Phenderix Magic World adds a lot of the game - a new worldspace, synthesized voice acting, new quests, all kinds of fun stuff. In with this, it adds a lot of new assets that generally fit its aesthetic. One of these are custom robes for mages in the four competing houses on Manantis. Given Phenderix' origins as a cross-genre fan fiction mod (though that's been dialed back in more recent releases), the use of generic black Skyrim robes with small house flashes on them makes sense. The problem is that this kind of looks boring, in my opinion. This is supposed to be a rival organization to the Synod and the College of Winterhold, not a bunch of random warlocks with a nice lair. 

 

Fortunately, I've been looking for a way to integrate Regrese's Star Cloth into my game for a while. The rival houses in Phenderix are Red, Yellow, Blue, and Green. Fun fact: star cloth has vibrant color variants in all of these varieties! You can see them in the screen shot below - the red is a little washed out by the glare on its environment map and I forgot to change the skirt from green to yellow on the last one, but there they are!

 

 

It also has the following additional colors:

 

• Purple "Conjuration"
• Skull Motif "Necrotic"
• White "White Mage"
• Black "War Cloth"

 

So let's take a little trip through the process of integrating new equipment into the game!

Surprise, surprise. This mod isn't compacted or ESL flagged. This isn't too surprising as it started its life as an LE mod, but we still want to compact it down to preserve precious load order slots. The good news is that this mod doesn't have scripts, SEQ files, voice tracks, or facegen, so it should be a straightforward exercise. That makes the first part pretty easy. Next, we'll check for any errors or dirty edits -- no errors or deletions but it did contain five ITMs.

 

I found no direct conflicts but I did find a number of wild worldspace edits which I deleted. Furthermore, there are new objects added to the Riverwood Trader. These appear to be a cheat chest and a recipe book for crafting. We'll check these out in game but if they are what they appear to be we'll be removing them. I don't need cheat chests cluttering up my precious real estate!

 

 

OK, credit where credit's due - that's attractive and they kept it out of the way. So we won't delete it wholesale. Instead, we'll change this into a normal safe and apply an ownership faction to the book so the player has to buy it if they want it. 

 

We'll start with the book first. Right away looking at its baseform we can see that it already has a VendorItem tag on it, so it should be automatically picked up by PSDI. However, in-game review did not show it to have the buy tag on it. This turned out to be because the REFR had the player marked as the owner. We'll just trim that tag and leave the ownership undefined. 

 

 

Perfect! As an aside, the testing gave a nice demonstration of Distributed Overlays and Detailed NPCs: Ophelia in action.

 

Now for the safe. Ideally, I'd want it to be a valid target for the radiant mission "the heist," and I'll be basically making a copy of Belethor's strongbox and its associated records to do this. I'm a little fuzzy on whether or not the Thieves Guild quest will play nice with a store located outside a major city, but this is a good opportunity for an experiment.

 

There are two records we need to duplicate. One is the safe itself, which we'll be treating kind of like a conflict resolution patch, and the other is a quest related marker. We'll make a temp file and also clone the quest item into the Riverwood Trader. We'll also change the ownership faction on the quest item and change its Z coordinate to ensure it's outside the bounds of the shop

 

 

Next, we're going to duplicate the characteristics of the strongbox on our Star Cloth Safe. Note that this is the placed object reference, not the underlying container record. Then we'll clone the safe and transfer over the loot data from the strongbox. We don't want to directly reference the TGRStrongbox entry because it uses a different model.

 

 

Finally, we hook up the Safe reference to the new container we made.

 

 

We're not quite done yet, however. We now have two novel records sitting in a temp file along with edits to the in-game safe. In theory, we could stop here and use this working file as a standalone patch (after we remove the ITMs), but I'm going to fold it into my worldspace deconflict patch. First we need to change to Form IDs on both novel records to point at my worldspace deconflict patch. Initially the records will show up as injected records, meaning they are still located only in the working file.

 

 

Next we are going to click on the injected records and copy them as overrides into the deconflict patch. We'll also do this for the modified safe record. Now they all show up as normal, conflict-resolved records.

 

 

We can save our work and delete the working file now. Here's what happens in game when we open the safe:

 

 

 

Looks good!

Star Cloth is a multi-part outfit that gives a lot of options for customization. However, tempting as it is to have various bits of nudity, we're going to keep a fairly uniform look on the students - all the actors will wear the leotard (which includes the bolero jacket), bib, arm, leg, and skirt pieces. However, that still leaves room for variation in the outfits. 

 

In total, the parts we have to work with (for each variant) are:

 

• Armlets - cover the hands up to the bicep, fingers free.
• Coat - leotard, hood, and bolero comes in hood up and hood down varieties
• Leggings - thigh-high boots comes in both barefoot and shoes varieties as you can see below, vanilla boots seem to fit the leggings without substantial clipping.
• Shirt - bib-like upper body garment
• Skirt - angled skirt and belt
• There's also a set of enchanted shawls that don't really match the color scheme of the rest of the outfit and which have magical buffs

 

 

The skirt and shirt can theoretically be worn with armor or other clothing, but they have significant clipping. So for the students who are our baseline outfit, we need to make 

 

• The outfit itself (may be an override of an existing Phenderix outfit)
• A sublist for hood up/hood down
• A sublist for built-in shoes vs. separate shoes
• A sub-sublist (that can be shared across multiple higher level lists) with options for shoes

 

We'll start with the green house since they're the first outfit in Form ID order and we'll initially copy that outfit as an override to a working file. We also need to add Star Cloth as a master for that file.

 

 

First let's build our basic outfit.

