So... the bad news is that I spent the last two weeks dealing with real life (including a broken tooth - ouch!) and so didn't make a lot of progress on modding. The good news is that most of that now seems to be behind me and I should have more time for hobby stuff at least in the short term.

 

I was flipping through some of the resources I had put together for future Fallout modding and got a bit of an urge to make some progress on that side of things - maybe complete one of the mods that I got permission to overhaul right before the big "next generation engine" update came out. Unfortunately, Buffout 4 is still being updated to the new version so my FO4 build isn't currently playable and I just don't feel like downgrading back to the old baseline. I've got plenty of other things to work on.

 

On the Starfield front, the mod situation seems to be stabilizing quickly (though it still requires a dev build of MO2 for it to run properly). I am starting to come up with a general idea of an adventure that might be fun to blog, but the NSFW scene for Starfield is still in its earliest days, and while I've encountered some concepts that might be fun to play with in Starfield (note that you probably need to translate this document if you can't read Japanese, but machine translation seemed to work pretty well when I used it), until foundational elements like good quality body replacers and animation resources are available it's kind of looking like that might be an SFW blog which I'd post on a different platform.

 

So that brings us back to Skyrim. When we last talked about Soljund's Sinkhole, we'd been running into some technical difficulties with porting a Celtic themed outfit replacer into the game. Since then, I spent a little bit of time consolidating a number of low-impact bug fixing mods that contained a lot of plugins and loose assets so that they weren't contributing to excessive load times. This didn't solve the load times overnight, but its a step in the right direction. I also developed a few ideas for fixing the commoner outfits - I'm not quite fully ready to give up on that resource I found - but those are going to wait for another day. In the end though, if it doesn't work out I have come up with a "plan B" option for the baseline appearance of rural Reach folk... so that's something at least. I also sketched out some ideas for Larza and Billiam, and I'm now gathering resources to use in realizing my idea.

 

Meanwhile, I want to spend a little time fine tuning the Lawbringer add-on for Soljund's Sinkhole. Currently it has four options: Reach (does very little), Empire (turns the mine into a Thalmor labor camp), Stormcloaks (adds a Stormcloak garrison but no other real shenanigans), and Forsworn (I haven't tested this thoroughly because of access conditions but it seems to add a bunch of Forsworn tribal decorations and stuff). What I'd like to do is expand these so they are similar in content density and also align with other resources we have available to us. I discussed incorporating this content with the Quaint Soljund's Sinkhole author and she indicated that her vision for any of the non-Reach scenarios would be, and I quote:

 

Quote

No more happy village, only suffering.

 

I think I can work with that. Basically what I've got in mind is:

 

• Reach Version: The exterior still only gets the one guard and no fortifications, but it also gains some Sacred Band warriors for additional protection. Similar to the Empire version, it would gain some prisoners working in the deep mine under the eye of Markarth guards. These will be Forsworn prisoners with the appropriate templates. I need to recreate my previous Sacred Band setup anyway for other purposes, so this is a good excuse to do so.
• Stormcloak Version: I'm not sure what I want to do with this yet. Maybe burn down the village and have the inhabitants become refugees in Markarth? Maybe just quarter Stormcloak soldiers in the homes and displace the original inhabitants? I need to think on this one further. 
• Empire Version: Perth has a shrine of Dibella in his house. I'm thinking that I'll change that to shrine of Talos and have him and his sister imprisoned by the Thalmor in this version. Exactly how I change it beyond that I need to think on further.
• Forsworn Version: Let's force-trigger this outcome and take a look at the changes it makes.

 

 

Outside it adds Forsworn guards and a few decorations. Like the Empire and Stormcloak versions, it adds some tents that might need to be moved slightly to line up properly with the landscape.

 

 

Inside the mine, there are a few Forsworn workers actually mining, as well as some guards and boss types. Forsworn decorations, too.

 

I'm kind of thinking that the approach here may be to replace the two Forsworn miners with Prynn and Midelle, forced to work in the mine, adjust the vanilla miners' packages so they sleep in the mine instead of going home at the end of their shift, and lock up Larze and Billiame in cages (perhaps some of the uncomfortable small ZAZ cages like the ones shown below). 

 

 

There might be some more options, but the ZAZ test cell always gives me motion sickness so I didn't delve too deep. Either way, I think I have a basic conceptual approach for the different scenarios. I need to do a little bit of research about the best way to accomplish these - especially in terms of altering the actors' behavior and packages. I think superficially the idea is to either add more conditions and then lock them up behind packages, OR to just straight up clone the actors and lock them up behind enable masters tied to the different scenarios. The latter should be a bit easier to execute in some respects, but it wouldn't be sensitive to alive/dead states without more work, leading to actors dying or resurrecting based on which scenario is chosen potentially. On the other hand, adding the extra package conditions shouldn't be too bad, but I might have some issues managing outfits. This warrants further research.

 

For today, let's actually hop over to Hydragorgon and customize the Sacred Band. I have a few things I want to do and that'll involve a few prerequisites.

 

1. Add a few more body types to the randomizer. The Sacred Band is fairly exposed, so having more variety is important for them.
2. Rebuild the outfit I created for last time.
3. Adjust their weapon selection for a more Markarth theme rather than the Imperial theme they have in the vanilla version.
4. Test against the existing instances of the Sacred Band, and if things look good then add Sacred Band to the Reach scenario (probably starting by cloning the Thalmor operatives from the Empire scenario).

