Hi folks, and happy Friday! Yesterday we took a bit of an unplanned deep dive into multi-mod compatibility as we integrated a small quest mod with a pretty significant location overhaul. Today, we're going to continue our journey back to Whiterun with a stop off in Riverwood. While we'll be customizing all the remaining areas in the zone during this trip (Riverwood really is that small - four houses, the store, and the tavern), the focus today is going to be on the Riverwood Trader and its inhabitants, Camilla and Lucan Valerius.

 

The first order of business is getting from Anise's cabin to Riverwood. One option, especially when exiting her basement through the back door that Maximus' overhaul adds, is to ford the river near the Guardian Stones. On a clear day, this route is pretty obvious from the exit and will see the player coming ashore near the fishing camp we briefly visited during one of our earlier blogs. The other option is to stay on the west side of the river and head north until the mountains naturally funnel the player down towards the Riverwood sawmill area. That's the route we're going to take today.

 

 

Of mild annoyance to me is the fact that the Riverwood Forest mod we looked a while back does a really good job making this path feel natural and organic. In fact, these tributaries and river features were the thing that drew me to the mod in the first place and I'm starting to feel like I should just really surgically punch out these sections and dump everything else. Let's see how hard that's going to be (spoiler: it may be harder than it seems at first because of landscape edits).

 

When I was taking these screen shots, I captured the form IDs for the two bridges, and what we're going to initially do is create a tailored file that only contains the cells of the bridges and the cells that connect them (to preserve the path). This might be a little tricky with Anise's cabin as I suspect it will mess with the foliage in her garden and the path, but I have a theory of how to address that.

 

 

Looking at ModMapper, it looks like we can capture these two features without directly touching the AnisesCabinExterior cell, though I'm still a little worried about seams or deformation where the cells join. Let's do a little experiment here. I'm going to forward all the vanilla edits from these cells and then copy the Riverwood Forest edits as new records so we can avoid making the original mod a master file for our working file. For now we won't mess around with trying to deconflict these areas against Riverwood Oaks - one thing at a time!

 

It's probably worth noting that there are additional tributary streams just south and north of Riverwood, but I'm probably going to omit those. The south one shares landscape records with Riverwood proper and will surely be competing with Flowering Riverwood when it comes to vegetation placement; the north one, while less intrusive, actually edits quite a few cells and while it looks lovely up close (it adds an island and some other details) it blocks the view of the river from the town in a way that I think is not consistent with the intended aesthetics of the location.

 

 

There's a pretty significant landscape seam here where 0, -13 meets 1, -13. This is because Riverwood Forests adds a building in this location (which I didn't copy to my working file) so the solution here will be to just go into the CK and smooth out the join. I say "just" but its still kind of a pin in the neck  Still, if that's the only problem then it'll be tolerable.

 

 

The waterfall east of the bridge looks fine. I'll need to take a quick dip to rule out underwater landscape seams but I think here the author preserved the general topology other than digging the trough of the waterfall.

 

 

The east side of the river, along with the river bed, looked OK on visual inspection. Let's now follow the path back to Anise's cabin.

 

 

The path looked good and it was navigable even though it got overgrown in a few places, thanks to well placed trail markers. Finally, we need to walk to wilderness perimeter to watch for any remaining landscape problems.

 

 

If found two floating oak trees that I'll need to patch out but otherwise the landscape looks OK. I just need to smooth out break near the cabin and remove some of the orphaned clutter there, and this should be OK - definitely within the scope of work that I'm comfortable tackling.

 

Let's load up the working file in the CK and head over to Tamriel 0, -12. I'm going to have to add Maximus' overhaul to Anise's Cabin to the master list for my working file to ensure the landscape joining matches that mod.

 

 

Here's the landscape break. Even as everything is loading in you can already see there are a bunch of collision boxes we'll need to deal with as well.

 

 

Some initial vertex flattening and junk removal.

 

 

Removed the rest of the junk and gap filled with some boulders.

 

 

Finished up with a little texture painting to blend out a landscape seam along the zone line. Now we'll go back into xEdit to clean the working file and conflict-resolve it against the rest of the build.

 

 

Conflict status wasn't too bad - there were the expected landscape edits along with some head-butting between Maximus' mod and this one, but those were expected and benign. I did have to forward a few disabled trees from Riverwood Oaks and of course I had to disable the two floaters as well. I do need to check behind Anise's cabin to make sure the edits in -1, -13 aren't interfering with her walk-out basement however. At this point we'll also add an ESL flag to my working file since there's no reason to keep it full size.

