Dragons in my game are still having issues

[HornyNerdBird]

So awhile ago I mentioned that my dragons models aren't working properly. Basically all vanilla dragons are stuck as the default dragon skin. So a frost dragon still looks like the regular low tier dragon, it will have the stats, skills and level of the frost dragon but will look like the default dragon. However the dragons added with the dlcs like the Serpentine, Revered & Legendary Dragons still work fine a as well as the unique dragons like Paarthurnax, Alduin, Odahviing & Durnehviir.

I'm unsure about the Skeletal Dragon, but since it's a unqiue dragon I presume it's working fine.

I'm bringing this up here because I think it might be caused by one of the LL mods I have. I haven't gotten any mods from Nexus that alter the appearance of dragons, the only dragon related mods I have from Nexus is:

 

Dragons Use Thu'um,

Dragons Remain,

Intuitive Dragon Controls 

and Dragons Fall Down. 

 

None of which should be affecting their appearance. 

 

However on LL a few mods could be doing it, at first I thought it may be Animal SOS since that mod is outdated and could cause issues, but after disabling it I was still having the issue. I then maybe thought it was Creature Framework so I uninstalled & reinstalled that and still the issue persists. The only ones left that might be causing it are More Nasty Creatures or Animated Beast Cocks which worries me because uninstalling them could royally screw up my game even further.

I doubt it's Sex Lab Dragons or Horny Creatures Of Skyrim since I'm pretty sure they're just animation mods.

If anyone can help me please let me know, I've been trying to figure this out for two months now. 

[MadMansGun]

50 minutes ago, PhoenixFlyer324650 said:

Dragons Use Thu'um,

Dragons Remain,

Intuitive Dragon Controls 

and Dragons Fall Down. 

 

None of which should be affecting their appearance. 

wrong, if any of them edit the npc entrys at all and are loaded after mnc then they will undo the "wornarmor" edit that was done in mnc.

 

without this edit CF will just think the dragon is a basic one that is wearing clothing. (because that's basically what they are in the original game)

Edited September 9, 2023 by MadMansGun

[HornyNerdBird]

28 minutes ago, MadMansGun said:

wrong, if any of them edit the npc entrys at all and are loaded after mnc then they will undo the "wornarmor" edit that was done in mnc.

 

without this edit CF will just think the dragon is a basic one that is wearing clothing. (because that's basically what they are in the original game)

According to Vortex none of the dragon mods I have are conflicting with MNC or CF so I don't have the option to load them before MNC, I could try making them load before MNC & CF in the plugins section on Vortex. 

Edited September 9, 2023 by PhoenixFlyer324650

[MadMansGun]

esp conflicts do not show up in mod managers, you need xedit to see them.

[HornyNerdBird]

I actually managed to fix it by changing the plugin rules in Vortex, also that xedit concerns me, I installed that during my first time modding Skyrim & it broke the game. Everytime I loaded up the game after installing xedit it froze for about 10 minutes before I could play and the games framerate from then on plummeted and I was never able to fix it even after uninstalling xedit. It only got fixed after I had to replace my laptops OS & CPU. I don't feel comfortable installing xedit again. 

[belegost]

13 hours ago, PhoenixFlyer324650 said:

I actually managed to fix it by changing the plugin rules in Vortex, also that xedit concerns me, I installed that during my first time modding Skyrim & it broke the game. Everytime I loaded up the game after installing xedit it froze for about 10 minutes before I could play and the games framerate from then on plummeted and I was never able to fix it even after uninstalling xedit. It only got fixed after I had to replace my laptops OS & CPU. I don't feel comfortable installing xedit again. 

You don't install xEdit to game folder or via mod manager if that's what you've done. That's an external tool that has nothing to do with running the game itself. In a nutshell, it's a highly specialised spreadsheet editor that tackles Bethesda plugin files. Basically a MS Excel for .esp's.

Whatever issue you had with your PC, it was not because of xEdit.

Edited September 10, 2023 by belegost

[HornyNerdBird]

TLDR (But please look at the more detailed description I gave) Had a big issue with Vortex that seems to have broken some things. I'm having the issue where all base game non-unique dragons are stuck on the default skin again for some stupid reason, what I did to fix it last time doesn't work anymore. I'm trying to use XEdit (specifically the version made for Skyrim SE) but it's extremely confusing even though I'm looking at tutorials for it. So if anyone knows what's causing the issue let me know, otherwise what should I be doing on XEdit?

