guide Skyrim AE for Beginners - V 3.1.0

[Aylis]

2 hours ago, MycoTao said:

Hey there ,  Nordic UI has an installer , I'm confised as to what or what not to select , anyone tell me what the rule of thumb is if such info is not mentioned  ?  thanks ! 

Unless I added some instructions, you can usually go with 'Pick what you like'.

[MycoTao]

36 minutes ago, Aylis said:

Unless I added some instructions, you can usually go with 'Pick what you like'.

 Alright , Thanks  Appreciated the reply ❤️

[Dez65]

On 3/29/2025 at 9:33 AM, hardcoremanuel said:

NGIO

Okay, I generated the grass cache.  I got all of the cgid files expected, made a "Grass Cache" mod and enabled it.  

 

I think now, though, that since I have Seasons of Skyrim in my load order, the correct thing to do is to generate "seasonal grass," using Grass Cache Helper NG.   

 

Not real clear on how to do that though.  I've read the Grass Cache Helper NG page descriptions and a bunch of the comments and I think the procedure is as follows:

 

1.  Open po3_SeasonsOfSkyrim.ini and set Season Type to winter (1) - rerun Precache Grass.   Rename the extension of each generated .cgid to .win.cgid;

2.  Edit po3_SeasonsOfSkyrim.ini and rune Precache Grass for each season and rename SPR|SUM|AUT|.

3.  Return the Season Type in po3_SeasonsOfSkyrim.ini 5 (Seasonal);

3.  Put all the renamed cgid files together in a Grass Cache mod.

 

The one thing I'm not sure of is if I need to first run non-seasonal cache without changing seasons.  In other words, is the first non-seasonal cache I generated necessary to generate the seasonal caches?

 

Thanks again for all of your help!

Edited March 30, 2025 by Dez65

[MycoTao]

World - Locations [Exterior Cities] , I've made it to this point and have missing masters for morthal.esp . The term cluster fuck comes to mind , its as clear as mud . Leaving this note to warn people about wasting 24 hours of thier life here .  If you want a crazy mod list to follow along with that won't leave you fustrated & disappointed serach Nolvus in google . This in a critique on the work here and not Aylis as a person , I've followed her guides many times over the past 6-8 years . Much love to her , but this monstrousity should be shot and buried . 

 

 

[_Warhawk_]

3 hours ago, MycoTao said:

World - Locations [Exterior Cities] , I've made it to this point and have missing masters for morthal.esp . The term cluster fuck comes to mind , its as clear as mud . Leaving this note to warn people about wasting 24 hours of thier life here .  If you want a crazy mod list to follow along with that won't leave you fustrated & disappointed serach Nolvus in google . This in a critique on the work here and not Aylis as a person , I've followed her guides many times over the past 6-8 years . Much love to her , but this monstrousity should be shot and buried . 

 

 

This sounds like user error and not something that Aylis did wrong. You can't come in here and say stuff like that with baseless claims like this. You either selected a patch for a mod you don't have, it comes later or you completely missed a mod. I know modding is difficult but you should check to see what mod that patch is coming from and see what it is requiring. You can go to the plugins section and look for any red icons. Modding is a a patient and time consuming process. I have ran through this list many times and never once saw a missing master for that specific plugin.

[SirusRobomage]

Continuing to work my way through the modding guide setup, and i'm finding that the leaves on the ground are full of these purple squares. I've been looking over the mods and I genuinely have no idea what the culprit here is. 

 

https://i.imgur.com/6See5jQ.png

 

Any ideas where I messed up?

[hardcoremanuel]

11 hours ago, Dez65 said:

Okay, I generated the grass cache.  I got all of the cgid files expected, made a "Grass Cache" mod and enabled it.  

 

I think now, though, that since I have Seasons of Skyrim in my load order, the correct thing to do is to generate "seasonal grass," using Grass Cache Helper NG.   

 

Not real clear on how to do that though.  I've read the Grass Cache Helper NG page descriptions and a bunch of the comments and I think the procedure is as follows:

 

1.  Open po3_SeasonsOfSkyrim.ini and set Season Type to winter (1) - rerun Precache Grass.   Rename the extension of each generated .cgid to .win.cgid;

2.  Edit po3_SeasonsOfSkyrim.ini and rune Precache Grass for each season and rename SPR|SUM|AUT|.

3.  Return the Season Type in po3_SeasonsOfSkyrim.ini 5 (Seasonal);

3.  Put all the renamed cgid files together in a Grass Cache mod.

 

The one thing I'm not sure of is if I need to first run non-seasonal cache without changing seasons.  In other words, is the first non-seasonal cache I generated necessary to generate the seasonal caches?

 

Thanks again for all of your help!

I can't help much with this one as I haven't used Seasons of Skyrim in a while and never with the Grass Cache.

I did find this Powershell script for renaming the .cgid files :  Grass Cache Seasonizer.

You will need something like that to automate renaming the files given the large number of .cgid files created.

