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Bethesda Modding Diary - 23 June 2022


gregaaz

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Welcome back, folks. Today we'll be installing a couple of Fallout 4 mods that will soon be needed for Charley's story. I've also got a few Skyrim mods, including some monsters, that I need to get up and running. We're starting out with the following mod counts:

 

  • Skyrim
    • Mods installed: 1709
    • Plugins active: 1658
    • Last load order index: E7
  • Fallout
    • Mods installed: 488
    • Plugins active: 547
    • Last load order index: A5

 

Nerd Numerology

Spoiler

Today's Skyrim mod counts also correlate to some interesting naval construction contracts. NCC-1709 is U.S.S. Lexington, a victim of the tumultuous procurement shuffle that affected the Class 1 program's early days - resulting in its name jumping between three different construction contracts. NCC-1658 also maps to a ship -- the command cruiser U.S.S. Berlin. Sadly, records on Berlin are quite sparse, so there's not much to dig into for her. But Lexington has some interesting twists and turns in her history.

 

(Un)Lucky Lexi

U.S.S. Lexington was intended to be the fourth Constitution class ship, originally authorized as NCC-1703. It's important to remember that at this time, the United Starfleet concept had not yet been fully implemented, and the early Class 1 ships were still operating under the authority of the United Earth Space Probe Agency's Starfleet Command. Consequently, it's not a historical anomaly that the early Constitutions all had Earth-centric names. However, it did not go unnoticed within UESPA that the first five names proposed for the class were all strongly associated with the United States of America. While the USA no longer existed as a governing political entity, North America still claimed a higher than normal number of command officers in UESPA, and it's culture had a strong influence within the organization. 

 

After some political wrangling by non-North American officers in the Federation's procurement apparatus, NCC-1707, U.S.S. Hood, was moved up in priority to help diversify the fleet. Initially, Lexington was reassigned to NCC-1704 (with Yorktown reassigned to NCC-1717 until the second tranche of Class 1 Heavy Cruiser construction). The subsequent decision to rename NCC-1704 to U.S.S. Furious (a testament to the influence of the Royal Navy within UESPA - they lobbied hard for a second hull name after Yamato's inclusion meant that along with Kongo there were two Japanese names in the class). Not wanting to repeat the delays inflicted on Yorktown, U.S.S. Lexington ultimately received NCC-1709, originally assigned to U.S.S. ValiantValiant herself is a bit of a procurement mystery, as we don't have clear records as to which contract she was actually built under. Her successor, Valiant II is listed as both NCC-1718 and NCC-1731, but the original is only listed as 1709 - which can't be right because 1709 appears canonically on screen as Yorktown. Most likely, 1718 is the contract number that the original Valiant was built under.

 

Despite her many false starts, the 1709 incarnation of Lexington launched relatively early and started her first five year mission in 2248. Lexington, like Excalibur from yesterday's discussion, was built in the pre-Bon Homme Richard command cruiser configuration, blending features of the later BHR with the original Constitution. Many of the same caveats about her layout that apply to Excalibur also apply here, such as the uncertainty about whether she launched with lasers or phasers, and whether or not she launched or refitted to swept pylons. Like ExcaliburLexington eventually received an engine upgrade to match the Achernar class but was not fully rebuilt as an Achernar

 

Unlike ExcaliburLexington survived the M-5 incident, albeit with heavy damage. She was already in the straight-pylon configuration by this time, and since she had surely received the phaser refit by this time that points to the likelihood that her Achernar engine refit had happened by this time, replacing the swept pylons (if she ever had them in the first place). It's unclear if Enterprise received the swept pylons at the same time as her phaser refit, or if that happened at some previous date after "The Cage" but before 2257. We know with some confidence that Enterprise's phaser refit happened late in 2255 or early 2256, since she had lasers in Desperate Hours but had received the phaser refit in The Enterprise War.