 

For the first item, we're going to be looking for BHUNP V4 presets that lean towards athletic body types. After a little fishing I decided on:

 

• Dibella's Strength
• BHUNP V4 Custom Natural
• Artemis BHUNP (this contains 5 presets)

 

With those installed, next let's update the OBody configuration files to only pull from those choices when assigning bodies to the Sacred Band. Hydragorgon has them all share a specific faction, which we'll key in on.

 

 

That should take care of the overall body shape. What about the faces and hair? Hydragorgon certainly comes with some options already, but it's mostly just "vanilla plus" type quality, and I think Dibella's gorgeous defenders will benefit from some further prettying up. 

 

Deadly Wenches is kind of a timeless classic, and it's been stable for a long time which helps facilitate customizations and patching - no worries about it radically changing tomorrow. While this does add a few new NPCs to the game world (via its prerequisite, Immersive Wenches), in my experience it isn't enough to really contribute to NPC-driven performance degradation. Let's go install those two now, and give them a quick once-over for compatibility purposes.

 

I loaded them above my custom patch for Hydragorgon just to facilitate easy patching - I don't want to create a second layer of patching just for this change. Unlike my bespoke edits to the main hydragorgon file, this custom patch isn't being "stage managed" to reduce dependencies.

 

 

An asset scan already confirmed that IW isn't conflicting with anything outside its own ecosystem, now let's open these files in xEdit and make sure they aren't touching anything they shouldn't.

 

 

For Deadly Wenches I just needed to do some limited lightweight patching of the leveled NPC records. 

 

 

The core IW mod was almost exclusively top level cell data edits. This does mean that I need to keep an eye out for stray objects or confused NPC pathing when I overhaul interiors (taverns mostly) but that's a pretty standard "due diligence" requirement anyway.

 

 

With those records patched, now we need to decide how we want to integrate the DW faces into Hydragorgon. Let's start by finding the Sacred Band characters. Initially we'll work with them in a working file just to keep the clutter under control.

 

 

Here they are. They actually already obtained a template from my earlier efforts to push more diverse faces out to them, but now we're going to make them more distinct rather than just using bandit faces.

 

 

Next I copied the Imperial Soldier Deadly Wenches leveled list along with the "all humans" list and did some tweaking. Basically, I replaced excess Nords with unused Breton faces. Then I made that edited version into a new record for the Sacred Band.

 

 

I then injected it into each Sacred Band NPC and pushed those edits back to the main customization file.

 

 

We'll save both the customization patch and also the working file, since we're not quite done here. However, before we do more xEdit work let's pay a quick visit to Bodyslide. Just like last time, COCO's Goddess of War is going to be the foundation of our Sacred Band costume. The basic outfit for the Band will be the arm protectors, boots #1 (the tall version), the non-SMP version of the body harness, the gloves, the waist piece, and the SMP version of the ribbon. They will have the gold version of the armor (in keeping with their Markarth origins) and the blue-dyed leather for their outfit. This is going to be a bit of a divergence from the red I used last time, so we'll see how it looks... we might go back to red if the blue doesn't look good.

 

Whoops, just kidding, the blue textures don't appear to come in the vanilla download so I went with gold and black instead. In any event, now it's time to build the outfits. The Sacred Band has two different outfits: one for melee and one for archers. Both will be based on the notional outfit I first put together, with a couple of tweaks for customization.

 

 

 

I also went through the equipment for each NPC and made sure they had dwarven, rather than steel, weapons. After I pushed all those changes back to main Hydra patch, the last thing to do is assign SOS factions to these actors. That final edit went to my overall Actors patch because the SOS assets are down-load-order below my Hydra patch, but that's actually fine for a few different technical reasons (not the least of which being avoiding a situation where it overrides SOS MCM settings if I ever share this patch with someone else).

 

Last but not least, I need to run the NPC facegen patcher on Immersive Wenches and Deadly Wenches to fix any skin mismatches. This was mildly annoying because I had to extract the BSA files for patching (that took a while) but otherwise it went smoothly.

 

Now let's visit one of the shrines and see how the Sacred Band looks.

 

 

I saw this on the way there, and I guarantee you the problem is that Immersive Wenches is depending on a hair texture that's not installed. Let's fix that real quick before we jump back into the game.

 

 

Much better. Though as I look at this mod I do realize that I'll need to either install iNova NPC to balance the sex distribution on random characters, or I'll need to peel back some of the Deadly Wenches contributions. I suspect that most combatant leveled lists have a significant female skew that, while aesthetically pleasant, isn't very realistic of "immersive."

 

 

OK, so while for the most part things are OK, there are three deficiencies I'm noting:

 

1. The outfits are not consistently morphing, almost certainly a sign that the Goddess of War outfit isn't fully BHUNP V4 compatible and needs to have some of its parts updated for the V4 body.
2. The default body textures' painted-on hair is making he custom-added 3d meshes irrelevant. This may prove slightly tricky to work with since these characters have randomized baseforms, so I'll need to think about how I want to overcome that issue.
3. The feet are not rigged for Racemenu high heels, so I'll need to add the offset text files. 

 

On the other hand the faces and skin textures all look good, so at least we aren't running into any issues on that score. I need to do a little research into the best way to address issue #2 - it might just be to remove the SOS factions - before I proceed to work on fixing this stuff, but I guess we know what I'll be working on in my next session!