Skyrim Modding Diary - 14 February 2022
Hi folks, and welcome back to the Skyrim Modding Diary. I hope you all enjoyed Kirstia's latest adventure! If you haven't already done so, please visit the Epilogue and vote on which path her next adventure should take. My goal is to start the next adventure in mid-late March or in April, with a new case study happening in early March (maybe kicking off late February if I'm really productive!).
If you're new to this series, the Modding Diary is a daily report on my modding progress for my large load order setup. For easier navigation, each topic is kept in spoiler boxes, and within I explain what I'm doing, how I did it, and any special complications or challenges I ran into. I try to especially go into detail on more advanced topics, such as large file flagging, navmesh repair, and multi-mod integration. I generally include links to the mods I'm working with.
Today we'll start out with some cleanup work, then get to work running down the lengthy to-do list for this configuration. We started the day with 1,310 mods installed, 1,318 plugins active, and a final index of F0.
Uninstallations
The Easy Stuff
We'll begin by removing six mods. Three of them (Alpha, Senturo's Corset, and JMenaru outfit) were accidentally left active after working on them and are just appended to the end of my load order with no actual integration. I'm not ready to get these into my game yet, so for now we'll just turn them off. This will bring us back to index EF, which is where we "should" be based on the configuration at the end of the last diary.
Naked Spanking - Animation Registry Updates
The next two to remove are Spank That Ass and Naked Defeat. These two mods, while technically interesting and containing a lot of good features, ultimately didn't meet my needs. You can read a bit more about the problems I ran into with these in the 'behind the scenes' section of Kirstia's second adventure. These mods may have integrations with my conflict resolution stack, so we need to be a little more careful removing them.
STA was a clean removal, with no errors thrown: so far, so good! Let's see if we get the same results for ND. As you can see in the second image, once again we are clean.
We do need to rebuild our animation registry, and while we do that I'm also going to fully uninstall and then reinstall the creature animations as I've been encountering some unusual results. I'm not convinced the registry is the problem - it may be the result of nif conflicts for the critters - but to be safe we'll do a full teardown of the animations anyway.
We'll start by completely deleting the contents of our FNIS and NEMESIS output folders. No need to delete the actual folders - we'll reuse them.
With that done, let's run each program and refill their holding folders. Before we generate the output, we'll click "de-install creatures" in FNIS . Then we'll grab and reinstall the latest creature pack from the FNIS Nexus page.
In the process of updating the Nemesis registry, I discovered that several of my Nemesis animation mods have updates, so we'll take care of those at the same time.
Since one of the mods that got updated is Go To Bed, we'll also recheck/reclean the mod to make sure we aren't introducing any inconsistencies or errors relating to the version switch. Fortunately both mods are clean and unconflicted.
As an additional added bonus, it appears that these updates have finally solved the annoying 'benign Draugr error' message that's haunted me for literally years.
Walking Back an OId Mod
I kind of tipped my hand earlier by saying I was looking at installing Alpha: the final mod to remove is going to be Skyrim's Shrouded Secret. This is a large, futanari-themed quest mod that I never fully integrated because it depended on other work that's still in progress. Since then, the author has incorporated this mod's content (along with several of his other works) into Alpha and future development and expansion will be under Alpha. Consequently, with SSS deprecated, we are going to phase it out.
SSS has references in three of my conflict resolution patches, so I can't just shut it off. We'll need to go into xEdit and walk back these edits.
For each of these patches, we need to run the "report masters" script to get a list of SSS records they include. For example, on Dialogue here is what we see:
This is a pretty clear one, we just control-double-click the form list and we see the following:
So we'll trim Galeese's voice from the patch and call it good. She'll be back when I install Alpha, of course.
For the other two files, we have just a few more entries to clean up:
The door is a key reference, which we'll just revert to the USSEP key
The actor record is a loot item, which we can just remove from the deconflict patch.
Now we just need to clean masters and save:
With these changes committed, we can now uninstall SSS and as you see here we no longer have errors in the patches. Now we can move SSS to the "no used in this build" category and it's officially uninstalled!
It's A Secret
Next I've got two unannounced mods that I'm installing as part of Kirstia's future story plans. Since these involve spoilers, I'll be withholding some information here.
From an asset conflict management point of view, both mods are clean. The first mod has no asset conflicts at all, and the second's sole conflict of note is an override of a vanilla asset. It's other conflicts are cases where higher quality assets are overwriting its content, which is acceptable "out of the box."
Both plugins are small uncompacted esp files (250 and 110 records, respectively) that do not contain any potential stumbling blocks like facegen, voiced dialogue, or SEQ files. We'll compact them immediately before proceeding. Neither file had any errors or conflicts.
