Hi folks, it's been a while! Star Citizen 3.17.2 is really solid and it's been eating up a lot of my free time. On top of that, my wife and I have recently started watching the Mobile Suit Gundam franchise in chronological order. It turns out that almost all the Gundam blu rays were on sale on Amazon, so we were able to fill in the gaps of what isn't streaming right now. Finally, I discovered and briefly binged Frostpunk, which I highly recommend. Long story short, I've had a lot of competition for my usual writing time!

That said, I haven't stopped modding Skyrim. My mod count is up to 1850 now, and we've made a lot of good progress. I've added a number of shops and businesses that were backlogged before, as well as some custom outfits (here you can see Helpful Hand BHUNP on Lu'ah al-Skaven).

Another fun discovery was that Coffee House literally puts the building on top of the entrance to Cave Club West from Hydragorgon. Kind of frames the little inn in a new light when you realize that it's a front for slavers! It required a little CK work, since I had to move some markers from both mods to eliminate conflicts and I had to change the outfits of the Cave Crawlers gang to not look so exotic, but now at first glance the Coffee House looks entirely legitimate (if drawing a bit of a rough crowd) - but if you then find that trap door...

But "proof of life" wasn't the only thing I came here to do. I also wanted to take you along with me while I evaluate a new mod - Whiterun Eastern Expansion. I know some of you are aware of my "Old Tannery District/Whiterun Red Light District" idea, which was basically to move a lot of the buildings that compete for space near the crossroads south of Whiterun. This would include Loverslab mods like Laura's Bondage Shop and Whiterun Brothel as well as non-Lab "vice" mods like Cannabis Skyrim. My original plan was to add a run-down suburb to Whiterun near the smuggler's cave west of town. However, I'm interested in seeing if this Whiterun expansion mod, which adds buildings that have non-functional doors, is a suitable alternative.

I've already spoken with the mod author and shared some information about cleaning opportunities and technical improvements - so don't mind the black face NPCs you'll see here. I've also confirmed that the unused doors are going to stay unused and received permission to publish patches that use those doors. So if this mod is a good fit, it might be the start of the District. Let's head over to Whiterun and take a walk through the expansion. Note that there might be some glitches here or there because I haven't fully integrated the mod into my world yet - I just stuck it at the end of my load order. So things like landscape tearing or overlapping statics are very possible and don't neccessarily point to defects.

On the way to Whiterun I saw an interesting sight - a Skyrim At War Imperial patrol marching side by side with a Stormcloak patrol. This is because I turned off AI detection to avoid me getting attacked on the road.

Their brief truce ended as soon as I turned AI Detection back on. You can see in these images the effect of my custom leveled lists. The patrol shows elements of Nordwar UA's various Imperial and Stormcloak armor mods, stitched together with vanilla armor improvement mods as well a number of mods that add new weapons to the world. 

The Stormcloaks were vanquished in the end, but they killed the Imperial officer before they fell - seems the overall balance of the two sides, despite the heavy randomization of gear, was about right.

Now, let's take a look at the mod itself. Here's the external part of the area - for the most part it fits in pretty well. There's a building from The Ruins that conflicts with the wall; it'll need to be moved. You can also see that there's an impaling pole from my patch for Hydragorgon that's kind of in the middle of the road now. I'll want to move that off to the side, or maybe into the courtyard that this mod creates, so it doesn't block traffic. 

Less critical, there are some landscape conflict issues, mostly cases where tall grass is concealing paths. I'm still learning the most efficient ways to handle landscape conflicts, but this mod might prove an opportunity to develop those skills further. I also observed some NPCs trying to walk through walls, so the navmesh is going to need attention on this mod (no big surprise there - navmesh conflict is almost a given with this sort of project!).

Moving into the walled part of the expansion, you can see that in general the mod's landscape work looks fine, though it has a few areas of tall grass that probably looks OK in vanilla but is too thick in this modded setup. We'll address that at the same time we do the other landscape matters.

As far as its suitability for our red light district, I'm leaning towards saying the answer is "yes*". The asterisk is that it may be easier to import some mods than others. Laura's Bondage Shop, for example, has minimal exterior decorations as you can see in this screenshot from its mod page. Consequently, it can probably live in almost any of the empty houses (of course, some suspension of disbelief is required in terms of internal space vs. external space. An extreme case of this is the Whiterun Brothel, which might end up getting omitted from this project because of its huge interior volume. 

The in-between case is mods like Deviously Pink and Ambient Slaves. Mods like these have outdoor cages that we'd need fit into the somewhat congested streets of this district. It's hardly impossible, just challenging. Indeed, Cannabis Skyrim's outdoor farm offers a particular challenge. There are a couple of small green spaces in the district, but I have my doubts that they'll actually fit. At the end of the day, the cannabis farm might end up being the business that gets to stay in the contested space, perhaps opposite the Whiterun Brothel which similarly seems unlikely to live in the 

Its a little early to say - next step will be integration of the expansion before we start patching other mods into it - but I think we've got a promising location for this long-delayed project!

Well, I think its a bit premature to officially say "I'm back!" but things are definitely moving right along. I'll probably continue to back burner the blog through the end of the month, then get rolling again with the diary in September. Until then, I'll try to post occasional updates so you can get some insight into what I'm up to and how the Skyrim build is moving along!