guide Skyrim SE for Beginners - V 3.2.6 (3BBB / HDT-SMP / HPH)

[ascendentkunglao]

4 hours ago, ascendentkunglao said:

I really appreciate it @wollboi, that’s simple enough.  I hope it does the trick, this by far was the easiest and seemless modding guide, I’ve stumbled upon.

 Big thanks to @Aylis, and everyone who’s done anything involved. 

Random question when you guys say load order you mean the left or right side? lol. 

[ascendentkunglao]

How bad would LOOT really fuck up the plugins? 

[Aylis]

5 hours ago, wollboi said:

@Aylis Could we please get a Tips guide for Green and Lush Aspen Trees? Not sure exactly which to pick as there are a lot of options.

Will do when i get back from work 

26 minutes ago, ascendentkunglao said:

Random question when you guys say load order you mean the left or right side? lol. 

Right side

24 minutes ago, ascendentkunglao said:

How bad would LOOT really fuck up the plugins? 

So bad that you'd have to deactivate all mods and then manually reactivate them one by one again.

[ascendentkunglao]

Just now, Aylis said:

Will do when i get back from work 

Right side

So bad that you'd have to deactivate all mods and then manually reactivate them one by one again.

Thanks Aylis, I appreciate the help.  I did notice some mods plugins were not in the same exact order of install and it seemed weird. Should I move them around to reflect the install order you gave us,  or if I installed it in the order you gave us the plugins should've been in the right order from the original install besides the annotated patches and "yellow dot/plugin" warning and instructions?

[Varithina]

1 hour ago, ascendentkunglao said:

How bad would LOOT really fuck up the plugins? 

Not too sure what It is like now, but the last time I used loot it put the bash patch just under the esm in the load order, though that was around the end of v8 and the start of v9 of it, so quite some time back, as for this list pretty much stuff it completely I would guess, personally I have not used loot in ages.

[Aylis]

16 hours ago, wollboi said:

@Aylis Could we please get a Tips guide for Green and Lush Aspen Trees? Not sure exactly which to pick as there are a lot of options.

As promised, i added it just now.

10 hours ago, ascendentkunglao said:

I did notice some mods plugins were not in the same exact order of install and it seemed weird.

The list already takes that into consideration if you work your way down from the top. The only things that have to be moved are the ESM, ESL and the patches. The first two seem to be automatically moved when you create the merged patch (but i'd still check the order).

 

And now *yaaaawn* to my first real coffee today... (that abomination in the company doesn't count ?)

[wollboi]

@Aylis You rule, thanks much! And, yes, company coffee is universally garbage.

 

@ascendentkunglao Keep in mind that roughly speaking, you're getting the left and right column in order just by following the list. Activate the stuff at the top of the left column (the mods) and it will activate the plugins (the right) in basically the order you need to follow. Plugins you need to manually move around are listed in purple in the list. You need to move those per the list's instructions, and you also need to move any ESM plugins to the top (also per the instructions). It sounds more complicated than it is. I move anything in bold to the top as the plugin becomes active when I activate the mod.

 

Use Loot only to check for plugins that you might have missed, and even then use it only as a rough tool. It has a lot of false positiives. Just use it as a second set of eyes.

[wollboi]

Anybody tried out the newest release of DynDOLOD? I'm not able to get it to finish. Dies with errors trying to build the Falmer Valley area from Dawnguard.

[Aylis]

17 hours ago, wollboi said:

Anybody tried out the newest release of DynDOLOD? I'm not able to get it to finish. Dies with errors trying to build the Falmer Valley area from Dawnguard.

Which newest one?

 

<snip>

 

Hmmm, strange. Now we got two different version numbers for DynDOLOD (2.87) and the ressources (2.85). Afaik they should be the same.

[Guest]

Hey, guys! @Aylis

I have an answer or two:

 

Meet my character, Ember. Her labia is an odd colour (sounds weird to say) . Doesn't match my skin tone at all. What can I do about that? I use Bijinn skin texture.

 

[Aylis]

1 hour ago, bybee said:

Her labia is an odd colour (sounds weird to say) . Doesn't match my skin tone at all. What can I do about that?

You did check the entry '3BBB' in post #3, right?

_______________________________________________

 

Over the weekend, when i got more time, i'll recheck the new version of DynDOLOD.

