There's something to be said for mods that only ship with a plugin - you aren't going to get any conflicts over assets, for example. However, mods that add NPCs and that don't ship with facegen nifs and textures are going to suffer from the infamous dark face bug. You've probably caught some glimpses of this in the course of this series, and now its time to fix those characters. Now, there is an SKSE extension - Face Discoloration Fix - but this approach uses valuable CPU cycles and I'd rather just do it right the first time. 

So let's load up Groot's Solitude in the CK and make us some Facegen!

Here you can see we've loaded up the mod, clicked the "actor" filter and sorted by Form ID. Next we'll highlight all the mods that start with 06 and then press CTRL+F4.

We'll click "yes" at the confirmation dialogue and let the CK do its thing. 

Since we're generating these files for the first time rather than re-generating existing facegen, the output is going to land in our overwrite area. Then we'll drag them into our Facegen Files section. Why didn't I just drag them directly into Groot's mod, you ask? Mostly just as a hedge against accidentally deleting them if I upgrade Groot's mod to a new (future) version.

As you can see, the new characters no longer have the dark face bug.

I've decided not to chop up this mod for ESL flagging yet. However, let's talk briefly about how I'd accomplish that if I wanted to.

ESL flagged files have two important limitations:

• Each file needs to have 2048 or fewer records
• Nothing can overwrite the top-level cell data for an ESL flagged file

Version 2.4 of Groot's Solitude, which is the current version on the Nexus at the time I'm writing this, has 6,297 records. This means we'd need to break this mod into 4 files (really 5 - more on that below) to ESL flag its contents. It's also important to layer the files in a way that nothing in an earlier part depends on a newer part. Basically, this means that the order of records needs to go something like this:

• Statics, Activators, Magic Spells, Magic Effects, and so forth
• Armor, Weapons, NPC data, leveled lists
• Novel interior cells* plus their door markers in associated exterior cells
• Regular interior cells plus their door markers in associated exterior cells
• Exterior cells
• Dialogue, packages, and quests

The asterisk on the novel exterior cells is that if there's a situation where novel interior cells are referencing other novel cells (if if some other mod is patching those areas - like a lighting patch for example), then the top level cell data needs to be put in a non-ESL-flagged holding file. I haven't set up one of these yet, but eventually I'll have to do so. Basically, this makes a full-size form ID available for the top level cell data, circumventing the ESL no-cell-overrides problem.

We'll probably revisit this mod in the future, but for now we can leave it be. Similarly, I'm going to leave the landscaping alone for now, since the biggest problem (doors substantially above the ground in some areas) were fixed by the author in version 2.4. At some point in the future, when I've refined my landscaping techniques to be more efficient, I'll be back to this and several other mods to deconflict their landscapes.

At this point, with the completion of the facegen and the decision to defer ESL flagging, we're technically done with this mod. However, the author recommends using three texture mods:

• Solitude HD (already installed)
• Fireapple Mortar Works (not installed yet)
• Extravagant Interiors (already installed)

Let's see how it looks if we sandwich the Mortar Works in between Solitude HD and Extravagant Interiors. If this doesn't result in Fireapple getting dead-ended, then it should contribute some nice new details to the Solitude texture set without wiping out E.I.'s unique look.

We can see right off that none of the three mods are dead-ended, they all have "+" icons on their gold bolts. Looking in greater detail, we can see that while it overrides a few textures from Solitude HD, it doesn't mess with EI at all. 

Let's hop back to Solitude and give it another look.

That adds some nice accents without flooding out the canonical Solitude look. Definitely a nice addition! The marble floors in the Blue Palace are more noticeable, but it's a palace so that's OK!