 

Fun side note, in the comments for my previous blog I mentioned how I was always learning new things about this game. Today I learned how to "grab" a ground texture for painting. If you are in landscape mode and control-right-click on a ground segment, the texture painting controls will switch to that specific texture. Very handy for getting rid of texture seams between cells.

 

 

Hmm, not quite done yet. I found a few more landscape seams that I need to join and flatten, along with a "dimple" that I just need to smooth out. Fortunately, those were pretty easy to square away, so now we've got a nice path from Anise's cabin down to the footbridge over the river. With that taken care of, now we can move on to the Riverwood Trader. 

 

The Valerius siblings' business has a bunch of options for overhauling it, but the HS Riverwood version caught my eye with its interesting shelf of candles over the counter. So let's try that one first. It has LOTD and Lux patches which we'll also need to install and we may need to manually move some other treasure items.

 

Initial review of the plugin went pretty smoothly - only minimal conflicts needing patching and no errors. 

 

 

The Lux patch is a little odd because while I know the point is to remove things from Lux that would cause problems (like occlusion planes, for example) it also removes some things that I'd expect a Lux user would want to keep - like improvements to some of the light emission characteristics. I had to pick through the conflicts on that one rather carefully and I patched out one of them that I felt didn't make sense. Let's see how it looks in the game.

 

One preemptive fix I did yesterday was to replace the model for Tundra Cotton. The old model had something wrong with its mesh lighting settings and it was causing the model to ignore shadows. Now the cotton plants don't appear to be radioactive.

 

 

The interior looks pretty good with just its OEM patches and the mild conflict resolution I did. If you look closely it seems that the ENB light from the potion cabinet is leaking a bit aginst the back wall, but I don't think there's much that I can do about that. You can also see here that the gemstone added by LOTD fits in fine even though the patch didn't change its position. This is a side effect of this mod preserving the general layout of the store, which is a nice compatibility choice. We do need to check on one cheese wheel that's added by cheesemod and a book from Bad Gremlin's collectibles mod, but I'm hopeful they'll work without any issues.

 

 

The book ended up on the floor, but it's basically a cheat item so I'll just disable its object reference. The cheese wheel is more or less in the right place so I'll leave it be.

 

In terms of character customization, both of these characters already have custom appearances from EasyNPC that I'm happy with. However, I'd like to fiddle with their outfits a little. Both of these characters are immigrants from Cyrodiil, and I think I'll try to adapt some of the Beyond Skyrim outfits for their use. I'll need to make custom bodyslides for them, but that shouldn't be too difficult. I want to try putting Lucan in Colovian Furs and Camilla in the blue Imperial Fine Clothes. I'm using these standalone versions instead of installing BS: Bruma because the amount of integration BSB would require is just overpowering... plus, as I've mentioned earlier I think, I'm most likely going to be using the Rigmor Trilogy once it finishes its release, and that series has its own take on Cyrodiil.

 

I pulled the plug on that particular project fairly early - once I was in Outfit Studio, I could see that these outfits would need a lot more work than just remapping them to the new reference body. So they can keep their current outfits. The next thing I tried was grabbing the HIMBO and BHUNP bodyslides for BS Bruma and taking a look at them, with the idea of making a custom outfit using those meshes.

 

 

This seems like a promising direction to go. At a minimum we can take care of Lucan, and I'm hopeful that CBBE -> BHUNP will be an easier conversion for Camilla than using the original models. Fortunately the texture paths are the same as on the standalone version so I don't have to go fishing in the BSB BSA for the time being. Also, it looks like even the mesh paths are the same, so we can actually use the standalone plugins for now instead of making custom outfits. That'll save a little more time.

 

 

Looking good! The next order of business is quests. Camilla already has several mod-added quests in this build, inherited from the 2023 version:

 

• A romance quest in Amorous Adventures
• A small interactive quest with some expanded behavior packages from Shadowman
• Her vanilla love triangle quest, including an enhancement to its dialogue structure from Sexlab Solutions

 

I didn't find any other candidates for adventures that specifically involve these two, though I did find a patch for Shadowman's quest that's intended to improve quest performance. Because it substantially changed virtual machine characteristics, I went ahead and back-loaded the edits directly into the parent mod rather than just letting the patch override. I still have the fix active in the assets pane of MO2 because it includes a new script, but I tagged the plugin as optional so it won't load into my mod stack.

 

Amorous Adventures' quest is basically a wrapped that adds to The Golden Claw and Camilla's vanilla love triangle quest, so it doesn't need much special attention, and Shadowman's quest basically just adds a package driven behavior where Camilla will bathe in the river and her creepy suitors try to watch her. How about the vanilla quest, though?

