Before we dive into Toys, I had a couple of minor things I needed to knock out. First, I need to evaluate Mild Hair and compare it to Realistic Hair Colors (which I'm currently using). Based on the screenshots it looks like Mild Hair is a little closer to the visual look I want for my world, but if the two mods don't fully overlap one another it's likely I'll keep them both for maximum coverage. 

 

 

Neither mod serves up new assets, so we're purely looking at this from the perspective of data in the plugins. As you can see here, there's nothing in RHC that isn't in MH. Part of me wants to do an in-game lineup and pick through the styles individually to mix and match the ones I want, but I don't think that would be a really effective use of my time. For now I'll just disable RHC and patch MHC into my game. In fact, on further review, this doesn't even require patching: all of the records are unconflicted. So that's an easy win. We'll be able to see the results in-game during testing later today.

The other thing we're going to do this morning is get The Wench's Wardrobe into the game. This is slightly more involved than it might seem at first blush because we aren't going to just install the mod. As you may have noticed from looking at the screenshots and the file manifest, this mod is a series of retexes of the vanilla Wench outfit, but they're provided as separate nif files. While the art design is nice, the way it's released isn't great game design, since this will ignore bodyslide builds for the wench outfit. What we need to do is turn this into a series of texture sets and apply them to my BHUNP wench mesh.

 

 

There's only one potential problem with this approach: the WW version adds a mesh layer called "metal trim" that adds some small embelishments that have environmental maps. I don't have an equivalent mesh part to put these onto the Wench outfit, but fortunately the metal trim part is just a clone of the main clothes mesh. Whether or not this is a good modding practice is somewhat controversial (and indeed, is at the heart of many critiques of Immersive Armors), but it makes our jobs a little easier here.

 

So first we're going to create this Metal Trim layer for the Wench outfit in Outfit Studio. Here's our Wench outfit bodyslide project from BHUNP Vanilla Outfits AE. We'll duplicate the clothes layer (so it'll inherit the bone weighting and other stuff) and then "save as" a new project. This is so future updates to the Wench outfit don't wipe out our work here. We'll call the new project "Wench for WW." Tangentially, we'll be revisiting this project later, when we go to update Skyrim Modesty Mod for use with BHUNP, since it contains a version of the Wench costume. 

 

 

Now we'll build this new asset and move on to the Wench's Wardrobe itself. The first order of business is to create our texture sets. This will involve a little data entry since we need to create four (male/female body, male/female boots) for each of the 24 color variants. Fortunately, once the first set is in, the rest involves a lot of copy and paste.

 

 

Next, we need to populate each texture set to match the nif files packaged with the mod. By the way, if you're wondering why I'm also doing the male versions, it's to future-proof the assets so I have to do less work if I upgrade to HIMBO bodies in the future.

 

 

With all those updated, the last thing to attend to is the leveled lists. The mod author has already done more or less what I want to do; my changes are mostly oriented towards getting the mod to perform as expected within my private mod ecosystem.

 

The edits to vendors look fine, and I'll be leaving those alone for now. The author has already made sublists for each matched set of dress and boots, which is good. The author's jewelry lists are a good idea but they'll need some work to incorporate more assets. For now, that'll stay as a to-do item for my mod project list, however. The part that I want to change is to take the current matched sets leveled list and add an intermediate level to it. One branch distributes the vanilla wench outfit, another branch distributes a matched black leather pair, the last branch distributes a brown leather pair.

 

This will ensure for now that there is still some representation for the basic wench outfit in the game while also providing the infrastructure I'll need in the future for adding more wench outfit combos (such as the modest version I described above, as well as lewd versions like the one from Shinshi, for example).

 

 

By the way, are you wondering why I'm doing this in the main plugin instead of in a conflict resolution patch? The reason is because I've reached out to the author for permission to upload this edit. So... standby, and if I'm allowed I will share this (assuming it works!).

 

Now that we're done with the mod customization, we need to load it up as part of the main load order and integrate it into my world. Much of the work is already going to be done for me by the edits to the basic wench outfit, but I'm sure we'll run into additional examples that aren't covered.

