when/if I install Rigmor, we'll need to come back here to check for any landscape conflicts. The revelers here are a world encounter that isn't in scope for the current effort, though eventually I might want to add some subtle hint that these guys are in league with Sanguine.

Fort Dunstad - and the Stumbling Sabrecat tavern within - is a bandit fort that's worth at least taking a look at. The character won't necessarily need to conquer the fort but short of a lengthy detour they'll need to fight their way through. The Stumbling Sabrecat has a good overhaul mod, but I may wait until Rigmor is installed since it has a pretty comprehensive Rigmor patch.

If we were going east towards Dawnstar I'd be seriously considering installing Dunpar Wall, which is a small settlement I like a lot, but we'll leave that be for now.

Heading west, we'll pass the Hall of the Vigilants. It's a bit off the path, but in a cold zone like this the player may be more quick to detour to warm up, so we'll look at it. I'm not sure if it needs an overhaul per se, but in its vanilla setup Dawnguard can destroy the hall rather early in the game, even before the player visits. I should look into options to delay that development.

One thing I've noticed in this area is that the RASS snow shader is a little bright. I'll need to drill into this because the RASS rain shader also seems to be ignoring my ENB shinyness settings. It's possible I may just dump RASS if ENB is already providing a similar function.

The route to Ustengrav is pretty unforgiving and in the context of an early main quest start will be the player's first encounter with serious cold conditions. A Nord may be able to make it OK (barely) but other races might have a hard time. I don't think this really requires any special attention, but it's a good thing to keep in the back of my mind while doing testing. 

The player will detect Stonehills from the road and is likely to be pretty cold at this point. We'll need to review this location since sheltering there is quite likely.

This lamp post is out of alignment with the road signs. I'll need to fix that.

The overhead map had led me to expect that I'd get so close to Ustengrav that it would be logical for the player to go their directly, but in practice the road led me to Morthal. I'll want to overhaul this area with the usual level of detail I've done for other sites. I have a soft spot for ClefJ's Morthal, but I'll review all my options. I also need to do a little bit of research about Hjaalmarch. It seems like it would have a similar cultural feel to the Pale, if a bit less prosperous. 

There are a few mods that customize the marshes north of Morthal, and we'll need to decide if any of those make sense. In particular I believe there's one that adds some rickety plank bridges throughout the marshes which make traversal a little easier and more logical. 

We'll skip Movarth's Lair for now as it isn't really relevant to the main quest.

At long last, our trek through the marshes deposits us at Ustengrav. We will want to review the dungeon for overhaul opportunities, but once that's complete we should ready for a shakedown of the next three Main Quest segments. Stay tuned for the continuation of our adventure!

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 her best buddy. While it's never easy to lose a pet, Oreo was able to enjoy 19 years of life and appeared to be largely free of discomfort until his final 3 weeks - and even then we were able to keep him comfortable until his health drastically declined on Tuesday night. The vet confirmed that short of hospitalization, there was nothing we could do for him as his kidney disease had reached a terminal stage. He passed peacefully, purring the whole time as he want to sleep while my wife and I petted him. 

Oreo is survived by Nala, his long time roommate and nemesis, and by our two kittens (not kittens anymore!), Scoobie and Pixy. Pixy in particular had managed to befriend Oreo in spite of all his grouchiness, and the poor orange doofus is right now searching the whole house trying to find his friend. It's sad and hard to watch, but I'm glad that Oreo was able to forge a good relationship with the other kitties before his time came.

Even though we knew he didn't have much time left after his health scare a couple weeks ago, his passing still hit my family pretty hard, and I don't expect to be doing a lot of blogging for the new few days. Still, thinking about him did give me one idea that I figured I'd share while I did it. I downloaded A Cat's Life 2, and took a look at it to see if it would be a good fit for my build I'm putting together.

The mod was clean and free of errors, at with only about 3000 records it will be a candidate for ESL flagging once the tools for using the new extended ESL space become well tested and mature. There were a few conflicts, but most of it was just top-level cell data or positioning adjustments for ACHRs.

That one landscape record was mostly an ITM that was reverting Update.esm, but something must have changed because ITM cleaning didn't catch it.

Weirdly, row 19 forwards the Update.esm edit to the vertex normals.

