Let's tackle this tool first. I've been watching this one for a while, and it seems like it should run painlessly (it has integration with Menu Maid already), but I've been dragging my feet on it. For whatever reason, I always feel a little anxious learning to use new tools, even though I know they'll be very valuable. Let's grab the MCM Recorder tool as well as Menu Maid's MCMR patch, and get them installed to the MCMR patch is the winner of their asset conflicts.

MCMR does come with a plugin, which is already ESL flagged. Let's take a quick look at this file in xEdit and confirm that it doesn't do anything crazy. Incidentally, you can get a feel for some of the recent additions based on the plugin stack, since I haven't bothered with managing load order in a long time - I just dump everything at the end and then patch their conflicts.

As you can see below, this plugin just contains the various messages and quests to run the recorder function. The only patching it needs is for the WEMerchantChests cell, though I believe this is a non playable cell and so skipping it would probably be harmless. 

With those checks completed, let's boot up the game and see if it works right. As I understand it, my expectation should be for Menu Maid 2 to boot in a sort of safe mode so that MCMR can run on a new game, and then I can turn on Menu Maid and its functionality will fall into place, such as hidden menus, reordered menus, and so forth. 

OK, so we've got a nice generic Nord Male #1 spawned in the starting cell. Let's see what the MCM looks like initially.

Hmmm... so it didn't start in "Dismiss mode", and reading the description that's probably a good thing. Using the original MCM manager from SKI would probably break my MCMs since I have "too many".

But let's try making a recording of an MCM and see if loading it works. My big question about this tool is if it can handle "click to activate" type MCMs, such as Sexlab, so we'll start with that one and see if it works. 

Now let's load a new game and run these settings.

As you can see, this did not change any settings for Sexlab and just left it at defaults. I suspect this is related to Menu Maid not starting in "dismiss mode" and we'll need to investigate that further.

While we're in the MCMs, however, let's find and disable a few more MCMs that we don't need to do anything with. I'm talking about mods like this one where I'm going to be running it solely on its default settings. 

To hide this MCM, we'll just go into Menu Maid and disable the mod from this list. 

As you can see below, the mod is now invisible on the main menu. If I need to see it again, I can always go into Menu Maid and reenable it, so this isn't a permanent deletion.

So I skimmed through and hid half a dozen menus that I didn't need to make any changes to, but before I go further I'm going to need to figure out what the deal is with MCM Recorder. I'm not super thrilled about the first results, but I don't mind doing some work to get it running.... just not today.

The next unresolved issue are a number of cleanup items that I need to address. Specifically, there's a four-way conflict between the Hendraheim CC DLC and several mods. Additionally, I've got a number of other conflicts relating to Man Those Borders and other mods that place structures close to its border posts. We'll be tackling these in the days ahead, though for today we'll just do an easy one - the Talos statue from "The Ruins" on the road from Helgen to Riverwood.

I'm not a big fan of having lots of Talos statues in public places everywhere. The White-Gold Concordat has been in effect for a generation, and Thalmor activity makes me doubtful that these roadside statues and shrines in smaller communities would just be left alone. Obviously, there are exceptions: the statue in the Cloud District, statues in Eastmarch, and the shrine outside Cocksman Village all make sense in story context. I've already replaced several other Talos statues from The Ruins with statues such as this Dibella Statue by Mandragora Sprouts, and reusing that statue was one of the concepts I considered. Other options were Sanguine, Stendarr, or the Champion of Cyrodiil. I ultimately decided to go with Stendarr, for this one. Let's download it and go through the steps neccessary to use it in this context.

One thing we see right away is that assets from this mod are already in Immersive Fort Dawnguard. Let's investigate a little further. So yeah, as you can see below, this statue is already in Immersive Fort Dawnguard. Better yet, there's a broken version. Let's use that to replace the Talos statue.

Here you can see that the statue has its own static already as part of IFD. Before we screw around with the CK, let's try patching the new baseform into the original record and see how it looks in the game. If it looks right, we might be able to leave it as-is. Otherwise, we'll need to go and tweak it in the Creation Kit. 

So it seems to be spun around backwards and sunk pretty deep into the ground. Let's hop into the CK and fine tune it. If you've read my previous diaries, then you know the drill - we'll copy this file to temporary plugin, make our edits, and then patch the new position and scaling data back into the main patch. This will avoid issues with the CK when loading too many master files. At the same time, we are going to extract the Immersive Fort Dawnguard BSA files into a temporary MO2 "mod" folder. The CK has some issues with opening non-vanilla BSA files, and we need to be able to see this mesh in the GUI to position it right. 

