Nether's Frea

[Netherworks]

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Nether's Frea

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Nether's Frea
Complete Follower Overhaul
 

 

  A complete overhaul to Frea including new voiced dialogue, quest and location awareness, dynamic lines from player actions, npc interaction, combat enhancements, new abilities, non-combat bonuses, customized skin, sculpted face and more! A Frea overhaul like you've never seen before.

 


(Does not include armor assets. Armor is from Book of UUNP by Gamefever)

Requirements:

• SKSE64 (or SKSE for LE)
• SkyUI
• Dawnguard, Dragonborn and Hearthfires to be active
• XP32 Maximum Skeleton Special Extended (or equivalent for LE)
• UNP or CBBE-based body (vanilla body is not supported)
   

Update (1.0.1)

• You can choose High Poly Heads option for SSE or LE. Requires High Poly Head (https://vectorplexus.com/files/file/283-high-poly-head/). You need at least the loose files installed.
• Improved CBBE maps.
• There is now an option in the (optional) Installer that supports Vanilla Frea or Frea's re-imagining from Bijin Warmaidens.
• If you use one of these options it will use your installed body and install no textures or meshes from Nether's Frea appearance.
• These options do not require UNP or CBBE textures or XP32 Skeleton, specifically.
• The tradeoff is that it will require a patch .esp which is included (flagged ESL for SSE).
   

Installation:

• Universal FOMOD installer for LE or SSE.
• You must select your version of Skyrim in the installer.
• You can choose body style (smooth or toned normal maps), hair color (blonde, red or silver).
• You must also select your follower manager of choice. Supports NFF, AFT and Vanilla (EFF). If in doubt, pick Vanilla.
• Once you acquire Frea as a follower, use the MCM if you want to filter out Lewd or Flirty comments. May not be family suitable! Not a hard R-Rating but certainly not rated G.
   

Acquiring:

• Frea is found as per normal on Solsthiem through the Dragonborn questline. There are no direct changes to how this works. It should take around 30-40 minutes of game play to freely use her as a follower if you go directly to the Temple of Miraak.
• If you have already completed the Dragonborn questline, new features will be unlocked for Frea.
• The MCM is locked and mostly greyed out until you have returned with her to the Skaal village and freed her people from the wind stone.
   

Appearance:

• Frea uses either the UNP or CBBE body depending on what you have installed as your standard in-game female body type.
• Fair Skin Complexion and Sporty Sexy Maps were used along with Frecklemania for body and head textures, with tweaks. Installer allows choice of an atheletic body (or smooth body maps for milk drinkers).
• Face, eyebrow (Maeven2's Eyebrows) and eye textures (customized from nevenbridge81's Natural Eyes).
• Hair is from KS Hairdos, with tweaked texture maps. Blonde, Red and Silver colors are offered in the installer. Hair is breast bone weighted.
• All textures have mipmaps generated with quality compression.
   

Personality and Interaction:

• All custom lines generated using xVASynth tool for Skyrim, tweaked for sound quality and brightness. Most are hand-tweaked and very natural sounding.
• Relationship system that introduces new lines as she gets to know you better. Starts at Friendly and progresses to Interested and Enamored. At Enamored, can marry Frea. Each "level" is based on a point system. Just spending time gets you around 100 points a day. There are bonus points that can be awarded during combat (once per hour). Takes around 500 points, total, to get to enamored. Must be a follower to generate relationship.
• Marriage and vanilla hearthfire locations are supported. There are currently no adopted children lines and creation club homes (SSE) are not supported.
• Location aware: Comment lines trigger when entering a city/town exteriors, dungeon interiors, inn interiors and landmark interiors (guild locations, temples and similar).
• NPC aware: Mostly for annoying people so far. She will sometimes interact with Guards, Heimskyr, Olfina, Nazeem and Rolff.
• Quest aware: Comments that involve points along the main vanilla, companions, dark brotherhood and dawnguard questlines, thus far. There are also general fill-in comments and lines for other parts of the game.
• Player condition aware: Can comment when the player is sick, has lycanthropy or is a vampire (and stage of vampirism) and similar.
• Player action aware: Can comment when the player loots loose items in the world, loots bodies, loots treasure chests, collides with her and so on.
• Many general idles lines that can be said nearly anywhere. This includes commenting in dungeons, about the weather, about the player or a location, and similar.
• Expanded general lines such as seeing wonderous sight, feeling danger, healing her, casting spells on her, hellos, goodbyes and so on.
• Additional lines for common follower interaction, such as recruit, dismiss, trade, wait and follow.
• Frea's dragonborn-based lines are now only spoken once when conversing with the player, to reduce dialogue clutter.

