You may recall that I never got around to explaining what I planned to do with JS Santa Hat a few days ago. Shout Like a Virgin and Toys Workshop both include a Santa Hat model, and what we're going to do is update them to utilize this higher detail model instead. This has the added bonus of adding beast race support, which the Virgin/TW versions don't expressly provide.

To accomplish this, we'll install the Santa Hat, and then redirect the relevant SLaVE/TW references to use the JS hat. We also want to copy the JS armor item to our working file and apply the 'sexlab no strip' keyword to ensure it stays attached during sex, as intended; likewise, we'll need to go into the JS nif files and records to move them to Slot 61 so they align with SLaVE/TW's internal setup. Finally, we'll compact and ESL flag the hat mod since it's silly that it's a full size plugin.

With those changes made, we'll go ahead and forward them to our conflict resolution patches, then we'll update the slot assignments on the nifs. Note that when I first 'went live' with this, it had some hair intrusion issues, so I went back to the ARMO record and restored the original's claim on slot 31 so that it suppressed the hair.

Very pretty!

Next we've got a couple of easy ones - graphics enhancement mods. Specifically:

• Woody's HD Torture Devices or not, since the author literally just hid the file before I could start downloading it
• Daedric Relic Rings SMIMed with ENB Light

Now, I already have Gemling Queen Jewelry, so I don't need to download Immersive Jewelry to use this ring mod. However, IJ is on my to-do list and since the loss of Woody's mod has left me with very little to actually post in this entry, let's go ahead and install it. I already have the latest version of IJ from a previous build, but we will also grab the Summermyst Patch for completeness sake.

We'll put IJ in the spot shown below, which should allow some of our other jewelry replacers mods to keep a presence in the game rather than being totally nuked out of existence by IJ's extremely large selection of mesh replacements.

Now, IJ is a huge mod with over 18000 records, so we aren't going to be doing any compacting there - at least not without some major mod surgery. The Summermyst patch is already ESL flagged, so that's taken care of. Both plugins were pretty clean, with just a single ITM in the main IJ file. Some conflict resolution patching was necessary, mostly to maintain compatibility for Animated Weapon Enchantments and to update leveled lists. 

One other thing I noticed while I was doing the leveled lists is that my gemstone lists are starting to get quite cramped. I suspect that I'll be needing to segment those leveled lists in a way similar to what I did with the clutter book lists soon, in order to ensure I don't overflow the entry limit.

But wait, there's more! As I proceeded through the necessary patching, beyond just the looming necessity of breaking up the gem lists, I was reminded of an important change that IJ makes which has some implications for compatibility with Gemstone Collector. Basically, IJ changes Corundum to copper (which causes some mild issues with NeV Extreme Materials), but GC adds an entirely new copper material, with its own sourcing process. So I actually canceled my patching and didn't save my changes. Instead, what I'll be doing tomorrow is grabbing the latest version of GC and integrating the two mods fully. I've been holding off for this for a long time, since the GC author briefly resumed work on the mod back in 2020, however it seems they've gone dormant again and I can't just wait forever for them to release version 3.0. 

It was a little disappointing to see all that work go to waste, but it'll be much easier to integrate these two starting from a "clean" position rather than one where I've already made heavy changes to support IJ alone. IJ/GC integration is going to be a pretty heavy duty project, so I won't be planning on integrating more mods (other than lightweight stuff like graphics) and the rest of my working list will be going on hold until I finish this. But that's fine, since the end result will be really nice.