Hi folks, welcome back! I originally planned to cover both the Whiterun exterior and also the interior in this volume, but I'm still wrapping up some final details for WhiterunWorld and Dragonsreach, so we'll split those up to give me a little time to complete my work. Today we'll focus on the walk from Riverwood to Whiterun, the Whiterun exterior, and of course the iconic fight between the Companions and a local giant. 

 

 In keeping with our approach to selecting mods, we're going to assume the player travels there directly and doesn't take on any side quests. The first thing I want to do is briefly revisit that waterfalls mod, but this time tailor it to remove the edits to the Riverwood cells. I'm not sure this will work (might have gaps or janky transitions between areas) but if does then we'll have some nice added life to the waterfalls in exactly the area the player is most likely to look at them.

 

 

Let's plan for the new landscape to start at 6, -10 and end at 8, -4 initially and see how that looks at first. We'll also preserve 1, -13 and 2, -13 if possible.

 

 

Actually, it looks like we might only need to pull 5, -11 and 4, -11. That's not too bad. Let's see how the transition between the -11 and -10 Y-Axis looks when we make that change.

 

 

I didn't observe any visible ground texture seams, and now the main Update.esm change I was concerned about - the overgrowth around the fishing spot - is no longer an issue. As a nice side note, you can see that the adjustments to the ENB have toned down the skin reflection to a much more reasonable level (don't mind the neck seam - that's just from being lazy and using coc riverwood from the main menu instead of starting a new game). I think we can mark this one down as a success.

 

OK, now let's take a walk from Riverwood to Whiterun and take note of what a new player is likely to interact with.

 

 

Missing texture. I dont think the player would normally visit the meadery so we won't go inside but we do need to trace that missing texture and get it working.

 

 

The giant fight happens on the route. I found this video below very interesting and it's informed a lot of my thinking about "bikini armor" and its role in the game. I've been unsure for a while about how I want to implement outfits like that, but the Companions seem like a logical place to give it a spin. 

 

 

 

The initial party you meet offers three different profiles to consider: sword and shield, two-handed weapon, and archer. This also gives me a chance to have some fun with the Wolf Armor parts in the TAWOBA asset stack, and beyond just the "berzerker warriors" and the "nords don't need lots of clothing" angles, there's also the "we're secretly werewolves and don't want to ruin our armor when we morph" part.

 

 

I'm not using CRF for this build, so I don't need to worry yet about the conversation between Uthgert and the stable hand. If it did, I might need to do a custom outfit for her similar to the Companions but using regular armor instead of Wolf armor. I can skip that for now, however. This might be a good opportunity to add a very tailored-down version of Diabloesque Decorations, since the impaled thief-murderer-serial-escapee at the gate is one of the better assets in that pack.

 

 

The Whiterun guards already have high quality outfits from Guards Armor Replacer and I don't need to mess with them further.

 

 

And that takes us up to the city gates. I guess the big remaining question is whether or not we want to do any kind of exterior overhaul for Whiterun. A huge overhaul like City of Walls runs counter to my goal of not substantially increasing the NPC count with little functional gain, but I'm not opposed to doing some small tweaks or enhancements. I like aspects of Fortified Whiterun, but I'm not sure I like how it also edits the interior worldspace for seemingly little value gain. I also considered bringing back Dwemerfication of Whiterun, but that mod requires a lot customization from a compatibility point of view and it breaks some of my other rules like having poor optimization. 

 

However, since I didn't see any other attractive alternatives, I think I will try Fortified Whiterun and possibly just tailor out the WhiterunWorld edits if I need to. I'll also be loading up Neutral Whiterun Guards, to support cases where the player doesn't start the main quest right away and may be on the Stormcloak faction.