 

Gameplay - Combat:

• Frea has slightly improved Heath, Stamina and Magicka.
• Corrections to Skills for heavy armor and using weapon in each hand. (similar to Unofficial Patch) with customized Combat Style with dual weapon ability.
• Elemental Strike Ability (perk) adds a chance to cause frost, fire or shock damage when attacking with a one handed weapon (works in each hand). Adds bonus damage to attacks that can be resisted. Elemental damage does a base 4 points and scales by 2 points at level 15 and then by another 2 every 10 levels, with a max of 10 extra points (14 total).
• Frost Armor Ability (voiced) replaces armor spells and adds a scaling protection from physical damage by hardening Frea's skin like ice. Base of 32 protection that doubles at level 15, triples at level 30, x4 at level 45 and x5 at level 60. Works with or without worn armor. This ability is vocalized ("All-maker protect me").
• Storm Call Ability When outside, can strike foes with lightning bolts called from the sky. Does base 25 damge and scales up with level, like elemental strike. Voiced ability and lasts 45 seconds with 60 second cooldown. Frea will always attempt to lightning strike her current combat target and can switch targets if the AI wishes to. This ability is vocalized ("you face the storm", etc).
• Armor Efficiency (Perk) 25% Armor bonus if wearing Light or Heavy Armor. Can mix and match. Requires chest, hands and feet to be worn.
• Torches are disabled for Frea if she (and the player) are in combat. This is to promote her using 2 actual weapons in combat. They are returned once combat ends. Only works on vanilla torches.
   

Gameplay - General

• Skaal Resourcefulness (non-combat ability) Frea can assist when the player is tanning or smelting, sometimes producing extra crafted materials due to efficiency and technique (15% chance). Must be a follower. Frea will attempt to walk to the crafting area and assist or advise (just an extra visual touch).
• Simple Outfit System. You can change her default outfit into anything you want. Just talk to her about her outfit. Drop the items you want her to wear in the Custom Outfit side and she will change into that outfit. You can restore her Skaal armor at any time. Be sure to remove any wearable items before creating a new outfit. Creating an "empty" outfit tells the system you've changed your mind and does not apply a change.
• Unlimited Storage System. Now she can pack mule her stuff and it's a safe place to put wearable items that you don't want the outfit system to accidentally affect.
• Home System. You can set her to live practically anywhere. Supports Day (6am to 2pm), Evening (2pm to 10pm) and Night (10pm to 6am) locations. When first used, all 3 time/locations are set to where Frea is currently standing. From there you can set different day, evening and night locations. You can also set her to sleep at day, evening or night. Removing locations will clear all locations and times so that you can start over. Any entry that shows "Tamriel" means that the location is not defined in game, so this is a catch-all word.
• All gameplay dialogues end with "*" to distinguish them from vanilla and other modded dialogues.
   

Integration:

• NFF: If using Nether's Follower Framework, an exception is added concerning extra inventory and outfits, hiding those features to Frea by default. Outfit dialogue is not hidden if a NFF outfit slot is in use for her.
• Works fine with RDO and will automatically generate an NPC "exception" in RDO to allow Frea to function separately. In other words, works outside of it and is not affected by it.
   

Translations:

• French Translation by jihan02 is here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/49139/
  

MCM Control:

• Comprehensive MCM menu under "Nether's Frea".
• See status of relationship and what percent has completed.
• Set the ability to speak extra idles and/or location lines.
• Set frequency of idles and/or location lines. Note that these sliders are dynamic and you will need to lower the minimum values beforing lowering the maximum values (and the reverse). Only updates in game after the last idle time has passed.
• Can change percentage chance of idle/location lines spoken.
• Enable or Disable Humor, Flirty or Lewd lines. All lines are more or less "lore friendly". Flirty is suggestive but "cute", Lewd can cross the line a bit but is not outrightly vulgar. There are not very many Humor lines but they are there some are bad pun level.
• Can modify the chance of spell abilities. Setting any percents to 0% will disable that ability.
• Can hide or show Outfit, Storage and Home dialogues. Hiding does not affect the functionality.
• Can cause all vanilla dialogues to be "completed", hiding them from view.

 



Notice:

• I feel this version of Frea is 100% game-ready but there is a lot more to do in terms of adding more interaction and quest awareness and perhaps new quests in the future to go along with it.
• With no intent to scare off any LE players, while there is no mod page specifically for Legendary Edition, the installer for this mod does include an LE version and will attempt to auto-detect your version of Skyrim upon install. I do not play LE on a regular basis and this version is provided in the spirit of community, with no guarantees expressed or implied. That being said, it should work fine but I believe in being transparent regarding this.
• No ESL is provided for the main esp. The mod is too large for this to be done safely, particularly in regards to any changes that might occur in the future. There is also a new CELL present, which makes this prohibitive. If your load order is too full this time around, you can simply choose to use Frea in a different profile/deployment in Vortex/MO2 or in a future game.
   

