Not much actually. The main thing that jumped out at me was Eviscerate, which is a sound mod from an author whose previous work I've enjoyed. This mod is a replacer, so it doesn't require any work in xEdit, but it does require asset load order management.

 

 

The only conflicts are with Audio Overhaul for Skyrim SE, and after reviewing the two mods, AOS is still providing plenty of other assets so we'll let the new mod win by placing it after AOS on the left side of MO2.

 

On the Fallout 4 side, we have a couple of new mods of interest. There's a texture replacer for the monolithic heads in Boston, and a mod that adds a distinct look to the Forged. The Kirby Heads mod is a simple replacer; while it has a plugin, it's just an empty BSA loader. That one doesn't require any special attention. However, the Forged we'll want to look at carefully to ensure it won't break anything. Normally, this is the sort of mod I'd install between playthroughs, just to be careful, but since I've already alluded to the Forged being kind of cult-like and distinct in the story, having their visuals match will serve the story.

 

In terms of exterior conflicts, the Forged mod is pretty minimal - its only issue is that it repackages some assets from an outfit mod that I have installed, so that's not really a problem. It does not contain any sensitive files like facegen or voiced audio. That's important, since this mod only has 52 records but its not ESL flagged. So we'll fix that first. 

 

Next, we've got an error. Not just any error, but a potentially game breaking one. 

 

 

As you can see, the author apparently removed an item at some point, but forgot to remove the reference to it off a leveled list. We'll fix this by just removing the null pointer. Ironically, this is probably the result of a crash fix the author did in the latest release, to remove an item with a corrupted mesh. I guess they just forgot to clean up when they were done?

 

 

The mod was otherwise clean, and the only conflicted record was one of the leveled lists. As you can see below, we'll resolve it by just merging together the relevant records.

 

 

Let's visit Saugus Iron Works real quickly and see how these new Forged look!

 

 

That'll do nicely!

So a while back, there was a thread on Reddit where people were showing off beauty shots from their modded games. One image caught my attention - it was a building interior and the roof texture looked really good. After some asking around, I determined that the mod providing that texture was Farmhouses and Farm Towns by Clevercharff. The whole mod looks nice, but its specifically that roof texture that I want and that's going to be our priority with setting this mod's asset load priority.

 

 

Now a fun fact... it turns out I already have this mod, but it's mostly been overwritten by other, more modern takes on the same subject matter. So we want to specifically find these interior roof textures and get them into a winning position.

 

The file we're looking for is ThatchInterior01 and its associated normal map, and you can see it here in the file folder.

 

The providing mod is Wizkid Parallax Farmhouses, which I do indeed generally want to win conflicts against Charff's mod.

 

 

But these two files are the exception, so let's open up the info tab for Wizkid's mod and filter the advanced conflict resolution tab for the file name, then we'll highlight the two files, open the right-click menu, and choose "hide."

 

 

Now we go back to Charff's mod, and you can see that the thatch interiors are now the coming from that mod.

 

 

Let's see how they look in the game.

 

 

Looks like its functioning as intended!

 

As an aside, while I was running down the mod I noticed that I had R's Farmhouses and Handcarts in my "not used in this build" folder. This is a nice, but older, mod that I had used on an earlier build but then superseded with other mods. However, I took a peek at it and discovered that it does serve up a number of textures that were coming from vanilla sources in my new setup. So I reactivated that mod and put it pretty high in my load order, so it would load to all more modern mods, but still replace the handful of vanilla items.

 

Yesterday I installed some script optimizations relating to cloak spells. While I was looking into that, I remembered that on my "to-do" list was another script optimization mod. Let's take a look at that one today and see if it's a good fit.

 

Unfortunately, we can see right off that this mod has a ton of conflicts with other mods. This means that fully implementing it will be difficult. What I'm going to do for now is put it (or rather, its BSA loader) very high in the load order and see if I can cause it to lose every conflict except for the ones with the USSEP. This should create a situation where only its overrides of vanilla and USSEP scripts are going into the game.

 

 

With that done, now we can see that we're still getting 437 scripts updated. If we eliminate source code, which was creating some false positives on the conflict report, we can see that only 30 scripts are being overwritten by other sources. 

 

 

In a perfect world, I'd like to go through those 30 scripts and incorporate these optimizations, but as I mentioned, today I have some time constraints and so for now we'll settle for "good enough" instead of "perfect."

Let's put some sexy bandit stuff in the game. It's an NSFW playthrough, after all ?

