If you've been reading the diary for the last few days, you know I have some patches and functional mods left over from this weekend to install. Specifically:

 

• Cool Staggers
• Orcish Weapon Replacer and Standalone
• Creatures Life
• Delay Bleak Falls Barrow
• Main Quest Delay Reminder
• Vigilants Pursuing Vampire

 

The level of effort for these mods is probably going to be all over the place, so let's see how it all turns out. Across all 6 mods there are only two asset conflicts. Both are scripts, but they're only conflicting with the vanilla game, so I'm content to just let them win without any further digging. Five of the mods contained plugins, and four of those were already compacted and ESL flagged. The last file doesn't contain any facegen, voiced dialogue, SEQ, or anything else that could cause problems for a compacted mod, so I expect we'll flag it almost as soon as we get into xEdit.

 

 

So here we are. 23 records, and the file's left uncompressed. Let me once again make my plea, mod authors: finish preparing your mods before you upload them. That means compacting your form IDs if your mod has fewer than 2048 records. There's no reason I should have to be doing this. Even if cross-platform compatibility is a problem, compacted files work just fine in LE. Anyway, rant complete for now.

 

Bet you can guess which mod had ITMs in it! Fortunately it was just two of them, but its more evidence that the author just made this mod in the CK and never cleaned it in xEdit. The same mod also reverts changes from the USSEP and from an official CC mod, so there's that. While all of these issues are easy to fix in xEdit, what percentage of end users actually take the time to do this? 20% maybe? So the other 80% are reverting bugfixes or breaking official content and might not even know it. 

 

On the Bleak Falls Barrow mod, there's one record we need to do a little extra research into. As you can see below, some stuff gets removed from the vanilla scene, and I suspect this content is transferred to a new record. We'll want to loop back and make sure the USSEP changes are being properly forwarded.

 

 

Whoops, never mind. Looks like that particular part just gets snipped out. That's fine.

 

 

The last mod for us to cover is the Orcish weapons mod. The mod as distributed is a crafting-only mod, so all I have to do here is add the weapons to the relevant leveled lists. Specifically, my orcish weapon variants lists. We'll do that by first adding this mod as a master to my conflict resolution file. Then we'll navigate to our Orcish weapons variants leveled lists and add the new items to the appropriate categories.

 

 

By putting them on the variants list instead of directly putting them on specific leveled lists, we keep the clutter under control and greatly reduce the number of lists that I have to maintain. I've already previously replaced most of the Orcish Greatsword WEAP references with Sublist_VAR_OrcishGreatsword LVLI references, so by updating this one record I'm effectively updating all those downstream leveled lists.

 

 

For the Dagger, it appears that we don't currently have an Orcish Dagger Variants sublist, so we'll create one and inject it into the relevant downstream records.

 

 

In the process of setting this up, I also noticed the Nova iNPC seems to be manually distributing Orcish daggers to a lot of its actors. As I worked through the various records, I found that several mods - in particular Nova iNPC and Deadly Wenches - were giving out Orcish Daggers like candy. I put the Orcish Dagger variants list on Orcish actors, but otherwise I gave them other dagger lists based on their rank. Trash NPCs got the Town Dagger list, mid-tier got the Expensive Daggers list, and top tier got the High Quality Dagger list. This should result in better weapons diversity for bandits in future playthroughs!

I'd been waiting to install Osare Maid Outfit [Class 3 female barkeeper] and a few others until I had started to set up the modesty-ranked outfit lists, but since I already have gendered leveled lists for the barkeeper outfit I might as well add this one now. This is a UUNP outfit, but it should be a good enough match to BHUNP to not be an eyesore - no big wrist gaps for example.

 

One thing I observed while I built the outfit in Bodyslide was how many parts it had. I don't mind this in principal, but we'll need to check out which body slots they're assigned along with a few other details.

 

 

Let's see how this is set up...

