Before we start, let's do our daily Star Trek lore review. Our numbers today are 1787 and 1736.

 

• NCC-1736 was part of the Achernar class authorization of Stardate 5930. She was originally planned as U.S.S. Quindar. According to Ships of the Star Fleet, she was commissioned in 2265 and later refitted to Endeavor specifications in 2282. FASA indicates that she commissioned as U.S.S. Ticonderoga in 2255 (as an Achernar), and was still in the process of upgrading to Endeavor specifications in 2286. Finally, Star Fleet Battles lists her as Kursk and indicates she was a CB some time after 2280. FASA does not provide any further history on this ship in its TNG sourcebook. If I had to guess, I'd say that Quindar and Kursk were interim names and Ticonderoga was the real name she commissioned under. She was built as an Achernar in 2265, then went in for refitting to Endeavor in 2280. She was scheduled to complete the refit in 2282, but this was repeatedly delayed and at some point morphed into an upgrade to CB specifications. By 2290 she was back in service (or at least the Klingon Empire thought she was) and she was featured in war planning exercises at the Elite Command Academy on Qo'noS. We don't know Ticonderoga's fate, though if she survived long enough its likely she refitted to CX and then decommissioned some time around the 2320s.
• NCC-1787 was planned as U.S.S. Pari as part of the big Achernar order in 5930. In the Prime Universe, it doesn't appear that she was ever built. In the Kelvin Divergence, this NCC was used to order a replacement for U.S.S. Newton (NCC-1727) some time after 2258 but before 2262. She was a Newton class dreadnought similar to 1727.
  
• Like the Einstein class, the Newton class also exists in the Prime universe, though possibly only as a single ship. While the Bon Homme Richard authorization planned 1727 to be U.S.S. Essex, Essex was eventually reprogrammed as an upgrade to NCC-1697 and 1727 was reverted to an earlier program aimed at replacing the now-obsolete Nimitz class dreadnoughts. It appears that this ship was originally planned to be U.S.S. Littoria and would have given that name to the class. However...
• U.S.S. Newton, NCC-3822, was initially authorized as a Keppler class fleet tug on Stardate 3640. We don't know exactly when she was originally meant to be built, but its likely the construction period was roughly concurrent with the Bon Homme Richard cruisers. At the same time, we know that U.S.S. Newton actually completed as a BHR cruiser under NCC-1951 and participated in the Klingon War of 2256-2257. Based on the lore from the Four Years War period of a large number of BHR cruisers coming online to fight the Klingon invaders, I suspect that the under-construction 3822 was finished as a hodge-podge auxilliary cruiser that looked something like the SSD below. It may have had 2-3 photon torpedo tubes (Drone-A launchers, not "hot" photons with warp power charging and stasis chambers) added similar to other auxilliary heavy cruisers, but it would have fallen short of a 'native built' BHR in capabilities, even if its likely she did have the phaser refit from launch.
  
  We know that this ship fought in the Klingon War of 2256-2257, but given her limited capabilities and the fact that the lead ship for a new class was named after her, it's safe to say that she was destroyed in the war and that Newton 1727 was renamed in her honor. 

Before we start editing anything in this mod, we want to start by looking at the file contents in MO2. You can also use Vortex for this purpose, but in my experience MO2 is better suited for detail oriented modding, especially in terms of managing assets. This mod has a FOMOD installer, so we'll click through each screen to make sure all of our options are set up the way we want them.

 

 

We'll be installing the KS Hairdo, UNP body version, since we have BHUNP bodies in my setup. Once its installed, we'll click the check box next to the mod to activate it. Immediately, we can see from the icons next to it, this mod has asset conflicts.

 

 

We'll right click on the mod and then click the "information" button so we can learn more.

 

 

In the "conflicts" tab, we can see which files are interacting with other mods. Most of them are just conflicts with Skyrim itself, and the last one is a redistribution of an asset from The Eyes of Beauty. Those conflicts we'll let go through without any special management. But the conflict with the Skyrim Particle Patch for ENB is one that, just to be safe, we'll manage. We want the particle patch to win, so let's right click on fxglowspotlinear.dds and choose "hide." 

 

Now let's look at the plugin. We'll use SSEEdit for this, but even before we go into it we can see that this mod is an uncompacted plugin. We'll want to look at its record count to see if its a candidate for converting to a compact, ESL-flagged plugin in order to reduce its use of load order space. 

 

 

After we load up everything in xEdit, let's click on Sexy Bandit Captives and see what it has to offer.

 

 

So this mod has 9547 records. That's enough that converting it for ESL will require some work. Moreover, this mod recently restarted active development, so we'll leave it be for now. Once the mod stabilizes, it might be feasible to chop it into more than one part and then flag each piece separately. Even though it would result in more plugins, if they all fit into the reserved space for compact plugins, it'll still free up the E9 load order slot for another large mod. But that's a project for another day!

 

One of my main rules for modding is to never trust the author to get it right. I wish I could, but in my experience, even top tier mod authors let dirty edits or errors pass through into their products. So we're going to fully scrutinize and clean this mod before we do anything else. There are five main cleaning activities we need to do, in this order:

 

1. Check for errors and fix them
2. Check for deleted records; we need to undelete and disable these records (UDR). 
3. Check for identical-to-master records; we need to remove these
4. Check for deleted navmesh; we need to repair these in the Creation Kit.
5. Check for corrupted navmesh edge links; we can fix these in xEdit.

 

To check for errors, we just right click on the plugin and choose "check for errors." Fortunately, the report comes back with no errors!