Further down we get some genuine changes.

We'll tentatively patch this by starting with the revised Update.esm landscape and only forwarding unique changes from ACL. We'll need to check this in-game for irregularities but I suspect it will be OK.

As I'm doing this, I just noticed that this appears to be for a cell that adds a building to the exterior, so I might have to throw out this particular patch and go with the ACL record in its entirety if it's necessary to prevent terrain intrusion on the store, but let's patch the rest of the conflicts, then check it out and see.

The mod contained a few object references that were set to "initially disabled" but not otherwise treated to guard against them accidentally getting enabled. I added the player as an inverse enable parent for them so that if something else tried to modify the object ref it wouldn't accidentally cause them to reappear.

The navmesh reverted changes from the USSEP, which is naughty, but it also introduced a change to the edge links which I had to take into account. I patched the edge link change onto the USSEP since otherwise the two mods weren't mutually incompatible, editing different aspects of the mesh.

Edge link cleaning still doesn't work as of 4.1.5b, so I may be reverting back to xEdit 4.0.4 soon if a fix isn't forthcoming. For now I forwarded the edge links from ACL, but this of course is an imperfect approach and I might need to go in and do a more thorough cleaning lately. It'll get the job done for now, however.

There's also one more edit I want to make before I go into the game to test. While the tuxedo cat in ACL isn't a perfect match for Oreo's pattern, its still close enough for my purposes. That said, if someone with better GIMP skills than mine wants to make a custom texture for me, I can provide reference photos that give a better view of his coat pattern. 

Funny story, Oreo earned his nickname not because of his aroma but because of his attitude towards the other cats in the house. Nevertheless, he decided to break up the sad mood during our final visitation with him at the emergency vet by letting out a truly profound and rank fart while we were petting him. It broke up the tension a bit and helped us regain a little composure before the vet returned to give him his final treatment.

A quick walk around the exterior pet store location didn't reveal any obvious terrain seams, but the front path was a little overgrown. I hopped in to the CK and quickly "mowed the grass" on that path to make it more accessible. I had to make a few edits to the adjoining cell's landscape as well, just to avoid a texture seam along the zone line. 

Still a little overgrown, but now there's a clear path from the main road to the shop. 

I don't cleave to the supernatural claims of organized religion, but I'm heartened in the knowledge that spacetime is a unitary system, not separate space and time. For the 15 years he was in my life and the 8 years he was in my wife's, Oreo is still present with us. In a sense, we'll never truly be separated, even if at the place in time we're experiencing now he's gone. And beyond that, he'll live on for decades to come in our memories and in the photographic record we created to capture our companions' lives and likenesses.

The modes we as a society use to dispose of remains cause me ethical concerns. While most of the cells that make up our bodies are surely doomed as central control fails and the system falls into entropy, it gives me great pause to further take away whatever miniscule chance of ongoing life those cells posses by embalming, cremation, or decay inside a sealed vessel like a coffin. This is an order of magnitude more true for the countless and teeming life-forms that share the surface and interior of our bodies with us. In that sense, even burial is less than idea, since many of those organisms that might have a small chance of survival in nature are unlikely to persevere when placed under six feet of earth. I wish we lived in a society that had the consciousness of our nature as complex collective organisms and the humility to accept the natural process of decay and where remains could be allowed to repose in woods and other natural spaces where opportunities for escape into the wild or even to find a new home in the bodies of scavengers could grant if not our own cells at least the populations of our resident organisms a chance at ongoing life.

But with the ground still frozen, burial wasn't an option for Oreo, and reluctantly we had to accept cremation for him. We'll give his ashes a place of honor in our home, and we collected clippings of his fur immediately after his passing, so his body won't be completely gone, though sadly the storage needs of those clippings will prevent any mites or other parts of Oreo's microbiome from having a meaningful chance of relocating elsewhere. I wish we could leave them out of the other cats to sniff at and maybe rehome those blameless little arthopods, but we have to be selfish in that regard and keep them sealed away so the clippings aren't scattered and lost.

And so, in the material world, the small measure of real immortality Oreo might have enjoyed through the propagation of the survivors of what to them must be a world-shattering disaster is denied to us. But we still have our memories, and at least through my hobby, I can give him a small level of virtual continuance. 

