Hi Everybody, hope you are having a good winter so far! A while back I posted about how the release of Skyrim 1.6.1130 - and in particular, the doubling of the ESL cap - got me interested in modding Skyrim again. If you've been following this blog for a while, you know that I had a very successful build in 2023 that met all my expectations and proved really satisfying to put together. Originally, I had thought about doing another build from scratch using the new version, but as things have developed I've had a bit of a course correction.

Critical to this is BEES. This mod successfully reverse engineers the ESL improvements and allows any version of Skyrim to benefit from them. Perhaps more importantly for some, as a collateral benefit modders were able to figure out how to enable ESL functionality on Skyrim VR, though that doesn't directly benefit me. Additionally, there seem to be some lingering compatibility issues with some DLL based mods that haven't quite been worked out for 1130 yet. At the same time, my sister-in-law expressed some interest in trying out my 2023 build*, and with some aspects of 1130 still in limbo I decided to instead go back to my existing setup and polish it up to get rid of the remaining rough spots and generally improve its presentation. Of course, I'll probably eventually upgrade it to 1130, but for now I'm going to stick with 1.6.640. 

*my wife thought this was great, but she did insist, "don't even think about adding Animal Mansion or Slaverun to your build!"

While it won't necessarily be the way I run things forever, I'm going to start out by targeting the environs of the main quest step by step for polishing and refining. I'm going to generally follow my rules from the 2023 build about avoiding bloat, but I will dip my toes a little bit into heavier customization such as dungeon overhauls, village improvements, and so forth. After all, my sister has already played the vanilla game, so I want her to get something new and fresh to enjoy. And of course, if we're following the path of the main quest, we need to start with the village of Helgen.

That path turned out to be a long and involved one, and I proceeded to spend the first three weeks of January writing almost 12000 words of content with lots of illustrations. As I rolled into this weekend, I had to come to terms with the fact that this blog entry was getting just too long to publish as a single entry. So I'll be breaking up the original script into smaller segments that I'll roll out over the next few days. 

Back to Helgen, this location has already been overhauled somewhat by Alternate Perspective, which we'll use as the baseline for this segment. Helgen Reborn is also installed, but it's outside the scope of today's exercise and I won't be messing around with it unless I run into specific conflicts or issues. As an aside, an unofficial patch recently got posted to address many of the longstanding issues with the old Return to Helgen mod, which I did consider trying as an alternative to Helgen Reborn. However, on closer examination it failed a lot of the ground rules for my build, and so I decided to hold off. I may do a dedicated playthrough someday to just experience the mod - for all his problems, I enjoyed Giskard's mods for Oblivion, and this one explores some interesting concepts.

Getting back to today's project, you can see my initial notes about Helgen here below:

    The AP room - normalize what options the player can start with gear wise, especially money. 
        * Also review early quest starts and see what can be deferred, conditioned, or unloaded.
    The inn is generally good but I'm still getting square fire particles and floating coals, both issues associated with Embers XD. 
        * Its probably time to dump that mod if I can do it without too much furstration
    Most of the interiors are locked and don't need attention as its unlikely a new character will visit them
        * Skalei might benefit from a custom outfit.
    Starting sequence: Elenwen and two Thalmor guards are present
        * Guards should have glass armor or special armor
        * Elenwen is in standard Thalmor robes. Should she have a special outfit?
    Locals and Imperial Soldiers seem OK
        * Review Falkreath Hold and think about culturals. May want to revise some civilians.
        * The sargeant seems to be having some hair clipping issues with her helmet. Remove helmet from her outfit.
    The Carts
        * The front cart has two male and one female Stormcloak soldiers. Put one of them - Ralof probably in DX Ursa "ruined Stormcloak armor" perhaps?
        * Put the regular soldiers in prisoner rags mostly to match the player stand-in
        * The stand-in for the player is a Khajiit (or perhaps a random character?) who either way seems fine
        * Ulfric is in his full armor. Find out if this is a separate outfit. Upgrade his gag to something more robust than a rag
    The tower with no separate interior has a cage in it. Convert this to a ZAZ cage and put a bandit inside?
    Is it time to install beast race schlongs? Otherwise the Khajiit's prisoner will have a visible human dong hanging out
    Should the executioner be in an imperial or penitus uniform? Probably the latter, but keep the hood.
    A priest of Arkay is present (one of several in the game). Should they have a special custom outfit instead of generic robes?
    In the keep give the player an opportunity to get 'ruined armor' also, probably on the corpse right inside (Gunjar). 
        * There should also be an opportunity to get a set of the armor at the Thalmor prison keep in case the player misses it here
        * There's a dead mage in the prison cage. Customize outfit? Gag and/or blindfold. Bondage mits if DD installed?

I also want to take a look at the Papyrus log to see if there are any errors getting thrown during startup that need attention, since I haven't checked out the log in a while. Most of the issues that I am seeing are benign, either compatibility stuff from Campfire or leftover scraps of the fish plaque bug, but I am seeing some quest related issues that appear to be linked to unimplemented/unfinished scripts in old mods like Moon And Star and Carved Brink. I'd like to clean these up eventually just to make the log more readable, but I know those mods work as-is so it isn't a huge priority.