 

Records are unclear about her fate. The FASA chronology indicate that Lexington went missing and was eventually replaced with a new hull (in the Enterprise refit configuration) using the original NCC-1703 hull number. Ships of the Star Fleet Volume 1 also indicates an NCC-1703 Enterprise refit configuration Lexington, but it describes this as a true refit. FASA Trek uses an arcane dating system based on Spaceflight Chronology that does not line up with any other sources, and Memory Beta appears to indicate a lack of Lexington sightings between 2272 and 2280, so it's possible that with some date adjustment the FASA account is accurate. Whether it was the original or a replacement, Lexington was out of service as a heavy cruiser by the mid to late 2280s, since its name is reused by NCC-703, a destroyer hull with new technology similar to the Enterprise-A

 

Skyrim Critters... And A Little Bonus

Spoiler

I was pleased to see that MihailMods has recently started reposting his mods. He'd pulled them down a while back, stating that they needed updates across the board. I suspect this was in response to frequent feedback he'd received about opportunities to improve the power balance of his mods. In any event, now that they're starting to return to us, let's install Fiendroth Beetles so we can get them into our game.

 

Unsurprisingly for a creature mod, this one has no asset conflicts. The file is already compacted and ESL flagged, which is convenient, and it also comes back clean for dirty edits of all kinds. Like most Mihail mods, this one works by hand placing the critters rather than injecting them into a leveled list, so it returned no conflicts (some users might run into top level cell data conflicts, though). This was a really clean and easy install, and I'm going to be delighted if this is the standard to which Mihail is bringing his mods as part of his refitting project. I'll be watching his Nexus user page with interest going forward.

 

The other critter I want to install is the new Shroom Beetles mod. Let's see how it compares to Mihail's mod. No asset conflicts here either, and the mod is indeed compacted and flagged (as promised on the Nexus page). Curiously, the author offers a non-flagged version as an optional file, but I guess there's a foot for every shoe.

 

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The plugin is clean (and I should note, just in case this is your first entry of the diary you're reading, by "clean" I mean: no errors, no deleted records, no Identical-To-Master (ITM) records, and no corrupted navmesh edge links). Its only conflicts are in top level cell data. It was overwriting Lux in a few areas, but I addressed this by just copying the Lux data to my Deconflict_World conflict resolution patch, allowing the image space improvements to prevail.

 

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Finally, we're going to check out ELAF POI, which adds some small points of interest around the world. I always enjoy this kind of mod, so if its clean and doesn't create eyesores I'll happily add it to my load order.

 

The mod doesn't have any asset conflicts, but it is in an uncompressed ESP format. Fortunately, the mod only has 573 records, so I can compact it myself and ESL flag it. 

 

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Unfortunately, that's where things get a little rocky. The mod has ITMs (no big deal) and also deleted navmesh (big deal). It's fixable, of course, but I'm not in the mood for dealing with navmesh right now, so we'll shelve this mod until I have the time and inclination. 

 

Now let's go into the game and see how these new creatures look!

 

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Looks good!

 

Futureproofing Fallout

Spoiler

I have a couple of mods that I need to get installed before Charley takes over Concord. Specifically:

 

 

The latter mod, of course, is for the laser musket sentry guns that we've mentioned a couple of times. The former... well, the former's kind of self-explanatory, isn't it?

 

HotC would normally also require me to install the Fusion Girl Bodyslides for HN66 Easy Girl, but I've already got that mod installed. 

 

Both mods are fine on the asset side; HotC has a bunch of conflicts, but its all with the HN66 outfits. None of these mods are compacted, and HotC has sound files which I don't feel like screwing around with right now, so it at least will stay that way. I'll compact the laser mod, however.

 

Once we get into the plugins, we can see that there are a bunch of errors.

 

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The INFO errors are probably harmless and we can ignore those. To fix the HITME errors, we just need to open the mod in the CK and resave it. That just leaves the bad component form ID for those two components. We'll go back and look at that after we fix the HITMEs. Conveniently, however, saving the mod in the CK also fixed the other errors, so we're good to move on!

 

There were a few conflicts in the Laser Musket mod, but they were pretty easy to fix. However, it was important to patch them, since otherwise this would have, for example, largely broken my overhaul of the Museum of Freedom. Top-level cell data as actually even more important to manage in FO4 than the SSE, because in addition to everything that Skyrim puts in those records, FO4 also uses this for precombined geometry data, which is critical to remove if you're turning a location into a settlement site. 

 

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Let's see how these look in-game!

 

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Everything seems to be working smoothly (though Charley needs a shower after her fun with Seth in the most recent chapter of her story)

 

OK, I think that's it for today. Between the POI mod and some others I'm setting on, it feels like I'm due for a Navmesh cleanup episode soon. Likewise, I need to do some Papyrus cleanup. With this hobby, the work is never really done!

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