And in this imaginary world, where I have the ability to shape the form of future events, I can ensure that he won't have to part from us prematurely. 

Having four cats was such a privilege. Such a challenge, too, but that was a cost well worth their companionship and affection. It won't be the same without Mister Stinky.

I'm not sure if you came here today for modding advice or for the NSFW hijinks that are Loverslab's bread and butter, but I'm pretty sure this volume of the blog wasn't quick what you were expecting. Thank you for sticking with it to the end and helping me process some of my own grief. As I mentioned a bit earlier, I'll probably have some downtime before I feel up for diving back into this project, but I'll try not to be too long. 

See you all soon, folks.

Almost immediately I find brawler's gauntlets that do more damage than my steel sword. So I guess we'll give those a try.

A few times now I've noticed that the glowing mushrooms' light source looks weird. I'm going to have to see if I can find a better asset for these... added to the punchlist.

The alternate dungeon paths are really refreshing - I have Bleak Falls more or less memorized, and this is a nice change of pace to play through. Its kind of an unavoidable issue that all the treasure-mod loot is located along the primary path, but that's not a dealbreaker since this is a repeatable dungeon and the LOTD research station will eventually reveal any treasure the player missed on their first run through. The modded version of the dungeon is mazey enough that I actually got turned around once or twice, which was kind of a unique experience compared to how linear Skyrim dungeons normally are.

At first level the brawler's gauntlets really wreck the enemy 😆

After a surprisingly long time I finally found an ancient Nord bow for that extra +1 damage compared to my hunting bow.

I entered Bleak Falls Sanctum through an alternate route that was a little hairy (ended up with a patrolling Draugr almost right on top of me) but with careful moves and some stealthy tomfoolery such as dropping flaming pots onto oil, I cleared the chamber and advanced to the room with the combination lock.

Word learned, Overlord defeated, Dragonstone acquired.

Exited the dungeon at 2 AM. Fortunately, the sky was well illuminated by aurora lights and I was able to make my way to Anise's cabin without any serious problems.

Wait, what? Apparently Anise was eaten by wolves   And her bed is still marked as owned so I won't be able to rest there. I'll have to get to Riverwood in the dark. Its kind of a bummer that she got killed, but I guess the game can't make her protected since she potential becomes hostile to you. I think I need to add her to the "friends with all animals" faction.

Oh, seriously?! Hopefully Alvor is feeling hospitable.

Nope, I'm locked out here too. I'm going to have to walk down to Whiterun, unless...

Whew, looks like the Valerius siblings are still up and about.

I walk in on an argument about thief-chasing. Sounds like I've got a chance to make a good impression!

Sadly, there wasn't anywhere for me to sleep there, so I ultimately had to hit the road and head down to Whiterun.

Those wolves were still out there on the road, but my torch (mostly) kept them at bay. They occasionally nipped at me, but I managed to get down the hill and reach the patrolled road.

I passed Anders and Buttercup on the road as we got close to dawn. They seem to be working correctly and look good in their new outfits. 

Sunrise

Finally! I head upstairs and get in a few hours of sleep so I'm feeling fresh for my meeting with Farengar... and the start of MQ104.

So here's the shakedown punchlist I have for the first three main quest segments:

* Improve Matlara's dialogue options
* Thalmor consular guards
* Check navmesh edge links near Helgen/Riverwood
* ZDD nif defects
* Sexlab Solutions Sex -> Seduce
* Glowing mushroom light source
* Anise needs animal safety faction

Not bad! When we come back, we'll discuss these fixes and then start assessing our needs for MQ104. See you then!

I rolled up a generic Nord male and equipped him with the gear from the starting room. For a starting scenario, I choose to make this character a patron at the inn in Falkreath. This will give the game to finish all its setup activities while I walk to Helgen from Falkreath.

Dead Man's Drink hasn't been customized yet, but it still looks pretty good "out of the box" just from texture and mesh improvements. At this stage I saved, reloaded, and then did the bare minimum of MCM setup. I started Sexlab, registered the ZAZ, M2M, and SLAL animations, and... then I got forcegreeted by some rando?

