Welcome back everyone! Last time we did a nice expansion of Bleak Falls Barrow, and while some of the mods I had hoped to incorporate didn't seem like good fits (the Dungeon Darkness mod for example). It was pleasing to find that Bleak Falls Revisited preserves all the vanilla coordinates, which is a really nice compatibility decision and something the author Cooleoj deserves praise for doing. 

 

Today we're going to leave Bleak Falls through the back door, walk through the mammoth graveyard, and head over to Anise's cabin (you can see it at the edge of the image blow in the bottom left corner of cell 0, -13). I don't know if there are a lot of opportunities to customize the mammoth graveyard, though I'll spin through ModMapper to see if there are any good options. There are several options for Anise's cabin as well as a couple of side quests, so that's good. 

 

 

The bulk of the mammoth graveyard is in -4, -13 as well as the surrounding cells, and ModMapper says there are about 600 mods that edit the area. Most of these are probably environmental mods - especially mountain overhauls - but with some filtering we can try to narrow it down to more relevant items.

 

Interestingly, Become Jarl of Ivarstead does something with that cell, but I won't be following up on that one here. Not because it's a bad mod, but because it touches a lot of things and breaks some of my content rules (notably, it adds lots of treasure items but doesn't have LOTD support, adds lots of NPCs in the exterior world, and doesn't naturally flow with a game where the player doesn't immediately start the main quest). I also noticed this old mod (from 2012!) does something with that cell, but as cute as the mod is, it's not a good fit for this build and given how old it is I imagine it would require a ton of cleanup. Not much else jumped out at me. Rigmor touches the zone, but I'm only going to add those mods if and when they get Hall of Forgotten support (which in turn won't happen until the trilogy gets completed by the author) as does Helgen Reborn, which I already have installed. 

 

So without anything to do in the mammoth graveyard, let's turn our attention to Anise's Cabin. First up is the house itself. There are basically three mods I considered for this: HS's version, Ryn's version, and an interesting one by MaximusTheWizard. Aesthetically, I prefer the Maximus one the most. It's garden layout is the most appealing to my eyes and I like the raised foundation, but it does also overhaul the interior, which means that it probably makes The True Face of Anise and/or DMT's interior overhaul impractical. However, I had already kick of soft-written-off those two mods, so that's not a hard stop. Let's install that mod and see how it looks.

 

 

I appreciate that the mod contains a bunch of native patches, even if none of them apply to my particular setup. No errors or obvious dirty records in the mod, which is another good thing. The mod does have some conflicts in it (no big surprise) including landscape edits (also expected), so we need to look at those.

 

 

The tree conflicts in -1, -14 are versus Riverwood Oaks, and I just forwarded the records from Oaks to my conflict resolution patch. There are some small landscape conflicts with Updates.esm, so we'll need to take a walk around the cell perimeters to look for issues. The mod does revert a couple of USSEP bugfixes, which I won't patch out until I've tested the mod inside the game, but those are going to need attention if I decide to fully integrate the mod.

 

The navmesh conflict is competing with edits from the Bleak Falls Barrow exterior mod we installed last time, and that will require careful patching if we decide to integrate this one. Likewise, the interior is conflicting with Lux and with several treasure mods, so we'll need to check those.

 

 

The exterior looks good, and I didn't see any visible seams at the landscape edges. What about the interior? Lux lighting should work already because the top level cell data was patched previously, but I expect we'll have some issues with treasure placing.

 

 

The interior as well as the exit area both look good, though the exit has a floating tree that I'll need to disable. However, all the treasure in the basement seems to be missing which probably means it's now spawning outside the walls or something. We'll need to investigate this. At a high level however I'm happy with this mod and I'm going to start integration.

 

Going back to the landscape records, it appears that the author used Updates.esm as a starting point. Since there are no other conflicts, we can let this mod overwrite Updates, since we're expecting it to change what's in the vanilla game.

 

 

The top level cell data had already been patched to preserve the water flow information, and doesn't require further changes at this time.

 

 

 

The navmesh conflict boiled down to two problems. First, the bleak falls overhaul added one more triangle to a navmesh that wasn't really even involved with Anise's mod - it was an an adjoining cell. However, because of some navmesh changes in the cabin cell, some edge links changed. A little bit of tweaking resolved this problem.

 

 

The final interior issue was one of Anise's books - I had to forward an ownership faction from the USSEP. From there, we can move on to the interior. As we saw, the lighting and the interior looked fine, so our goal here is to identify the missing treasure. We'll do that by looking at which other mods edit the basement. The answer is:

 

• Legacy of the Dragonborn - places a gem and a strongbox
• Cheesemod - places cheese
• DX Armors All-in-one - places a book and a supply chest

 

I removed the supply chest (don't need cheat items) and then put the remaining items into a working file so I could move them around in the CK. Before I can do that, I also need to install the assets for the DX Necromancer set since otherwise the book may be invisible and impossible to interact with in the GUI.

 

 

Interesting... the structure of the old basement is still there in the cell. You can see some of the treasure floating in mid-air here. So we just need to take these items and move them to new positions. Below you can see the strongbox in its new position.

 

 

The cheese was a little trickier because its models are packed in a BSA file, which we need to manually add to the CK's ini files in order to load the assets.

 

 

Much better! Now we'll back-patch our changes from the working file into the custom patch for this build and verify everything looks right in the game. At this point we're also going to patch a couple of records where Lux baseform changes were getting reverted by this mod, and also disable the floating tree by the back entrance.

