Welcome back, folks! I've played Skyrim dozens of times and there are few, if any, vanilla quests I haven't played yet. For this new build, I want to mix things up a bit, and for today we'll focus on installing vanilla quest overhauls. 

I want to be clear that we're not talking about vanilla quest tweaks that just add time or skill gates or slow down quest chain progression. I may yet add some of those, but for today we're looking at mods like Extended Cut: Saints and Seducers, which make substantive changes or expansions to these quests. In fact, let's start with Extended Cut.

Before we install the actual mod we need to shore up our foundation a little bit. First, we need bodyslide support for the new armor and clothing items the Creation Club adds. There is BHUNP support for these as well as HIMBO which is good. Speaking in body support, I was having some further issues with the EasyNPC injected Worn Armor records, but I found a solution - there is a Synthesis patcher that strips these out. Using this will greatly simplify any future NPC overhaul passes (and there will be some in the future since some mods I haven't added yet include additional NPCs). 

After building the new armor meshes, I took some time to look for any generalized CC fixes. I have one or two already, but I'm sure there are more out there since the last time I looked. In the end, I got a decent list of texture improvements, world integration stuff, and voice packs. 

This is a decent list, but I'll need to check them all in xEdit to make sure they're playing nice with each other. All in all it wasn't too bad. I had to clean up a very small number of dirty edits and deactivate one mod that was duplicating another, and finally forward a bunch of NPC outfit changes to a custom patch. In theory I shouldn't have to do that last part as EasyNPC is supposed to catch these types of edits, but it feels safer to go ahead and patch it myself.

With those patches in place, now we can move on to installing Extended Cut. While we're at it, we'll also get the quest expansion patch for Farming, since its a shared requirement for one of the patches for Extended cut. Unsurprisingly for a quest overhaul, EC had a bunch of conflicts, but they were all narrow in scope and didn't appear to pose any problems - I let EC win them all. I did need to swap out some Lux patches, which was just a matter of replacing the vanilla Saints and Seducers patches with the ECSS versions. The main issue I ran into here was that I had to roll back the NPC overhaul, since it had improperly formatted texture paths. Its disappointing that this forced me to forego the improved faces, but I don't have the time or patience to find an easy way to fix these. There's probably an xEdit script out there somewhere, and if and when I find it I'll revisit this one.

Let's take a moment and visit one of the new zones to see how they look.

Looks good! Next, we want to grab JaySerpa's series of vanilla quest expansions. 

JaySerpa's stuff is very clean and I didn't have to do anything really special in xEdit - mostly just forwarding some top level cell data. I toyed also with installing WARP, but unfortunately it's been set to hidden for quite a while (BUVARP is unacceptable for me because of the extensive use of actor cloning. Too many interoperability problems).

However, while I was looking for mods to install, I was interested to discover that Dirtyborn (formerly Skyrim's Shrouded Secret, formerly Alpha) has been uploaded to the Lab, as opposed to a place that gets my posts put into moderator hold if I link to it. DB is outside the scope of what I'm doing today, but I'd been planning to install it before the end of this project, and this will make it more convenient to blog about. We'll revisit DirtyBorn when it's time for me to address intersex content in the game.

Well, today's session was a little shorter than I'd intended, but I accomplished what I came to do and I'll take it as a win. At this point I'm getting pretty close to completion of the "phase 1" version of this build. I do need to think about adding some interior overhauls (need to research Lux compatibility and potential for problems in connection with quest mods), and I also need to install Legacy along with at last a moderate selection of add-ons for it. As I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I need to decide how (or if at all) I'm going to do intersex content in this phase of the build and concurrently get Dirtyborn installed. Finally, I need to install a couple of NPC quest overhauls I've been looking at (along with the controversial AI voiced Valerica mod that I'm interested in seeing how good the synth is within). At that point, and after a couple of small customizations, I should be ready to actually play this build for a while!