 

That quest, "A Lovely Letter," basically involved Sven and Faendal both trying to slander the other to win Camilla's attention. You can choose to favor one or the other (the one you chose becomes a potential follower and Faendal is an archery trainer) or you can exercise the Sexlab Solutions option to out them both for their schemes, in which case they both dislike you. So let's take a look at Sven and Faendal.

 

Faendal is a Bosmer archer and woodsman, and like almost all the talking characters in the game he already has a customized appearance from the 2023 build. His outfit looks fine, though considering that Sven thinks Camilla would find it credible to cast Faendal as an Elf supremacist, I think it might make sense if he opted to wear leather instead of cloth based clothing. The first thing I looked at was whether or not the "Bosmer" keyword along with filtering to armor and clothing would be a good idea, but what I got back was all armor and it was too fancy for a regular working guy like Faendal. 

 

 

There's a HIMBO patch for DX Druid outfit, but it's still too fancy for what I'm looking for (as well as too skimpy for a non-Nord character). At length I came across NordwarUA's Nordic Fur Armor, which almost worked, but I decided it was too heavy for a temperate zone, especially on someone who does heavy labor as part of his job. In the end I just gave him some vanilla fur armor instead of his vanilla clothing. HunterOutfit02 will work for what he needs, so we don't need to make a custom outfit, just update his NPC_ record sheet.

 

 

What about Sven? He's a Nord who works as a lumberjack by day, but who also works in the tavern as a bard. He's on the bard job faction and actually went to the Bard's college, so I'm half tempted to put him in Bard regalia, but I think that would look weird during his day job. Instead, let's just goose his existing outfit by adding the Bard's college amulet to him. Because we're using the AIO version of DX's mod collection, we need to start by "in-sourcing" the HIMBO meshes. We'll do that by copying the HIMBO model data into an override of the DXAIO arma records as well as creating a new version of the beast race AA hand parts in our armor patch. 

 

 

With that saved to the armor patch, we can disable the standalone DX Bard plugins and rely entirely on the AIO plugin for the actual outfit pieces. Next we'll build the outfits in Bodyslide and finally create Sven's custom outfit. With both of those guys fine-tuned, let's see how they look in the game.

 

 

Hmm, I'd been trying to get him to equip the full coverage version, but this is acceptable for someone who cuts wood for a living. I'll write it off as a happy accident and leave it unchanged. What about Sven? 

 

 

Perfect. So where will we most likely meet these clowns? Faendal works outside, but Sven is often in the tavern. As seems to often be the case, we have three options for the Sleeping Giant that aren't tied up in multi-location AIO overhauls or full reworks of Riverwood: JK, HS, and Maxi. Of the three, I prefer JK's take, and that'll be the first one I attempt to use. The mod itself was clean and it had patches available for most of my treasure mods, which was a nice added bonus. I only have to check five items to make sure they are accessible. On that topic, fun lesson learned: if I turn off clipping before I teleport to an object ref, there's no chance that I'll eject the item by bumping into it.

 

 

JK didn't mess around too much with the layout of the inn, so just about everything looks right. I'm pretty happy with this installation. The only thing that's left is to decide what (if anything) we want to do with Sven and Faendal's houses. Both have three options; Ryn, HS, and Lele. I like Ryn's take on Sven's house and HS for Faendal's. Lele's Faendal house was also one I seriously considered, but it didn't appear to have a Lux patch and the comments on its page made me question if the mod was going to play nice in a complex environment. 

 

Neither mod needed any error corrections or explicit additional patching, though I do need to check on one piece of cheese from Cheesemod For Everyone in Faendal's house. Let's take a look!

 

 

Looking good for the most part. Faendal's house has a cheesemod item on the floor and some landscape intrusion under his porch, which we'll want to do something about. For the cheese I just found another cheese wheel in the house, disabled it, and moved the cheesemod wheel to the exact same location.

 

 

 

The landscape will be a little trickier. First, let's see what mod is defining the landscape for Faendal's house. I'm expecting it to either by Flowering Riverwood or Seasonal Landscapes.

 

 

Well that's unexpected. It's update.esm! OK, let's make a copy of this record in a working file and then add flowering riverwood as a master. Then we'll load this up in the CK for its landscape editor. I just captured some ground texture and dragged it in a "T" shape down the path in the yard and then underneath the porch. Here's the result:

 

 

That'll work. I'll patch that into my game and call it a day. Now that we've finished up Riverwood, the next step in the adventure is to return to Whiterun and start "Dragon Rising." That'll take us through the fight at the western watchtower and then see our character sent off to meet with the Graybeards. There will probably be a bit of a delay between now and the next session because I'm going to have to take a character through the main quest up to where we're at so that the quest will start properly and activate the various scenes. That said, we're going to have all kinds of fun things to customize as we go forward!