 

 

So unfortunately this issue has returned & I'm not 100% sure why, but I have an idea. About a week or two ago when I decided to play Skyrim after a break, when I opened Vortex to get my mods ready, Vortex told me that pretty much all my mods were changed externally asking me to either save the external changes (which would delete them) or revert the changes,. So basically & I've no idea why but Vortex apparently thought I deleted all the mods which I didn't do at all. So I clicked revert & had to wait about an hour for it to deploy. I imagine this whole situation broke some things. One of the things it seems to have broken is the dragons, as once again all base game non-unique dragons are stuck on the default dragon skin again, also I didn't point this out before because it wasn't something I really cared about, but the colour variations of the different dragon types also don't work. For instance the higher level variations of the regular dragon are meant to have different colours, which they don't for me, which isn't too big of an issue, it's just the fact that the different type of dragons look like the default dragon that I have a problem with. The dragons added by Chaos Dragons work fine. I even kind of figured out how to solve the issue I was having with Chaos Dragons where the visual changes that mod makes to named dragons like Mirmulnir weren't working. I have XEdit now (the one specifically for Skyrim SE) but I have no clue how to use it, it's extremely confusing to me, even after looking through the conflict help page online, the fact it uses different Bethesda games as examples doesn't help. I just want to see if I can find what's causing the issue. I can see if a mod is conflicting because of the colours, but I don't know how to check what specifically is conflicting with what or how to actually solve the conflict. So if someone can just outright explain to me what mods could be causing the issue let me know, but if you can't let me know what I need to do in XEdit to check and hopefully solve the issue.

Edited November 15, 2024 by PhoenixFlyer324650

[belegost]

33 minutes ago, PhoenixFlyer324650 said:

About a week or two ago when I decided to play Skyrim after a break, when I opened Vortex to get my mods ready, Vortex told me that pretty much all my mods were changed externally asking me to either save the external changes (which would delete them) or revert the changes,

 

That tells me that you most probably reinstalled Steam and/or copied all Skyrim files to a different location then copied them back. The files therefore had new timestamp date on them that was not consistent with what Vortex had in its staging folder and that's why it reported it. What you have now is the version of modded Skyrim from whenever last time you made a deployment. Should've kept the changes, not revert them. Nothing would change in the game directory and Vortex would probably just update staging folder with new timestamps and that's it.

 

If you had fixed the issue before, most likely whatever you had done last time would work again.

 

Just be aware that if you make changes directly in Skyrim directory, once you're done, have Vortex deploy manually and when prompted, select "keep changes" (assuming you knew what you were doing, made the changes consciously and want to keep them). Then the staging folder will be updated and will be consistent with game directory. This is not a bug, but feature of Vortex. You can treat it as a sort of return point. If you mess something up by editing game files directly, it can be reverted back on deployment, but only once and only if the mod in question was installed through Vortex. With manual installation or through other 3rd party programs, you're on your own.

Edited November 15, 2024 by belegost

[HornyNerdBird]

26 minutes ago, belegost said:

 

That tells me that you most probably reinstalled Steam and/or copied all Skyrim files to a different location then copied them back. The files therefore had new timestamp date on them that was not consistent with what Vortex had in its staging folder and that's why it reported it. What you have now is the version of modded Skyrim from whenever last time you made a deployment. Should've kept the changes, not revert them. Nothing would change in the game directory and Vortex would probably just update staging folder with new timestamps and that's it.

 

If you had fixed the issue before, most likely whatever you had done last time would work again.

 

Just be aware that if you make changes directly in Skyrim directory, once you're done, have Vortex deploy manually and when prompted, select "keep changes" (assuming you knew what you were doing, made the changes consciously and want to keep them). Then the staging folder will be updated and will be consistent with game directory. This is not a bug, but feature of Vortex. You can treat it as a sort of return point. If you mess something up by editing game files directly, it can be reverted back on deployment, but only once.

Yeah I did move them to a external storage drive I got. I made sure to immediately change the Vortex staging folder. But I did that a few months ago & resolved all the issues that caused quickly.

Before I had this issue happen with Vortex it was working fine, it's only after I took the break & opened Vortex again that is when the issue happened. The Vortex thing happened about a week ago. I played the game about 2 weeks prior to the Vortex issue & everything was fine, Vortex deployed properly, I even got a few new mods.

Edited November 15, 2024 by PhoenixFlyer324650

[belegost]

3 minutes ago, PhoenixFlyer324650 said:

Yeah I did move them to a external storage drive I got. I made sure to immediately change the Vortex staging folder. But I did that a few months ago.

Before I had this issue happen with Vortex it was working fine, it's only after I took the break & opened Vortex again that is when the issue happened. The Vortex thing happened about a week ago. I played the game about 2 weeks prior to the Vortex issue & everything was fine, Vortex deployed properly. 

 

Whatever you did you messed up one or the other, that's why Vortex acted up. Don't ever touch staging folder, unless you know what you're doing.

If you want to keep the files intact with original timestamps, use "move" instead of "copy". Move keeps original timestamps and everything. Copy creates new instances with different timestamps.

Edited November 15, 2024 by belegost

[HornyNerdBird]

23 minutes ago, belegost said:

 

Whatever you did you messed up one or the other, that's why Vortex acted up. Don't ever touch staging folder, unless you know what you're doing.

If you want to keep the files intact with original timestamps, use "move" instead of "copy". Move keeps original timestamps and everything. Copy creates new instances with different timestamps.

I did move them instead of copy. The only thing I can think of is, I must've accidentally disconnected the storage drive while Vortex was deploying or updating. But I like I said I made sure to select the revert option, so I thought that would've solved the any issues caused by the Vortex issue, but apparently not.