 

First, we'll install OregonPete's Bandit Makeover. This should improve the appearance of some vanilla characters, but we will let the high poly head project prevail over it, which will not only maintain that mod's superior geometry but will ensure that some more "normal" looking bandits remain in play.

 

 

This mod is uncompacted, which we'll be fixing in xEdit, but it doesn't contain any novel facegen so we do not have to reindex anything. We're also, however, going to flag this mod as a master so for ease of conflict resolution I can put its plugin above the high poly project in my load order.

 

 

Conflict resolution will proceed the way we normally do with NPC overhauls - we'll let the designated winner (High Poly) prevail, while the vanilla overrides can go through. 

 

 

We'll just remove those three edits and hide their associated facegen. I'm also going to remove the master flag, since in retrospec I realize it's pointless to have on a mod that depends on KS - I can't put it as high up as I planned.

 

Going through this mod, I can see that the poor bandits just don't get a lot of attention, do they? Most of what I'm doing here is just merging equipment edits (and at that, private equipment edits I made myself in he past) with the new face data - no other competing records. It makes the process a bit easier, but it really underscores the need to install mods like this if I want to overhaul all the content. A nice added bonus, too, is that I found a previously undetected conflict that would have caused the black face texture issue on some higher level bandits.

 

Next, let's install Sexy Female Bandits, which adds some new bandits with skimpy custom armor (we'll also need to grab the UUNP bodyslide for the custom armors and port it to SSE). The bandit mod has no asset conflicts and its already ESL flagged. Structurally, while the mod isn't perfect it's workable. I did notice a wild edit, which I deleted, but no errors, deletions, or ITMs. Conflicts were limited to top-level cell data (a result of ACHR entries in the associated worldspace cells).

 

I toyed a bit with adding some bondage gear like collars or harnesses to these actors, but I think I'll hold off on that at least until I see them in the world. The screen shots look "just OK" on the Nexus page, but they're obviously taken at low resolution without all the supporting infrastructure my build has, so the in-game results may look nicer. So next we'll build the UUNP meshes for the armor items and then run them through the nif optimizer for SSE use.

 

Now before we load anything else, let's look at how these characters appear in the game.

 

 

Distributed Overlays, Muscle Solution, OBody, and SOS seem to be adequately diversifying the character bodies, so I don't feel a strong need to add more to the costumes. I do need to give them the SLA Exhibitionist trait so they don't play modesty animations, but that's a pretty easy fix. Note how Devious Strikers is detecting these women as candidates for its function and applying its own unique costumes to some of them.

 

Hmmm, do we want to do one more? Keeping with the theme, let's install Sexy Bandit Captives. Now, this mod has a number of optional integrations that we'll look at as well. They are:

 

• The Coenaculi
• More Bandit Camps
• The Watchtowers Reborn
• DFT's More Bandit Encampments

 

The Coenaculi is a Slavetats add-on and its a simple, fire-and-forget install with no asset conflicts and no plugin. As for the rest... let's see if they'll play nice. Right off the bat, we can see that Watchtower is going to be beyond the scope of what I want to deal with. It depends on the mod Genesis, which while I'm interested in will require a lot of work and testing to get integrated. So let's look at the other two.

 

Both bandit camp add-ons are uncompacted ESP files with 3700 and 14000 records each. Neither is a candidate for conversion to ESL on the timescale I'm working with here, so we are not going to try to integrate these mods today. The mods do look interesting and seem to have had a lot of time put into them, so I'm sure we'll be back to them at some point in the future.

 

SBC is a 9000 record uncompacted ESP. At this time I'm not going to try to split it up for compacting. The mod has a bunch of dirty navmesh edge links that I processed with the cleaning script, as well as 2 ITMs and more frustratingly, 15 deleted navmeshes. It also has many conflicts. Because of my limited amount of working time, we won't be proceeding with SBC at this time. I'll probably instead approach this mod and its underlying location mods as a case study at some point in the future. Oh well

After having to skip four mods in a row because of time constraints, let's finish up with something nice and easy: Faeries and its ENB Light patch. This mod is nice and self contained, with its only conflicts being the ones between the main mod and the ENB patch. Somewhat curiously, the mod is an actual ESL file instead of an ESL-flagged ESP, so it'll load in the ESM space. 

 

 

As an ESL, the mod is already compacted and not eating up precious main load order spaces. It has no errors, navmesh edge link corruption, or deletions. However, it did have 9 ITMs that I removed. It was all orphaned top level cell data. The remaining conflicts were also all top-level cell data, mostly conflicts between this mod and ENB Water over water flow data. The whole installation process was very painless. 

 

Lets see how these guys look within the game.

 

 

Looks good!