Hi folks, and welcome back. I've had a couple different factors conspiring to keep me away from this blog - notably my discovery of a dev version of MO2 that can properly run modded Starfield and the fact that I broke a tooth last Friday, which has left me a little less focused on hobby stuff than usual.

 

Yesterday on the Nexus I noticed a nice looking mod that I'm interested in incorporating into my game world. This will be a bit of a departure from the Whiterun area, but I think it will be a nice opportunity to stretch my character's legs. Soljund's Sinkhole has always had a special place in my Skyrim experience because it was the first town (and dungeon) I visited long, long ago in my first build to use an ENB. In addition to the town overhaul, we'll be installing the Lawbringer patch and, by extension, Lawbringer itself. 

 

So... Lawbringer first. Right away, I see something I like - you can pick and choose which core modules the new version supports, which means that if something doesn't want to cooperate I should be able to just remove Lawbringer support from that location rather than have to fight extensively with the mod.

 

 

 

Let's check these out first to make sure nothing problematic appears in the files.

 

 

We do have a lot of conflicts, but I suspect most of them will be pretty easy to patch out. In fact, most of it was, but we did have to do a little bit of xEdit ninjitsu to account for some modded changes. Here you can see that Cheesemod replaces the vanilla cheese at Stendarr's Beacon with a custom version. LCO adds an enable parent based on who controls the site. To make this work, I needed to transfer the enable parent from the LCO record to the Cheesemod record, and then patch the Cheesemod version of the original piece of cheese (which disables it) over the LCO one.

 

 

Most of the conflicting edits involved Lux stuff, so while I patched up the obvious conflicts I'll need to check Lux to confirm if it has a more comprehensive patch in its archive. There was indeed a patch for Lux Orbis, along with one for the Bleak Tower mod that we installed way back when we were working on Whiterun. With those installed, now let's get the Soljund's Sinkhole mod installed and then take a quick tour.

 

 

The new NPCs need to have their facegen patched, but the architecture looks good. 

 

 

A quick run through the dungeon showed that everything seemed to be in good order. I think we can declare the bones of the overhaul to be good, now we can look at fine tuning it. First, let's get the LCO patch installed and running. 

 

 

Immediately I can see there are landscape and object ref edits here that I wasn't really expecting, so we'll need to go back and examine the area to make sure nothing is screwed up. 

 

 

We also need to extend some faction membership to the new NPCs.

 

 

 

As soon as I get into the game I see this fuckery. Let's try moving the LCO patch ahead of the overhaul mod. The issue, by the way, turned out to be an unexpected landscape override coming from the LCO patch, so doing this switcheroo returned it to the correct data from the overhaul mod. 

 

 

Better. 

 

 

Groan. NOT BETTER. I just straight up deleted those objects, but I have a bad feeling there's going to be more of this shit. I may have to pull this mod and wait until there's an OEM patch, because I don't have the energy right now to go through and hand-patch every last little bit of it.

 

 

Removing those records got rid of the duplicate well. Now let's change the alignment a few different ways and see how it looks.

 

 

The Imperial version actually looks OK - a couple of slightly floating beds, but they are hidden in a tent. I'll need to go in and fix them eventually, since one of the tents is interfering with some actors moving around, but I'm no longer contemplating immediately uninstalling. 

 

 

Weirdly, he didn't actually arrest me. Also, I'm not sure why he even confronted me. Also, Perth (the quest NPC) is hiding inside his house and refusing to come out. I'm pretty sure this stuff is all linked to the LCO mod, which isn't even wholly working right anyway. OK, we're going to dump that mod for now. But it was fun to try.

 

I think that's it for today, but when I come back I need to finish cleaning up this location and, in particular, I need to patch up the NPCs. I might just do their facegen, but I'm kind of tempted to do some more in-depth work on them. I'll think on that before we return for the next session.