[Dez65]

7 hours ago, hardcoremanuel said:

You will need something like that to automate renaming the files given the large number of .cgid files created

Thanks.  I saw that, but I'm not sure why I can't just use the ren command in DOS.

 

Just the cache for Winter has been running all night and has produced 8200 files so far.  And it's still running, since like 8:00 p.m. last now (now 6:16 a.m.). 

 

I knew it would take a long time but I didn't think this long.  Hope I didn't screw something up!

Edited March 31, 2025 by Dez65

[Aylis]

@MycoTao

User error. 

 

So many have used this guide over the years and nobody else saw this happening to them? That alone would make me recheck my downloads. And this one is easy to fix as you know exactly what is missing. Btw. this guide is partially based on Nolvus and others... I just improved on them and gave it my spin.

 

@Dez65

Four seasons means roughly four times as much time required for creating files.

[Dez65]

3 hours ago, Aylis said:

Four seasons means roughly four times as much time required for creating files.

Understood. 

 

Shizof also suggested creating a new profile and disabling all mods in that profile except "anything that modifies exteriors" meaning anything "that doesn't touch exterior terrain" before running precacche.  He said that running "grass precache on your regular mod list would take ages."   I was attempting to generate a "winter" cache with the entire modlist enabled, so that's probably why the program was still running after nearly 12 hours.

 

Shizof also recommended this guide, which has answered a bunch of my questions.  https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/articles/6920

 

Passing this all along here in case anyone is as much of a noob as I am, which seems unlikely.  

[Dez65]

I think I'm going buggy.  I have Seasonal Landscapes in my load order and I can see that I downloaded and installed it when I first starting working on this modlist but I can't find it in the list now.  Did that mod get replace by Floral Fields?  Can both be used together to generate the grass cache?  

 

 

[wollboi]

Imagine thinking Nolvus is easier to install than this mod list. It isn't, and it sure as fuck doesn't look better.

[trgdolors]

6 hours ago, Dez65 said:

I think I'm going buggy.  I have Seasonal Landscapes in my load order and I can see that I downloaded and installed it when I first starting working on this modlist but I can't find it in the list now.  Did that mod get replace by Floral Fields?  Can both be used together to generate the grass cache?  

I think Seasonal Landscapes (and Seasons of Skyrim SKSE) was removed a while ago. If you look in the guide in the group below Lighting, there is Seasons (Later™). The intention was to eventually bring the Seasons mods back.

[Dez65]

7 hours ago, trgdolors said:

was removed a while ago

Darn!  Don't know how it ended up in my load order.  

[Dez65]

I think I know what happened.  Freak's Floral FOMOD has a setting for Seasons, but Seasonal Landscapes is a prerequisite.  I must have though that I missed Seasonal Landscapes in the list somehow since I wanted to use Seasons, so I also installed Seasonal Landscapes.

 

Gonna keep it in my load order for now (while I figure out Seasonal Grass Cache) since apparently its supposed to work with Floral Fields.

[wollboi]

Freak's also got an update a while back that I just got around to installing a few days ago. Looks absolutely incredible.

[Tiemphyx]

Yet another Heretic?!  To the stake with him!  Bwahahahaha!

-----------------------------------------------------------------

Just a couple of FYI utility mods anyone here might benefit from:

 

FOMOD Plus - A mod installation overhaul for MO2  - Remember your FOMOD choices?  Requires running them again, but then it's one and done.

Skyrim Autocorrect - Dialogue Grammar Fixes  [requires: Dynamic Dialogue Replacer] - Particularly pleasant with some SL mods...give 'em a shot.

[SirusRobomage]

Ok so I found the solution to my problem. Apparently if you're not using ENB with Freaky's Floral Fixes you need Community Shaders, or else the grass/leaves textures don't work properly. Word to the wise.

[SirusRobomage]

@AylisI've run into what appears to be a missing instruction when building the load order, where Dremora Markynaz Armor is concerned.

 

The patches for it use the esp for DMA as a master, but the file defaults to giving you the ESL, which won't work as an appropriate master. If i'm mistaken, feel free to correct me, but I believe what you need to do is open up the mod in MO2, go to the Optional INIs tab, and use the arrows there to swap out the esl for the esp.

 

Something that, if true, should probably go into the instructions for the guide so people don't miss it.

[wollboi]

5 hours ago, SirusRobomage said:

@AylisI've run into what appears to be a missing instruction when building the load order, where Dremora Markynaz Armor is concerned.

 

The patches for it use the esp for DMA as a master, but the file defaults to giving you the ESL, which won't work as an appropriate master. If i'm mistaken, feel free to correct me, but I believe what you need to do is open up the mod in MO2, go to the Optional INIs tab, and use the arrows there to swap out the esl for the esp.

 

Something that, if true, should probably go into the instructions for the guide so people don't miss it.

You don't need to do that. I hit that problem too. One of the downloads provides an esp, the other an esl. Or maybe it's a FOMOD choice, but you can definitely get an esp plugin.

