guide Skyrim AE for Beginners - V 2.0.0 (3BA / HDT-SMP / HPH)

[NismoMan]

I've just gotten to the NPCs section in my load order and... yeah things are messy, more so if people began to use their preferred NPC overhauls instead of the ones mentioned here in the guide. I'd recommend that people UNPACK the BSA's here, many overhauls kept overwriting each other regardless of mod priority because of loose facegens / head nifs / facetints overwriting BSA's lower than them. and that includes Cosmetic Vampire Overhaul.

 

it's either you unpack the BSA's or pack the Loose files, this would probably solve 95% of people's issues with mismatched faces / tints.

 

EDIT: If the conflict is minimal, just hide the offending meshes/textures from the mod with the loose files that are overwriting the BSA.

 

EDIT 2: If you want MO2 to show conflicts between BSA's and Loose files, you'll have to go into MO2's settings and check "Enable Archive Parsing" under the Workaround tab. Click OK and Refresh your MO2. Make sure you disable this when done reviewing your conflicts since it might cause your MO2 to become a bit laggy.

Edited December 30, 2022 by NismoMan

[alaunus01]

1 hour ago, NismoMan said:

[...]UNPACK the BSA[...]

 

NO!

I guarantee you the average schmock will end up with lots of additional quirks because he then has a metric frakton of loose files winning BSA conflicts. Not to mention the performance strain it will add to potatos.

Either use Synthesis or if that is too scary/complicated for you try EasyNPC. It does not get much easier than that. You can even get nitpicky with that one and fiddle around with the postbuild check option.

[jaeos]

1 hour ago, NismoMan said:

I've just gotten to the NPCs section in my load order and... yeah things are messy, more so if people began to use their preferred NPC overhauls instead of the ones mentioned here in the guide. I'd recommend that people UNPACK the BSA's here, many overhauls kept overwriting each other regardless of mod priority because of loose facegens / head nifs / facetints overwriting BSA's lower than them. and that includes Cosmetic Vampire Overhaul.

 

it's either you unpack the BSA's or pack the Loose files, this would probably solve 95% of people's issues with mismatched faces / tints.

 

EDIT: If the conflict is minimal, just hide the offending meshes/textures from the mod with the loose files that are overwriting the BSA.

 

EDIT 2: If you want MO2 to show conflicts between BSA's and Loose files, you'll have to go into MO2's settings and check "Enable Archive Parsing" under the Workaround tab. Click OK and Refresh your MO2. Make sure you disable this when done reviewing your conflicts since it might cause your MO2 to become a bit laggy.

Yeah... I think you forgot a word in the title.. beginners.. 

[NismoMan]

30 minutes ago, alaunus01 said:

 

NO!

I guarantee you the average schmock will end up with lots of additional quirks because he then has a metric frakton of loose files winning BSA conflicts. Not to mention the performance strain it will add to potatos.

Either use Synthesis or if that is too scary/complicated for you try EasyNPC. It does not get much easier than that. You can even get nitpicky with that one and fiddle around with the postbuild check option.

 

True, I haven't taken potatoes into consideration.

I usually repack the BSA once I remove what needs to be removed but figured many would simply gloss over this part anyways. Had some issues with Synthesis a while back and didn't consider it this time around and EasyNPC while awesome with what it does, all I personally had to do was to get rid of a couple of nifs that I know are causing me issues and didn't think of using it this time around.

 

I agree though, using EasyNPC would be a far more practical solution for people with many NPC overhauls and are picking and choosing between the hundreds of NPCs.

 

16 minutes ago, jaeos said:

Yeah... I think you forgot a word in the title.. beginners.. 

 

What are you on about, the unpacking? It's a matter of right-clicking the bsa under the Archive tab and choose extract. Flagging an esp as esl is more involved than that yet it's here in the guide.

[NismoMan]

ENB Particle Lights - Dwemer Lanterns seems to be unneeded. EDIT: PROBABLY... (to give myself room for deniability )

 

use this instead

 

SRP Markarth and Dwemer ruins Hotfix

 

Spoiler

 

Edited December 30, 2022 by NismoMan

[Aylis]

Happy new year - i wish you good luck in your endeavours and always good health.