This is a character from Mihail's Slenderman mod. This is functioning as intended, since normally the player character wouldn't be in Falkreath until they've been in the game for a while and so a forcegreet is fine on its own. Since AP might start the character here immediately, my knee-jerk reaction is to put some conditions to delay the mod from starting, but that's something I should ponder a little bit first. I don't see any notes on the mod page suggesting that it requires a minimum level to play, so maybe this could serve as a good starting quest for a new character if they happened to land there. I'll just put this on my punchlist to investigate without committing to a change.

Falkreath looks nice, though we'll eventually want to customize it. No rush there however, as I don't believe the main quest ever takes you here unless some pair of objectives just happen to pass through the town. 

While I tried to pick off the bandits at the gorge, some Thalmor Justiciars showed up. I believe these guys are from Hydragorgon based on the fact that the prisoner is naked instead of tied up or in rags. There are several wandering groups with captives from that mod that I do eventually need to overhaul, but because of that mod's scope I've been taking it a little bit at a time. I should note that in the final cut, they won't mostly be "slavers" - instead they'll be Justiciars, bounty hunters, Penitus Oculatus, and so forth. Maybe still some slavers on the routes near Riften to support future SS++ integration.

The Thalmor attacked the bandits... and then more slavers showed up. I thought these guys were supposed to have unique routes, so I'll need to investigate that a bit. It might just be a case where they start out spawning at the same location initially and then path to their patrol routes, which is fine.

I reached Pinewatch OK. When my "official" travels take me this way, I'll have to decide if I want to install the Pinewatch Village mod. I used it in my last build and it was a nice concept, but it does add more low-value NPCs, which I've been trying to avoid. I'll need to learn more about the mod contents and decide if it adds enough content to make it worthwhile.

We've reached Helgen. Let's stop in for a little nap... surely nothing will happen in the meanwhile, right??

I don't feel like that dialogue is quite right. I wonder if I should make it more explicit ("start main quest") or if I should remove that warning entirely and make that just happen if you rest there without warning you up front. The second option is more immersive, but the first one gives the player a choice before starting. I can the arguments for either approach. 

I watched the full conversation before I went out. Let's see if between starting the game away from Helgen and also letting these guys talk is enough to manage the engine load that makes the carts flip.

Nope, both carts flipped. As an aside, I need to remember to go back and customize the Thalmor consular guards. I located their baseform ID after some fiddling, so now I can fine-tune them. Most players won't see them in this scene, but I'll reuse the costume later for the Embassy party.

Opening the console and waiting 20 seconds prevented the carriages from flipping, consistent with previous testing.

The prisoners are processed and Lokir makes a run for it.

The executions begin, and then Alduin appears, and the opening credits roll.

Ulfric orchestrates his escape and the local kid applies for a Darwin Award.

In the Alternate Perspective version, siding with the Stormcloaks is a less obvious choice since you aren't a prisoner on the cart when the game starts. Our character takes the Imperial path.

The friendly local torturer is skeptical of our claims about a dragon attack.

Escaping through the caverns... we are not alone.

Hadvar tries to recruit me.

LOL I wasn't expecting that turn in the conversation. 

This was a little unexpected - Hadvar took the back way to Riverwood, which meant he didn't deliver the tutorial dialogue about the Guardian Stones and Bleak Falls Barrow. I wonder if that was intentional or if it means that I have some broken navmesh edge links somewhere on the route, making the back way the best path? He made a few odd zig-zag moves that suggest this is the case. 

The dragon attack happened a bit before noon, and its night when we arrived in Riverwood, so timing feels about right. Even with our alternate route, it doesn't feel like the customizations dragged down the pace of the story.

Alvor feeds me and then neatly derails my plans to join the legion with my new boyfriend 😛 Hadvar suggests (sadly not captured on a screen shot) I take a carriage to Solitude after visiting Whiterun to warn the Jarl. This kind of makes me want to revisit the whole "delayed Bleak Falls Barrow" mod since it'll give a more natural path for players who committed to a faction during this first stage to go do the civil war without feeling pressured to stay on the main quest track. 

In the morning I set out for Whiterun and met Camilla on the road. She starts the "wrapper" part of her Amorous Adventures quest but doesn't directly trigger The Golden Claw (which depends on you being inside her brother's store). This again is pretty good game design - she does mention Sven and Faendal but doesn't put any pressure on the player to take further action which might derail you from the main quest.