I'm also seeing a bunch of errors related to Sexlab Cum Overlay, and it looks like the main thing is that I need to install this mod that extends and streamlines how SCO functions. Eventually this will all be rendered obsolete by Sexlab P+, but I'm not quite ready to tackle that one yet since last I checked it was still in development and not feature-complete.

I started by updating AP to its latest version, and after giving it a quick check for errors or conflicts, I headed back to the AP starting room to check out the contents. Fortunately, only a single record needing patching (Legacy of the Dragonborn adds a custom bottle for the local mead which was getting reverted back to vanilla by unrelated edits to the ingestible record, so I needed to merge those changes into a patched record).

The arms and armor cabinets aren't too bad; while they're exploitable they offer appropriate items so it looks like the only thing I need to change in terms of what's on offer is the money chest, which contains so many resources that it's actually hard to not take an excessive amount. There currently aren't any extraneous quests starting inside the room, which is good, and there are only a couple of notes that spawn in the player inventory, neither of which steer the player into starting specific quests, so also OK. I think conceptually I could move those books and notes onto the shelves in the inn room, but I don't think that's a critical activity right now. So we'll move on to the inn's common room. 

Embers XD had a recent update, so I've gone ahead and updated it, as well as trying to stitch the Inferno content back into my load order. I'd previously taken it out because of rendering issues. Let's see if this fixes the fireplace in the Helgen inn.

An interesting and immediate - but unexpected - result is that the god rays in the starting room seem more pronounced and crisp. I'm curious what caused this change, but I'm definitely not going to complain about a nice bonus like this!

OK, the square particles are gone! (spoiler: that's a lie, and I'll have to address this issue again in the future. I didn't have ENB Light installed ) This is great, though we'll still need to be on the lookout for other issues with light sources. However, it looks like the enhanced Lux compatibility with the 2.9 branch of Embers has gone a long way to improve the situation. 

Next up is Skalei the merchant. She's an Argonian with a modest hairstyle. Her existing outfit is a good foundation to start with, but I imagine the climate here might be a little chilly, so we'll customize her a bit.

I considered leaning on Sensible Mittens, since they looked like a good fit in terms of texture, but I didn't really want her hands covered inside her store. The classic Blanket Scarf mod seems like a better option to start with. I kind of want to give her a warm hat also, either red to fit her outfit or green to fit her feathers, but I couldn't find a good option that didn't have too many strings attached, so I just added the scarf to her outfit. 

The blanket looks pretty good, but I will have to think more about how I want other Argonian characters to look. While I couldn't solve my specific hat issue, I found some other nice warm clothing mods that I think I can get good results from. I was a little unsure about the blanket scarfs because they don't have any bodyslide support, and I was worried they might have issues with clipping when the actor is posed, but if you pay attention to some of the later screen shots you'll see that when Skalei is seated to watch the execution, the blanket looks fine. 

Before we wrap up with this first volume of the blog, we need to revisit the starting room and adjust the starting items it gives out. There are a few different mods that edit the starting equipment, but none of them quite matches what I want. Basically, I want to provide a comprehensive set of gear that doesn't make the very early game experience too easy, and also that don't make the starting gear provided in the main quest redundant. Also, I'm not sure I want to start the player character with items that can fill displays in LOTD. I think what I need to do here is (first) tone down the cash loot and then put together some custom starting gear that the player can choose from. This would boil down to...

1. A basic light armor chest piece and a backpack
2. A choice of one or two basic cloaks
3. A hunting bow and some iron arrows
4. A choice of simple melee weapons - a knife, a quarterstaff, and a woodcutter's axe 
5. Spell tomes for the basic starting spells (edit the character record so they don't automatically start with these)
6. Enough gold to cover basic initial expenses (about 100-200 GP)
7. A couple of low value gems to barter with
8. A couple of lockpicks
9. The Explorer's Guide and the Gentleman's Guide (these might be an exception to the 'no LOTD' rule if they are displayable items since they are useful newbie books)

After fiddling around a bit, I think I've settled on a pretty good 'new player' gear setup. This should be enough to get the player to Riverwood if they skip the main quest, without giving any kind of special advantage for taking that route.

To go along with putting the basic spell tomes in the dresser and removing the basic start-of-game spells, I also installed Immersive Spell Learning to avoid a situation where the new dragonborn can immediately learn the spells from the dresser. The player should still have any bonus spells based on their race selection, just not flames/healing. With that last piece in place, I was pretty happy with the starting room setup, though I do need to do something with the knife - either replace it with an iron dagger or fix the mesh - because currently the knife doesn't render right when sheathed in 3rd person view (it floats about six inches away from the character's hip). That, however, isn't a burning issue for the moment.

With pre-main-quest Helgen completed, I think we can wrap up this first volume of the blog. When we come back, we'll be customizing the characters involved in the infamous prisoner cart scene, as well as a poor schmuck in the Helgen dungeon. See you then!