 

The mod was uncompressed, so we fixed that and added an ESL flag. No issues came up during cleaning. Conflict resolution only showed the expected conflicts, which we integrated into the main leveled lists. For the two outfits, I forwarded their contents to the deconflict mod to overwrite the previous data; I omitted the changes from the working clothes list as I don't feel like fancy clothes fit with the theme there. 

 

The integration works like this:

 

• Pawn shops now have a 2/3 chance of stocking one vanilla wench item and 1/3 chance of stocking a fancy wench outfit
• Higher class shops, or actors giving gifts, have a chance to give a fancy wench outfit
• Characters with a wench OTFT record have a 2/3 chance of wearing a fancy wench outfit and a 1/3 chance of wearing a regular outfit (technically, 4/6 fancy, 1/6 regular, 1/6 modest). These will always be matching sets color-wise between dress and shoes
• For characters or object references that previously served up either a wench dress or wench boots, the items are assigned contextually, directing either to the 'pawn shop' list, the matched set list, or a fancy-only list. 
• Male merchants have a chance to wear the fancy version of this outfit; this was accomplished by forking the outfit record and underlying leveled list. There's a unisex list that includes neither peropero (female only) nor WW (male only) outfits. This'll be a bit of a test, but is probably the model I'll follow in the future for integrating non-unisex gear.

 

 

That last bullet point ended up being very time consuming and required a few loop-backs and redesigns (such as creating a 4th branch of combined items for use in treasure and merchant chests), but when all was said and done it worked out really well and fully met my in-game expectations. This essentially immediately opens the door to install DIE RAV Merchants, and more broadly I'll be able to replicate this approach for other outfits when I need to split them to avoid diluting one sex or the other's outfit choices. Eventually this will open the door to putting things like Minidress Collection or SOS Revealing Armor into the game, which is an essential prerequisite to my long-term goal of setting up regional/cultural outfit lists. When this comes to fruiting, you'll see a really stark difference in clothing between Markarth (lots of skimpy stuff - the influence of the Temple of Dibella) and Windhelm (lots of heavier clothing to deal with the cold) with a spectrum of other stuff in-between. You can get an idea of what I have in mind from this very early planning document that's been sitting on my desk for a few months.

 

 

But I digress. Here are some images of the new outfits in the live game environment:

 

 

The main event for today is a full update of the Toys Framework and its ecosystem. @VirginMarie was kind enough to share a release candidate for Toys version 1.8, so we'll be using that for now until the official release.

 

Let's begin by looking at Toys Framework itself. This is a compacted, ESL-flagged ESM file with 410 records; nice and streamlined. Cleaning revealed no ITMs, deletions, or errors. The mod does not contain any cell records, so there's no need to clean edge links. I came out with no conflicts either, though that's partly because I patched a few benign conflicts on an earlier version and those patches remained in effect. I'm also going to check my conflict resolution patches for errors in case something from Toys has been removed and in lingering in my patches. Fortunately they all came out clean. 

 

There are however a couple of small edits we need to make. Marie advised me that as part of her efforts to remove a hard Sexlab dependency, most of the items no longer have the SexlabNoStrip keyword. Now, some Toys content relies on the ability to run sex scenes even though the Dragonborn is in a chastity belt or stuffed with dildos or butt plugs, so we won't add the keyword to items in slots 48, 49, or 57, but we'll inject it back into the others. Before we do this we also need to add Sexlab back in as a master for Toys. To accomplish this we'll select all the other toys in the pack and run the "Skyrim - Add Keywords" script.

 

 

The other change is an aesthetic one. I don't like the bratty silencer, which is a dental-retractor type toy. It's nothing against the creator, as it's a high quality mesh just like all the other assets in the mod. It just doesn't work with my personal taste.

 

 

So we'll go ahead and remove this device from the relevant lists lists. We may need to do this again after we update Toyful Temptations down the line. These changes will all go in my leveled item conflict resolution patch so we won't have to repeat the whole process every time I install a new version of Toys.

