One high-effort item on my list for this week is Heart of Skyrim. I have my doubts about getting this mod integrated today, but we need to take a look at it to better understand any conflicts it may be running in to. In particular, the documentation is somewhat vague about how extensively it changes Riverwood proper. So we need to load this up and do a walkthrough of all the areas it edits (the green area, below).

 

 

This is a pretty substantial mod, clocking in at about 24000 records. It does appear to contain some wild edits, but I expect these do not represent a significant amount of the total records count. The good news is that it appears a very substantial portion of its records are temporary exterior references, which are the easiest to split off into their own overflow files. With patience, this giant mod, I think, can be an ESL. The trickier part may be its interior cells. They'll need very careful handling to ensure the "no edits to ESL-based novel cell data" engine limitation doesn't bite us.

 

 

Either way, doing this mod is out of the scope of what we have time for today, so we'll settle for cleaning the mod and then taking a tour through the areas it edits.

 

Cleaning revealed 73 deletions plus 10 deleted navmeshes, which is certainly a problem. It also had 150 ITMs and unsurprisingly the navmesh edge links were a mess. The better news is that conflict resolution was generally limited to cell and worldspace records, which are relatively easy to process. There were fewer navmesh conflicts than I feared, which is also good.

 

 

So let's take a look inside the game engine and see how it changes the world. I'll be loading this after all the conflict resolution patches but before the occlusion file, so other than LODs this mod will win all conflicts. We'll start at the east edge of Lake Illinalta and proceed north from there, with godmode on and detect turned off for convenience.

 

 

Right off the bat we get to this guardpost, which looks great but has intrusion from trees; when we start integrating this mod we will need to go through and record the form ID numbers so we can disable or move those trees.

 

 

Very scenic. I like how the more interesting geography isn't limited to the stuff that's right in your face during the main game loops. This stone arch in the second image is kind of off in the woods, near the dragon burial ground. 

 

 

Some torn landscape here we'll need to repair. Don't let me mislead you, though, this mod is remarkable. When the time comes to integrate it, it'll be well worth the extra effort. I will need to keep an eye out for less obvious issues than what we've highlighted so far as I experienced a few crashes while exploring. Crash logs suggest it was a resource depletion issue, and it may simply be a case that a loadout this intense is a little fragile during high altitude TCL flight. 

 

 

The logging camp looks great, but I'll need to rebuild my grass cache after I install this mod since the intrusion is pretty obvious.  

 

 

The mod extensively changes Riverwood proper including, oddly, adding a big old statue of Talos. Fortunately, despite the heavy redesign, the number of conflicts are actually rather low. This can probably be cleaned up just by identifying conflicts and disabling offenders in xEdit........ and changing that damn statue to something that makes more sense. Though if I was feeling more ambitious it would be fun to put in a defaced statue and have a Thalmor agent hanging around, maybe with a "lean against wall" idle marker or something who harasses the player if they approach the statue. 

 

After leaving the Riverwood area and heading down the hill to Whiterun, this mod's touch becomes lighter, with the actual switchback descent looking more or less vanilla. When we get to the new settlement west of Whiterun, we run into this monster occlusion plane, but that'll get resolved when we regenerate LOD. The second image shows what the plane was concealing. Also (groan) another Talos statue.

 

 

So yeah... this is going to be a lot of work to get into the game, but when it's done the end results should be really impressive!

While I was doing my Elven-equivalent armor work earlier, I remembered that I'd meant to install More Elven Armor a while ago. This has several assets I want to use for specific characters as well as some more generalized assets that can further flesh out generic Thalmor characters.

 

The plugin was completely clean, which was great. We can move right on to distributing the armor. Here's what we've got in the game:

 

• Spearhead set -- this is a heavy armor version of the elven armor with two different helmet styles. This will be available to Thalmor soldiers level 12+
• Benison set -- Ancano will use this as a unique outfit
• Absolution set -- we'll choose one or two High Elf Vigilants of Stendarr to wear this
• Dingy/Full Dingy -- there are two Thalmor characters who will get this; the "disgraced Thalmor" from hydragorgon and the 3DNPC Thalmor who hangs out in Dead Man's Drink
• Highborn -- available to Thalmor officers level 12+
• Clandestine/Covert Cuirasses -- available to vampires level 12+
• Hard Pouch -- chance that officers will have one of these
• Thermos -- chance that any Thalmor soldier (officer or regular) will have these

 

Let's start out with the sets as those are kind of the low hanging fruit. For the Spearhead set, we're going to add a no-helmet outfit list (not an OTFT) to the Sublist_ThalmorSoldierArmorVariants in my custom leveled list structure. We'll add the helmets as a separate option in Sublist_ThalmorSoldierHelmets. To avoid saturating it with the four different types of Spearhead helmet, this will direct to another sublist. 