 

 

 

Next, we need to fix any deleted records. To do this, we need to filter the plugin for cleaning. Here's a summary of how to do this from the last case study:

 

Now let's look at the cleaning report. We know the mod has at least one dirty entry from that odd deletion with an editor ID. As an aside, if you want to follow this step you need to do a couple of things. 

 

First, in MO2 you need to add a specific argument to the SSEEdit executable, as shown below:

 

 

This will enable some additional options in the SSE Edit menus. As illustrated below, two different settings need to be checked in order to enable manual cleaning. 

 

 

With that done, let's filter this mod for cleaning and see what comes up on the undelete-and-disable-references report.

 

 

Well, there's good news and there's bad news, isn't there? The good news is that other than navmesh, there's no deletions. The bad news is that this mod has 15 deleted navmeshes. That's really unacceptable and we are going to have to go back and fix every one of these later. For now, however, we'll just write down those error messages and save the repairs for our next chapter.

Next, let's check for Identical to Master Records, but right clicking and choosing the option shown below.

 

 

Fortunately, there was very little in the way of problems here. It appears that this mod contains a wild ITM of the basic battle axe, which in turn injected an unnecessary header into the file. The ITM report removed both of these.

 

 

Even though we need to do a bunch of navmesh repair, let's do some preliminary fixes on the edge links. A mod having deleted navmesh pretty much guarantees it'll have edge link problems too, since if the author didn't fix the deletions, they certainly didn't fix the edge links. We'll look at these by going into the script menu and choosing "Skyrim - Clean Navmesh Edge Links"

 

 

The result is pages and pages of this stuff:

 

 

We'll need to go back and do this again once we repair the navmesh deletions, because that'll almost surely reveal more issues. 

Our next order of business will be repairing the busted navmesh, but let's briefly filter this mod to look at conflicts and get a general idea of what else is going on with it.

 

 

Here's what we see after we filter it:

 

 

So we've got all kinds of conflict. Some of it is top-level cell data, like SwindlersDen01, which contains information about lighting, music, encounter zone assignments, and so forth. This is a routine issue that we see all the time in mods and it's nothing to worry about. We'll cover patching them in future volumes.

 

Underneath the top-level cell data, we have object references and ACHR references (placed NPCs). These require a little more analysis since based on context we may let other mods wipe out data, selectively, from Sexy Bandit Captives. In other cases, like the one shown below, we'll create a patch to merge together two different mods' changes.

 

 

The Form ID lists are a similar case - we just need to patch together all the different edits so no mod loses any of its functionality.

 

 

The locations are an interesting case; location records are one of the rare records that the game patches up automatically. See the yellow boxes below? We'll look at these for educational purposes, but they almost never require special attention. However, other records do need attention, and we don't want to neglect them since they can result in problems ranging from cosmetic issues (like here) to full-on loss of function (in the second screen shot, failing to patch this record would break Lawbringer for that location).

 

 

The cure disease effect is another one where we need to patch the record if we don't want to choose between one mod or another. The effect adds new Sexy Bandit Captives related functions to the Cure Disease potion, but in doing so it reverts changes made by CACO. By patching it, we'll ensure that both mods work.

 

 

The packages and statics are similar cases that need to be patched together for multiple mods. Finally, there's the worldspace records. Those are just like the interior cell records we talked about earlier, though they also contain the broken navmesh.

That's it for today! Tomorrow, we'll clean the defective navmesh and then start working through the conflicts. Before we wrap up, however, let's visit some of the mod locations and see how the new captives look.

 

 

This is a pretty big red flag, reminiscent of the code that caused outrage with Maximum Carnage a while back. As someone who has to start many new games at short intervals, nuisance code like this can be a real problem, and we'll be discussing how to mitigate or remove content like this in the future.

 

 

Accepting the EULA shown in the first screenshot causes visual and tactical effects in a scripted sequence. Under other circumstances, this would look nice, but in this context its problematic. Moreover, can you imaging how much time the author spent putting this nuisance feature into this mod? Surely it would have been more than enough time to fix all the deleted navmesh. Honestly, I find features like this pretty upsetting - like, I'm almost ready to uninstall this mod right now and take it off my modding plan. But since its a case study mod, we'll see it through to the end.

 

 

We'll need to pay very close attention to how this soft mod support function works as it might require work to make it compatible with compacted versions.

 

 

"Hey Lucan, nice painting but where's the damn note that starts this mod?!"

 

"Uh, I don't know Mr. Dragonborn. I'm sure it's around here somewhere."

 

"I guess I'll need to find it in the CK later in the series to fix it so that it's actually accessible."

 

"That sounds like a great idea, Mr. Dragonborn. Now, how'd you like to help me find a golden dragon claw??"

 

 

Ah, I see. It's upstairs in Lucan's bedroom. As part of this series, we'll discuss how to place a copy of the quest-starting note in the Alternate Perspective starting room to avoid a use case where this mod's content gets suppressed for an extended period of time if the user doesn't happen to find the note.

 

 

We'll also need to make sure the Resting Pilgrim Inn's barkeeper qualifies to advance this quest. I'm sure having to jump through a lot of hoops just to get screen shots of the captives, huh?

 

 

"Sorry Dragonborn, talking to me isn't enough to enable the mod either. You need to go to the Pale and talk to someone there."

 

"Uh, thanks Hulda. Guess I need to get my heavy winter cloak ready."

 

"Good idea. Though if you're feeling chilly, Saadia could get you warmed up before you leave."

 

 

"There have been some rumors." 

 

"Thank you for gracing me with six whole syllables, my Jarl. I too have heard rumors that this mod actually contains Sexy Bandit Captives."

 

"Here is what is known."

 

 

Hopefully this means that, at a minimum, the mod is enabled for Frostmere Crypt now. Let's go take a look at it.