 

• Amulet: Slot 35 (good)
• Apron: Slot 44 (bad - 44 is the gag/face slot - should be slot 58; corsets, harnesses, and abdomen add-ons)
• Armlet: Slot 34 (good)
• Top: Slot 32 (good)
• Headdress: Slot 44 (good)
• Socks: Slot 46 (acceptable but should be slot 38 - calves)
• Shoes: Slot 37 (good)
• Skirt: Slot 38 (not ideal. Should be Slot 49 - belt/panties/separate bottom)
• Panties: Slot 45 (bad. Should be Slot 49)

 

So there are four items we need to change the body slots for. I'm really tempted to just back burner this, but for the sake of the blog let's work through it. First things first we need to go into Outfit Studio and change the partitions on the bad items, then recreate the bodyslides. 

 

 

Next, we need to repeat the partition changes in the ARMA and ARMO entries. While I have to grudgingly appreciate some of the subtle edge cases you can achieve with this setup, it's just like Bethesda to create a system where three different records store the same data and generally don't work right if they don't match up. Brilliant!

 

 

As an aside, while I originally planned for this to solely be a Class 3 outfit, the presence of two different slot 49 items opens the way for a Class 4 version as well. You'll see what I mean later when I post the screen shots. So let's build out outfit; here's the concept:

 

• Outfit for Female Barkeeper
  • New leveled list for shoes - either vanilla shoes or shoes from this mod
  • Headdress part from this mod
  • Amulet from this mod <--- further review reveals that this is described in-game as a collar, and that's a better fit. So we'll switch it over to Slot 45 before we wrap up
  • Female Barkeeper Clothes list (choose one of this list)
    • Existing options
    • Class 3 ("Light") Osare sublist (all parts color matched)
      • Top
      • Skirt
      • Socks
      • Armlets
      • Apron
    • Class 4 ("Minimal") Osare sublist (all parts color matched)
      • As class 3, but Panty instead of Skirt
    • Class 5 ("Exhibitionist") Osare sublist (all parts color matched) -- needs to also be accessible to the existing Class 5 Clothes list
      • As class 3, but no top or skirt

 

All the new sublists will need to go on the combined list as well (that gets used for loot generation). With these created, we'll incorporate them into my leveled item conflict resolution patch. With these done, we need to do a little bit of fiddling for Sexlab compatibility. Specifically, we need to make the following changes:

 

• The tops all need to received the SOS Revealing keyword
• The skirts all need to have slots 52 and 54 added to their ARMA (to hide pubic hair and penises)
• The panties need to have slot 52 added to their ARMA - they are low cut enough that they shouldn't block 54

 

 

Now let's go and take care of the collar, then try on some of these clothes!

 

 

You can see the four levels of modesty here. A few more, this time sighted in the wild, below:

 

One mod that I'd had on a previous build and liked, but haven't added to this one yet is Devious Lore. I really liked how this mod chipped away a bit at the whole lore-breaking nature of some of the Devious Devices stuff. Let's see if this one will play nice with our setup.

 

The main mod is an uncompacted ESP file with 4030 records. Conceivably I could split this mod and compact it, but we'll leave it alone for now. The three patches are already ESL flagged so I'm only paying for this mod with one load order slot.

 

 

The plugins were free of errors, though I found a lot of bad edge links that I had to repair with the script. No deletions, which is always good, and I only found 2 ITMs. 

 

Devious Devices is kind of a mountain of conflicting records, in part because - for reasons that remain unknown to me - the author opted to keep the beast race and male body add-ons as separate patches. This means that most mods are compiled against the core DD records and unsurprisingly, they end up in a conflicted state with the DDFH/DDBRR patches. As I write this, however, I do have to acknowledge eating some crow - I didn't initially realize the reason why Devious Lore was stripping the no enchantment flag and spent a lot of time merging records before I put 2+2 together and realized my mistake... and got to start over with my patching.