Hi folks, welcome back and happy Friday! Last time we took a couple of long walks through Skyrim and identified a lot of opportunities for improvement. To summarize in broad strokes:

 

• We should take a second look at the mod that delays the start of Bleak Falls Barrow, so that players aren't derailed from the alternate quest path where they start a civil war quest before proceeding with the main quest.
• We should do some further improvements on Whiterun. While a full overhaul would be out of scope for what we are doing here, we'll want to add some more colored roof tiles, consider customizing a few additional NPCs, and make Lydia a custom outfit. We should also review the mod options for Breezehome to see if we want to do anything with that location or leave it vanilla. 
• There are also some outlying locations we'll want to look at in Whiterun. Loreius Farm and Whitewatch Tower have several overhauls available, we'll want to put custom roof tiles on Battle-Born Farm (if I can get them to seamlessly replace the thatch roof), and we want to assess if the cannabis farm can be installed with a minimal amount of work.
• On the road to Ivarstead there are a couple of sites we want to look at customizing, notably including Valtheim Towers and a shrine of Dibella. I already did a couple of these locations, like the Ritual Stone during some hobby time that I didn't blog but there are several other items to look at.
• I want to overhaul Ivarstead and look at customizing some of the NPCs there. I also need to decide if I want to install Cocksmen Village on this build. That mod requires Sexlab Aroused so there's more thought involved than might appear since I've tried to avoid installing pervasive behavioral mods when I can avoid them.
• There are a couple of opportunities for work on the road from Ivarstead to Morthal, but not too many - I don't want to add a lot of POIs to the frozen area that much of the route winds through, which somewhat limits what mods I'll consider.
• Finally, I'll want to overhaul Morthal, the adjoining swamps, and the dungeon of Ustengrav.

 

Let's start by taking a second look at "Don't Rush Me: Bleak Falls Barrow." When I was evaluating this mod the first time, I viewed it as kind of a 'nice to have' that was not entirely in scope for my current project, and that might post some technical challenges. However, during the shakedown run I discovered a branch of dialogue that I hadn't really been aware of before where Hadvar (and I presume Ralof, too) steers you towards going to join a civil war faction after talking to Balgruuf. This recontextualizes the way the game rushes you into starting Bleak Falls Barrow, and I think now that the option to delay the quest is much more relevant to this project. So let's take a close look at this mod.

 

The mod itself is an ESL-flagged ESP file. In terms of assets, there is a single script conflict with the USSEP that we need to take a look at.

 

 

Comparing the scripts side by side we can see some structural differences. It's pretty clear that we also need to compare with the vanilla version of the quest though as I believe part of the changes are related to Don't Rush Me removing some of the functional elements that push forward into the next quest. The actual comparison provide a little tricky because all three versions of the script (vanilla, USSEP, and Don't Rush Me) all make changes to the order that the properties and fragments are listed in. I suspect that's the CK at work being silly. So let's manually put everything in order and then compare them again.

 

 

Now that we've conformed the fragments and props we can see that there are a lot fewer changes than we first thought. In the end there was only a single change I had to forward from the USSEP along with an added script prop (USSEP adds a check for an Imperial race related function that was getting applied to everyone previously). This is exactly the kind of bugfixing edit that I try to preserve when mods conflict with the USSPE so I recompiled the script and then moved forward to examining the plugin. 

 

 

No big surprises in the plugin file. I needed to merge some conditions on one AI package and also forward the USSEP edits to MQ103, but otherwise the records were unconflicted.

 

 

 

The remaining change was just some light polish - the mod as shipped implies that the player received a summons to see Balgruuf and continue the quest, but this isn't actually the case - the player initiates the next stage. So I made a small change to the player's dialogue to remove the implications of a summons.