5th level wolves blocking the patch! This is a tough encounter. They're vanilla refs so this is probably just a challenging random encounter, but if they'd been mod added I would have had to check out the conditions to make sure something like this would in fact be a rare occurrence. My character, still first level, can't handle this and he'll have to seek an alternate path. There is a mountain path to the west that ends up in the foothills around Whiterun so we'll go that way to bypass these guys (I could also have just dove into the river, which is what I'd do if the fight was already joined), but since I spotted them early I'll just bypass.

Half way there I remembered that the path is actually pretty close to Bleak Falls Barrow, so I'd have to fight the bandits at the watchtower to get there. Fortunately, the bandits are going to mostly be 1st level, which I can handle.

I killed the bandits patrolling outside the watchtower (I didn't go in and fight the boss), snuck past the bandit camp outside Bleak Falls Barrow, and then descended the mountain path to come out near the western watchtower. Currently the western watchtower is being served up by Whiterun Watchtower Doesn't Start Broken, but there's a mod by Ryn that offers a slightly more polished experience. I may not be able to do that customization on this build because almost certainly WWDSB involves a bunch of persistent records and stuff that changing mid-game will cause visual glitches. But I'll put it on the punchlist.

On further examination and thought, WWDSB actually looks pretty good, and I like some of the small details it comes with, so we'll keep this one as our customization for that locale.

I experienced some frame rate drops as I approached Whiterun. Nothing crippling but enough that it was just barely starting to become noticeable (hitting 30 at times). This might be an optimization issue - I haven't rebuild occlusion since I made all the edits around Whiterun - but its the sort of thing that I need to keep an eye on. 30 is really my "warning level" and if I see drops below that in normal gameplay I need to try and do something about it. I'll also want to check the P Log after the session to look for signs of script overload.

I did my good deed of the day helping fight the giant.

I'm pretty confident now that the impaled criminals are indeed suffering from the nif defect where they don't show shadows properly. It's especially clear on the one on the left. I'll need to do some research on this best way to fix this and then repair the nifs.

Of course Sexlab Solutions has a path to get in. Though I feel like maybe I need to go through Sexlab Solutions and change the (Sex) tags to (Seduce) for more consistency with Persuade and Intimidate. 

After this scene I ran out of memory and crashed to desktop. This may have been related to the frame drops earlier (heavy engine load == more stuff flying around in active memory) but I'm sure if also was related to playing while having a ton of Chrome windows open, alt-tabbing back and forth constantly, and generally not playing the game as intended. I didn't get a crash log, so while that doesn't guarantee it wasn't caused by a defect, it makes me lean towards just a straight up out of memory scenario. Some time soon I need to install those new memory modules I bought a few months ago...

On reload, frame rate was better (about 10 FPS higher) and I did see some pop-in on the Whiterun battlements which goes to my theory that the occlusion is badly out of date. I'm sure that's not helping one bit, especially with Fortified Whiterun adding a lot of geometry around the WR entrance. 

This time I got in fine and proceeded to Dragonsreach. 

I make my report to the Jarl, who leads me to Farengar's study.

Farengar sends me off to Bleak Falls, and as I leave I can hear Nazeem spreading rumors at court.

As I leave town, Irileth is dispatching guards to Riverwood. I'll take the mountain path directly to Bleak Falls since I've already gone that way once before.

I defeated the bandits outside the Barrow and then proceeded inside. 

As expected "The Golden Claw" starts in response to the bandits' conversation around their campfire.

I tried some of the alternate paths through the dungeon that my overhaul mod added. Even with my embryonic skill level, stealth-archer proved effective at clearing the way. However, it became clear to me that I hadn't adequately prepared for this adventure - I needed torches. To avoid a long backtrack, I consoled some into my inventory.

The spider was a tough fight at 1st level, but with the help of a bunch of healing potions I took it down. I freed Arvel and let him run off ahead - in my experience he seldom survives his dash for freedom. Not far down the hall, I find his corpse and claim the claw.

We'll continue the shakedown run a little later, but I think it's time for me to take a break for now. See you all soon!