[wollboi]

Got it redownloaded and will try to check it again tonight. Google says that the mod author says the error I'm seeing is usually because it ran out of memory, and that the solution is to run the x64 version of the application but that's already what I'm running (and always have). If this doesn't work I'll try it with the old version, which I know worked.

 

Edit - Finished this time. Maybe it really was a memory issue and I had some process running in the background. Which is weird, because my machine has 32G of memory. Maaaaaybe those new 8K tree textures were a bit presumptuous of me to download. But dey purdy.

[IdosheJungo]

Slightly confused about bodyslide...I thought it was only for if you wanted to make more bespoke changes to PC and NPC...but I'm starting to wonder if I should run it for everything, like for the changes to the guards armor for example.

 

If so....please tell me you can just batch run it hahahaha

[EvilCampinCow]

Hey Aylis, any reason Interesting NPC's isn't on the list, or if it WAS, why it was removed? I started going through the list, but 161 pages is a lot to dig through.

Thanks.

[Aylis]

17 hours ago, IdosheJungo said:

please tell me you can just batch run it

The option is there and i linked to a guide in post #6.

 

11 hours ago, EvilCampinCow said:

Hey Aylis, any reason Interesting NPC's isn't on the list, or if it WAS, why it was removed? I started going through the list, but 161 pages is a lot to dig through.

Never was...

1. Scripts. I'm actually trying to find ways to reduce the number of scripts that are running in the game.

2. ESP. It looks like that mod requires quite a few patches and additional mods. Another thing i want to reduce.

3. AI. With all the changes to the cities the AI starts to become a problem. NPC getting stuck in corners or sitting on invisible chairs isn't something i want to see...

[mknn]

47 minutes ago, Aylis said:

Never was...

1. Scripts. I'm actually trying to find ways to reduce the number of scripts that are running in the game.

2. ESP. It looks like that mod requires quite a few patches and additional mods. Another thing i want to reduce.

3. AI. With all the changes to the cities the AI starts to become a problem. NPC getting stuck in corners or sitting on invisible chairs isn't something i want to see...

Even in my limited overall experience, I will double down on these comments. I *love* me some NPCs, and they are, for me, the key to both immersion and narrative structure in the game. But Interesting NPCs seems to blossom out into its own mini-world of patches, adjustments, darkface bugs, etc. If the patches were all ESLs and the inter-relationship of different NPC modifications were easier to manage, it would be quite compelling.

 

That said, it's obviously run by a lot of people, so YMMV.

 

It's a little bit like the KS / Apachii hair discussion: if you really get joy from 1,000 hairstyles *and* it's worth it to you to chase down 2 sets of hairstyle patches for different things, yeah, you go, run 'em both ...

[wollboi]

@IdosheJungo I do. There are a ton of videos that will show you how to use it in 15 minutes.

[thirstydovahkiin]

I've been following this guide for a while, using Vortex as my mod manager.  It turns out that by default, though, Vortex auto-sorts mods using LOOT.  And the guide says in all-caps, "DO NOT USE LOOT."  How screwed am I?

 

Should I disable everything and re-enable them in order, after turning off the auto-sort?  Or could I get away with something more surgical, like using the dependencies and groups in Vortex to force a certain order?

 

Thanks so much, Aylis, for curating this list.

[mknn]

12 minutes ago, thirstydovahkiin said:

I've been following this guide for a while, using Vortex as my mod manager.  It turns out that by default, though, Vortex auto-sorts mods using LOOT.  And the guide says in all-caps, "DO NOT USE LOOT."  How screwed am I?

 

Should I disable everything and re-enable them in order, after turning off the auto-sort?  Or could I get away with something more surgical, like using the dependencies and groups in Vortex to force a certain order?

 

Thanks so much, Aylis, for curating this list.

I made a very serious run at doing this via Vortex. I gave up.

 

The only way to do it is to create your own custom groups in the PLUGINS tab (not the MODS tab) in Vortex, and micromanage it that way. Doing that forces Vortex to sort by PluginGroup and then by the LOOT order.

 

You can read my attempts over the past 5 pages or so--eventually, I gave up, installed MO2, and have been an instant convert. It's a better tool for this task.

 

One big warning: Your MO2 mod order will be changed from the pristine order of the list. ESMs and ESLs will drift to the top, followed by ESPs. But you can still move things around by hand. ALSO, beware of mods that activate more than one plugin. By default, MO2 seems to list them alphabetically, so if there are dependencies, you will have to move manually.