 

 

OK, so that should ensure the delay on Bleak Falls Barrow is properly handled without losing any features from the USSEP. But we've still got some more work to do in Whiterun itself. During the shakedown, I identified six landmarks that I want to look at overhauling in Whiterun:

 

• The Gildergreen and its surrounding square
• The Temple of Kynareth
• House Battle-Born
• House Gray Mane
• The Drunken Huntsman
• Breezehome

 

At a minimum, several of these will be getting colored roof tiles. Beyond that, let's look to see if any of these have overhauls that improve the exterior. We won't be considering interior-only overhauls at this time.

 

For the Gildergreen itself, GIRTH stood out immediately as a good option. Combined with Arthmoor's old Gildergreen Regrown mod and the GIRTH Seasonal Landscapes patch, this should give the old tree a very nice overhaul. Initial installation went smoothly - I hid a few conflicting files from Illustrious Whiterun but otherwise didn't need any special handling on the assets side. In xEdit, I had to forward one script attachment from The Curator's Companion but otherwise I didn't need to do any significant patching. I didn't see any comprehensive edits to the rest of the little park around the tree - at least not ones that weren't tied up in full-city overhauls, but I did consider a couple of mesh improvements to make things look a little nicer. After screening their contents, it looked like Illustrious Whiterun was already providing similar content and included Lux patches, so I left those be. 

 

The usual suspects have overhauls for the Temple of Kynareth, but none of them appear to touch the exterior of the building. HS has nice overhauls of House Battle-Born and House Gray Mane that include exterior enhancements. JK has a similar overhaul for the Drunken Huntsman. Of course there are about a million Breezehome overhauls, but we're only really interested in ones that preserve the vanilla decoration/buildout mechanic. This on here looks like a potentially good fit. Let's go ahead and get these installed then make sure everything is working right. 

 

I started with Breezehome and its Lux patch. These mods had no asset issues, though I did note that the main mod wasn't compacted. This might just be a result of it having too many records, but let's check.

 

 

 

Nope, size isn't the problem. Let's crunch this down and flow the new form IDs into the patch as well. Otherwise the mod looked fine; I didn't see any obvious problems or conflicts in the file that needed special attention, so for now we'll leave it be and move on to the Drunken Huntsman. As with most JK mods, this one is well supported with patches and doesn't have any problematic asset conflicts. 

 

 

The Drunken Huntsman does appear to have some treasure items that we might need to manually move. Since we're probably overdue to check on the parts of the city we've already done, let's go into the game and check up on the treasure while also verifying everything looks right.

 

 

Breezehome interior looks good.

 

 

Exteriors look good, though there seems to be a cow stuck in the Huntsman's back deck. Form ID noted for further research.

 

 

Gildergreen looks good. Now let's check the interior of the Huntsman and in particular inspect the various treasures and collectibles.

 

 

Gem and LOTD notes seem to be OK.

 

 

No issues with Cheesemod.

 

 

The Sotetta Huntress materials satchel is intruding on some static objects, but that's kind of a cheat item so I'll likely disable it. Additionally, I needed to install a few assets to get the Huntress crafting manual to show up. It's kind of blocking other items and also getting perturbed by the shop owner's animations. I'm going to change it to replace the ruined book on the bar (the one on the left in the image below)

 

 

The paintings from Forgotten Art also show up in the right places once manually enabled through the console.

 

 

After disabling the vanilla ruined book, I pasted its coordinates onto the crafting manual. That should address its positioning.

 

 

The cow is an interesting case. It shouldn't be getting stuck where it landed, but many users have reported that happening. It may be an issue related to SkyTEST's modified AI, but I don't really want to screw around with that right now. Since nothing seems to depend on that cow, I'm just going to disable it. There are plenty more cows in the game, after all. Let's hop back one more time to verify that the book is in the right place before we do the remaining buildings.

 

 

There we go, now everything's accessible. Now let's install the two HS mods and their Lux patches.

