As I mentioned before, Devious Lore puts its buildings in locations that, at least so far, are unconflicted. We do however need to do a few things. 

 

1. Remove the underscores from the cell names, as this can cause problems with saved game sorting
2. Add the SLA Exhibitionist trait to this mod's NPCs
3. Check two navmeshes for potential issue

 

The cell names are pretty straightforward to fix; we'll use the script "Replace text in EDID and FULL" to remove the underscores as you can see in the example below. With that done, we'll promulgate this edit from the working file into both the conflict resolution patch and also into Devious Lore itself.

 

 

For the actors, we'll copy them from the KS Hair patch into our conflict resolution patch for actors, then add the SLA_Exhibitionist faction. This should suppress EVG Conditional modesty animations.

 

 

That just leaves the navmeshes. Let's start by analyzing the differences between the DL versions and the alternatives.

 

Navmesh ED02B -- Tamriel 6, -28

• Edited by Legacy of the Dragonborn and Skyrim Underground
• All three mods add door links, so at a minimum the navmesh needs to be refinalized

Navmesh 106C52 -- Tamriel -24, 22

• Possible conflict with Great City of Dragon Bridge, but this might be a 'satelite' navmesh where it's just connecting edge links

 

Now let's compare the source meshes.

 

DL seems to be the only one of the three that's changing the structure of the mesh. Legacy adds a dungeon entrance in the area marked above. Skyrim Underground doesn't make any obvious changes. I could have sworn I saw a door link on its navmesh record, but when I looked it seemed to be on the navmesh just north of this one. We'll check it out again in xEdit, but as far as structure goes we'll be using the mesh from DL as a springboard.

 

After letting DL provide the mesh geometry and copying over the door links, the only red conflicts left were in the triangle registry - and just for the door flags on the relevant triangles. The door tris are not renumbered between the meshes, so forwarding the door flags turned this mesh yellow for "benign conflict".

 

 

What about the other one?

 

 

For 106 we can see that the only difference is the punchout for the Devious Lore building. Essentially, we'll want DL to prevail overall, then we can look at whatever specific differences there are in xEdit (probably, again, edge links).

 

Opening it up in xEdit, we can see right away that everything is yellow except for some triangles. This probably means that the conflict has to do with triangle flags rather than shape since the vertices aren't also red. 

 

 

So this is an interesting one. Earlier when I was deconflicting the various Dragon Bridge mods, the CK added edge links to a navmesh that's provided by Great City of Dragon Bridge (note the "DC" form ID index). However, GCODB itself doesn't include these links. So we're going to forward the edge linkage data from TGCODB to our working file (which in turn will overwrite the conflict resolution patch).

 

So that actually came out really cleanly - we didn't even need to re-finalize the mesh data since the changes were very self-contained. We do want to regenerate the Navmesh Information Map for our conflict resolution patch so it properly registers the door links.

 

With that done, we'll just clean the edge links on our conflict resolution patch and we can officially declare Devious Lore to be integrated! It'll be fun to explore this mod's content in game.

I have two purely graphical mods on my list right now: Sprites or Spectres and LOTD Upscale. We'll also grab ENB Light for Effect Shaders as it's recommended by the author of Sprites or Spectres. Setup went smoothly, though the effect shaders mod was a little squirrely as it can't be configured until you've used it at least once.

 

 

Looking good!

There are two small functional mods I want to install next: Bound Fishing Pole and Majestic Mountains More Accurate Collision. MMMAC may be dead-ended right out the gate, but I'm going to give it a test install just in case there are Majestic Mountain meshes that weren't covered by Holy Mountains. And in fact... it is. So we'll uninstall that and move it to my 'not used in this build' section.

 

 

Bizarrely, the fishing pole mod, which must be tiny is an uncompacted, unflagged ESP. So we'll need to fix that in xEdit. 

 

 

Cleaning revealed no errors or deletions, but the mod did have 3 ITMs (10% of its records!) that I cleaned. They were orphaned cell data, and their presence indicates the author did not clean the mod in xEdit after creating it in the CK.

 

 

If you remember my coverage of Star Cloth a couple months ago, you'll remember the problem we had with the crafting book in that mod not being buyable even though it was in a cell designated as a shop. The reason for this was that the player was marked as the item's owner. The same 'problem' exists in this mod, so we'll fix that by removing that ownership value.

 

And with that last edit, this mod is integrated. I haven't really delved into the new fishing mechanics, but when I do having mods like this should increase the convenience of those features a lot.

If I had a little more free time I'd try tackling City Trees, but I need to go for something a little quicker as I wrap up for now. We'll do Ryn's Steed Stone and Whitewatch Tower Reborn. You might be wondering why I'm not just installing Skyrim Reborn: Whiterun Hold instead? Two reasons. First, I'm hopeful that the standalone Whitewatch Tower mod will be eligible for ESL flagging without having to dismember it, and second, SRWH conflicts on a few locations like the Ritual Stone where I prefer the alternative I have already. However, if this mod ends up looking good, it won't be the last mod from the SRWH series that I grab.

 

No big surprises with the Steed Stone - it's very clean except for the edge links. Whitewatch Tower also has problems with its edge links, not a big surprise. Neither mod has errors or deletions, and only WWTR has ITMs - and only 3 of them out of 700-odd records, so not too bad. WWTR does have facegen, so we'll need to reindex those as we change it to an ESL.

 

 

Steed Stone has minimal conflicts - mostly just landscape competition with Majestic Mountains, which we'll let this mod win. Of course the stone itself has the usual conflict with Shout Like a Virgin, which we'll patch out by merging the changes from both mods. WWTR has a seemingly wild edit to the generic Whiterun guard that we'll just ignore. It also has some landscape competition with Update.esm which we'll basically ignore unless we see any eyesores in game. It also has a lot of Object Reference conflicts, but these seem to generally be vanilla props the mod is disabling, which are fine to allow to prevail as-is. I didn't encounter any records that appeared to need patching on first review. Now let's see how these two locations look within the game.

 

 

Generally looking good! I'll need to check on that Hydragorgon character a little to make sure her access to the furniture isn't blocked by this mod. If so, I'll need to move the post a little bit. Otherwise, though I'm quite happy.