Technical Bits:

• Frea still follows the game rules for vanilla Frea, in terms of acquiring her. Spoilers: You can only acquire Frea once you have initially discovered and gone through the temple of Miraak, then have visited the Skaal village, learned the word of power and freed at least the Skaal (this takes about 10 min in the temple, a couple to get to the village, then get the word of power, another 10-15 minutes). This is completing stage 70 of DLC2MQ03. This will unlock the MCM controls and allow relationship to build.
• At the point where you accompany Neloth, she will not use location lines in the dungeon as she will be constantly in a scene.
• There will be a point in the Dragonborn questline that you face Miraak and she will stay at the village. You will not have relationship built at this time, if it isn't maxxed already, because she needs to be a current follower. It is a fairly short time (30-45 minutes) to fully complete the main quest at this point.
• Location lines "next idle" values are stored separately per type (Inn, City, Dangerous area, Landmark). Generized idles are conditionalized so you can get additional comments when outside in wilderness, in an inn, in dungeons and so on.
• No idles will occur if the player is sneaking, at far distance, or in furniture (including crafting, siting, sleeping).
• Idles are designed to attempt to not be spoken while other followers are speaking, where possible. This does not always detect fast enough, so there will be times (especially with chatty followers) that this is unavoidable. Most idles are randomized slightly as to when they start.
• Skaal Resourcefulness Where the player can make stacks of items, the percent chance is multiplied and every 100% represented will guarantee a bonus material. For example: If the player can make 10 leather strips at once, 1 is a guaranteed bonus and there is a 50% chance of an additional 1 (15% chance x 10 items at once). This is done to keep the system light and to prevent scripting stack errors from processing too many calls.
• If you don't like the weather affected by Storm Call, you can turn that off in the MCM. Sometimes weather will not update until the player completely changes to a different location.
• Vanilla and hearthfire homes and marriage is supported. There are no extra children/homelife lines, nor is she particularly concerned about your adopted children. Creation Club extra homes are not really supported as it's niche and beyond the core support of this mod.
   

Future Goals:

 

• The aim of the "Nether's" series of follower mods is to flesh out existing game characters and to make them into what they could have been.
• It takes time to really produce what I feel are believable lines that Frea would say and I have to be in the proper headspace to do it. I don't want lines to sound insincere, repetitive or annoying, just to squirt out hundreds of additional lines. Thought it put into every sound byte in this package.
• There aren't a huge amount of flirty or lewd lines thus far. Trying to balance towards innuendo rather than being outright perverse. Marriage lines are very slim right now.
• I have plans to add interactions with other NPCs and followers as voice models improve for xVASynth. This must be balanced out property and not be game breaking or too complex.
• Certainly what is already on the table will be expanded.
• Possibly add interesting radiant or Skaal-related quests to Frea. Not looking to really overhaul too much outside of the follower but we will see.

Troubleshooting:
 

Support for Pandorable's Frea (and possibly similar overhauls):
If you are willing to deal with a loose file and can operate nifskope, you switch the head out of Pandorable's Frea's head.

• drop pandorable's head into "Data\Meshes\actors\character\FaceGenData\FaceGeom\dragonborn.esm" (or you can create a folder with this path structure, zip it up and make a patch mod for Vortex or MO2, etc).
• open the head in nifskope.
• go to the header tab, expand Strings.
• Change PAN_FreaHair to nwsFRHair.
• Change PAN_FreaHairline to nwsFRHairline.
• Change PAN_FreaHairline2 to nwsFRScalp.
• Save the file.
• You also want to make sure you have Pandorable's Frea textures installed.
• This will still be using my body textures but you can copy Pandorable's from "Textures\Pandorable\Frea" to "textures\actors\character\NWS_Frea". Anything that has the word "hand" and "body".
• This is a process but it's what I would do if I really wanted that specific head for Frea. If you are clever, you can path all of this into a zip file and install it as an override/priority after installing Nether's Frea.

Black/Blue or Face that doesn't look anything like the Promo shots:

• An NPC overhaul is deployed in lower load order than Nether's Frea. Make sure Nether's Frea is lower so that it "wins".

Head is missing or different hair is showing:

• You may have installed some kind of "wigs" mod that overhauls the armor to put hair in it and makes default NPCs bald to try to create some kind of wig or barber shop system. Make sure Nether's Frea is lower in load order than this kind of mod.

LE version:

• An LE version is included in the installer. The esp was generated by running it through the creation kit and saving out. LE version shouldn't have any issues as quests are not directly manipulated. Basically this is just a header change and I do not play LE except to provide light testing. There is zero chance I would re-create the entire mod in Creation Kit for LE, so this is the best I can offer in the spirit of community.