 

 

Both mods are mostly clean but there is one potential problem - they overwrite the vanilla versions of the houses. This could be an issue for mods that reuse those models. We might have to do some surgery on those... we'll find out more once we're in xEdit. Before I could look at the houses in more detail, I had to do a little bit of patching because this mod was stripping the persistent flag from certain NPCs who spawn inside the houses. This isn't a defect per se - those actors aren't persistent in the vanilla game - but it would have caused issues with other mods that relied on making those characters persistent. Let's also do a quick sweep of the locations to look for treasure that might need adjustment.

 

 

Cheesemod revealed a conflict that I was able to preemptively fix just by swapping out an analogous object. The cheese situation in House Gray Mane is a little more nuanced and it might require CK work to resolve.

 

 

Both mods also have items from Forgotten Art that are probably no longer placed right. Let's investigate. Before we go inside, let's capture the form IDs for the two buildings themselves so we can look deeper into their baseforms.

 

 

The exteriors look really nice. I captured their form IDs for further review. 

 

 

The interiors look great, though as I suspected the Forgotten Art items will have to be manually repositioned. Also, I spotted another Sovngarde statue which I want to replace.

 

 

The cheesemod stuff in the second house is less of an issue - while there is some minor intrusion by the platter, the main thing I need to do is just disable those two rolls of paper. I noted their form IDs for action. 

 

 

I may have spoken too soon, when I turned collision back on the platter shifted and sent a bunch of stuff flying. I may need to shrink the platter a little in the CK to ensure it works. So it looks like I've got a few things to do. First, let's check out the building baseforms.

 

 

As I expected based on my experience with the Bannered Mare, Falskaar uses both models. This will break their geometry since the doors are not in the exact same place, so we need to make some changes here. We're going to create a unique version of each model and remap the Whiterun versions to those, while also moving the HS geometry into a different folder.

 

 

 

While we're at it, let's make and apply the texture sets for the colored roof tiles. We'll use the glazed red tiles for the Battle Born (the faded red will go on their farmhouse later) and gray tiles for the Gray Manes.

 

 

I'll also disable those rolls of paper and scale down the platter to 80%. Hopefully that'll be enough to prevent it from ejecting its contents.

 

 

The model redirects and texture sets are working right for the exteriors, and 80% was just right for the platter. Now for the hard part - we need to move the statics from Forgotten Art. We'll do this by creating a working file in xEdit and then making the actual moves in the CK's GUI.

 

 

After some quick repositioning and disabling a few unneeded clutter items, Forgotten Art seems to be all fixed up. Now we just need to clean the working file and push its changes into my main patch. The technical implications of Forgotten Art are kind of interesting. I haven't really delved into this quest much but it appears that as the player obtains the different treasure items, copies of them appear in relevant interior locations. I'll have to fiddle with this mod some more in the future and learn more about how it works.

 

I'm pretty confident everything will be OK with these locations, so before we go to check them let's finish adding colored roof tiles to the other locations we worked on. We'll do blue for Breezehome, green for the Temple of Kynareth, and dark green for the Drunken Huntsman. That'll just leave the "normal" red which we're saving for battle born farm, so if we want to do more tile customization we'll need to find more colors to work with.

 

I realized at this point that I was making a serious order-of-operations error. To do the rest of the roofs I needed to go into the game to harvest their form IDs, so I should do any remaining work that I can do without logging in first. That's the statue customization. So let's grab some alternate statues. There are signs of Stendarr and Kynareth worship in the houses, but we don't have to use those deities. For the Gray Manes, I'll probably use the wooden statue of Talos model since it should be credible as a smaller decoration. The Battle Born statue is in their bathing chamber, and Dibella would certainly be traditional. TRX's bad girl might also be a fun alternative, especially if I can line up the waterfall effect properly. On a similar note, I did consider TRX's Champion statue, but that one is reserved for the statue of the Champion of Cyrodiil in Bruma.

 

Let's see if we can get the TRX Bad Girl statue working. We'll start by opening up the plugin and examining it. As packaged, the mod shows signs of overengineering by the CK but that won't be an issue as we'll be removing most of these contents. 