 

I do this by running WRYE and then running VIEW ... MOD CHECKER in WRYE. The bottom section will list any plugins that are out of order with their dependencies. There may be other ways to accomplish this, that's the easiest for me.

[wollboi]

@thirstydovahkiin The guide also says to use MO2. It's not designed with Vortex in mind, because it tries to automatically shuffle things like you're describing. I would start over using MO2. There is a way to export your mods out of Vortex, but you're going to have to rearrange everything anyway and starting over with MO2 is going to let you get a feel for using it. It sucks, and I had to do it a few years ago, but you need to get away from using Vortex.

[mknn]

28 minutes ago, wollboi said:

@thirstydovahkiin The guide also says to use MO2. It's not designed with Vortex in mind, because it tries to automatically shuffle things like you're describing. I would start over using MO2. There is a way to export your mods out of Vortex, but you're going to have to rearrange everything anyway and starting over with MO2 is going to let you get a feel for using it. It sucks, and I had to do it a few years ago, but you need to get away from using Vortex.

I chose to go with a totally fresh start--reinstalled Skyrim from scratch, etc. It led to an extra 2 days of downloading mods, but it allowed me to really treat MO2 like a total restart.

 

I like GamerPoet's videos for an overview, although I could see their style--meticulous, detailed--not working for everyone.

 

One trick is that most of the better videos I found were for older versions of MO, so the screens didn't look the same. The trickiest parts--for me--were learning how to install things like Wrye or zEdit to work with MO2 and learning how to use the Overwrite mod. I'm happy to help if I can, having gone through the Vortex -> MO2 transition just a couple weeks ago. Not an expert, but I can share what I do know ...

[thirstydovahkiin]

2 hours ago, mknn said:

I made a very serious run at doing this via Vortex. I gave up.

 

The only way to do it is to create your own custom groups in the PLUGINS tab (not the MODS tab) in Vortex, and micromanage it that way. Doing that forces Vortex to sort by PluginGroup and then by the LOOT order.

I did some reading up on how the groups work in Vortex, and apparently groups are a LOOT feature entirely.  And LOOT sometimes ignores groups for some pairs of mods if it feels like it?  My installation looks like it's completely ignoring the groups altogether when I try to sort things.

 

You can also manually specify one esp as being a dependent of another with the manage rules button, or by dragging the icon in the dependencies column from one to the other.  I might be able to salvage my load order that way.  I don't know if that would be more or less tedious than trying to manually set a specific load order.

 

After downloading MO2 and looking at the UI, I kept trying to come up with some argument to stay in Vortex other than the sunk cost fallacy, but at the moment I can't really come up with much.

[mknn]

1 hour ago, thirstydovahkiin said:

After downloading MO2 and looking at the UI, I kept trying to come up with some argument to stay in Vortex other than the sunk cost fallacy, but at the moment I can't really come up with much.

Yep. This was my conundrum, mixed with a healthy dollop of respect for what Vortex is trying to do. It's just not there yet.

 

Trying to manage the load order through Plugin Groups in Vortex ends up being a nightmare--some mods insist on self-categorizing, you can't control the order within the groups very effectively, etc.

 

The switch to MO2 was painless. A few important things for me

• Pay attention to how, when you click on a plugin (the right hand side), it highlights where in the load order on the left the corresponding mod is.
• Use separators. Not only does it help in limiting what you're trying to keep track of to a certain "section" of your load order, even though the implementation of right-click, send to separator is awkward (it should be a fly out menu, not a dialog box), it is very useful.
• If you are activating and deactivating mods regularly, remember that newly activated plugins will show up below your bashed patch, which is not what you want. There's a lot of activate, drag to the right spot activity.
• Remember that MO2 uses a virtual file system. It's funky at first--your instinct may want to go edit an ini file directly or whatever, but it's not the right thing to do. Do all of that through MO2.

Hope this is somewhat helpful.

[mknn]

@Aylis, add me to the list that can't get the Bethesda Rings on both hands mod to work. It's installed and active, but I can't find a way to move a ring to the other hand or assign a finger or equip a 2nd ring. Dunno if it's linked to pulling it down from Bethesda or the mod itself or user idiocy or what.

[Aylis]

*opens one eye*

 

@mknn

Rightclick on the ring...

 

*grumble... 04:00 in the morning...*

 

*Zzzzzzz...*