 

So to summarize, here's our punchlist for the Riverwood to Whiterun walk:

 

• Fix the missing texture on the Whiterun braziers
• Create custom armors for Aela, Ria, and Farkas
• Install and tailor Diabloesque Decorations, disable most of the items that don't feel like good fits for the world
• Install and tailor Fortified Whiterun, assess if I want to make it part of the mod
• Install Neutral Whiterun Guards

 

 

The braziers are from the Unofficial Lux Patch Hub and that leads me to believe they might depend on a 3rd party mod. It actually took some digging to find the source, which turned out to be this mod. Further examination however reveals that this isn't the sole issue - all the assets from that mod were already in Lux Via. 

 

 

Nifskope, however, shows the patchhub version is also expecting parallax textures. I don't see a good source for those, so I'm going to hide the patchhub version of this brazier and let the one that Lux includes prevail. The Lux version is packed in a BSA and I'm not going to bother digging it out just to check it, but I'm pretty sure it should work. We'll verify next time we go into the game.

 

 

Skipping around a little, next I installed the neutral guards mod. I used this in the past without any problems, but it does have an update so we'll go and clean it and conflict check just to be safe. Fortunately, the mod was clean and free of conflicts, so that didn't require a lot of work. 

 

Finally, let's fiddle with those Companions NPCs. I'm going to make them custom outfits instead of trying to piece together something out of regular TAWOBA parts, since that mod poses a lot of compatibility challenges that I'm not super excited about tackling. Let's start with Ria. She's skilled for heavy armor and uses a sword and shield as her primary armament. She's also not a Nord, so we may want to keep her a little warmer than some of her compatriots. Here's my first draft. We'll also give her a black fur cloak and maybe a matching fur hood.

 

 

If I was doing this for my previous world (the one seen in Kirstia's adventures and my 1800-mod stack) I probably would have omitted the loincloth entirely and left her lower body exposed. That world was a bit more explicitly exhibitionistic and I liked the idea that the bikini part of bikini armor would only serve to keep the floppy bits from flopping too much, so female berzerkers would skip bottoms and male berzerkers would skip tops. For this build, I want the world to have slightly more modesty on the part of its inhabitants, so we'll use the loincloth here.

 

Let's add this to my custom clothing patch and customize Ria's outfit, then we'll see how it looks in-game. If everything looks right, we'll tackle the other two.

 

Stats-wise, we'll base this armor on the Wolf Armor, but remove the amulet slot from the ARMA so amulets are visible. 

 

 

Then we'll drop in the new armor path, hook up the ARMA to the ARMO, and create a custom outfit.

 

 

Don't mind my typo... I must have been typing too fast when I updated the project characteristics

 

 

While I was doing this step, I ran into a little complication - I don't have the cloak and hood assets to lean on. In the past I've used Winter Is Coming and had good results with it, so that's the route I'm going to take here. This will require a little cleanup (notably, the Cloaks of Skyrim patch for it isn't ESL flagged for any good reason), but it shouldn't take too long to install. Fortunately, the amount of work I needed to do was minimal - mostly patching outfits to avoid double cloaks assignments. I won't compact the main WIC mod yet because I think I may bump into one or two patches for it in the future and frankly I'm only at load order index 6F so it's not critical.

 

The first attempt with Ria was a little bit of a fail because I had forgotten to fix a few partitions on the custom outfit. After cleaning that up (and making some small edits to the ARMA record), I took a second shot at it and things looked better.

 

 

Much better! Now let's move on to Farkas. He's a two-handed, heavy armor warrior. He's also a Nord. To get male parts for him, we'll need to dip into TAWOBAE's resources, and we'll also need to map them to HIMBO's bones and sliders, so this will be slightly more involved than working with Ria - for her, we could import BHUNP-weighted parts directly from the BHUNP remaster of TAWOBA.

 

 

Oh what's this? TAWOBAE has HIMBO projects after all! Perfect  This will be much easier now. Or... well, maybe "much" was going too far, since the HIMBO builds are all-in-one setups that I'll still need to chop up and customize a bunch.