Here's the statue implemented as a simple baseform replacer:

Let's spin him around and shrink him a bit, then pull him up closer to ground level. Here's the new alignment:

Let's drag the new data into our master patch, and then visit the statue in-game to see how it looks.

Much better. Bad news for Stendarr with the whole losing his head business, but it definitely fits the environs better than the old Talos shrine.

Another area we need to clean up is the script load. I have a lot of errors in the papyrus log that point to scripts that are either not programmed right or that aren't implemented at all (for example, there's script properties in the plugin file but no PEX file in the scripts folder). We'll identify these by looking at the Papyrus log and try to clean them up. For today, we're going to be ignoring everything from the creation club (I need to update those mods to the latest versions first) and anything that I know I'm not running the latest versions of currently (stuff from the Toys & Love framework, for example).

Here's the first page of the papyrus errors:

[09/02/2022 - 03:57:39PM] Cannot open store for class "QF_00WEMS01_03068700", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:39PM] error: Unable to bind script QF_00WEMS01_03068700 to 00WEMS01 (20068700) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:39PM] Cannot open store for class "ZazOnTriggerEnterBindingsTMG", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:39PM] error: Unable to bind script CH_ColdhavenAttachToMainQuest to CH_ColdhavenMainQuest (264C4832) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:39PM] Cannot open store for class "QF_CH_Gwyndris_Dialogue_054AB2A0", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:39PM] error: Unable to bind script QF_CH_Gwyndris_Dialogue_054AB2A0 to CH_Gwyndris_Dialogue (264AB2A0) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:39PM] Cannot open store for class "AMP_ProstheticScript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:40PM] error: Unable to bind script SKI_PlayerLoadGameAlias to CASMQuest (FE052800) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:41PM] Cannot open store for class "TIF__0202E69E", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:41PM] error: Unable to bind script TIF__0202E69E to topic info 2F02E69E on <nullptr quest> because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:41PM] Cannot open store for class "PF_FlorinBeatteBasketPatrol7_0304BBC9", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:41PM] error: Unable to bind script PF_FlorinBeatteBasketPatrol7_0304BBC9 to  (2F04BBC9) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:42PM] Cannot open store for class "ConjureHorseScript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:42PM] error: Unable to bind script ZZDaedraFormQuestScript to ZZDaedraFormQuest (382A5251) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:42PM] Cannot open store for class "pamaImpalerBaseBlock", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:42PM] Cannot open store for class "pama_ImpalerDeviceMain", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:42PM] Cannot open store for class "TT_PlayerHandActivatorScript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:42PM] Cannot open store for class "osexintegrationmain", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:42PM] Cannot open store for class "dxflowergirlsscript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:42PM] Cannot open store for class "hsmquestscript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:43PM] Cannot open store for class "rdm_cloak", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:43PM] Cannot open store for class "PRKF_Aur_LordStone_Perk_2_Ab_03000A08", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:43PM] error: Unable to bind script PRKF_Aur_LordStone_Perk_2_Ab_03000A08 to  (FE0A4A08) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:44PM] Cannot open store for class "tweakdfscript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:44PM] Cannot open store for class "UndeadReanimateScript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:45PM] Cannot open store for class "aaaGhostFadeEffect2", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:45PM] Cannot open store for class "hisrealisticskinningscript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:45PM] Cannot open store for class "hisstatsnotescript1", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:45PM] Cannot open store for class "hishbskinningscript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:45PM] Cannot open store for class "hismodoptionsscript", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:46PM] Cannot open store for class "PF_TicSeeksWorksSandbox_05000A76", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:46PM] error: Unable to bind script PF_TicSeeksWorksSandbox_05000A76 to  (FE108A76) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:46PM] Cannot open store for class "PF__ArtTrainingArchery10x4_07098A65", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:46PM] error: Unable to bind script PF__ArtTrainingArchery10x4_07098A65 to  (FE10CA1D) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:46PM] Cannot open store for class "TacValt_MCMRegister", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:46PM] error: Unable to bind script TacValt_MCMRegister to TacValt_LCORegister (77CCC090) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:46PM] Cannot open store for class "MC_SCRIPT_ConvertSoulGemFragments", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:47PM] Cannot open store for class "KA_DLC_addMagCloak", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:47PM] Cannot open store for class "KA_AdditemOnActivate", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:47PM] Cannot open store for class "KA_RevFogSCRIPT", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:47PM] Cannot open store for class "PF_018AuriRidePackage02_05332027", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:47PM] error: Unable to bind script PF_018AuriRidePackage02_05332027 to  (7D332027) because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:48PM] Cannot open store for class "DsR__TIF__020253E5", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:48PM] error: Unable to bind script DsR__TIF__020253E5 to topic info 8A0253E5 on <nullptr quest> because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:48PM] Cannot open store for class "DsR__TIF__02025960", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:48PM] error: Unable to bind script DsR__TIF__02025960 to topic info 8A025960 on <nullptr quest> because their base types do not match

