While it's definitely a 'back burner' issue, one of my goals is to have the player character start with no quests in the journal (except the AP startup quest). I've been gradually accomplishing this by adding start conditions to the various quests, but I'll happily take a more involved solution if it's available. One such example is a new mod uploaded today on the Nexus: Immerisve Kaidan Start. This mod adds a small prelude quest to Kaidan 2 so it doesn't pop an immediate objective in the journal. 

 

The patch is ESL flagged out of the box and doesn't have any asset conflicts. It got through cleaning without any issues, and even the conflict check came back without anything that need my attention. All in all it's a very clean patch and a super easy installation.

Load order index F0 is basically my 'red line' for the load order. If I push past this I start getting into a situation where newly installed mods might run out of indices before I can compact them if they have a lot of uncompacted patches. So now it's time to compact files and reclaim some space. Let's start by running the ESL report and seeing what we get.

 

 

There are 136 mods in my load order that are below the 2048 record cap and can theoretically be ESL files. However, some processing is required for us to go through them.

 

 

First, we'll filter for any mods that can be ESL flagged "out of the box" with no changes to their form ID structure. There's no reason not to ESL flag these mods, so we'll do that right away.

 

 

That gets us back down to ED, but I think we'll be able to push further. Next, let's look at mods that can be compacted, but that don't have CELL related warnings. That reveals 87 mods, but we are going to eliminate a lot of these. Mods that are likely to have future dependences (for example, RS Children), that have known GFFF calls (some Sexlab/DD stuff), or that are associated with Legacy of the Dragonborn (and are therefore in its patch matrix) are all going to get deferred for later. We'll also leave out mods that get frequent updates, such as SUM. I took a pretty conservative view on what to keep and ended up with the following candidates:

 

 

Under other circumstances I might have left out OSA also, but I only use the mod for 0Body Standalone, so I don't really care of its other interfaces get disrupted. DNRA has a bunch of hardcoded form IDs in its DAR registry, so we'll skip that one for now. Footprints has a bunch of closed source scripts that I don't really feel like decompiling today, so we'll defer that one also. Wildcat we'll compact - I'd previously reviewed its scripts and found no red flags, so it's been on my short list for a while. Also, the mod is stable (no updates for years) and nothing really references it, so it's a pretty safe choice.

 

PC Head Tracking is positively loaded with fuz files. Normally I'd just reindex these, but this mod is a little quirky and all its scripts are closed source. We'll defer this one. Get Snowy has some downstream patches, but that isn't a big issue - it's such a small mod that grabbing an uncompressed version and re-compacting it to fix future patches is manageable. We'll update it to the latest version and then compact. We'll skip the next three as they involve a little more work and we've been doing well so far in terms of finding mods to target. We'll also defer Lazy Item Hider, as it's receiving regular updates still. 

 

That leaves the mods with cell records in them. First we'll trim out the mods that we don't want to bother with yet. I ended up with two left.

 

 

Andromeda is another "finished" Enai Saison mod. It has a couple of patches we'll grab, but then we want to look at compacting this one. Here's the novel cell: 

 

 

Note the white conflict status on the top level cell data. Nothing else is messing around with this cell, and I don't expect that anything will in the future, so this mod is safe to compact. Litheria is another long-abandoned mod with no downstream children. It's novel cell is also untouched, so while we do need to reindex facegen, this mod is otherwise safe to compact.

 

And with that, we're back to a final index of E8!

Unique Skulls HD is a nice mod in its own right, adding a bunch of distinct skulls to certain enemies that you can take as trophies. Better yet, it integrates with Legacy of the Dragonborn so you can display the skulls rather than just carrying them around in inventory. The mod itself has a few asset conflicts, but nothing unexpected. We want it to win these conflicts and provide its new textures, so we'll let it go to the bottom of the texture section where it'll have higher priority than the other mods. 

 

The other side of this mod consists of three plugins - the main mod and two patches. All of the files are already ESL flagged. I found no errors, deletions, or ITMs, and the conflicts were only what you'd expect for a mod that does what this one does.

 

 

Looks good!

What's worse than angry Falmer? Angry Falmer in heavy armor! This should be a good expansion to the underground enemies we run into. This mod comes ESL flagged right out of the box, though it's a little odd how its set up. You have to go into the extracted mod and copy the ESL flagged version from one place to another. It kind of makes me wonder... why? But if it works, I won't complain!

 

 

There aren't any asset conflicts, and the plugin doesn't have any errors, deletions, or ITMs. It does have a bunch of conflicts that we need to look over closely. In most cases, the solution is to just merge the relevant changes for each record. The main "issue", if you can call it that, is that the armor edits don't have any WACCF support, so I need to go through each one and combine this mod's edits with WACCF. 

 

 

Let's see how the new NPCs look:

 

 

Fighting these guys should be an interesting change of pace next time I run a Falmer dungeon.

I've been watching this pair of mods for a while, but I'd held off before since I didn't want to ESL convert a mod that was still under active development. Since there's now and ESL native version of both parts, let's try it out and see how it looks. For part 1, we'll do the Apachii Hair version since that set is underrepresented in my load order currently.

 

No big problems during installation - there was one deletion in the first file which I did a UDR to fix. There was only one conflict - a tree that got repositioned. This mod edits a large number of locations, so let's just visit a representative sample to see how it looks. We'll go to...

 

• Nchuandzel05
• Fellglowkeep02
• TrevasWatchExterior01
• Solitude
• Windhelm
• MilitaryCampWhiterunSons

 

Looks like Veil is still having trouble getting into her furniture, which I know from conversations with the author was an issue with earlier versions. Otherwise it seemed to be running fine.