 

 

Based on my past experiences with the softcore stripping effect (not to be confused with the hardcore strip effect, which I'm satisfied with) I may be coming back here to make some edits to the MCM script so I can reduce that effect all the way to 0%, but I'm holding off for now to see how it behaves in the 1.8 environment. I'm hoping that I'll have a better experience this time around.

 

That said, Toys had a really smooth install, which says a lot about the quality of its programming. If I hadn't decided to make 'vanity edits' to cater to my personal taste, this would have been a zero-effort installation. 

Next up is Toys' world injection mod, Toyful Temptations. This mod functions similar to the original core functions of Deviously Cursed Loot and it's pretty essential for using Toys, especially since this mod doesn't have a universal struggle-escape system like DD has; as a result, random key drops are crucial for the proper operation of the whole Toys ecosystem.

 

TT is a super slim, 13 record compacted and ESL-flagged ESP. It has no errors, deletions, ITMs, or conflicts. The only work I had to do in xEdit was removing the bratty silencer from its distribution list. 

 

 

As an aside, both my leveled items and actors conflict resolution patches have over 200 masters at this point, so soon we'll be starting a second patch in order to not overflow the master list (which has a 256 entry limit).

 

OK, another clean and easy install. This bodes well so far!

This is the mod that got me involved with Toys in the first place and it has a special place in my heart. I've already heavily deconflicted this one, so I'm not expecting any problems with the install, but it will require a little more assembly since the scope of the mod is so huge. We do have a couple of script conflicts which I'd previously been ignoring. These are just small administrative conflicts with USSEP, where some improved syntax from that mod didn't get forwarded to the SLaVE version. We'll recompile these with the USSEP code included.

 

 

We'll finish up by putting our patch after SLaVE in asset load order to ensure it prevails in conflicts.

 

 

With the MO2 part of the install done, let's move to xEdit. SLaVE is an uncompacted ESP with 7464 records. It is a candidate for cutting up into four separate files for ESL flagging, but based on conversations I've had with Marie more updates are likely still forthcoming, so we will leave it intact for ease of future upgrades.

 

Cleaning reveals no deletions, errors, or ITMs. There were no corrupted edge links. Unsurprisingly there are a lot of conflicts, but that's to be expected with a large quest mod. Fortunately, I've already resolved most of them on 8.1b, so there's only a half dozen or so I really need to look at. The main change I needed to make was to forward some alias structure changes from USSEP's MS06 quest fragment so SLaVE doesn't revert it to vanilla and cause script derp with USSEP.

Hot & Wet is the Toys ecosystem's survival mod. It integrates with and extends Frostfall, opening up some new (and lewd) ways to stay warm in the frozen parts of Skyrim. At some point in the future, I may crib some assets from H&W for some of the naked actors in Windhelm, like the Hydragorgon hostages. You know, for immersion and realism. In fact, maybe I will as part of this install.

 

H&W is a 322 record ESL-flagged ESP file. It has no errors, deletions, ITMs, corrupted edge links, or conflicts. Another super smooth installation. Since we didn't have to put much time into this, let's do those hostages. First we'll copy their outfits to a working file. We'll also copy the normal H&W toys, for reference.

 

 

Based on my discussion with Marie, there isn't currently a ton of NPC support in Toys, so we may need to make some dummy versions of the toys (like the gag, for example) and wire up some ZAZ back end code to them to ensure the mouths look right.

 

 The hostages have a gag, ankle restraints, and a yoke. Since there aren't any yokes in H&W we'll leave the ZAZ ones in place. Let's look at the models for some of these pieces and see how they look. No big surprise the ball gag looks fine, pretty conventional design. Same with the ankle restraints. The blinders look promising, and feel appropriate for the context.

 

 

I think what we'll do is this:

 

1. All three hostages get H&W ankle restraints
2. The two with log gags will get a fake-out version of the ball gag that uses ZAZ gag code
3. All three get blinders

 

First let's make our ZAZ-enabled gag. We'll use the ZAZ ball gag as a direct reference. We'll copy over the ZAZ magic effect and keywords.

 

 

Then we'll backport this new gag to our armor deconflict patch and populate the outfits. Now let's see how it looks in the game.