Hi folks, welcome back! When we last left off, we had just delivered news of the dragon attack on Helgen to Jarl Balgruuf and been introduced to Farengar. Let's walk through what's going to happen next. In the vanilla game, Farengar will encourage the player to travel to Bleak Falls Barrow and retrieve the Dragonstone. Over the course of the Bleak Falls adventure, the player will also get the quest "The Golden Claw" if they haven't already, and since the exit to Bleak Falls will push the player to return to Whiterun via Riverwood, we'll cover the rest of that quest at the same time. 

 

Incidentally, I toyed with installing Don't Rush Me, but it had a couple of red flags in its structure that lead me to believe I'll need to recompile its scripts to preserve bugfixes from the USSEP. Since delaying the main quest is already kind of out of scope for my current focus, I'm going to defer doing anything with that mod until much later in this project.

 

Let's start with a quick tour of the quest route. We'll do this with AI detection turned off and just focus on observing the environment. We start out by leaving Dragonsreach and essentially retracing our steps back to the Riverwood bridge. At that point we're going to hang a right and go up the trail into the mountains. I'm going to assume here that the player exits Whiterun through the marketplace and not put any work into the other route through time. We can focus on that when Irileth leads us down that path to raise the guard force in Dragon Rising, a bit later.

 

One thing I did notice on the way out of town was that the two impaled criminals seem very bright, and I think some of the characteristics on their nif files might not be set up quite right. These two are kind of obscured by the big braziers, but its something I should look into when I have some free time.

 

 

Further along the road, I found that despite me giving her clothes, this city official is showing up as naked. The issue appears to be that her spectacles are assigned to Slot 32 and are overriding her outfit. I'll need to fix that in xEdit (and maybe nifskope).

 

 

I observed some navmesh issues on the Whiterun bridge. Looks like I need to put down some navcut boxes to keep people from getting suck on these flower pots. The slavers are another issue, but I'm going to defer fixing them for now - I inadvertently orphaned a whole bunch of Hydragorgon NPCs from their ACHR records by removing some of the dungeons, and I'll need to restore the full staffing of the caravan groups before I do any customization on them.

 

 

Here's the start of the path. I believe there is a mod out there that adds more detail and nuance to the landscape on the path to Bleak Falls and I'll be investigating that as part of this phase of the project.

 

 

There are a few spots on the trail that are overgrown enough that the path isn't always obvious; hopefully that landscape mod improves this big a little. Obviously, my sister has played this before and won't be completely lost, but part of Skyrim's charm is its soothing "walking simulator" aspect, and when you have to think too much about how to stay on the path, it disrupts that zen experience a little bit.

 

 

A stealthy player could probably avoid the bandit encounter in this tower, but its placed in a way that will cause most people to fight the bandits. I'll be looking to see if there's an overhaul for the locations and look at refreshing it. The bandits themselves are just generics and unless I have some sudden strike of inspiration I'm going to leave them alone. In principle I wouldn't mind adding a mod like Deadly Wenches or some other bandit overhaul (I'm pretty sure this quest stage is the main bandit encounter for the main quest before it pivots to other threats), but that could be a lot of work and it might get deferred. 

 

 

The Barrow itself has some comprehensive overhauls available that I'll want to pick through - I'd like to find one that adds or changes the dungeon guts in a more or less compatibility friendly way without greatly increasing the difficulty of the dungeon crawl. Incidentally, this is one reason why Forgotten Wenches is deep on the back burner - its characters tend to make low level dungeon crawls a lot more difficult (to say nothing of all the work it requires to actually get it performing to my requirements, something I've touched on in the past in the Mod Diary series).

 

I encountered the first crash I'd had in quite a while while exploring Bleak Falls. The problem originated in SKEE but I think the actual issue was with a BHUNP V4 mesh trying to morph in an illegal way to fit a UUNP preset getting handed out by OBody. If this is the case, the solution is just for me to remember to turn off the vanilla BHUNP presets when I'm done using bodyslide, but I'll have to monitor that closely to see if there's something more serious going on. 