 

 

Since Farkas does not have a shield, we will give him shoulder protection on both sides. He'll have arm protection on his dominant (right) side. In accord with the principle of keeping his floppy bits under control, he will have some sort of smallclothes to contain his genitals. As a Nord, he doesn't need a fur cloak or hood, but depending on how he looks he may get a decorative pelt or a gorget of some sort to link his pauldrons. Here's the first draft:

 

 

He mostly looks good, except his hand texture is broken. Let's fiddle with him a little further - maybe put a glove on his left hand so we're not relying on a possibly problematic asset. Not so obvious in the screen shots are some problems Farkas' hand bones animating. I think I squashed this with some Bodyslide TLC - so let's see how it looks now. Hmm, though while I was for Skyrim to boot in, I see that Ria's hands are broken also. Its hidden by her shield, but we still need to do something about that.

 

 

Well, the gauntleted hand works, but the flesh hand is busted. On the other hand, Ria's hand is animating OK, looks like just the texture needs attention. After some more troubleshooting, I decided to address the problem once and for all by giving up on the false hands and instead trying to manage clipping against the gauntlet with a normal hand rendered.

 

 

OK, I think we've almost got it. There's some very light residual clipping that I need to touch up in Outfit Studio, but otherwise I think we're good. I think I also need to do something about the cube maps on Ria's armor, which are out of control compared to Farkas. I'll do those behind the scenes. So what about Aela? She's a Nord archer who in the vanilla game uses ancient Nordic armor. There actually is a TAWOBA ancient Nord set (part of the expansion pack), but I'm not srue how flexible its pieces are. Let's take a look. 

 

When I started visualizing how I wanted to do Aela, I was thinking about leaning hard into the whole Amazon look, removing her right breast and leaning on the top surgery scars mod to add scarring, but that ended up being unnecessary, since the TEWOBA ancient Nord set comes with coverage similar to an archery breastplate. With that happy coincidence, I was able to spin up 

 

 

I'm not sure what I want to do for undergarments. I don't want to just reuse the exact same piece that Ria has, and at the same time I don't want to use something that doesn't look like she could shed it easily when she wolfs out. After poking around I found a female Tsun armor mod that looks promising.

 

 

That one had potential, but its too heavily armored on the back part. Aela isn't a heavy armor fighter so I don't want thick plates like that. Further research revealed that there's an alternate Draugr Bikini mod circulating that seems to have more options. Let's investigate. 

 

 

That'll do the trick. Let's give her a little arm protection, then finalize this. As an aside, one thing I've learned from this is that the various bikini armor mods seem to have a lot of little defects in them that can create some strange results, especially when they interact with other mods. Nothing that's a hard stop on using that family of mods, but it definitely creates more work to have them look their best.

 

 

Aela's outfit came out right on the first attempt, but as with the Wolf armor the cubemaps are a mess. I'll fix those up in Outfit Studio and regenerate the nifs. Basically whoever made these used cube maps from guard armor and from iron ore (including on leather and cloth parts!) instead of the armor-specific ones. In conjunction with mods like dynamic ENB cubemaps, it makes the armor look much more reflective than it should be. Vanilla ancient Nord armor doesn't even have cubemaps, so we'll just delete them off the profile (though this will take a while since Bikini Armor always has a ton of different pieces under the hood, each of which I have to change manually - though that cuts both ways since it also makes kitbashing easier). 

 

 

OK, I think we've put the busted cubemaps to bed once and for all. So next up, let's tailor Diabloesque Decorations so we can get our spiked career criminal but eliminate most of the bigger and more over the top decorations. We don't want to completely remove the unwanted items, just disable them so they don't show up in the world. The reason is because some mods lean on ZDD for assets, and we don't want to create a crash scenario by having null baseforms. We'll also remove two mesh replacements that use some assets from this mod that I don't find particularly aesthetic.

 

While I was at it, I found a few wild edits and also removed those. Notably, this mod contains three persistent ref overrides for Solitude that appear to mess with Dark Brotherhood quest fixes in the USSEP. So if you're using ZDD, maybe check on those refs and see if they're messing up your game. Ultimately I deleted all the large set pieces, all the weird ones with the victim's head concealed by a stormcloak helmet, and all the kind of juvenile ones like the "hanging upside down with hooks in the vagina". What's left are a few impaled criminals, a hanged criminal in Markarth, and one or two other small setpieces.