 

 

The key thing is to capture the objects it uses in conjunction with the statue its effect. Below you can see we've tailored down the plugin to just list those items. 

 

 

Next we'll copy these object references along with the statue I want to replace to a working file. Sadly, once we're in the GUI it's pretty clear this model won't work without big changes and this is far enough off-scope that I'm not willing to commit that time to it right now.

 

 

Dibellan Holds has some fun models also but these are used in the Sisterhood of Dibella quest which might make it into this build. So we'll leave those ones alone for now.

 

 

I went on to check a few more options, but reluctantly I concluded I'd need to just leave the sovngarde statue in place. The dimensions of the statuary grotto were pretty unforgiving on most of the options I tried, and messing with the interior dimensions of the house is beyond my scope of work. So we'll just do the Talos statue and leave the bath be. 

 

We'll give the Talos statue model a distinct name, and also create a baseform for it. After that, we'll use it to replace the Ysgrammor statue.

 

 

 

Oh, come on, really?! They had to put a huge base on it? OK, I guess we won't be messing with that one either. Sigh. I'll save this Talos asset for some other use but I'm not going to waste my time fighting with it at the moment. OK, I guess we're going into the game to get those building form IDs now.

 

While the temple is in fact unique, the other two buildings are used by Falskaar. So we'll start out by seeing if the custom versions I downloaded are replacing the exterior geometry. If they are, I'll need to move those assets to separate folders and remap with custom baseforms. In fact, I'll probably make custom baseforms for all three just to future-proof. Then I'll make the texture sets.

 

 

The Huntsman doesn't use a custom house mesh - the porch must be an add-on with its own geometry. Same deal for Breezehome. So that saves some time. Let's make our alternate baseforms and then apply the texture sets. Then we can take a nice walk through town to make sure everything looks right.

 

 

Those tiles are not on the roof. Looks like the 3D Index must be off. Some further snooping around in NifSkope revealed some extra BSTriShape entries nested under a NiNode that I hadn't noticed, which threw off my count by a little bit. Let's try again.

 

 

OK, the buildings are starting to look a bit more distinct. The last order of business for the Whiterun worldspace right now are the NPCs the player is likely to observe. Amren and Saffir already have customized faces, but we should look at their outfits. Amren isn't a Skyrim native but his default outfit is very light hide armor that's more suitable for the naturally cold-resistant Nords or at least someone who grew up in Skyrim. Let's see if we can find a better outfit for him. Dragonstar Armory is interesting but too fancy for Amren. I thought that with a little fiddling, Kreiste's Storm Tempest armor might work, but once I got it opened up it wasn't what I was looking for. In the end I decided to compromise a little bit on using fancy armor and equipped him with Dwarven Mail from the Alternate Armors DLC. I didn't mess around with Saffir's outfit at all as it seemed like a good fit. For Lars and Braith, I decided it was time to load up Realistic RS Children. I know this will make some more work for me in the future since I'll need to fix broken facegen in some mods, but I think overall it'll make the game look better. 

 

RS Children wasn't too hard to get installed since I had used it on a previous build and had all the latest files lying around, but I did need to regenerate my Synthesis patch to ensure the right face data was getting merged with the AI Overhaul edits. One or two characters needed manual patching to forward mod-specific edits, but those were a small minority. I also had to hide the Fjotra facegen from both RS Children and the Realistic Children add-on so that the "Young Adult Fjotra" mod would take provide its facegen.

 

 

Let's take one last visit to the game and see how the revised characters look. 

 

 

Braith is missing some hair textures (its missing KS stuff that I can fill in easily enough) and Amren's boots look profoundly stupid on him - I'm going to give him his hide boots back. But in general everything looks pretty good.

 

I think that about wraps things up for today. When we return, we'll move outside the city walls and spend some time working on the outlying sites around the city. See you then!