 

Testing:

• Big thanks to CKord for help with testing this and other followers.
• Thanks to several "prefer to be nameless" friends on Discord for testing support.
   

Resources/Tools Used:
SKVA Synth (xVA Synth) by DanRuta

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/44184
 

(from Skyrim LE version):

Maevan2's Eye Brows created by Maevan2, uploaded by Shiva182

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/98309
 

Natural Eyes by nevenbridge81

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/3589
 

Improved Eye Reflections and Cube Map (only cubemap) by fadingsignal

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/67447
 

Fair Skin Complexion by HHaleyy

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/51602
 

KS Hairdos by Kallies

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/68311
 

Frecklemania 2 by tetrodoxin

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/86208

 

PureSkinTexture by Anini n Regenbot03
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/73853/?

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• Submitter
  Netherworks
• Submitted
  07/06/2021
• Category
  Regular Mods
• Requires
  SKSE64, SkyUI
• Regular Edition Compatible
  Yes

 

[Neuroman]

Great mod, I think Marvelous Mirabelle is one of your mods, right? are you going to bring it too? Thank you

[Unknown DragonX]

Any chance of nether karliah coming back?

[pleasetryme]

am having trouble. i havnt been able to get her to follow me. i use nff have for a very long time. she refuses to come along with me at all, i have reinstalled and even got rid of my 2 followers they are not following. i literally just killed miraak and still only choices  get is pursuade her to come along or offer gold she totally refuses. 

[InsolentTedium]

Nether, do I need to wear an Amulet of Mara to bring up the marriage option with Frea? I'm at the point where she's making comments such as suggesting my Dovah and her run away together and get naked.

[Danek]

No no no ... how could you ?! I already have my Follower group, which has not changed for years: Vilja, Lydia, Toccata, Sofia and Serana. It's already a bit crowded now. I put your Frea into a game ... it's fantastic! How can I just leave her there and go without her ?!

 

Poor me ... ehh, it's hard for me to walk with a small army ... Often I can't even run to my opponents to hit them, my valkyries have already beaten him. It looks nice, but it's hard to level up your combat abilities ... I could use some mod to improve it ... or maybe I'll let go of the fight "let my Valkyries take care of it" ... Just what I'll do during the fight ... watched ... cheered ... played the drum to give them a rhythm (it would be interesting ... such a bard in 'Ordinator - Perks of Skyrim' I saw something like that ?).

 

Thanks for the mod ... it's great ?... now I have to think how to play with such a gang.

[Bullfye]

Man I have a weird issue with this installI follow the installer for SSE version no problems but in game she looks like this :

 

 

 

well I just tried the next two options one with Bijin Frea  the other with Pan Frea , both options add just the esl flaged  plugin to have the Menu and dialogue options of you version ...The result was the same purple Frea.. so there is something wrong with this installer , either is installing LE version on the SE option what is what I think you have done by mistake...

 

Or can be the folder structure that is not the same as the commands from the Plugin cause the way I see it its just missing textures and hair...

Edited August 17, 2021 by Bullfye

[Scroolose]

Another fantastic of your mods.  I'd love to see something similar with Vex ( who doesn't like our rude, slightly abrasive thief), though not sure how many voiced lined she has as "base".

[axz2]

There seems to be a conflict between this mod and "Shield Sisters Re-imagined".   I have this mod installed later in my MO2 load order and it overwrites facegendata/facetint/dragonborn.esm/00017934.dds and facegendata/facegeom/dragonborn.esm/000177934.nif.

 

So far the only symptom I've noticed (which might even be from some other conflict as it doesn't involve Frea) is a blackface bug for Aela.  Haven't noticed any other black faces in the game, but then I've haven't seen Frea yet in my test games.  I've only been in Falkreath, Whiterun, Riverwood, Ivarstead, Darkwater Crossing, all around Lake Ilinalta and mines, caves, forts and wilderness in-between. 

 

OK, the Aela issue probably has nothing to do with this mod.  Rather than just looking for what overwrites what in MO2, I tried SSEdit and show filters for conflicts with all the mods that I thought might be conflicting and found no conflict for Aela.  Only  for Ingjard and Frea, and those conflicts were things like armor (I would think whichever came last would win) and perks (either whichever  comes last wins or all perks are added not sure which).  But then I'm not exactly an expert with xEdit.    There still is the facegen overwrite but I imagine that is for Frea  and likely enough has nothing to do with Aela, wether Vanilla or "Shield Sister Reimagined" version.

[axz2]

I would imagine that this would be somewhat incompatible with Defy the Gardener.  Technically the two mods would both work, but Frea would probably refer to Storn's death even though he would still be alive.

[TotallyStephenHawking]

I tried running this with AFT, but once I recruit Frea, I can't enter dialogue with her again.