This morning I found a few interesting mods in the 'last 24 hours' section of the Nexus:

• GLAM Angi
• Ryn's Valtheim Towers
• NPC Animation Remix
• Legacy of the Dragonborn: Player Houses
• Pulsating Beating Heart ENB Light

Let's take a look at what we've got here.

• Angi looks nice, but she has a custom CBBE body and that's just more trouble than its worth on a BHUNP based setup, so we'll skip her.
• Ryn's Valtheim looks great, but it may have geometry conflict with some other mods, notably Tactical Valtheim. We won't cross this one off yet.
• NPC Animation Redux is a DAR plugin so it should be safe to try out as long as it doesn't push me over the current hard cap in DAR.
• I really like the LOTD mod! But it's still under development and I already have a big LOTD update planned for down the road. We'll let this lie fallow for now.
• Pulsating Beating Heart is basically a higher quality version of a hacky edit I did back in January, and I'll happily let it replace my version.

So we'll install the DAR mod and the beating heart right away. Neither of these have plugins, so as long as we don't have any asset conflict issues these will be effortless installs. The only asset issue was actually with the hearts - it dead-ends both of the earlier heart mods. We can go ahead and deactivate them in favor of the new version. 

We can also see that the DAR mod is intended for use with Immersive Equipment Display, and so our next thing for today will be to look at that mod; if we don't use it, we'll need to get a patch for that DAR mod. First though, let's look at that Valtheim mod and see how badly it conflicts.

The East Gate looks fine; West Gate, too.

We've got some floating landscape and static intrusion here in the courtyard, including a blocked door and an unusable staircase (and, by extension, almost certainly a navmesh that requires correction). This alone is probably enough to stop me from installing today, but I'll complete the tour so I understand what's here. In any event, this mod is definitely going on my installation list because I want it in the game eventually - it looks great.

Patching this mod together with Tactical Valtheim is going to be a bit of an exercise, but it'll be the perfect project for a weekend afternoon. We'll deactivate this mod for now and move it to the work in progress section of my mod list.

For a long time, AllGUD was the go-to mod for showing equipment like potions on the character's 3rd person model. Unfortunately, that mod absolutely devoured body slots and so did not play nice with many other mods. It also required extensive patching that could be problematic for a large load order setup where the script could potentially overflow the 256 master maximum for a plugin*.

Immersive Equipment Display promises to resolve these issues, and it's been on my to-do list for a while. Since that mod is a quasi-requirement for the DAR mod I just installed (there are some shield behavior issues that need patching if you don't have it), I think it's time to either install IED or definitively decide to not use it. 

(*Fun fact, some of my conflict resolution patches are starting to get close to this limit, so you may start to see "Deconflict_LeveledItem_2" or something like that in the background in the near future)

First things first, IED itself has a prerequisite: Simple Dual Sheath. This mod is a simple SKSE mod with no plugin file or asset complex. From a technical point of view it's rather interesting though - the DLL file appears to support both SSE and AE runtimes! That speaks well for the future of interoperability between runtimes if other authors can achieve the same. The mod does warn about possible goofiness with left-hand weapons on the XPMSSE body, so we'll need to keep an eye out for that (there's a technical solution on the mod page, though it requires using a Synthesis Patcher to update the weapon nifs).

IED is also a dual-runtime SKSE extension with no plugin, so it's pretty painless to install. It does however have two extensions we want to look at:

• Carry Your Carcasses
• Use Those Horses 

The first mod is a Hunterborn add-on. I'm going to hold off on installing this one because I'm seriously considering dropping Hunterborn unless I can decode its component distribution system. Right now HB forces me to use too the 'manual loot' option too much and I'm not really feeling an incentive to use its native features. I will however download it so its at my fingertips in the future should I decide to keep HB.

The horse mod sounds good, but it appears to still be developing (notably, shields are currently disabled because of CTD issues) so we'll let this one lie fallow and keep developing for a bit.

Since we aren't installing any of the add-ons, let's go into the game and see how this mod looks in action.

The sword scabbards seem to be working fine and looking good. Unfortunately, this mod is yet another example of a mod that Skyrim Souls SE is incompatible with. This is kind of the final straw for me with regard to that mod and I'll be uninstalling it. This also means that Faction Warfare is suddenly much higher on my list of priorities, since its issues with SSSE was what was holding me back from running it. 

It looks like I will be back to this mod at some point in the future to rig up things like potions, but the weapon support is already a good first step and should enhance the gameplay experience.

One thing that installing Courageous Women yesterday revealed was that I still have a lot of actors who are only being served up by the High Poly NPC Project or Bijin NPCs, or even aren't getting an improved face at all. To try and catch any other actors we're missing, we're going to install five more mods at relatively low priority and only let them win conflicts with the HPP (and for female actors, with Bijin). 