 

That just leaves Fortified Whiterun to look at. I'm not sure if this one is going to make the cut, but let's give it a fair shake. Immediately I'm seeing that this mod only has about 900 records but its not compacted for ESL. This kind of sloppy lack of cleanup doesn't bode well, but its an old enough mod that I'm willing to give the author the benefit of the doubt and assume the lack of compacting is just to maintain compatibility for older mod lists. Most of the conflicts were benign, but I did find one wild edit that would revert changes from Lux Orbis, as well as two significant navmesh conflicts. While the first one at least looks fixable, the process of doing so crashed my xEdit instance, which annoyed me. And then it did it again, though I suspect this is actually an xEdit issue rather than one with this specific mod.

 

In any event, it took three tries but the good news is that this mod is actually pretty clean internally. I also need to make a mental note that navmesh edge link cleaning highlighted a could of triangles that I need to look at on a slow day. I don't think its anything game breaking, but it could cause some unanticipated NPC movement because of edge link goofs. For now however, let's pay it a visit and make sure it looks good form an aesthetic perspective. I've been playing lazy recently and just using coc whiterun to go straight to the target area but this time I'll actually start a new game and walk down from Helgen. That should ensure that everything loads up "as intended" and nothing ends up not getting turned on.

 

 

Visually, everything looks pretty good. However, before I move onto the interior of Whiterun I need to scrutinize the Papyrus log a bit. While I've been testing this last batch of enhancements, I've seen some signs that there might be script lag going on behind the scenes, and that's something I need to nip in the bud. At a glimpse, the areas of immediate concern appear to be script errors originating in two of the alternate armor DLCs, along with pages and pages of the same error message:

 

[01/11/2024 - 04:48:52PM] Error: HasMagicEffectWithKeyword called with invalid Keyword
stack:
    [ (00000014)].Actor.HasMagicEffectWithKeyword() - "<native>" Line ?
    [SexLabQuestFramework (14000D62)].sslactorlibrary.CountCum() - "sslActorLibrary.psc" Line 197
    [SexLabQuestFramework (14000D62)].sexlabframework.CountCum() - "SexLabFramework.psc" Line 543
    <unknown self>.condiexp_interface_sl.IsPlayerCumsoakedOral() - "CondiExp_Interface_SL.psc" Line 7
    [alias MrPlayer on quest CondiExp_StartMod (FE0D5D64)].CondiExp_StartMod.updateDirtyStatus() - "CondiExp_StartMod.psc" Line 252
    [alias MrPlayer on quest CondiExp_StartMod (FE0D5D64)].CondiExp_StartMod.OnUpdate() - "CondiExp_StartMod.psc" Line 161

The issue appears to be associated with Conditional Expressions Extended. A quick check shows that the mod has been updated several times since I last installed it, so we'll start out by updating that and seeing if it puts the errors to bed. At the same time, we'll start parsing the Creation Club errors and try to assess how readily we can fix them.

 

~~ several hours later ~~

 

So I went ahead and updated Conditional Expressions Extended - I was like a dozen versions and 18 months out of date on the mod. However, in the meanwhile I showed my wife the draft of this blog and she clicked on the Shadiversity video link, which we watched together. In doing so, I realized that I had misremembered some of the commentary there about the positioning of partial armor and it planted a horrible brain worm in my head that I just couldn't stop thinking about. So rather than tackle the Creation Club errors, I spent a bunch of quality time in Outfit Studio instead. My wife also didn't particularly like Ria's underwear options, so I'm going to have to keep an eye out for something better. After some pretty deep digging, I finally found what I hope will be a suitable alternative top. 

 

She wasn't a huge fan of Ria's loincloth either, and I'd previously noticed that Ria's sword just kind of stuck to her hip when she wasn't using it, so I gave her a tasset that could kind of serve as a sword belt. After much consideration I decided to ditch the loincloth and have Ria go Rosa-Roundbottom-style. We'll see if I decide to stick with this look, as it's a mild departure from my initial concept for Ria, but it's more faithful to the original overall design for bikini armor in the previous game world. 