 

 

[1001nights]

found a fix which I didn't know I need: Spazzing Skeleton and Corpse Fix. I always thought that's a vanilla bug like most of the people in the comment section of that mod.

[jaeos]

14 hours ago, 1001nights said:

found a fix which I didn't know I need: Spazzing Skeleton and Corpse Fix. I always thought that's a vanilla bug like most of the people in the comment section of that mod.

not a bug.. a Feature™️

[Aylis]

@All

 

Ran into some RL problems (my year is starting great ). Will be off for a while 'til i can fix that...

Edited January 2, 2023 by Aylis

[axz2]

5 hours ago, Aylis said:

@All

 

Ran into some RL problems (my year is starting great ). Will be off for a while 'til i can fix that...

 

Take care of yourself.   Hope everything works out OK.

[1001nights]

wish you all the best Aylis

11 hours ago, Aylis said:

@All

 

Ran into some RL problems (my year is starting great ). Will be off for a while 'til i can fix that...

 

[Aylis]

The troubles arn't over here. Waiting for the letter that will solve the issue.

_________________________________________________

 

Small info:

Inquisitor Armor is working great.

Traveling Mage Armor is good too.

 

The Tribal Hunter Armor could be an armor for Auri.

 

Alternate Perspective - Alternate Start seems to be a better solution than 'Alternate Start'. It starts the game before Alduin destroys Helgen (which works nicely with some other location mods in the guide). 

[CursedGor]

Hello,

 

I tried to mod my Skyrim SE/AE according to the mod list. First of all thank you for your work, much appreciated. The series of Lux mods however gives me a headache. For me they cause crashes both before the main menu and (after disabling some esps) when starting a new game.

 

Did anyone else experience this and might give me some pointers how to fix the issue? If it's not fixable, are ther alternatives to Lux?

 

Best regards

 

[Aylis]

@CursedGor

Make sure that the ESP for Lux arn't messed up. The main ESP have to be placed before the patches for other mods.

__________________________________________________

 

@All

 

Picho-ENB version N7.9 seems to be problematic (get CTD before the game fully loads). I recommend to use the older N7.8 instead.

Edited January 6, 2023 by Aylis

[CursedGor]

@Aylis Thanks for helping out ? Currently going through all esps that crash...their order seems to be in order ? I will disable them for now, so that the game at very least starts.

[wollboi]

@Aylis I'm running N7.9 okay. I was having the same issue you were but it was because I forgot about MO2's wonderful feature of renaming the mod installations whatever the hell it feels like when I was installing the new Great Cities Resources.

[Jessica_Degurechaff]

Hey there peeps long time no see, i had to move half the continent away and life has been crazy.
 

How you guys doing?

 

 

Also, before i start installing any mods:

 

 i guess 'Curation Club'  allows to choose and pick what "official mods" are active so they show up or not in game (the mod website its not clear enough).
But dont AE already comes with a lot of mods? can this mod activate/reactivate those?. never used CC before so this is why i ask

 

(literally just bought AE since i cleaned up my pc off everything and now use Win11)

[LogTM]

2 hours ago, Jessica_Degurechaff said:

Hey there peeps long time no see, i had to move half the continent away and life has been crazy.
 

How you guys doing?

 

 

Also, before i start installing any mods:

 

 i guess 'Curation Club'  allows to choose and pick what "official mods" are active so they show up or not in game (the mod website its not clear enough).
But dont AE already comes with a lot of mods? can this mod activate/reactivate those?. never used CC before so this is why i ask

 

(literally just bought AE since i cleaned up my pc off everything and now use Win11)

What Curation Club does is take each AE BA2 and ESP and moves it into its own mod folder inside of MO2 so you can pick and choose which CC content you want to use and disable to the ones you don't want to use without having to mess with deleting them from the install directory.

[Aylis]

@Jessica_Degurechaff

Thats why i recommend the mod. You have a choice if you want to use a CC once it is finished. Normally you don't.

__________________________________________________

 

Finding the right balance between 'too-alien' and 'too-human' is hard.

Spoiler

 

Inquisitor armor.

Spoiler

Now i need a rapier and a flintlock pistol to complete the outfit...

 

Travelling Mage

Spoiler

The lantern is in both cases from a different mod. Sadly there will be some clipping with both armors, but otherwise they are very good.