Why am I crapping on Bijin NPCs, you ask? Isn't that mod a staple of many well respected mod lists? It's actually a nice mod, but it relies a lot on custom bodies and skin textures, which sometimes doesn't play nice with modern utilities like OBody. I actually keep the mod's custom hair colors, but otherwise I try to phase it out with newer options when I can.

Here's what we're installing today (along with their hair texture patches, if applicable):

• Pandorable's Dawnguard
• Pandorable's Dragonborn
• Pandorable's Males
• Pandorable's Males 2
• Pandorable's Sovngard

All five modules are uncompacted, so we'll need to do that before we start resolving conflicts. All the records outside the reserved address range are outfits, texture sets, and head parts, so they're safe to compact without any special attention.

Unsurprisingly for this kind of mod, I didn't find any errors or other defects, but there are a huge number of conflicts. We are going to let these mods lose conflicts with any other NPC overhaul mod except for the High Poly Project and Bijin NPCs, but we do need to watch out for conflicts with Immersive Weapon Integration and similar equipment editing mods (and indeed, my own private edits!)

That should help continue phasing out older/less distinct faces in the game.

Since we've dumped Skyrim Souls, it's time to get Faction Warfare installed. This mod started out as "Faction Economy" but has subsequently grown in scope to involve NPC conflict as well. It has a rich feature set but became very fragile when running alongside SSSE, I believe due to timing issues with script execution when certain menus are unpaused. At the same time, we're going to evaluate Configurable Real Names, which is a recommended companion mod for this one. Earlier attempts at this function were pretty unstable, so I'm interested to see if they did a better job this time around.

Once we have this set up, we'll need to - at a minimum - visit Heljarchen Farm to confirm we don't need to do further conflict resolution, as this mod apparently places a building in that area.

Both core mods are uncompacted ESP files with 2856 and 38(!!!!!!!) records each. Real Names appears safe to compact out of the gate, so we'll do this first. At > 2048 records, we need to take a closer look at Faction Warfare. We'll try doing the blunt force approach first, moving the dialogue, quests, cells, worldspace, and NAVI to a new file and counting the records. We need to move at least 808 records. In fact, this moves over 2200 records, so this approach is too vigorous. Instead, let's try moving just the temporary REFR and ACHR records. 

So now we have the opposite problem. But that narrows down the solution - we need to move the Dialogue, quest, and cells, then regenerate NAVI for both files. Doing that causes the game to report 2101 records, so now we need to trim out one of the novel cells and see if that does the trick. This does require a little bit of research - because of a glitch with ESL parsing in the engine, we can only have one top-level cell record for this location; others may get treated as unique cells and glitch out the game. Now, I was about to say that this would be an ideal case for super-compacting the mod with xEdit, but it appears this feature is no longer present in the latest version of SSEEdit, to my great annoyance. While the CK positively hated that feature and actively tried to sabotage mods that use it, it had certain edge case applications, and this - a 'world' of cells where every cell is interconnected but the only connection to the world is a vanilla worldspace door - is one of those cases.

For now we'll just leave this mod in an uncompacted state and bite the bullet. Most likely, longer term I'll need to go into the CELL record and trim out excess furniture to burn the mod down to 2048 for compacting. Something for another day, however.

I didn't find any terrain intrusions in Heljarchen (at least with the CRF patch installed) so that's good. We'll still need to go back and do a proper conflict resolution pass on these mods, but since we're in game we'll also derp around a little to confirm that Real Names is working. As you can see in the second image, it is. For a real playthrough I expect I'll probably be running it in 'stranger mode', where actors only get a name after certain interactions with them, but we'll see. 

And this is why we do error checking...

Skipping: [NAVM:000FF81A] (in GRUP Cell Temporary Children of [CELL:0000907B] (in Tamriel "Skyrim" [WRLD:0000003C] at 18,10))
Skipping: [NAVM:000FF823] (in GRUP Cell Temporary Children of [CELL:0000907D] (in Tamriel "Skyrim" [WRLD:0000003C] at 16,10))
[Undeleting and Disabling References done]  Processed Records: 2939, Undeleted Records: 0, Elapsed Time: 00:00

We'll be back to look at those, but first things first let's review the other conflicts. Notwithstanding the neccessary conflicts in the patch to support CRF, the rest of the issues were pretty light. I did need to patch some factions to ensure they were allied with new FW factions in a few cases. It also conflicts with Mysticism Magic Overhaul, and I let Mysticism win that conflict. So now let's loop back and address the navmesh issues. 