 

 

Farkas got a less dramatic change, just reversing which arm he wore armor on based on his fighting stance.

 

 

I decided to leave Aela alone for now - I'm pretty happy with her outfit as it stands currently and I don't see a need to change it further. Let's give the game a quick visit and just make sure nothing is badly glitched out. 

 

 

That'll do. I need to goose Farkas' left hand a little just like I did with his right hand to avoid clipping, but everything more or less seems to be working. In a perfect world where I had unlimited time and resources I'd also move Ria's sword a little to line up better with her belt, but I think I can just left that slide. 

 

Upgrading Conditional Expressions didn't solve the Papyrus error spam, so I'm going to go ahead and remove that mod and see if the problem still persists (i.e., "is it an issue with the underlying conditional expressions mod?). While this mod would be nice, it's not one that I absolutely have to have, and if its not going to work then I'll dump it - I'd rather have a stable and responsive game than the absolute prettiest possible game, and I don't have the time or Papyrus chops to go through and try to fix busted scripts if it isn't absolutely necessary. 

 

Uninstalling the extended version of Conditional Expressions did make the error spam go away, but it did not resolve the generalized delays I observed. The next thing to attack are the large number of errors related to the Creation Club, which initial research suggests are the result of dirty modding in an add-on mod (deleting script props without changing the script at all). Tomorrow I will try pruning out the dirty changes for any scripts listed in the Papyrus log and see what impact this has. The script stack is due for cleaning anyway, so this is an opportunity to catch up on that. 

 

That hypothesis, attractive as it seemed, turned out to be wrong - restoring the removed props did not make the errors go away. Kind of makes me glad I didn't name and shame the mod in question prior to checking. Additionally, a longer test of the latency revealed that eventually the game did recover to normal performance. I'm starting to suspect that what I'm experience has more to initial game startup (such as building NPC registries for mods like Fertility Mode) and shouldn't be a chronic issue. While its not ideal, that's actually much more tolerable; in a real playthrough, the player is going to spend time in the Alternate Perspective starter cell setting MCM settings and choosing equipment, so by the time they are in the live game environment, the system load should be passed. 

 

That said, I still want to clean up the Papyrus log a little. I've talked about this before but in case you haven't read my previous blogs on the subject, reducing script errors doesn't just reduce overall system load, it eliminates a lot of chaff from the log that might camouflage a more serious problem. Having said that though, I know that banging my head against the Papyrus log is one of those things that can erode my motivation to mod, so I'm only going to tackle a few errors per session.

 

I started my attack on the Papyrus log by going after easy wins - exposed form IDs that I could focus in on. In particular, I'm looking for calls against scripts that don't exist and VMAD record stacks that contain properties that don't exist in the linked script. While I'm doing my due diligence by making sure there aren't any better ways to handle these (checking for mod updates, looking for possible typos, things like that), in general I ended up pruning the entries that are causing error messages.

 

In the process of going through these errors, I discovered that there is a new (free) Patreon build of Fertility Adventures posted here. Superficially the new version appears to be compatible with the child add-on for the original, but I'll have to keep an eye on that. In any event, FA+ still contains a script call that can't bind properly because its looking for an object reference but the alias is a book (a baseform, not a reference). I swear I've talked with the mod author about this in the past and the explanation was that the book spawns dynamically and so doesn't have an object ref, but that doesn't change the fact that this function doesn't work. 

