Our numbers for today are 1799 (mods installed) and 1751 (plugins active). Here's the Trek Lore we have associated with those numbers.

 

• If you recall our coverage of the ADREFT/Super Balson situation, then you remember that NCC-1751 is U.S.S. Kirov, the first ship of her type. In an alternate universe where ADREFT was selected for production, she would have been NCC-2150. Kirov launched in 2281, replacing an earlier Connie (U.S.S. Forrestal) with the same hull number that had been scrapped some time earlier (its difficult to pin down the original 1751's decommissioning date with certainty because it falls into the "time hole" in the middle of the SFC timeline, but she left service some time between 2275 and 2284 going solely by the FASA dates and not factoring in other data sources). Kirov received a refit, probably a so-called PX refit that updated some but not all of her systems to the standards seen on the Enterprise II class, in 2302, before finally being decommissioned 20 years later. At some point after that, she was replaced with an Excelsior class ship of the same name.
• NCC-1799 was planned as U.S.S. Tutakai as part of the large initial order of Achernar class ships. There's no evidence this ship was ever built, though its possible its resources (and maybe even a partially constructed hull, considering the similarities between the Belknap and the Connie) were reprogrammed to the Belknap class under a different contract number, since there seems to be some overlap between the commissioning dates of that class and the original planned launch dates for some of the high numbered Achernars. 

I've already got a lot of NPC overhauls that touch the Companions in various ways. However, I did recently browse through BB's The Companions and I was pleased with the quality of the mod. In particular, I kind of liked what they did with Torvar's face. For comparison, here's how he looks in my game right now:

 

 

Not a bad look, but pretty consistent with the looks of other members of this guild. BB gives him a younger look that I think will add some good diversity to the whole group. Let's download BB's mod, but then prune it back to just Torvar. We'll start with the men only version of the mod, just to save us the extra work of removing the female edits. We'll put the mod in asset load order after beards of power, since I'm pretty sure that's what the current Torvar edits are from. 

 

 

Now let's look at the assets. Torvar's form ID is 1A6DB, so we want to hide the facegen for everyone else.

 

 

That takes care of the asset conflicts. Now let's similarly prune the plugin. We'll remove every NPC record except for 1A6DB, then go through our usual cleaning and conflict resolution stages. 

 

 

Now let's see how he looks with his new face:

 

 

That'll do. Note that his armor is totally different compared to the first screenshot. That's because I've made customized leveled lists for the Companions armor outfits that randomly assigns different armor pieces from several different Companions armor mods; the result is a distinct look for the Companions compared to other factions, without having them look "samey" or overly uniform. 

You guys might recall a while back that I talked about a modder who doesn't post on the Nexus, DDS Workshop. They caught my eye with their complexions mod, which has a different mod called ALT2. Let's look at that mod first to see if its a good fit for my setup. In terms of features, it doesn't really add anything I particularly want or need, so we'll be assessing how easily it is to cause its overwrite functions to get suppressed while still keeping its unique assets.

 

 

OK, that's special. Then it tried to install ISO files to me. Then it tried to send me Indeed.com add popups. This website is pretty shady. I get it that the author may have limited choices of venue, but its still kind of crap. There are other Russian Federation nationals who are still able to use the Nexus, and while I get that the author wants to monetize their work, if they're posting it for free anyway, I wish they'd post it on a reputable website.  

 

 

That's old school. After installing it, let's look at the assets.

 

 

As we can see here, most of the "winning" file conflicts are overwriting other stuff that I'd rather use, so for those we need to do some asset load order management. If nothing else, I do see that we've received a new set of normal maps for the old person body, so that's good. There's also a plugin. Let's see what it contains, because I'm suspecting the answer is "custom racial skins" which we'll need to carefully assess from a compatibility perspective. If the plugin doesn't seem to add a lot of value, we might just disable it and just use the old person assets. 

 

The plugin is an uncompacted, 109 record file that we'll eventually need to compact and ESL flag - though not until we also evaluate the complexions companion mod, since one might depend on the other.

