Welcome back, everyone! Yesterday we did some work bugfixing as well as enhancing the mountain path that leads up to Bleak Falls Barrow. We also took a look at a nice environmental mod that would have been a great fit but just presented too much work to properly integrate - but who knows, maybe we'll give it a second look in the future?

 

Today, we're going to overhaul the interior of Bleak Falls Barrow and then look through it for opportunities to make smaller tweaks and improvements. We'll also go through the dungeon and make any adjustments we need for our 'treasure hunt' type mods to ensure nothing ends up inaccessible no-longer-logically placed.

 

I found three options for "big upgrades" to Bleak Falls, but only one of them seemed like a good fit for this project: Bleak Falls Revisited. I loaded it up and give it a quick review, and the mod was free of errors. It already had a Lux patch, which simplified working with it. I did run into one annoying little snag however - the latest version of xEdit doesn't have the ability to compact down mods to use the new extended ESL space, so even though this mod only has about 2700 records, I couldn't ESL flag it. Hopefully a future version will enable this so I can stop burning a load order space on this mod.

 

 

The extent of conflicts offered by this mod was quite low also, which was a nice development. I did have to make some small manual corrections to incorporate the Lux Embers patch with the new positional data from the Lux Bleak Falls patch, but hat wasn't especially onerous and only involved a small subset of the records.

 

 

Before we dive in further, let's take a closer look at which treasure-hunt mods are editing this location. We can see this by looking at the top level cell data. That's because any time a mod adds, disables, or moves an object reference in a cell, it also needs to include a copy of the top-level cell data record. This creates a conflict which will show up in xEdit as a column on the right side of the screen when viewing the TLCD.

 

• BleakFallsBarrow01 has edits from Legacy of the Dragonborn, Amulets of Skyrim, and Cheesemod for Everyone
• BleakFallsBarrow02 has edits from Legacy of the Dragonborn, Amulets of Skyrim, and Bad Gremlin's Collectibles

 

 

Let's take a look at what each of these mods does. We can do this by control-clicking on the column header, then scrolling down to see what actual changes were made.

 

 

LOTD, for example, just adds a painting for the player to find. I know from experience that it's rolled up on top of the bandit chest in the antechamber. I'm going to write down the Form ID numbers for each of these and then use player.moveto to check each of them for displacement.

 

 

 

Most of the items were exactly where they'd be in a vanilla game, which speaks well to the design of this overhaul mod. Two treasures from Amulets of Skyrim ended up slightly bumped out of position, but its possible what happened is that I bumped them myself when I teleported to their position. I'll check the furniture they're normally lying on to make sure they haven't moved.

 

 

The first altar is untouched, so that one was a teleport bump.

 

 

Same for the second one. So we don't need to do any patching for the treasure. This makes things much easier moving forward. 

 

Before we take a tour of the revised dungeon, there are a couple of to-do things already on our list. First, we'll update the spider mini-boss. This is a really simple mod with no conflicts or obvious issues, so installing it was a breeze.

 

 

 

Next, we want to try and find a better option for the desiccated corpses. As you probably recall, they had a weird low-detail brown texture that didn't look great. 

 

 

There weren't any obvious hits on this specific asset when I searched the nexus, so let's take a deeper look at these guys.

 

 

WebKitDinnerHuman, what a great name for that asset

 

 

Here we can see the texture folder that the victims' textures are located within. Both assets are currently coming from Ruins Clutter Improved. My initial searching pointed me to W.E.B.S. as an option. If we go with this one, we'll want it to win against Ruins Clutter, but lose to Solas Weather. However, Solas has a lower priority than RCI, so we'll need to hide the Solas files to prevent them from prevailing in the conflict.

 

 

That looks a lot better. The next thing on my punchlist is Arvel. Let's take a quick look at WARP and see how hard it would be to integrate. 

 

 

Never mind 🙄 Sorry Arvel, but I already decided I'm not using CRF and it's too late to back out of that decision. Before we go further, let's loop back and take a look at our options for improved potion bottles. 

 

 

This one looks nice, but it only covers a small subset of rare potions. But I think we might have a winner on the one featured below:

 

 

 

That looks good. The other 'basic treasure' thing on my punchlist is the coins in the containers. In the past I've had good results with Coins of Tamriel, but I think this time we're going to use C.O.I.N. It required a little bit of patching to avoid wiping out some edits to the loot tables from other mods, but the integration was smooth and painless.

 

 

With the coins in place, I took a walk through the whole dungeon and found that everything so far is looking pretty good.

 

 

That leaves me with three items from my punchlist:

 

• Bandit NPC enhancements of some sort?
• Dungeon darkness mod?
• Draugr improvements?

 

I'd already more or less concluded that for both Bandits and Draugr any NPC improvements are going to involve installing the Wenches series, which I'm not ready to tackle just yet. Ancient Nord Stalhrim is one that I want to integrate eventually, but we're still too early in the game for that one to be relevant. So for now I think that just leaves the darkness mod. Let's see how it looks in the game (using the Loremonger settings where Draugr maintain the lighting awaiting the return of their masters...)

 

 

Honestly, I don't see a big difference here, and what I did see was a very long processing time when I entered the dungeon, followed by my controls getting locked (I had to enable them with the console). That feels like way more trouble than it's worth, so I uninstalled the dungeon darkness mod. 

 

I think that takes us through to the end of Bleak Falls Barrow. When we come back, we'll work on the return trip from this quest, covering Anise's cottage and the elements of Riverwood we didn't cover on our previous visit. See you then!