If you've been following Charley's adventure, you know that her little gang has been talking about putting up a water tower in Sanctuary for quite a while. However, which kind of water tower I want to add is more of a question. After a lot of research, I'm heavily leaning towards PWR, but I'm mindful that the Nexus page has a lot of people reporting problems with the mod not working right. So let's take a look at it in xEdit and make sure we're not screwing it up.

The mod doesn't report any asset conflicts, and it doesn't come packed with a DLL file, so whatever issue others were having isn't an asset conflict or an F4SE compatibility problem. Going into xEdit, we can see that this is an uncompacted ESP with a little over 100 records. There are no errors, ITMs, deletions, or even record conflicts. There are also no obvious red flags when looking at semi-randomly audited records. Because of the reports of this mod being fragile, we will not compact it. That way, if it has a script that includes hardcoded form IDs, we won't accidentally break anything (the author did not include script source files and I don't feel like decompiling them to check!). As an aside, authors, include your script source code. It's a dick move when you don't.

The items are buildable and, more importantly, the rain barrels are correctly filling up - which suggests the scripts are operating properly. I think we can say that at least for now, this mod is working correctly. Of course, if it starts to screw up, we can always go back and examine it further.

Next we have a couple of Skyrim mods that shouldn't pose any major difficulties in installation:

• Charcoal Stick
• Word Wall Suspended Stack Fix 
• Sexlab Body Search Dialogue Fix
• Project Echo Gen 4 Dialogue for Sexlab Body Search

Most of these were very straightforward installations, but the word wall fix turns out to conflict with Shout Like a Virgin (I've actually patched this script in the past when other mods have conflicted it) so we'll be looking at that in more detail. First though, let's check the Body Search dialogue patch in xEdit to make sure all is OK with it. Fortunately, the patch was completely clean and free of errors, so that was an easy one. Now let's talk about that suspended stack fix.

We have four mods that are in conflicts here: SLaVE, USSEP, Vanilla Script Micro-Optimizations, and the Suspended Stack Fix. Now VSMO already incorporates the USSEP fixes, so what we really need to do is patch together SLaVE, VSMO, and the new SSF. We'll open up each version of the script source in Notepad++ and compare their contents.

Well, we have the source file queued up and ready to go, but for whatever reason I'm missing some underlying scripting for the Toys framework. So let's shelve this one until I update to the latest version of Toys. No point in digging around for the missing source files until I'm using the latest version of everything. We'll revisit this mod in the future.

The next four mods are all variously related to how the marriage functions work in the game. Specifically:

• Married NPCs Wear Wedding Rings
• NPCs Wear Amulet of Mara Plus
• Bond of Matrimony
• Immersive Rejections

Installation was generally smooth, though for some ill-conceived reason the author of the first and third mod chose to pack their mods in BSA files, which had adverse impacts on asset management. I extracted the BSA files and proceeded from there. All the mods are already ESL flagged, so that's not going to be an issue here. The mods did have a bunch of errors relative to Immersive Sounds, which is a result of my compacting that mod previously. We'll fix these manually by hooking up the correct form ID.

Notwithstanding the above, which was a "me" issue, I didn't find any other dirty records. Of course, there were a bunch of conflicts, but those were mostly simple cases of different mods altering different parts of the record, and it was a simple affair to merge them. 

Let's swing by Whiterun and check on the visuals from these mods.

I didn't spot anyone in Whiterun with the Amulet of Mara, but as you can see, Adrianne has her wedding ring. The amulets only have a 25% chance of spawning on eligible NPCs, so I'm not too concerned about not spotting any on this trip.

Yesterday, we ran into a mod that depended on Genesis. This is a product of the Sands of Time guys, and I admire a lot of their work, even if it's not always a good fit for my setup. Let's take a look at this mod and see how it stacks up.

This mod is a dungeon enhancer that adds dynamic spawn points (the idea being to make the dungeon contents somewhat less predictable and generally keep the gameplay experience fresh). It also has an add-on module that supports mod-added locations. 

I didn't see any asset conflicts that concerned me. Curiously, the 'patch' to add mod location support is a literal patch - it replaces the ESP file that ships with the basic mod. This is rather different from the approach that I'm accustomed to, and while doing this can be a compatibility nightmare under the wrong circumstances, for this case it should make cleaning and integration a bit quicker.

The mod is an uncompressed 1,060 record ESP, which isn't great. The mod has been stable for quite a while, so we'll go ahead and compact it. Because it contains an SEQ file, we will need to regenerate that as well. 

I found no errors, dirty records, or bad navmesh in the plugin. Conflict checking revealed a small number of top level cell data edits, but otherwise it was clean in that regard as well. Let's hop into the game and see how this edits a nearby dungeon.

The new spawns worked pretty well, showing up fairly seamlessly and generally working well. As you can see from the sad state of my character after a few fights, dungeon crawling with no armor at first level can be a dangerous pursuit, especially with extra spawns in play!

One mod that's been floating around my to-do list for a while is Children of Azura, which builds on trans-inclusive lore from ESO to add some lightweight transgender lore content to Skyrim. Since I'll eventually need to greatly increase the futanari population in the future to support the seemingly never-stopping-to-grow DLC sized quest mod Alpha, to say nothing of the fact that I've taken a bit of a kitchen sink approach to just about every facet of sexuality in this build, it seems high time to incorporate that lore. Let's see how this mod looks.

The mod has no asset conflicts and the plugin is already ESL flagged, so that's a good start. The plugin doesn't have any errors or cleaning issues, and the edits are limited to some worldspace edits and leveled lists, mostly dealing with adding the lore books into the world. 

The worldspace conflicts were in top level cell data, and it was pretty easy to resolve. The leveled lists were trickier, as I've had to substantially restructure my book leveled lists on account of the large number of books I've got in my game. We're going to actually do this work in a holding file to minimize the amount of scrolling I have to do. After forking the book list for this mod into a branch file, we can hook it up to my custom version and the percentage chances should work right.

If you don't recall from my books binge, each of these branches is literally that mod's version of the clutter books list, so the end result is that vanilla books remain common, while the large number of mod-added books can't flood them out because each branch contains both the vanilla books and also the books from only the specific mod that acted as its seed. In this case, Branch 5 is for Children of Azura, while the four previous branches are from the other various books mods I've installed.

Unfortunately, this mod doesn't equip the Azura necklace it adds onto any actors, but it does place a few in the world. Down the road, I might use SPID to give a chance of putting the amulet on futanari NPCs.

So no good opportunities for beauty shots, but that does put some new lore in the game, and I'm always in favor of more lore!

Call of the North is a port of a pretty old mod that added quite a few animal-themed helmets to the game. Let's use this to increase the variety of what we see in our world. All the plugins for this mod are already ESL flagged and there's no asset conflicts. While we'll check for errors and dirty edits, I suspect that all my work is going to boil down to worldspace integration. There were a few ITMs, but otherwise the mod was indeed clean.

There were some questionable records in the main file, but the "fixes" patch already addresses them in a satisfactory way. Moreover, despite my initial concerns that I'd have the manually populate a ton of leveled lists, this mod actually does a good job distributing the gear already. It did need some trimming, as the probabilities weren't to my taste in come areas, and I had to do some manual adjustments to take into account sublists I created, but overall everything looked good. Let's go into the game and see if we can spot any of these helmets.

Whoops, looks like Sexy Female Bandits puts one of its spawns in the same location as the Windhelm Stormcloak Camp from Rigmor of Bruma. Needless to say, they didn't survive very long.

However, the new helmets do appear to be all working correctly, so I'll count that as a win!