Today let's look at 1745 and 1693. The former in particular has some interesting gymnastics involved with interpreting its records.

 

NCC-1745 -- U.S.S. Rocroi

 

 

NCC-1693 -- U.S.S. Rene Fonck

 

Some time back I was considering installing Prince and the Pauper to improve the child actor clothes. At the time, I got side tracked and never finished the installation. Recently, a new mod called Prince and the Pauper Refine came out and it caught my attention with some of the claims it makes about compatibility. Unfortunately, further review revealed that this is a large-scale SPID outfit replacer. These mods do not promote compatibility. These mods are compatibility nightmares. And seriously, the sooner people realize this, the sooner I can stop screaming. The only thing that SPID whole-outfit replacement ensures is that a particular outfit can win conflicts without the risk of causing the black face bug. It doesn't do anything to resolve cases where more than one mod need to edit an outfit, and in fact it breaks all such mods that do this. 

 

Fortunately, the author separated the SPID related edits from the rest of the mod, at least so the mod page claims, so let's see if we can get this running as a conventional mod. 

 

 

Here's the stack of mods that we need for this to all work together. At this stage, the only change we need to make to the assets is to hide to modified PrinceandPauper plugin from the "Refine" version. That one wipes out a bunch of NPC records and will generally make our life harder. Now let's switch over to xEdit.

 

Right away we can see that we need to re-compact Hearthfire Multiple Adoptions to properly flow down the form IDs to these new files.

 

 

That was actually a fortunate distraction, because there's a new version of Hearthfire Multiple Adoptions, which I grabbed and then used as the compacter target. After doing that, I went back into xEdit with the full load order selected so we could get back to work.

 

After fixing those null pointers and forwarding the revised quest data from the multiple adoptions patch to my own conflict resolution file, the only errors left are benign tint layer issues.

 

 

The original Prince and Pauper returned 53 ITMs, which I removed, but otherwise this stack of mods was clean. Moving on to conflict resolution, we have a few conflicts in quests and dialogue. There are a couple of conflicts with TKAA that I may need to investigate in more detail down the line, but for now I'll let the edits from this mod prevail. I mostly use TKAA for non-adoptable NPCs, so support for it in the adoption quests isn't a major requirement. Beyond that, the main conflicts were with the outfit records, which were pretty easy to stitch together. 

 

At this point, we should be done, but now we need to deconstruct the SPID stuff. These two DISTR files have the SPID instructions and we need to reverse engineer them before we remove them.

 

 

For example, in the 3DNPC file, it injects outfit D64 from Prince and Pauper into the 3DNPC character Olette. We'll go into her record, copy it to the conflict resolution patch, and just edit her DOFT line to reflect this outfit.

 

 

As you can see below from the vanilla SPID, the author has changed the distribution of outfits compared to the original PandP, so we'll need to pick through and update these all. Fun times!

 

 

Now that we've updated out conflict resolution patch to match the tweaked outfit assignments from the SPID files, we're going to hide them so they don't muck around with my custom configuration.

 

 

How does it look in game?

 

 

Not bad! While we're at it, let's also grab the Rigmor of Cyrodiil RS Children patch. This one was clean and didn't require any patching. The plugin was already ESL flagged as well, so this made for a very painless install. 

I actually originally found this mod when I was looking at potential outfits for Arrectus Mantula from Sausages of Solitude. While I rejected it for him, I did like the look of the mod and decided to put it on my to-do list. The mod's assets appear to be unconflicted (except for the facegen it replaces). 

 

 

Moving on the xEdit, we can see that this is already compacted and ESL flagged. The plugin was also clean and only required patching to integrate gear edits from Immersive Weapons Integration.

 

 

Let's invite him to my room at the Resting Pilgrim to see how he looks!

 

 

While we're at it, let's grab some other graphics mods and patches that were on my list, specifically:

 

• CC Geodes Redone
• CC The Contest
• Better Fur Merchant Hat
• Silver Objects SMIMed

 

These were all fine for the most part. On the Silver Objects mod, I allowed a few other items to prevail over it, notably Medieval Silverworks and Smoking Candles, but in general everything was a smooth install. The patch for The Contest didn't conflict with anything other than The Contest itself, so that was also a clean install. 