Some of these items we can trim out because we know they correspond with mods that are waiting for updates or because they appear to be soft depedency links. This still leaves a lot of scripts. Unfortunately, filtering by script takes a long time, so we'll only be able to chip away a little at the start of this list, but we can still make some progress. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of the internet you don't have to sit and wait while the process scans through the 1800-odd plugins. Let's start with the first script on the list:

This is a quest fragment where an property in the plugin is failing because the underlying PEX file doesn't exist. We'll start by finding the properties in the plugin, then we can investigate further from there. This could be a missing script, an unimplemented feature that left behind traces, or it could be that the script has the wrong name associated with it. While the script ran, I looked up the file name and had an interesting discovery: the source code for this file exists, just not the compiled script.

This isn't some random meaningless fragment that does nothing - as you can see it contains actual instructions.

Maslea is an interesting one, because I've had some issues in the past that suggest to me that I have an incomplete installation of this mod. At some point, I'll want to do a full reinstall with the latest version. For now, however, let's repair this specific issue. Nothing is overwriting the record or its properties, so hopefully a simple recompile of the source code will be sufficient.

That should address this issue. We'll have to watch out for it going forward to make sure everything else is behaving correctly.

What about the next one? From the "CH" in the title, I'm guessing this is from Coldhaven. We'll verify that with the script, but I'm not running the latest version of CH... therefore, if I confirm its part of that I'll first and foremost add updating this mod to my "to do" list. This one doesn't have any lingering artifacts like stray source code, so until we update the mod we might need to trim out the references to this missing script. 

Here we can see that this is an empty VMAD record with no actual properties assigned to it. We'll remove that VMAD record so that it stops trying to call the non-existent script fragment. It remains to be seen if this actually does anything, but as you can see the dialogue exists so we'll leave the rest of the record intact.

We'll do a couple more of these today, but I don't want to completely lose track of adding new mods today (the statue notwithstanding). When I search for TIF__0202E69E, I get an interesting result -- it comes back with Midwood Island scripts that have an MI_ prefix added. Now, if you've worked with mods a lot, you probably already know that the CK is pretty bad about giving generic names to script fragments that can randomly conflict with other mods. Authors address this by changing the file name. It looks like in this case, the author may have forgotten to commit the new script name to the plugin, and so its still trying to address the generic CK file name.

Filtering by the script does indeed confirm it came from Midwood Isle, so we'll just go in and correct the script name in the plugin. 

So here's something interesting - it looks like I already patched this file and for whatever reason the old reference is persisting. I'm going to try patching it a different way, but if I keep seeing these errors it probably is a sign that I can't count on overwriting the VMAD data to fix the problem. While that just means I'll have to edit the original record directly, I always feel a little dirty doing that  

OK, last but not least, if we're doing script fragments let's look at these two:

[09/02/2022 - 03:57:48PM] Cannot open store for class "DsR__TIF__020253E5", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:48PM] error: Unable to bind script DsR__TIF__020253E5 to topic info 8A0253E5 on <nullptr quest> because their base types do not match
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:48PM] Cannot open store for class "DsR__TIF__02025960", missing file?
[09/02/2022 - 03:57:48PM] error: Unable to bind script DsR__TIF__02025960 to topic info 8A025960 on <nullptr quest> because their base types do not match

Both of these files are genuinely missing (source code too), as are the generic TIF files that the CK would have originally created. These are scripts that are supposed to be associated with College Days Winterhold and refer to two different dialogue branches. Review of xEdit shows that merely patching out the VMAD data was insufficient. So we'll also peel those script calls out of the original and see if that finally silences the errors. 

