I decided to start building my new AE setup today since I found myself a little fixated on the idea after the aborted launch from earlier. As I mentioned in my last post, the goal here is to get a lo of the richness and nuance of my last version without the bloat. I will eventually lean on certain elements of the old setup, but other parts will be all new, using the latest tools that have become available rather than the patchwork I assembled in the past.

 

I started by doing a clean install of SSE 1.6, including the AE package, and then used root builder to start migrating my external tools like ENB into virtualized storage. This will help promote better hygiene in my SSE folder moving forward. My goal for today is get the bare necessities in place to successfully launch the game: ENB, SKSE, engine fixes (and related mods), racemenu, menu maid, and alternate perspective. Since these are essential resources, we'll be doing all fresh installs - I won't even attempt to use my legacy installations. Note that Nemesis is turned off right now. I won't be activating it until/unless I install a mod that needs it.

 

 

Speaking in hygiene, how's this for the contents of the data folder? All the official files are in virtualized storage (except the Bethesda logo video) to protect them from an surprise updates that might temporarily break compatibility for DLL mods.

 

 

After installing a few more essential items, we have a basic foundation to start building on. You'll notice by the way that the USSEP and similar core mods are deactivated. That's because these are out of date and need to be revised. Additionally, for the time being I will not be installing Cutting Room Floor. I may revisit it in the future, but I've used this mod extensively in both SSE and LE and I've already seen most of its content. Since it is old and a bit creaky around the edges, I will likely skip it for this build.

 

 

In addition to USSEP and Vanilla Micro Optimization, we'll be grabbing the unofficial CC patch and the CC content patches. At the same time, we're going to install Alternate Perspective and Racemenu, along with their dependencies. This will give us our very first "playable configuration", though in terms of what the player can see it will be very close to vanilla. This initial set of installations is very much 'behind the curtain' type stuff.

 

 

Before we launch in, let's go into xEdit and check for any issues. I've already cleaned the vanilla files, so now we'll focus on the new plugins. I'll be skipping cleaning on them, as from my past experience I know they are generally in good shape already. If I run into issues I can always loop back, but what I'm focusing on today is initial conflict detection and mitigation. 

 

 

Good news! Only two of them have conflicts (the two that I expected to have them, in fact). Let's take a closer look.

 

 

AP makes a lot of edits, but if they are all overrides of the USSEP, we can accept them with only minimal oversight. After reviewing them, all of these records were conflicts with either the USSEP or the vanilla Update.esm file. We will let AP win all of these, since its redesign of Helgen is kind of a central feature and we expect it to overwrite the vanilla version. The other edits all relate to AP's changes to the dialogue and quest structure in Helgen and will all be allowed to prevail... except for one. 

 

 

For this ingestible record, we want to copy over the survival mode effect for maximum compatibility. I haven't thoroughly examined Sunhelm's "guts" yet, but it leans on elements of Survival Mode (that's how it manages to be pretty lightweight) and so may benefit from this. We'll patch this record.

 

 

The Unofficial CC Patch was similar. There was one conflict with the USSEP on the Elemental Fury spells where USSEP took a slightly different technical approach, but I let the UCCP win, rather than doing an elaborate patching job, since UCCP is a more targeted mod.

 

To avoid rework in the future, we'll now create a modgroup that contains all of the relevant plugins so far. That'll be all the official plugins, plus USSEP, AP, and the UCCP. In the future, this will suppress "loser" items and avoid accidentally reintroducing deliberately deprecated records in the future.

 

 

We'll periodically revisit the modgroups to keep them fresh, but this will cover our needs for now and into the next several phases of this build. As you can see below, xEdit remembered my previous selection and pre-populated its recommendations for which modgroups to activate.

 

 

We don't have any animations or bodyslides to set up yet, so all we need to do next is populate the root directory with the ENB binaries and SKSE. We'll eventually be installing Patrician ENB, but that will have to wait until some additional baseline mods are installed to ensure we don't get janky graphics. 

 

 

Now you can see the hardlinked DLL files in the root. The less sensitive files will be added to the virtual file system at runtime. 

 

 

Speaking in runtime, let's boot up Skyrim and take it for a spin!

 

 

Wow, potato graphics indeed! But its working, and its working FAST. We'll spawn a character and walk around a little before we declare victory.

 

 

So yeah, the graphics are very 2011, but the game performance is never going to get better than right here. In the days ahead, we'll start the process of rebuilding our world piece by piece while we try to keep everything stable and smooth. See you soon!