 

 

Quote

[01/11/2024 - 11:32:52PM] Error: Unable to bind script defaultsetstageonplayeracquireitem (defaultsetstageonplayeracquireitem->ObjectReference->Form) to alias Journal on quest FMA_VilkasStoryQuest01 (3E26CF96) because their base types do not match

 

There's two solutions here: either create a new script that does allow for BOOK to bind, or delete the script call. Since here is already a duplicate function that triggers the same quest stage for closing the same book, I'm just going to pull this part of the script stack. Now the stack just looks like this:

 

 

I also found a rather interesting error that revealed a conflict between the USSEP and Caught Red Handed: Quest Expansion. Both mods edit different parts of this vanilla quest, and without a patch they're mutually incompatible. This mod now has a USSEP patch on its Nexus page, but by the time I discovered that I'd already made the changes myself, so all's well that ends well I guess. This review similarly revealed some unfished or cut content in the well received mod The Forgotten City. It seems perhaps the author planned to have some additional scenes and music queues that aren't in the final scripts. I wonder if these things made it into the standalone game that succeeded the mod?

 

An interesting quirk about the Papyrus log I noticed is that sometimes (but not always!) if one form ID has a bad script property associated with it, the log will report a different form ID that has the same script but that doesn't have the same script property. Weird. So in those cases I have to use the "filter by script" function in xEdit to find the other, bad script binding. Overall, this proved to be a much more interesting and less frustrating exercise than my last dive into the Papyrus log. Whether it's a result of clean modding practices or just luck, all the entries I pulled today were fairly straightforward defects to correct and at the same time I got some interesting insights into not just how certain mods work but also what the author's intentions for the mods were. 

 

After I finished up with the bad properties and script bindings, I had a length of time in the afternoon where I was only intermittently able to check my computer, so I used that time to trace some missing script files. These searches against the file stack take a long time, so it's an ideal background activity. 

 

 

Looks like there is still residual Legacy Edition code in Sexlab, since it is trying to call NiOverride functions. I wonder if Sexlab P+ will purge this stuff?

 

~~A couple days later~~

 

OK, I lied. I did the whole Papyrus log. Now the log has basically no errors in it except for compatibility related getformfromfile/other-mod-script fails and stuff like the NiO calls in Sexlab. A clean papyrus log is surprisingly satisfying.

 

I also went ahead and regenerated my Dyndolod assets. The newest version spotted a possible wild edit in Falskaar of all places, 

 

 

Sure does look like a wild edit. This object will spawn way below the terrain in this area. I removed this record.

 

Dyndolod also reported a bunch of nif and texture related concerns which I deferred action on (except for tracking down a copy of 3AM Trees, since that was also affecting my normal LOD billboards). I'm not ignoring those warnings, but I'm not done tweaking things like trees and landscape texturing, so I'll wait to attack these before I've done more work in that dimension.

 

With that done, the next thing to do is take a tour of Whiterun and develop a customization punchlist. However, before I do that there's one more thing I want to do - I'm not really loving how Ria's fur hood wipes out her hair. I think I want to replace it in her outfit with a lowered hood. 

 

 

Now we can see Ria's hair (though her cloak is so big it mostly hides the hood). I toyed with also fiddling with Aela a little. In the old Skyrim's Shrouded Secret mod, she was on the list of intersex NPCs, and I thought about giving her som bulging male underwear instead of a loincloth to telegraph that. However, SSS has undergone so much feature creep and evolution that I'm really unsure if it fits into my game plan anymore. Therefore, I'm holding off on any intersex content until I have a gameplan for integrating it, rather than just randomly adding NPCs to SOS Futanari factions. So she can stay as-is for now.

 

 

Hang on, that's not just a lowered hood, that's a whole cloak with a lowered hood, vanilla pre-USSEP style. OK, we're just going to remove the hod entirely, I guess. Oh well. Meanwhile, what's up with Aela's neck gap? This need a little investigation - I think we've got a case here of a Bijin-NPCs-style WNAM mesh vs. armor body mesh issue.

 

 

So there's the custom body mesh. The good news is that she uses the vanilla body, which avoids the most serious potential problem with something like this. 

 

 

After some further poking, I found the problem. Somehow I had accidentally removed the bone weights from Aela's reference body, so even though her armor was scaling with her weight and bodyslide details, her body wasn't... causing the neck gap.

 

 

Perfect. When we come back for our next installment, we'll pass through the Whiterun city gates and try our hand at customizing the path through the city that takes us to the Jarl's palace, as well as working on the interior of Dragonsreach itself. See you then!