 

 

Looking deeper, we can see a fairly extensive overhaul of the race system, adding custom racial skins for every playable race, including Nords. That's actually not a terrible approach from a compatibility point of view, since it lets you leave the original default skin for things like the Afflicted race, but I'm concerned this may cause head-body texture mismatch issues for some (most) races. Specifically, as you can see in the second screen shot, it edits the head texture sets, which won't automatically propagate out to facegen. While there are ways to update the nif files, it can be involved, and at times it can result in unexpected outputs. 

 

 

Let's go into the game and see if this causes head-body discoloration on navmesh from other mods. 

 

 

Here you can see the difference between the modded body texture and the head texture. We might revisit this in the future, but for now let's disable this plugin and just use this mod to provide the higher quality old person textures. The complexions mod doesn't require ALT2 "out of the box" but has an ALT2 patch. We'll also put that in the optional files folder for now.

 

The complexions file doesn't have any asset conflicts (its all new assets):

 

 

All the plugins for the complexion mod are also uncompacted, so let's compact and flag all of them before we hide the ALT2 stuff. While I did that, I took a peek at the structure of the complexions mod and noticed something interesting - it contains some complexions designed for specific actors.

 

 

Now, I don't know if I'm going to use this author's NPC Mod, but I'll have to evaluate the future benefit of editing those complexions onto these actors if they don't have their own special textures. Something to consider for the future.

 

 

With the asset load order managed, let's do a test on the vitiligo complexion. We'll try it out on two NPCs: one Dunmer and one Redguard. Our goal is twofold: first, check to see if the complexion "takes" without causing a neck seam, and second to see if Dunmer skin complexion looks right with this texture.

 

 

 

It's correctly catching her face tint, which is good. This opens up options for using these complexions on pretty much any character who isn't fair skinned (though I plan to only use each of the three complexions once to keep them rare). 

 

 

There's a mild but noticeable neck seam on Jenassa when she's undressed. These textures will probably require some blending to use (or I just need to get ALT2 up and running... I can almost guarantee you that those face textures would line up with ALT2 perfectly). As you can see below, this complexion also causes a face-body mismatch on a Redguard character.

 

 

So despite living on a shady website, ALT2 seems to be a quality product. It is definitely not a "no assembly required" type deal - getting this mod to play nice with a complex load order is going to require a degree of massaging to eliminate things like neck seams or other unexpected behaviors. I also have some doubts as to how well this will play with things like the musculature mod - that'll require further investigation.

 

For now, I'm going to uninstall this mod and not use it, but I'll keep it in my "work in progress" area for a revisit in the future.

 

While I was working on this article, I noticed that I had some tabs open on my phone's browser. It turns out they contained Nexus pages I'd looked at a while back and then forgotten about. Let's take a look at them and see if we want to use any of these. They are:

 

• SV Mods Menu SE
• XP32 Maximum Skeleton Lite
• PrivateProfileRedirector SE
• Kagrenfahlz

 

The first mod adds some new ownership/immersion features to activities like hunting and crafting, and whether I use it or not is going to depend on how its implemented. It has no asset conflicts, which was my original concern - I was worried about it screwing with lots of vanilla scripts. Now lets look at its plugin file. It's uncompacted, but doesn't appear to anything sensitive other than an SEQ file, which we'll regenerate. This mod does duplicate some follower-related functions that I may need to disable in its MCM to avoid fighting with other mods, but in general it looks like it is pretty self-contained. Conflicts were minimal and all easily solved by just merging edits.

 

The next mod is actually a bit of a DIY guide, which shows how to remove deprecated functions from XPMSSE. These have been superseded by mods like DAR and Immersive Equipment Display, and as my friend @VirginMarie can attest, they positively flood the papyrus log with low value garbage spam that can complicate troubleshooting.  The Private Profile mod is another performance improvement mod, this one addresses the insane use of a 16 bit function inside the SSE engine. I'd used an earlier version of this and can attest that it does improve load times, but an update came out this January that fixed a few lingering points of inefficiency, so hopefully I'll see at least a marginal further improvmeent.