 

 

Perfect... and the cellar looks much better with the Lux lighting fully patched in. Next, let's customize Anise. We'll start by using the Sotteta Necromancer outfit on her - it makes sense, since the crafting manual is in her basement. 

 

 

Currently Anise has a custom appearance from ARIS, though her default outfit makes it kind of hard to tell. Let's see how this changes with the new outfit.

 

 

The face isn't bad, though I do kind of like her Project Cougar appearance a little better. Either way, we'll need to pay attention to her face textures, since her current facegen seems to have some mismatched diffuse textures going on. Let's give her the other face and then see what further edits are needed.

 

 

I went in and patched the diffuse map on her head but otherwise the Project Cougar mod only required standard conflict resolution with the previous output from EasyNPC. I didn't want to rerun Easy NPC right now because it requires a certain level of cleanup after running, which doesn't make sense for a single NPC.

 

 

That looks a little better, but the outfit doesn't quite look right. She's a Nord of course and the weather in Falkreath Hold is probably positively balmy to her, but the Sotteta outfit doesn't quite look right.

 

 

That's better. I'd like something that extends the pants just a little, but I don't want to give her the high heels from the set - I don't think it would look right with her idle animations. I guess this will have to do for now. Now the last question is, do we have any interactive content we can add? As I mentioned earlier, The True Face of Anise depends a lot on its own custom interior, and reading through the comments thread it seems like the mod isn't very well balanced. Anise does feature briefly in Rigmor, so if and when I integrate those mods she'll get a little more interaction with the player. The remaining option is Shadowman's very classy romance mod, which is fully voiced and seems to offer a path to access the basement without having to fight Anise. 

 

 

Right away we can see some potential problems. The first error is actually a conflict with the overhaul of her house and that'll be an easy one to fix - not actually a defect in this mod. The second one looks like it might be a cut feature and we'll verify that against the script before we proceed.

 

 

Anisehug is expecting a spell, but its been commented out of the script. For whatever reason this was never implemented in this mod and so we'll just remove this script property from the virtual machine record. 

 

 

To fix the door, I forwarded the version of the door from the housing overhaul, then applied the changes to the lock and ownership fields from the quest mod. The resulting hybrid record in my object references patch should work correctly. What about the rest of the mod?

 

 

Unsurprisingly, Anise's record needed some fine tuning. It's set up to make her less likely to get aggressive with the player and to remove some scripted effects she might inherit from a hostile NPC template that she uses for her spell list and other features.

 

There was one seemingly wild edit in the exterior world that I solved by forwarding the version of the object reference from the exterior overhaul mod. 

 

 

I'm not sure how I feel about this mod wiping out her vanilla dialogue quest. On one hand, this may be necessary for the mod to function properly, but I'm always a little skittish about ripping out features wholesale like this, especially if some other mod tried to hook into this dialogue tree (Rigmor might). This might require some further attention if and when I install Rigmor in the future.

 

 

There are just a couple of conflicts with the basement. I'm solving these the same way I did with the exterior one - forward the overhaul version as a start, then apply any functional changes needed for the mod to function.

 

Next let's give the mod a quick overview to make sure its not adding a ton of objects that might conflict with the overhaul mod. 

 

 

Outside it was just the door and the wild edit. Interior had a couple wild edits and a couple moved items. The one thing that needs a trigger is record #895, which is a new record that appears to be aligned with the original basement. Fortunately, its coordinates are the same as the vanilla SetStage Trigger (the red conflict on the screen shot just above 895) so we can copy over the revised coordinates.

 

 

Let's give this mod a quick test.

 

 

Her idle behavior seems to be working fine, so nothing got broken there.

 

 

The initial dialogue and seduction part of the quest is working right. 

 

 

I got to the basement OK but Anise ended up stuck in a wall. I'll need to look into this so she appears in the right place. I had to use the console to move her into an accessible location.

 

 

But once I moved her she was working fine. So far the mod has actually been pretty wholesome (even if it does involve some hanky-panky) and the dialogue tree introduces the player to core crafting concepts, which is really good for an NPC that's located in the path of the early main quest. 

 

This conversation completed the first part of her quest, and it seemed to be working well other than a couple of minor issues. Specifically, Anise getting stuck in a pillar and the kissing scene not animating properly. The answer to both will be in the scripts, so lets look at them.

 

 

These elements send animation events. Examination of the mod's mesh path reveals that it needs an FNIS update to properly display those animations. This wasn't mentioned in the mod's requirements but it was probably just an honest oversight. 

 

 

The teleport that happens when Anise lets you into the basement is targeted on an object reference that's defined in the script properties. Let's investigate.

 

 

So the target is that object reference we moved earlier. Looks like we need to adjust where it's placed. We'll move this into a working file and set the overhaul mod as a master for it, then load it up in the CK. After snooping around in the GUI, I realized that the problem was actually the pillar in the center of the room. The trigger box is a volume object and having a large non-playable item directly in the middle of it was interfering with the teleport functioning right (Anise was moving to the trigger box and the game just plopped her in the middle, despite the pillar).

 

I disable the pillar and the attached torch, which should fix the problem. Let's give the quest another spin.

 

 

Appreciating the view

 

 

Completed the first encounter.

 

 

Plowing the field, so to speak

 

 

She's athletic for her age.

 

 

Got into the basement without any mishaps this time. I think we've successfully integrated these mods!

 

I think that'll do it for today. Tomorrow, we'll visit Camilla and Lucan Valerius and give them - and their home - an overhaul. From there, if time permits, we'll start cleaning up the rest of Riverwood. See you then!