Edited January 7, 2023 by Aylis

[alaunus01]

12 hours ago, CursedGor said:

@Aylis Thanks for helping out ? Currently going through all esps that crash...their order seems to be in order ? I will disable them for now, so that the game at very least starts.

 

Quick refresher on how to narrow it down faster.

You take the 60?ish lux patches and disable half of them.
Game crashes -> disable half of the 30 you still had enabled

Game crashes -> disable half  of the 15 you still had enabled

Game does not crash -> reenable half of the ESPs you disabled in the previous step

 

You're welcome

[alaunus01]

16 hours ago, Aylis said:

[...]

Picho-ENB version N7.9 seems to be problematic (get CTD before the game fully loads). I recommend to use the older N7.8 instead.

I have no issues with 7.9 either.

---snip---

Some random thoughts from my Experience / Open World Loot playthrough. Level 20ish now on the great hunt for the moth priest, took a detour exploring/clearing stuff around markath, dragonspawns still disabled. Changing the leveling curve feels like the right call, probably will adjust the allowed trains per level to a much higher value than vanilla. daegon & vayne are ridiculously overpowered at those low levels ?
I pulled conditional expressions for NPCs too because (at least for me) even with the modified spid ini I found I still got enough CTDs on entering a new cell to be annoyed.

OWL 'seems' to do its job (remember only level 20ish yet) loot so far is appropiate to the levelrange promised.

Synthesis: Must have for Experience and OWL, The AOSISCSoundPatcher is 'nice', so is the BreakdownRecipeGenerator for a OCD packrat like me (recommend reducing the yield percentage in the settings down to 50% at the very least though). Turning static crates into lootable objects sounded fine on paper but I don't really want even MOAR stuff I need to open and look at ?
Stay away from the SynFixBOOKRecordTypes, not only does it bork all existing NOTE types into BOOK instead of 'fixing' it, it does so by changing the records in the SOURCE files. Unless you are a fan of redownloading the base game files and creation club stuff you painfully arranged into seperate mods manually, then go ahead ?

And while I writing this up I noticed GridTransitionCrashFix which might be exactly the reason why I had to pull conditional expressions for NPCs, hmmmmmmh

[Jessica_Degurechaff]

Its possible to get 2 radically diferent mod lists to work in the same Skyrim?

I mean that i like to keep around "epic" skyrim (basically an skyrim 2) and HentaiSimulatorSkyrim.   

But since both of those modlists use the same base i end up bloating a LOT of space for having 2 copies of the game + their mod list.

 

 

Once i tried to use Profiles but i did not work as i expected as (if i remember correctly) i had to manually turn off and on a few mods depending on what type of skyrim i was going to play and it led to messing up my saves and stuff (im not even sure if its called profiles.. i think so at least)

Do you have any way to get this to work? Or i just have to keep as i usually do.

 

I have not starting to mod anything yet, literally just installed AE as my pc is shiny new and im getting everything in place regarding windows.

[1001nights]

31 minutes ago, Jessica_Degurechaff said:

Its possible to get 2 radically diferent mod lists to work in the same Skyrim?

I mean that i like to keep around "epic" skyrim (basically an skyrim 2) and HentaiSimulatorSkyrim.   

But since both of those modlists use the same base i end up bloating a LOT of space for having 2 copies of the game + their mod list.

 

 

Once i tried to use Profiles but i did not work as i expected as (if i remember correctly) i had to manually turn off and on a few mods depending on what type of skyrim i was going to play and it led to messing up my saves and stuff (im not even sure if its called profiles.. i think so at least)

Do you have any way to get this to work? Or i just have to keep as i usually do.

 

I have not starting to mod anything yet, literally just installed AE as my pc is shiny new and im getting everything in place regarding windows.

you can make a portable instance of MO2 with a dummy skyrim installation and kezyma's Root Builder for MO2.

[SevenRedSuns]

In case Aylis hasn't seen, there's a DAR replacement in the works

[Aylis]

24 minutes ago, SevenRedSuns said:

In case Aylis hasn't seen, there's a DAR replacement in the works

Now i've seen it.

 

That will solve such a big problem! I've seen so many mods i'd love to include...