Of the two mods, one of them met expectations, whereas the other didn't. Fortunately, I found a comparable, working asset in a different mod, so all ended well. The mod that didn't meet my needs got uninstalled and sent to 'not used in this build.' I may revisit that one in the future as it did have some nice art in it.
Midwood Isle Boat Patch
Getting Started
Right at the end of the January mod diary, we found a conflict between Ambient Slaves and Midwood Isle. Fortunately, MI already has a patch to help with exactly this issue, so we'll get that installed and see if it fixes our problems. The mod itself has also been updated, so we'll grab that while we're working.
This option here is the critical one... though if you're familiar with Colorful Magic you know that this won't be the end of our work here. There's another longstanding issue that we need to take care of... One thing at a time though!
As you can see below, we have some new patches for MI. We will leave LOTD and BSB inactive for now as the first requires a lot of CK work and the second requires me to... install BS: Bruma; and undertaking that requires a lot of work in its own right for integration.
Dealing with Errors
Except for the main plugin, all of Midwood Isle's components are already ESL flagged. Cleaning revealed only some minimal issues with the Lanterns of Skyrim II patch, which I cleaned. Error checking, however, revealed a lot of problems that are likely to cause CTD, so we'll have to work through and fix all of them. Some, hopefully, are just cases of patches referencing older versions of the mod that we can fix fairly easiuly.
Before we start actively bug hunting, we'll first go through in conflict resolution mode, as this should reveal any version mismatch issues and let us fix them quickly. One thing we see right away is a navmesh conflict, which we'll need to loop back and correct after we take care of these initial problems. Fortunately the other two navmesh issues appear to be benign and generally ignorable.
The vast majority of the errors were version mismatch issues in the high poly head patch. There are two errors in the main file that seem to be leftovers of the old version and I've reported these to the mod author for repair. The LOS II errors were both version mismatches and readily patched out (one was a deprecated record that I deleted, the other just needed the form ID of a location code updated). Finally, the Location 2 patch that I embarked on this whole mess over has a corrupted nav mesh info map, which I deleted and then regenerated by loading the plugin in the Creation Kit and then saving it with no edits made.
Moving Jack
I alluded to a problem with Colorful Magic earlier, and specifically the problem is that CM puts a miniboss, Jack The Ripper, in the location the new dock is at. This was already a problem because it resulted in a lot of NPC on NPC combat and Jack himself is not suitable for lower level characters to face (and he's pretty agressive). So we're going to move Jack to a different location.
If you're familiar with previous times I've done things like this, you won't be surprised when I start by creating a temporary working file. We'll move Jack's ACHR to that file and open it in the CK. Now, here's our guy:
He doesn't have any markers or other extra stuff associated with him, so it'll be a simple drag and drop operation. But where do we want to put him? How about Brinewater Grotto - that's isolated enough to keep him away from normal 'player walking routes' but will still push the character towards an eventual encounter in TG04. Specifically, we'll put him in the little alcove with the treasure chest.
Here's the new position:
Now we just save the working file and push the ACHR file back into my worldspace conflict resolution file. We'll also do a double-check on Jack to make sure he doesn't have any sort of package that would cause him to move to his original spawn location. Jack does in fact have a linked reference patrol package, but there's no linked ref on his ACHR so this shouldn't be an issue, so we'll commit this edit to the patch.
Here you can see him in his new position:
Navmesh Time
The last thing for us to take care of is the navmesh conflict between MI and LOTD. We'll reuse our working file to hold the navmesh data, but first let's compare the conflicting data. We really only need to look at LOTD and Midwood Isle, because in my experience the USSEP edits are already present in the LOTD mesh.
We can see above that both mods make major edits to the navmesh; this is something we can't ignore. So what we are going to do is take the MI parts and weld them directly onto the LOTD navmesh. We'll start by copying both versions into the working file. We'll copy the MI version first, and change its form ID so it doesn't get overwritten by LOTD. The only masters we need to add here are MI and LOTD, and both should get added automatically because of the door linkages in the mesh.
Next we'll open our working file in the CK and navigate to the exterior cell. One thing that will make our lives easier is the fact that MI barely touches the vanilla triangles. It adds a few more to allow for a clean connection, but otherwise it's all new tris. What we'll do is snip around the edited area and then only remove the edited vanilla triangles from LOTD. With that punch-out complete, we only have to connect the two meshes and merge them, then finalize.