In the patch, the deletion appears to be a genuine error - possibly CK-instigated - that wasn't cleaned. The author just wholly deletes a vanilla navmesh with no replacement in sight. We'll undelete and remove that record. If we observe problems in the future like NPCs trying to walk into geometry, we can always go back and do a proper navmesh edit. The native navmesh issue appears similar - I suspect this is removing a navmesh that is fully conflicted by the newly added walls for the keep. I'm also going to restore and remove this record, but I suspect I'll be back to hand-fix it. One thing at a time, however. After that, I cleaned the edge links (both mods had heavily corrupted edge links) and saved the files. 

That'll do for now, but I suspect we'll be back at some point. This is one of a few areas with questionable navmeshing that I want to return to once I'm in the mood for that sort of work.

I mentioned a couple of days ago that F.E.M.A.L.E. and Creepy Zombies were on my list of things to install. We're going to do FEMALE today, including its followers mod. We'll also do the Zombies, but only if time permits; FEMALE may require a lot of patching to the leveled lists.

FEMALE has a FOMOD installer, and I'll be leaving out the whole 'mermaid' family of enemies. I'll also omit the Zombies since they are all from Creepy Zombies anyway. Before we dive into this we'll also look over the readme on the followers mod, since it contained multiple warnings that it was unsupported and users needed to read the document first. 

That doesn't sound too bad. Probably just means I need to delete the Mermaid follower. I was already planning on removing the angel followers as I remember them being glitchy in the past. 

Holy smokes! Look at that plugin list. At least all the modular bits are ESL flagged. Both of the uncompacted files are candidates for compression, so we will crunch those down and also reindex the facegen files.

Next, we'll add SexlabNoStrip to the relevant body parts. This should avoid unexpected immersion breaking changes, especially with regard to the followers.

On deeper examination, it looks like we can leave the Mermaid follower in the game - no errors resulting from me leaving out the Mermaid module. All the modules passed their cleaning checks, which means all we have left to do is conflict resolution. This is mostly going to involve leveled lists, and we'll be doing just normal merges in most cases.

One thing I'm seeing in the leveled lists is that there's a lot of 'flood effect' at high level, where FEMALE monsters end up dominating certain lists. In these cases, I've split the FEMALE version of the list to a sublist and then referenced the sublist at a more appropriate frequency. 

One of my pet peeves is how FEMALE handles naming on the Draugr it adds. We'll go in and change these to "Draugr" and "Headless Draugr," respectively. We'll use AT Quick Change to automate the process and speed things up.

Finally, if memory serves me correctly, Dranei are canonically futanari (or at least, they're Rule 34 Fanon futanari... I'm not an expert), and specifically they have horse cocks. Since I ended up reducing my SOS count by one more than I originally planned, let's install Evil's Horse Penis 2 and hook them up. 

We'll start by zeroing out all the distribution percentage chances, since we are going to distribute this by manual faction assignment only. If you recall our SOS work from last month, we'll use AT Quick Change to assign float values to all these globals.

Now we want to add the SOS faction to the Dranei actors (and make sure their special skins aren't blocking slot 52). Behind the scenes, they have the Nord Race, so we don't need to add a custom race to their SOS ARMA and other records. Review of "the literature" reveals that Draenei seem to range from 'slightly above average' to 'excessively well hung', so we'll assign their faction ranks for the six variants as 4-9.

Now lets spawn some of these monsters and see how they look in the game. Looks like the weapon attachment point is off center on the headless draugr, but that shouldn't be a major problem since they don't normally walk around with their weapons sheathed. The Draenei has some noticeable SOS seam, but I have another project in the works to address that before I start my next game. All in all, I think this one's a success! Don't mind the untextured hair on the second picture - I had forgotten to download a required asset.

I have a little bit of spare time left, so let's get the Zombies installed. Hopefully this will be pretty painless - the visual update patch also comes with an ESL flagged version of the original plugin. The mod did have a few ITMs and bad navmesh edge links, so I fixed those before proceeding. I noted with interest that this mod's assets are used by a number of other mods, such as Republic of Maslea and Death Consumes All, so the improved visuals should flow down to a lot of different places.

The conflicts in the mod were somewhat more diverse than I expected. I went ahead and patched all the conflicts, in some cases weaving them together; for example, you can see below where a fog bank from Obsidian Weather was conflicted; I kept CZ's position, but used OW's scaling.

Like with FEMALE, CZ tends to flood the leveled lists with its Zombies, so I moved them to sublists just like I did with FEMALE. 

Last but not least, I'm going to take the zombies from FEMALE and inject them into the CZ leveled list structure. I cloned my sublists and renamed the original ________Split. Then I put two copies of the new leveled list in there, along with one each of the two FEMALE Zombie leveled lists.

I did it this way because FEMALE also puts zombies on the leveled lists for Draugr dungeons, and I didn't really like that approach.

Looks solid!