 

Before we look at the last mod - which is larger in scale - we'll rebuild our animation registry just to be safe, since we've removed a bunch of the XPMSE native animation stuff. Both FNIS and Nemesis ran smoothly, so we should be in good shape on that end. Now let's take a look at Kagrenfahlz. If you haven't already clicked on it, you'll know that this is a quest mod that adds a new locations and a scavenger hunt type quest... and of course, new books, and you know I'm a sucker for mods that add more books! Let's install it and see how it looks. Incidentally, once we get this mod situated we're also going to try installing Ayleid Palace and its CC Patch since this one is an old favorite of mine and its located close enough to the university to pose some potential compatibility issues. I doubt I'll leave the Ayleid Palace installed for now if it needs any work, but I want to t least understand its needs.

 

 

This mod has a bunch of conflicts, but its all redistribution of other community assets, so these are almost certainly benign. Unsurprisingly, the plugin is uncompacted; I expect it will be significantly above the 2048 record limit. 

 

 

Yeah, we won't be compacting that. That said, the mod was mostly clean - it had a single error that appeared to be benign, as well as 15 ITMs which were all orphaned cell records. Easy to clean up and nothing to worry about.

 

 

Conflict resolution revealed light conflicts, but it did show signs of navmesh edge link corruption, which I'd forgotten to check earlier, and I'll need to go back and fix. I observed some navmesh conflicts with The Cause, which I believe is the same mod that causes landscape issues with Ayleid Palace, so we'll need to look out for potential issues when we visit the quest site. I particularly need to keep an eye on Tamriel 46, -16 which appears to contain unique navmesh changes from The Cause which are in conflict with changes from Kagrenfahlz. Overall, however, integration went smoothly. The main lift was branching a few remaining book lists that were still in single-merged-list format (something we've talked about at length in previous blogs). Let's visit some of this mod's locations and see how they look.

 

 

Here's that cell with the navmesh conflicts. If you look on the right you'll see a stone cairn in front of a cliff. That cliff conceals the entrance to a cave from The Cause. I'm not sure if that's supposed to be closed off like that (I'll go back and check to see if that cliff piece gets disabled when the quest advances) or if its a landscape issue... we'll check on that later. Otherwise, the area looks OK. You can see to the left that the other cave in the area doesn't seem to be blocked off. (For the record, that rock is indeed landscape - gonna have to give that further attention at some point!)

 

 

The other areas I visited look good. I think we can mark this one as a conditional win, with the little asterisk being that we need to go back and look at that landscape for The Cause.

Before we finish up for today, let's quickly drop in Ayleid Palace and see how it conflicts with Kagrenfalz. I'm kind of hoping that the conflict is strictly a technical one (fighting over top level cell data, stuff like that) and that the patch for it will fix the landscape issue with The Cause at the same time. 

 

 

Um, well. I wasn't expecting that. Fortunately, the problem didn't reoccur when I rebooted xEdit, so it seems to be a transient glitch of some sort. A quick review of the content shows that it does indeed impact the same cell where we had the dungeon (apparently it's from Umbra, not The Cause) getting covered by terrain, so let's jump back into the game and visit it again to see how it looks. This is with AP just loaded at the end with no integration done, so this is strictly just initial reconnaissance. 

 

 

So, while it requires a little bit of cleanup (removal of that stray tree), the entrance to the Kagrenfalz library looks like it interfaces fine with the Ayleid palace. This cell will almost certainly need navmesh help. I do see that the cave on the left of our earlier screen shot and also the entrance to Champion's Rest are hidden, so those are going to need more attention. However, since we aren't installing the Ayleid Palace right now, we can leave it be for the moment. The main lift will be to fix the Champion's Rest entrance, something I'll be touching on at a later date.