 

Another thing that I'm going to have to check carefully if I overhaul the Barrow is treasure placement. LOTD, Amulets of Skyrim, and Cheesemod, at a minimum, are likely to have placed object here that might be perturbed by changes to how the dungeon is laid out. We saw this earlier with the houses in Riverwood and its just one of those things that I'll have to incorporate into my work going forward as I overhaul locations. While I work on Bleak Falls I also need to think about whether or not I want to install Dynamic Immersive Seriously Dark Dungeons. I've fiddled with this mod before, but my kludged together light settings on the 1800 mod build prevented me from getting the optimal experience with the mod. The mod also likely increases Papyrus load in a non-trivial way, so I need to analyze those potential impacts as well. 

 

 

I need to do a survey of the options for vanilla potion replacers. Maybe this is a good opportunity to get my wife's input on which mods she likes the aesthetics of and then kludge together some kind of custom solution.

 

 

There's a mod out there that customizes the spider miniboss using one of the Creation Club monster meshes. That one's almost certainly getting into this overhaul. I also need to take a look at the spider web textures because there are a few places where the spider webs are so transparent that they're hard to see... but they block player progress if you don't cut through them. I also want to take a look at the options for the desiccated corpses. They just don't look that great when you pay close attention to them.

 

 

There's a pair of mods that overhaul how certain NPCs work and basically create an alternate outcome to the encounter with Arvel where you can save him and he persists in the game world: WARP and BUVARP. BUVARP uses a really poorly thought through technique of cloning the NPCs (in the name of 'compatibility,' 🤢🤮, literally punishing people who know what they're doing by making integration harder), but WARP does require careful analysis to make sure it won't do more harm than good.

 

The next segment is an extended tomb crawl with Draugr as the enemies. A comprehensive overhaul of the Draugr is not by any means something I have to do right now but I'll think on it at least. Concurrent with this, I need to think about whether or not I want to add a coin mod so that Draugr (and Dwemer too) dungeons don't have lots of modern coinage stashed in illogical locations. 

 

 

The second stage of the dungeon is basically a continuation of the Draugr tomb and has the same general considerations in play to be worked with. At the end of the segment, we encounter our first word wall, and this'll be a good opportunity to review any word wall overhaul mods for integration. 

 

 

We exit Bleak Falls a bit southwest of Riverwood, on the far side of the river and overlooking a mammoth graveyard. The entrance to Stadomaar, from Helgen Reborn, is down at the foot of this cliff, but it's blocked off by a force field that well keep the player out if they aren't ready for the relevant quest.

 

 

Anise's cottage is just around the hill if the player heads north, and it's map marker icon is likely to draw some curiosity, so we'll look at our options for overhauling that home. I believe there's at least one mod that improves it a bit. Anise herself also might get some attention. At the same time, I need to take a look at the model for the blue Mage Robe, since it's doing something strange that's making Anise's hair float in front of her belly. I think something may be reverting its armor records to the original pre-USSEP configuration.

 

 

There's some pretty bad grass intrusion going on here. If I don't find an overhaul that fixes the landscape record, I'll need to go into the editor and do something about that. A little further north and we end up at Riverwood again. As I mentioned earlier, if the player hasn't done The Golden Claw yet, it gets triggered in the course of the Barrow adventure. So I think we can safely assume that the player will stop at the Riverwood Trader to complete the quest.

 

 

To support that diversion, we'll want to look at an upgrade for the Riverwood Trader, as well as the Valerius siblings. Moreover, talking to Camilla will very likely start her own sidequest, so we'll do the same for Sven and Faendal, and their houses, and for the Sleeping Giant tavern, since Sven often spends his time there. Essentially, we'll be finishing the overhaul of Riverwood that we started during the previous arc of the main quest.

 

 

After we complete Riverwood, it'll be smooth sailing back to Whiterun. So our punchlist right now looks like this:

 

• Apprentice accountant spectacles - slot 32 usage
• Navcuts for north bridge
• Bleak Falls approach landscape improvements
• White watch tower
• Bandit NPC enhancements of some sort?
• Dungeon darkness mod?
• Review potion enhancement mods
• Spider miniboss
• Spiderweb textures - better visibility?
• Dessicated corpses don't look very good
• WARP integration
• Draugr improvements?
• Coin improvements?
• Anise and her cottage
• Blue mage robe - is it working properly?
• Overhaul remaining Riverwood locations

 

For this volume of the blog, let's focus on the approach to the Barrow - we can tackle the dungeon itself and what comes after in the subsequent entries. First things first, let's fix some of the little clothing issues.