 

So to do this we need to first create two leveled lists: one for the armor-gauntlet-boots combo and one for the randomized helmet. The syntax we'll use for these will be: Sublist_ThalmorSpearheadSetNH and Sublist_ThalmorSpearheadHelmetVariants

 

 

Since the Highborn armor is only a cuirass, we'll replace the elven armor in the normal level 12 officer entry with a sublist that gives either the normal armor or the highborn armor.

 

 

We also have the beak helmet, which is intended as an alternative for the normal elven helmet. The author has already rigged a sublist to split this 50/50 with the normal elven helm, so we'll just redirect the existing elven helmet entry on my elven soldier helmet sublist to this list. 

 

Now for the uniques. How to apply these depends on if the actors already have a custom outfit or not. As it turns out, none of them do, so we'll make new outfits for each character and then assign them that way.

 

At this point we'll start moving the actors we are working with to a working file to cut down on the amount of scrolling I have to do back and forth.

 

 

With those done, we just need to add the accessories. We'll first make a leveled list to hold them so no one gets more than one. These lists will also have a 75% chance of none so these items are somewhat uncommon. To avoid tons of rework, I cloned the existing cape list that all officers get and turned the original into an accessories list (changed the editor ID but not the form ID) that now points to the new cape list, plus the thermos & case lists. For common soldiers, I added the thermos list directly to their outfit record.

 

 

Now let's spawn some of the unique characters and see how they look. (Ugh, again that weird half-face paint. Need to get that out of the overlays rotation at some point I think)

 

 

So those looked good, but these... not so much:

 

 

The pouch on the covert armor shouldn't be a big problem - looks like a bad texture path. We'll fix that one first. It's looking for this texture path, and that folder is indeed totally missing from my setup.

 

 

Some further sleuthing revealed that these files are part of Immersive Armors (which is not listed as a requirement for this mod, grumble grumble). We'll extract them from the IA BSA and put them in the appropriate path. While someday I would like to integrate IA, that mod is a mess and I don't have the time to touch it right now.

 

But that should fix the purple pouch. Now the bigger question is: what's wrong with the Vigilant armor? Well, this would explain the problem...

 

 

Like... if you release a unisex armor mod and one particular piece is female only, it would be wise to spell this out. Now I have to go back and find a different character for this armor

 

 

This is doubly frustrating since even in my heavily modded game there are literally no female, unique, vigilant/dawnguard high elves. Ultimately I found a female high elf Thane from Public Whore who seemed like a workable option and we used her for that armor.

 

 

I'll count that one as a win.

Of the "Puss in boots" variety, that is. Though boots... are kind of the problem here. Creatures of Nirn - Khajiit Alfiq adds Alfiq (cat-like Khajiit) to the world. The only problem with this mod is that it puts way too many of them not just in silly boots but sometimes even puts them with boots on their forepaws. I don't like it. So I'm going to change it. On a side note, it also messes with the courier and we're going to fiddle with that too. But one thing at a time. We're also going to grab the associated HDT-SMP patch.

 

Right off we see a potential warning sign: facegen for vanilla characters. This might just be the courier replacement thing it does, but we need to investigate this further.

 

 

The mod is uncompacted, though that's not terribly unusual for an LE port. It only has 270 records, so we will be compacting it. Here's another problem though: the outfits don't have separate boot/gauntlet parts. Fortunately, there is ample canon establishing that Alfiq often only wear head coverings or even just wear their own fur. So the stupid outfits (my subjective opinion) will end up just only wearing their headgear, or wearing nothing at all, whichever I find I prefer.

 

 

The vanilla replacers are indeed three of the vanilla couriers. I'll make these all into unique characters and then add them to the random courier leveled list. First we'll extract the BSA file so we can rename the facegen files. After we change each file to the new name structure, we'll move them from the skyrim.esm facegen folders to the unique folders for this mod. 

 

 

 

With that done, next I'll delete the vanilla overrides and create a LVLN to contain the three Alfiq couriers. This will prevent us from swamping the main courier LVLN with cats. With that made, we'll insert our custom LVLN in to the random courier LVLN entry. As couriers, we'll also put all three of these guys on the wet and cold 'go home' blacklist.

 

 

Fortunately, a review of the models in NifSkope revealed only a couple of them had 'front boots', which I removed from their outfits. I pulled a few more that just seemed odd, but generally let the be. With that done, I realized I'd forgotten to clean the mod so I went back and took care of it. No big surprises. With that all done, I compacted the file, ESL flagged it and... well, let's see how it looks in the game.

 

 

Seems to be working!