MandragoraSprouts recently released a new Nocturnal statue mod that looks different from the vanilla statue. I don't really want to replace the vanilla statues with this one, but in conjunction with More Nocturnal Statues I think this could work well. This also ties in with the need to turn New Nocturnal Statue into a standalone since it doesn't exactly play nice with Shout Like a Virgin. Finally, we'll also grab the Nocturnal statue from Devious Statues and get that into the game.

 

First, let's install More Nocturnal Statues, since that'll be the foundation for all the work we're doing today. Then we'll install the three statue variants and turn them into standalones.

 

 

Now we want to go and map these into More Nocturnal Statues. If you look at the mod description page you can see where it adds the statues. We're going to put the clothed statue in the graveyard, the bound statue at Snow Veil Sanctum, and the last two at the Sepulchre will be the mostly-nude version. With those edits in place, let's visit the new statues and see how they look.

 

 

So we can see above that while the indoor statues in the Sepulchre were fine (the mod in question was designed with that model in mind) the other ones are misaligned and scaled wrong. Let's hop into the CK and fix those two.

 

 

Much better!

A while back I started installing Rorikstead Basalt Cliffs, but I set it aside after discovering it needed some minor CK work that I didn't have time for right at that moment. Let's finish this one up and get it into our world.

 

Since I already did the bulk of the cleaning and setup work, let's start by going into the world and getting the Form IDs for the problematic statics. If I remember right, it was a few pieces from The Ruins that needed to be moved or disabled, along with a campsite from which mod I don't remember.

 

 

The cliffs west of town are all fine, no edits required there. South of town there's one static that clips in the cliff. I was going to disable it but I might actually go into the CK and rotate it instead. Further south there's also a gallows from Civil War Battlefields that needs to be moved out of the hillside.

 

 

North of town, I need to move or disable this big piece of stone debris from The Ruins. I'll probably disable it since I don't have a really good place to put it. Higher up the hill, there's one section of cliff where the Z level needs to go down very slightly in order to conceal a gap. 

 

 

Finally, I need to take the camp you can partially see below and move it back up above ground level. 

 

 

We'll deal with this by copying the impacted object references to a working file, then adding the basalt cliffs mod as a master. From there, we'll go into the CK and make our modifications in the working file, then finally push them back to our conflict resolution patches.

 

 

 

Much better. Though it's a good thing I had god mode turned on because when I went back to examine the area I ran into a bunch of Devious Striker NPCs who clearly were itching for a fight!

 

Another one that's been sitting in my to-do stack for a while is Scale Nord Armor. This should be an easy one to integrate so let's take care of it today.

 

No major asset issues, just a few conflicted cube maps, but it looks like most of the competing files are from other mods by the same author (NordwarUA) so I don't anticipate there'll be any problem with letting this mod win those conflicts.

 

 

The plugin is uncompacted, and we need to fix that, but otherwise I'm not expecting to have to do much work beyond just populating leveled lists. Fortunately, other than the lack of an ESL flag, this file was clean.

 

Now, here's the armor:

 

 

We'll create three subsidiary leveled lists that combine the armor with a chance for the fur collar, then inject these parts right into the appropriate leveled lists. Stats-wise, these align with Scaled and Steel respectively, and that's what we'll base these on. The light version is "Elven equivalent". With the sublists set up, now we need to track down the appropriate leveled lists to inject the items into. We'll do this in a working file.

 

 

Now that the working file is assembled, let's start by doing the easy part - populating the elven equivalent list for the "light" version.

 

 

That's one down, now we'll track down the rest of the Scale/Steel sublists and add these new items. With those filled in, we'll forward them to the conflict resolution patch and call it a day!

 

Here's what the armor looks like in the game:

 

 

 

One item that I've been wanting to do for a while is City Entrance Overhaul - Windhelm. This isn't one that I'm going to integrate today, but let's pay the mod a quick visit to see how badly it conflicts with the existing structures in the world.

 

 

These floating icicles are leftovers from some other mod that edits the solitude bridge. I'll probably end up moving them to the new overheads added by this mod. Pretty easy CK fix. There's a floating lantern on the bridge also that seems to be the same issue and has the same solution. 

 

 

The execution grounds appear to be unconflicted. This will however be an area that involves some work, since I'm going to want to replace some of the crucified skeletons with ZAZ crucifixes that have (live - at least for the moment) prisoners on them. 

 

There were some floating snow drifts underneath the bridge that I also need to remove, but by and large this mod looks as if it's a lot less conflicted than I previously feared. That's a pleasant surprise that moves this up my list in terms of prioritizing which mods to install.