Note that there's still some yellow "boundary" markers in the connected mesh above. That's the sides of the pier and they'll keep NPC's from randomly jumping on or off of it (and probably getting stuck) while pathing. We will go back and restore the pale yellow 'preferred path' highlighting to the road, but after that all we have to do is click the red check-mark "finalize button" before we move on to xEdit.
Note how finalizing restores the edge links automatically (green rectangles)
Back in the CK, we'll start by cleaning the edge links right away. Then we'll clean the file and remove any irrelevant records.
The leftover records, many of which relate to navmesh targeting changes, we'll all forward to the relevant conflict resolution patches. Navmesh changes will go to deconflict- navmesh; everything else will go to deconflict - world. None of the navmesh changes conflict any other mods (except the USSEP), so we can forward them as well without making additional changes.
Last but not least, we'll remove the NAVI record from our navmesh deconfliction patch and regenerate it by saving the patch with no edits in the CK. We'll also go back and clean the edge links on our patch once more just to be safe. CK shouldn't be able to inject any junk, but it never hurts to measure twice and cut once, as they say.
With that done, let's visit the new dock!
Looks good!
Solstheim Weapons
Getting Ready
If you've been following this blog, you know that I'm looking to add more variety and regional variation to the leveled lists. Today we're going to install Bonemold and Chitin Weapons, with the goal being to replace some of the weapons in DLC2 content. Bonemold will displace mainland style steel weapons and Chitin will displace Elven. Steel will eventually be back when I integrate Armoury of Tamriel 2, in the form of Dunmeri steel weapons. As you might have guessed, I'm not going to use this mod's built-in leveled list edits and instead integrate it into my own structure.
This mod contains some benign conflicts with Immersive Weapons Integration which we'll basically ignore - it looks like both mods are packaging the same assets. The file itself is an uncompacted ESP file with 161 records. We'll compact it and flag it before we proceed as there's no reason for it to stay in full-size ESP format. Next, we'll delete all the container, leveled item, and NPC records.
Next, we'll copy all the weapons to a working file (the arrows, too). We'll do the same for the weapons and ammo they're displacing.
Hand-Placed Items
With that done, we'll go through each original entry and harvest relevant DLC2 references to them. When it's a direct item placement, we'll swap in the new item 1:1. We'll loop back later to scrutinize leveled lists because those require slightly different handling.
When we start processing the Redoran guards, one thing we quickly see is that there are other sources of bonemold/chitin gear in the game: in this case Beyond Skyrim Merchandise. So we'll be setting up our first DLC2 leveled list - a sublist for Bonemold war axes.
We can also see on the same Redoran Guard that we need to expand on our previous work we did to de-Thalmorize their list. Currently, they always get an ebony ranged weapon because that's the only thing we had for them. Now we'll make a pre-list that splits between Chitin and Ebony. In line with normal Skyrim level distribution, Ebony will start to appear at level 36.
.
Since we currently only have one Chitin missile weapon - the Chitin Bow - the Chitin_Missile leveled item list will just redirect to the bow list, which in turn distributes a bow and a random number of matching arrows. With those leveled lists in place, we can go back and update the Redoran Guard template.
We'll repeat this for each entry in the working file.
Handling Leveled Lists
The other thing we're potentially contending with are Solstheim actors and references pulling from vanilla leveled lists either for weapons in general or for specific weapon types. Continuing with our example of the arrows from above, we'll pull the relevant leveled lists and examine them, omitting ones that clearly aren't relevant, such as lists for other regions or for specific factions (e.g., Stormcloaks).
We can see below that the first one, BaseArrowSteel75 has some direct references in Dragonborn as well as feeding several subsidiary lists such as the bandit arrow list that might be relevant.
Base Arrow Steel is actually an endpoint distribution list, so after we harvest it for downstream dependencies we'll remove it from our working file. We'll repeat this process for each of its subsidiary leveled lists until we have isolated the relevant DLC2 lists and references. Then we'll sub in bonemold arrows (cloning the underlying list when neccessary).
When all was said and done for Bonemold, we ended up having to clone a few leveled lists, but most of the work was just in switching over entries. We'll repeat this process for each weapon.
During today's session, I completed integration on all the ammunition, all the war axes (including the shell lists for one handed weapons/weapons in general), and a smattering of other items of opportunity. We'll continue with this project tomorrow but we're at a point now where we can visit Solstheim and see the new gear in action.
And that's it for today! We uninstalled some deprecated mods, updated Midwood Isle and cleaned up the vicinity of its docks, and started integrating more diversity into the mix of weapons in the game. We ended the day with 1,305 mods installed, 1315 plugins active, and a final load order index of EC.
Edited by gregaaz
0 Comments
Recommended Comments
There are no comments to display.