 

So about those glasses? Here's a weird one for you. They aren't Slot 32, they're slot 52 - the slot that SOS uses. We're going to change them to Slot 55, like Devious Devices blindfolds. That'll require changes to the ARMO, ARMA, and to the nif.

 

 

With the slot assignment corrected, the apprentice is now able to wear her glasses and her clothes at the same time. Much better. How about the navcuts? Let's start by isolating the records we want to work with in Lux Via so we don't have to load that whole huge mod in the CK. As you can see from ModMapper, the north bridge is entirely within a single grid square, so we'll just copy all the edits in that square to a working file.

 

 

In the CK I dropped collision boxes over the hanging planters and set their primitives to L_NAVCUT. You can see them here in xEdit, showing Collision Layer 49, which is the layer ID for navcut. These markers will effectively punch holes in the navmesh and prevent a situation where actors try to walk through the hanging plants to reach their destination.

 

 

 

NPCs now appear to be successfully pathing over the bridge instead of getting stuck on the hanging plants. With those issues solved, let's look at the landscape leading to Bleak Falls. The first thing was the landscape, and I found two mods that touch on that aspect. The first one is Northern Scenery, but the more I look at it the less I like it. Notably it plops down one of those big Sovngarde statues that I try to avoid overusing in the game world. While that one looks like a quality mod, I don't think it fits here. The other one is Unique Locations: Riverwood Forest. Aspects of this mod remind me a lot of the Oblivion mod series Unique Landscapes (which the author cites as an inspiration). However, I'm lukewarm about some of the changes it makes. I'll give this one a chance at least, but I'm pretty sure it will pose a lot of compatibility problems that will render it infeasible without a lot of tailoring. 

 

Note that this mod does have OEM patches for Lux and CC Fishing, so I won't be worrying about any clashes with those mods when I do my dry run. I'm almost certain it will clash with Riverwood Oaks, and I'll likely address that by removing all tree related records in any cell that the Oaks mod also touches. Consequently I won't worry too much about issues with the Oaks. 

 

 

OK, that's a pretty nice mod. However, it has some critical defects like the huge crater in the middle of Helgen, and it has a lot of little issues that will take a lot of time to fix. Some heavy-handed solutions will help, like removing all the edits south of the standing stones and addressing the trees by zone rather than individually, but for all its nice features one thing this mod doesn't do is fix the spot where the trail to Bleak Falls kind of gets lost a big short of the tree line. Between that, and possible compatibility issues with the related locations, I'm going to put this one on the back burner for now. I might revisit it considerably later, because I do like the mod.

 

When it comes to the two exterior locations - the tower and the outside part of the Barrow - there are basically two options: Snozz2004's mods and Ryn's mods. Normally Ryn is my go-to guy, but this time I kind of like Snozz' vision better. Let's try installing those ones first and see how they look.

 

  

OK, I'm actually quite happy with that pair of mods. If no problems show up during integration, I think we've got our exterior for Bleak Falls. Fortunately, integration went smoothly, mostly boiling down to some very lightweight patching of incidentals like clouds and forwarding a couple of USSEP edits. I'm always happy to see such a light conflict load.

 

 

After I committed those edits, I spent some time looking through the options for bandit overhauls. Unfortunately, most of the ones that I looked at either tried to add unwanted features, mess around with game balance, or may wide-ranging changes that would be a lot of work to integrate... and that's not even getting into the lore issues with certain mods like OBIS. Ironically, the classic combo of Deadly Wenches plus Nova iNPC seems like the best way to proceed, but that has the potential top open a pretty big can of worms. Big enough that I don't want to touch it unless I'm also going to be tackling one of my other Wench-mod-related projects, and I won't be doing that until at least I'm done with Hydragorgon. So we'll keep the bandits as they are for now.

 

I think that's where I'm going to call it for the night. When we come back, we'll delve into Bleak Falls itself and figure out how we want to mix up that classic dungeon!