Let's start with the 'fire and forget' items - mesh, texture, and animation replacers. Specifically:

 

• DAR Rifles of Skyrim
• Heels Fix
• Apocrypha ENB Light
• Particle Lights - Falmer Drips
• FYX Honeyside Deck
• FYX Whiterun Drawbridge Gate
• FYX Whiterun Scaffold
• Bright Falling Leaves Fix
• Demi Rose Bodyslide Preset
• Rudy in Pi-CHO for Obsidian

 

Only the last mod requires in-game setup, so unless we run into problems with some of the other stuff it'll be the ENB update that we focus on here... and as expected, there weren't any issues. Obviously, as always some items required asset load order management, but there were no tricky on ambiguous situations. Two of the mods did have plugins, one of which was ESL flagged and the other of which was an actual ESL. A quick review of the plugins revealed they were free of dirty or badly conflicted records. I did notice with satisfaction  that the DAR mod already supports the new version of Handguns of Skyrim that I haven't upgraded to yet - note the two injected records at the bottom. 

 

The new ENB mod is going to involve a little bit of assembly. I use Rudy ENB right now, but Pi-CHO has always interested me. This new patch lets me use the best of both ENBs, but since Pi-CHO is the foundation of this setup, I have to start by installing that ENB over Rudy. And it's not just a drag and drop replacement; as you can see from this diagram here (packaged with the Pi-CHO installer), there are a bunch of extra steps for fine tuning:

 

 

Steps 1 and 2 are pretty easy, so I won't spend time covering those. But let's look at the INI settings. Again, this diagram is from the Pi-CHO ENB installation package.

 

 

Fortunately, these edits are pretty easy to implement using MO2's built-in INI editor. Moreover, most of the changes were already present in my settings so I only had to tweak a few things.

 

 

That just leaves the in-game patch. This might be tricky, since I use Window Shadows, Luminousity, and LUX, all patched together. I'll see if I can apply all three patches, but I suspect I'll need to just install the LUX patch and accept that the other two mods won't be perfectly optimized. Actually, turns out my fears were wrong. I was able to load all three compatibility patches.

 

 

We'll take a little walk through Falkreath Hold (and beyond) and see how things look. 

 

 

It's a different look compared to Rudy, but not bad. There's a grainy pattern visible in these screen shots that is much less noticeable in game which I'd be interested in tamping down further, but otherwise all the changes seem to be improvements. I've noticed a lot less light source fighting (perhaps because of the light patches?) and also generally much better focus implementation. As an added bonus, I finally spotted a particular Thalmor officer costume "in the wild" that I hadn't seen since installing a while ago. I didn't see any negative impacts to frame rate, and in fact frames seemed slightly better in exterior areas (though it might be more of a "less grass-related stutter" than a straight FPS increase).

That's a little Star Citizen joke.

 

 

But it's relevant! Because our next mod is another Mihail Mods title I stumbled across recently: Mating Crabs. As the name suggests, it adds various types of crabs to Skyrim's coastline. My experience with Mihail's stuff so far has been pretty good, so I'm not expecting a lot of problems here. Let's take a look at the mod. Curiously, it has a lot of asset conflicts... however, review of them reveals that they're mostly third party textures that other mods also use. None of them seem to pose any problems, so we'll leave them be.

 

 

The plugin is already ESL flagged, which takes care of one potential "to-do", but we'll still want to clean it and check for conflicts. I found no errors or deletions, but I did remove 16 ITMs. Conflict review revealed very few conflicting records, most of which were top level cell data.

 

 

 

Looks good!

If you've been following this blog for a while you know that I have a bit of a soft spot for Ryn2g. While I was out sick, they released two more mods - one that I'm definitely going to use and one that I probably won't use. But let's look at the both.

 

As we've become accustomed to seeing by now with Ryn's mods, the plugins were already ESL flagged and had no deletions, errors, or ITMs. They did require navmesh edge link cleaning. There were a lot of conflicts with the shadow stone; mostly trees getting repositioned. I let the Shadow Stone mod win all the tree related conflicts; I also had to merge record data for the necromancer NPC and the stone itself to ensure compatibility with Artifacts of Tamriel and with Shout Like a Virgin. Note that if you're following along with me, the record merge for the Shadow Stone is a non-skippable step - either the stone will be in the completely wrong place or SLaVE's functions will break if you fail to patch this record.

 

 

As you can see below, everything looks pretty good. There are a few areas that won't look quite right until I rebuild my grass cache, but that's par for the course and of course I'll be doing that before I start my next adventure.

 

 

The Loreius Farm mod, however, is problematic. As you can see from this image here, the mod conflicts heavily with Frostfield and with the Loreius Farm Hamlet. While I wouldn't mind porting over some individual elements of them mod, that would involve a lot of work for relatively little benefit. Consequently, we're going to skip this one for now.

 

Devious Strike is an interesting mod. In one sense, I like how it incorporates devious devices into the game and has NPCs wear them. However, there are a lot of potential 'devils in the details' that the description alone leaves me unsure about. Let's try installing it and giving it a test run.

 

The mod doesn't have any asset conflicts, but it ships with an uncompacted plugin. A quick look through the scripts doesn't reveal any obvious red flags, and the mod itself is a "last place" mod that shouldn't pose downstream problems from compacting. Likewise, while the file contains a novel cell, nothing else is likely to edit it, so this is safe to compact. We do have some errors related to file format differences between Form 43 and Form 44. These are generally benign, so we can leave them before now unless they cause problems.

 

 

The mod is otherwise clean and free from errors, which is helpful since it lets us test this in game without adding this mod as a master to our conflict resolution patch.

 

Looking at the mod in-game, we can see that it had a pretty rich MCM. This is good, because we need to fine tune the settings if this mod is going to work. If you remember my conversation with VirginMarie about certain Toys features, I want certain types of bondage gear to be pretty rare in my game, since they can become nuisance items and interfere with gameplay. 

 

 

It does look like I can fine tune all the potential problematic percentages, and in actual use I expect I'll turn them down substantially. Going into embershard mine, we can see that the game is correctly injecting the new NPCs. However, I did notice that the Strikers have the dark face bug. Male device injection appears to be working correctly as well. 

 

 

Device injection did knock my character into third person mode and would have been pretty dangerous in a melee situation. However, in general the script execution was quick and wouldn't be guaranteed to be lethal. 

 

 

I'm pretty happy with how this mod ran during my test session, and I think I'll be keeping it. With its percentages turned way down, it should integrate pretty smoothly without massively altering gameplay.

 

However, the blackface is a little concerning. Let's take a closer look at how this mod is structured internally... I'm hoping that it's just a matter of me needing to regenerate the faces in the CK.

 

 

That's actually exactly what we need to do - as you can see, the new NPCs have their own face data, so we need to output their facegen. We'll do that by going into the CK, selecting all the new NPCs, and pressing "control+F4" to generate their facegen. Then I'll drag the output into Devious Strikers' folder. And with that done, this mod should be working correctly! When our next adventure starts, we'll revisit the MCM settings, but I expect that turning them down 90% will avoid any issues with gameplay domination (e.g., change 80% to 8% and so forth).