It's been a long time since I last modded for Skyrim. I've mostly been playing elsewhere in other games, modding them here and there, fumbling my way through a minefield of letters and numbers that fit together to make cool things happen. But a recent delve into coding brought me back here, to a game that I love (and truthfully, have never finished), Skyrim. I started modding it around 2014 and quit in 2016 after I lost access to being able to animate. I could never figure out scripting and while I had ideas, I had no way to write them. I learned to mod mostly through breaking down PSC files and looking at logic and a big bunch of it was trial and error, and I think I managed to make do, considering I stumbled through making a mod that hooked animations into the SexLab Framework before it the main Framework was updated. But stress and poor mental health really hit hard around that time, and it became a struggle to keep up with.

For the last year, I've played about with the idea of getting back into modding and building my perfect setup. I still have my LE set up for Skyrim, as messy and unstable as it is, and I liked throwing it open every now and then. But I decided to finally dip my toe into SSE and AE editions of the game and thus, set up a new mod build from scratch. Somehow, I always made it out in my head that it would be too complex to start again and shunned the idea. Though now, I've learned that's not true. As some of you may have guessed from my blog and past mods, I have a male character and I am male/male orientated in my setup, so I do gravitate mostly to mods and animations that have catered towards gender-neutral or LGBTQ+ friendly.  

So I thought, what about keeping a journal of my progress? If anything, it would be good for me to look back over my own journey of how much I've done and how far I've come. It might not really serve to help anyone except myself and no one might care to read it, but it's a space for me to reflect, make notes, and maybe if things get messed up, something for me to look back on and figure out solutions. 

So here I go. Off back into the world of modding for Skyrim!

MY FAVORITE WOOD ELF

I will not lie. I'm not the biggest fan of the elf looks (I was gutted when I played ESO on console and couldn't make the hottest Bosmer). So the first thing I set out is to make sure I get my favorite preset back from the Nexus along with the Ethereal Elven Overhaul. It changes the aesthetics slightly but remains lore-adherent. I've used Race-Based Textures (though I am interested in looking at Every Bodies Different in the future) and mixed my textures between BNP Male Skin and AW Mosaic Skin. I know in my LE edition, I played about with textures to get the type of body hair I wanted, and I made adjustments to make nipples appear in the right place on skeletons, but I was still very fresh-faced. I had mismatched feet that were broken and I could never resolve or be happy with them as I wanted the particular skin for the chest—thank god for the Strip Options in SexLab! But these new options have such vivid detail that is visually appealing so I'm good to go.

Showing off the cute elf!

I've geared him in some revealing fur armor taken from the Revealing Armors for Schlongs of Skyrim mod. This mod is more a replacer and replaces all actors wearing the gear into the revealing version, but I made a personal mod to add them as single standalone gear sets to wear for my character only, porting it to AE for my game (which I'm happy to finally learn that it's dead simple to do). I need to work on some ground objects for them, make stronger versions (since I wanna keep wearing them), and learn more about armor leveling/scaling (if any) so it's a good little piece to play about with. 

A WORLD OF STUNNING VISION

In LE, I opted for the Grim and Somber ENB. I particularly liked this for its dark and moody tones it brought to the game, particularly in dungeons. But this time, I've gone to look at something different and opted for Ruby ENB. It's preset to complement Natural and Atmospheric Tamriel and LUX to give a very fantasy but realistic in its visuals. My LE save was on a weaker system that couldn't handle the graphical power brought by upgraded textures, but this system has got me pushing the boat out a bit more. 

I haven't upgraded many textures apart from the ones required and recommended with the ENB, such as adding Embers and LUX, and the skin textures. The game looks pretty stunning as is in the AE edition (as seen from the screenshot above) but I'll be looking around to see if anything needs enhancing further. I did spot a missing texture in a dungeon, so will need to figure out if it's a mod doing it, or just good old game devs missing a spot.

NEW GAME, NEW MODS, NEW SCENARIOS

If there is one thing I have come to love about the modding community, it's the ability to play through various different scenarios with different mods and load-outs. I have a couple of characters that I've saved the models from LE so I can look at making them in AE, and the growth of the modding community bringing new and creative stories through adult gameplay is something I really enjoy. I mean, this is a roleplaying game after all! I've played the hero in trouble to the bandit leader being turned upon, and I'm always thinking about what's next on the horizon.

Good old Bleak Falls Barrow. I think I've done this first quest a hundred times.

When I was setting my game up, I spotted Practical Defeat as a newly uploaded mod in the forum homepage so I decided to take a look into this one. Immediately I was grateful to read that it was written with a player/character of any gender in mind. Acheron also looks to be a good death-alternative mod, having personally played about with these types of mods in my LE setup. While still in its early stages, I've given it a play though and, while I've run into a few bumps with it failing to create a scene, it may be the hard requirement on an older mod causing conflicts or I haven't quite figured out how to set the scenes up. But I look forward to exploring its features as it grows.

That's just one new mod I've tried. I've loaded in a bunch of old faves and upgraded one or two to be AE-compliant but I don't want to just bore you with my full mod list, ahha.

RETURNING TO ROOTS

The last thing that I was working on was a personal follower mod, one with dialogue trees linked to SexLab Aroused to trigger different responses depending on the follower's arousal. It was very basic and even now, as I look over it, I cringe at my writing. I have grown so much in eight years. But this is going to form part of my own person modding project to learn to script and is included in my plan to build my perfect list. Making a personal SLAL pack (or coding it directly to SexLab's registry) along with tags that will help me code it into this follower, this project is surely going to take a while, but I know I will learn a lot from it with the right animations and the right alignments. I#ve just been able to successfully voice one line for him, so my weekend will be filled making some more lines!

Setting up the facility to compile scripts though was probably a little more painful than I'd like. I mostly use Mod Organizer 2 (MO2), so gathering the scripts to place them in the game directory was a little tedious, considering one or two were on GitHub (SkyUI and a script from Precision) and I had to hunt around for another. But I ran it, tested it, and it's all up and running. I felt a little giddy that I'm excited to get back into this!

That's really it for now. In the last few days, I've mostly set myself up ready to both play a new game as well as enhance it through tweaks and updates. It's been fun trying out a new mod and breaking down some older mods to get a look at their raw coding. Hopefully, I'll make some progress and share some more updates with everyone soon. If read this far, thanks for sticking around.