Rebooting Skyrim, we can see the following changes in the Papyrus log:

• The Maslea error is gone
• The Gwyndris error is still present (patching out was not enough)
• The Midwood Isle error is still present (patching out failed again)
• The DsR errors are gone

So we need to go back and actually edit out rather than patch out the issues with Coldhave and Midwood Isle. I'm not a big fan of the situation that creates, where I can't strictly maintain version control by putting my edits in patches, but its good to know - evidently its just one of those quirks that we need to understand exist in the game. We'll also keep the patched records so I can see how I changed it if future versions of these mods reintroduce the bad script calls.

Now that Man Those Borders is mostly installed (just needs some very specific navmesh and landscape work), the next mod in a chain of requirements I need to install to fully integrate Heart of Skyrim is Heljarchen Farm. While I can't guarantee we'll actually see HOS make it into the game for my next adventure, it's part of the long term plan and I want to keep pushing towards it. 

We'll start by installing HF and all its patches. Doing this reveals a lot of conflicts in the parent mod, but its all open-permissions models and textures that are being simultaneously distributed by other mods. This is no problem. I do observe that some of the plugins are uncompacted, and I suspect that HF itself is too big to compact. The MTB compatibility patch, however, is a different story and we'll probably be ESL flagging it.

So yeah, there's no reason for this patch to be uncompacted. Or rather, I should say, unflagged, because the form IDs are already in the reserved range -- if it even has any unique form IDs. This might just be overrides on the original. either way, let's flag it and then look at the main mod. HF itself has over 10,000 records, so it won't be compacted. Some day, in the distant future, I may merge it with similar mods, but that's a long ways away.

The patches are free of problems, but the main file has multiple bad form IDs in its script properties.

Fortunately, at least some of these items are clearly labeled as to what they are supposed to point to. Having said that, let me digress for a moment and opine: this is not the way you respond to a question where a user is asking for help. 

Fortunately, there's a fixed ESP file in the forum thread for the mod, which saves me some frustration. This smells like the kind of silliness that happens when people save highly scripted mods in the CK to change them from Form 43 to Form 44, but that's just my knee-jerk reaction. As long as its fixed, I've got no complaints.

That's better. Now let's look at the other attributes of this mod. No deletions and only 30 ITMs, so that's a good start. Unsurprisingly, there's a load of corrupted navmesh edge links, which we'll process using the edge link script. 

Since the mod has a bunch of patches, conflicts are more or less inevitable. However, most of it is either small positional changes or top level cell data. If you've followed this blog before, you know how I fix these and that's remained true today. We do have some landscape conflict with the Loreius Settlement mod, so we'll need to inspect that area for terrain tearing or grass overgrowth on the farm. Other sectors show similar landscape conflict with Civil War Battlefields and we'll also need to look at those. 

There's a single navmesh conflict with the Loreius Settlement that is also a conflict with Man Those Borders, and which I'll address along with the other MTB navmesh conflicts. Overall not too bad. Let's visit the farm in-game and see how it fits in. 

Here you can see the ruined farm and its position near the Loreius settlement. So far things look OK - some minor texture mismatch at the landscape edges, but not really noticeable. Let's visit the settlement and see how badly (or how not-so-badly) the landscape is derped up. 

Hmm, these Sexy Female Bandit spawns might be a little close to the settlement. I'll need to move them as part of my cleanup activities, maybe put them down in the ruins of the farm so you have to clear it out before you can start rebuilding.

Can you spot the landscape conflict? You can really see how the cell closer to the ruined farm is being overwritten by the landscape patch. The solution here might just be to let the Loreius Settlement landscape win out in that cell, assuming it doesn't cause problems closer to the Heljarchen Farm. 

Similarly, the civil war area seems kind of overgrown and has fires burning in the middle of tall grass. We'll also plan to let CWB win the landscape conflict here. We'll also reposition those SFB spawns before I forget about them.

So let's give this one last look-see in game. While we boot up, I realize that there's some unspoken politics behind the whole Heljarchen area. Looking at the MTB border posts  and other hints in dialogue, it seems like Frostfield (the Loreius Settlement), despite being de jure part of the Pale, is functionally in Whiterun's influence. With the Hall and the Farm creating a "meta settlement" that includes Frostfield, is the Jarl of the Pale's land grant to the Dragonborn actually a flex on Balgruuf, trying to bring this area back under his control? I do love multi-mod interactions that add unexpected depth to the game.

OK, that's looking much better. As you can see in the middle screenshot, there's a "flap" of disconnected landscape that we need to glue back into place and that might require some CK attention, but overall things are looking good.