[trgdolors]

16 hours ago, wollboi said:

Freak's also got an update a while back that I just got around to installing a few days ago. Looks absolutely incredible.

Some user on Reddit a while back did an amazing comparison of grass mods.

 

Comparison of 20 different grass mods in 6 regions

 

One takeaway was that Freak's was arguably the prettiest, but very heavy performance-wise. I am still on Folkvangr myself.

[Dez65]

Hi!  I have the swimming animations from the list installed as well as the recommended No More Swimming In Air - Fixed Floating SwimIdle bug fix.  

 

Sometimes,  as soon as the PC steps into shallow water (that is, before it's deep enough to swim) she will immediately go into the swimming animation.  A hard restart sometimes fixes the problem.  Other times, I can fix it by disabling the No More Swimming in Air fix.  Still, the bug eventually re-occurs.  

 

Any clues as to what I'm doing wrong?

 

Thanks!

[Dez65]

On 3/31/2025 at 1:50 PM, Dez65 said:

Four seasons means roughly four times as much time required for creating files.

Wanted to report back on generating grass for four seasons.  Per instructions from Shizof, I pared down my modlist in a separate profile to just the grass mods and anything else directly touching the landscape.  I was able to generate caches for the four seasons in about three hours including the renaming with Grass Cache Seasonizer, recommended by hardcoremanuel.  

 

Results look great so far!  Yay!  On to Dyndolod!

[remodel]

Ok, I never figured out what was up with my DynDOLOD errors while trying to play the game and then fix.  After a couple of day's trying, I gave up and just went without it.  Game looks good but not as good with the DynDOLOD; and most importantly I'm not getting those mysterious crashes every few minutes. 

 

The Evanora PC Head tracking voice pack broke after I got to Whiterun.  Checked on the mod page posts and others are having the same Issue I had, just sopped after a while of playing.  Replaced with Ciri's voice packs.  Still tweaking the load order for those but by and large pleased with Ciri so it's beginning to work better and better.

 

Got rid of "Read the room" mod.  I liked it (actually I thought it was great) but it was causing issues with Papyrus getting over loaded with sexlab mods poling in addition.  Made things unstable and induced a couple of crashes. The Sexlab mods were more important to me.

 

On a secondary note: what's up with SLEN.  Won't let Orgies happen no matter my selections.  When I have only 1 follower I get clearing an area and morning surprise; I bet with one follower, dragon deaths would work too.  What's broken?  I saw wollboi's post on the SLEN support page, so I guess I'm not the only one.  Does anybody know?

[xxxstupidfastxxx]

Finished a 1-40 playthrough with this guide and it was incredibly stable for a modlist of around 1900 mods. Did run into a random CTD about once every few hours. Really did seem random (no time/NPC/cell in common). Log decoder seems to think its linked to Occlusion.esp though I believe that is just due to it overriding long chains of ESPs. Other thing could be large amounts of NPCs with physics enabled being a main cause (mostly happened in cities or outdoor cells with a LOT of NPCS).

 

Working through the following small issues then trying out a magic playthrough:

• Fill Her Up caused lots of issues with its deflation animation. This appears to be because it is "storing" items into a common container then restoring them from that common container. This means that for lots of NPCs doing the deflation animations, they all start having all the items in that shared container which on a long term save file causes some CTD issues (due to equiping random items) and really annoying issues like NPCs/follower equiping random gear from other NPCs. Solution is just disabling the animation which kinda sucks
   
• Experience/gameplay balancing. Experience caused levels to go extremely rapidly in the beginning  (making the game really difficult) and then slow at the end (making it extremely easy). Need to tweak its settings to balance this (drop location clearing and discovery to 1exp). Enchant/smith/alchemy in any combo breaks the game still, need to balance new armors added in and play with a rule that disallows item upgrades after a certain point which is unfortunate
   
• Looking for a decent mod that does what aroused creatures does for creatures but with NPC->NPC. Also looking for a better prostitution mod, as Radiant prostitution caused problems and Simple prostitution was functional but only rewarded 1-5 coins and had a 90% rejection rate despite the settings, making it kinda suck
   
• Make sure to update to the latest P+ if you have any SL issues. Its found on their discord below and it fixed a bunch of creature related CTDs and made all SL quite stable. Estrus is currently broken for me though and the latest release doesn't have animation modification in game.
  https://discord.com/invite/mycaxFPSeV/

Currently typing up two addon guides for this one. The first being setting up MCO/Dodge frameworks to work along side this guide. I got both working and playtested through that playthrough, really helps with combat being stale. The second is my companion list, which is extensive. Last playthrough I essentially did a Pokemon style list were I collected ~120 companions from nexus with the rule of needing to do a quest/clear a dungeon with each individually before assigning them to a house. Keeps the followers fresh and I'm parring that list down to a more reasonable number after finding the ones with texture/CTD issues or ones that just didnt look good with this guide. Posting install list, links and notes for all soon. 90% will be ESL and 3BA compatible with the focus on a wide range of looks, styles, and locations.

Edited April 2, 2025 by xxxstupidfastxxx