 

 

We'll populate the sublists with the following ratios:

 

• 80% hoods down, 20% hoods up
• 50% built-in shoes, 50% separate shoes

 

 

The big question now is which shoes do we want to populate on the list. We'll hop in game and try on a few options; the students won't use armor pieces like I showed in the screenshot further up. After reviewing the options, I'm not happy with the unisex shoe options in the game when mixed with the leggings, so we'll get rid of the sublist and just have all the students receive the shoes-included leggings. We'll save our shoes sublist for possible later use with other costumes. When the student outfits are all done, here is what we have:

 

 

Next, let's take a look at the named faculty and see how their outfits are handled. As you can see in this example, they seem to be using Winterhold College outfits.

 

 

What we're going to do here is clone the student outfits, and also add one in for the unused purple outfit. We'll also make a white outfit specifically for the archmage and a black outfit for the unarmored guards (we'll revisit this later for the armored guards). The faculty is small enough that I'm going to have them all keep their hoods down so their facial features don't get obscured. By contrast, the unarmored guards will always be "hoods up". For these faculty outfits, we're also going to give them the matching cloaks - all of them are a single type except for the guards who have a sublist with the various destruction type cloaks. 

Things are starting to come together now. We have all the students and the main faculty done, now we need to grab the guards and look at them. We'll start by targeting the unarmored guards and then we'll talk about the armored guards. We also want to keep an eye out for any actors with oddball costumes.

 

Most of the guard are easy to capture because they have generic names. While we picked out these characters I also identified some actors who use necromancer outfits, which will let me put the final costume to use. For now we'll exclude the Wildlands Guards, because I need to better understand their place in the story before I start handing out gear.

 

This leaves the armored guards. By default they have elven armor, but my long term goal is for only Thalmor actors to have Elven armor. To get ahead of the game here, I want to find an alternate armor for these guys. It's going to need to be light armor, and ideally not in one of the normal styles. It also needs to be sized in away that it can mix with at least some Star Cloth outfit parts without clipping badly. The armor also needs to be unisex.

 

This might work - unisex, BHUNP, relatively small shoulder projects. Let's give it a try.

 

 

 

Sadly though, a trip to Outfit Studio reveals this one is a no-go... too much clipping. We'll shelve this mod for now and keep it in mind for some future use.

 

 

Here's another option, but if it works we still need to find a male mesh since this isn't unisex.

 

 

On the female side at least, we've got a winner - this armor is extremely modular. But we still need to get the the male visuals hooked up so we need to keep looking for something there.

 

 

This'll probably work - and it's been on my watchlist for a while. It'll preclude using the Star Cloth arm/leg pieces for the guards, but otherwise should be fine. I'll still want to find a use for the main mod in the future, maybe for those Wildlands Guards. Though the same is true for the Blader armor, as I suspect I'll only be using a fraction of its assets for this narrow use case. 

 

 

Looks workable, despite some light clipping:

 

 

Unfortunately, after further experimentation, it looks like neither armor will work without a lot of Outfit Studio work. Much as it pains me, I think we're going to throw in the towel for now when it comes to the armored guards. We'll revisit them at the same time we go back to work on the other outfits.

 

That means for now, the last thing for us to do is to backport all the custom edits into my main deconflict file and see how it looks in-game.

 

Here you can see some students (no cloaks) and faculty (cloaks) mostly working as intended. I do note that the male actors don't seem to be displaying the skirts correctly, so I'll need to investigate that - something for tomorrow, I think. However, I discovered during my tour that there are a large number of generic sorcerers living in Manantis proper who still have generic outfits. I'm not sure I want them in school uniforms for obvious reasons, but they're another class of NPCs for me to add to the "to-do" list next time we visit this mod!

 

 

Incidentally, if you're wondering why the men have obtrusive leather underwear, it's because I had AI turned off for getting the screen shots and so SOS wasn't processing the men when they spawned in. The male version of Star Cloth's leotard is SOS aware, with a physics enabled 'banana hammock' ?

Integrating Star Cloth turned out to be a fairly involved activity. Our next out should be pretty easy. This outfit caught my eye and I think I have the perfect person to put it on. YPS adds a newly arrived student to the College of Winterhold who is the gateway to that mod's gender-bender quest.

 

This'll be a fast one - the underlying mod is already flagged and came up clean. We'll move all the relevant records to a working file for ease of access and then make a custom outfit with the new items. Hook it up to her record, backport into the deconflict patch, and we should be ready to roll.

 

 

However... this doesn't seem to be functioning as intended.

 

 

Using the console to tell her to equip the body piece works, but something may be initially thwarting her in getting dressed. I have a suspicion that it's the satchel. Let's check in xEdit.

 

 

So I think I've found the problem. The bag is using slot 52 - the slot for SOS genitals. 

 

 

Let's remove it from her outfit and try again... and that's better!

 

...Gelatinous Cubes. Because every dungeon needs one, right? I haven't installed new monsters in a while so this should be fun.

 

The mod is already compacted and ESL flagged, and it came up clean for errors and deletions. It did contain a ton of ITMs which I removed. Conflict checking revealed only one conflict - a top level cell data overwrite.

 

As you can see, this mod is reverting changes to the lighting in one location from my lighting mod. We'll just forward the lighting record to my conflict resolution patch. That'll fix the problem, but it's a good illustration of why folks need to pay attention to cell edits even if they only plan on doing minimal patching. It's very easy to lose enhancements like better lighting or sound effects due to unavoidable conflicts like this.

 

 

Looking at the contents of the mod, we can see that rather than just putting the monster on a leveled NPC list, the cubes are hand-placed in a selection of locations. This can be a double-edged sword, since on one hand it can shut out New Lands type mods, but on the other it can help balance a situationally tough enemy or one that doesn't work well with every type of environment. We'll take a quick god mode run through Ansilvund and see how this guy looks.

 

 

Seems to be working! It'll be fun to run into some of these guys during actual gameplay in the future!