Try to make a comeback

[Storms of Superior]

Hey, folks! It's been years since I've tried to make Skyrim work, but I think I might try it again. The problem is that I'm so far out of the loop, I don't know what I'm doing, just like back in the day.

Is there anyone who can help get SSE up and running? I'm looking at armor/weapons mods, utility mods, weather/lighting mods (think CoT but not ENB), just all of the different things. What's fun to use these days, and what's the process for building a stable game with SSE?

[Varithina]

This maybe, it is a step by step guide on a full setup, but if you know what you are doing changing stuff by removing or adding is not too hard, though it is currently being updated, so even if you do intend to use it you may want to wait till it is fully updated.

 

 

Edited August 21, 2024 by Varithina

[libertyordeath]

Some quick tips from me, as someone who made his 2nd try a year ago:

 

1. GO SLOW. Do not install too many mods at a time. Start by installing all the SKSE-DLL dependencies, like engine fixes, papyrustweaks, papyrusextender, FISS, and so on. Plus USSEP. No actual "mods" yet. Play for a few hours to see if it works. Then add 1-3 mods at a time and play for hours. Yes, this means you will need over a hundred hours to complete your skyrim setup, and yes, you will occassionally need to start a new game, when you add mods that require a new game. BUT: You will never have a situation where shit breaks, and you have no idea where to look. You always know: "it worked until i added the last 1-3 mods".

 

2. Go with community shaders, not ENB. Yes, existing ENB users should stick to ENB, but for new modsetups from scratch, CS is the better option.

 

3. ELFX + ELFX Shadows seems to be the current king when it comes to lighting mods.

 

4. Landscape & weather: I recommend cathedral landscape + weather. Mainly because cat-land has hyper fast grass so performant, you can have grass all the way out to the furthest loaded cell - and virtually no performance impact. Moreover, the cat-land ground textures are designed to blend with grass at distance, so actually you can barely see grass pop-in. It works so great, you don't even need any of the new distant LOD grass tricks. Cat-weather, because it's designed to look well with cat-land.

 

5. Bodies: CBBE + 3BA currently is the most supportand and mature female body. For males, The New Gentleman (TNG) provides both a body and acts as an SOS-replacement.

Edited August 22, 2024 by libertyordeath

[Grey Cloud]

Why not follow a fucking guide rather than post here and get a load of disjointed "facts" and recommendations for mods you aren't interested in.

 

For SE
https://www.loverslab.com/topic/136543-mod-organizer-2-other-tools-from-zero-to-hey-sexlab-is-working/

https://www.loverslab.com/topic/118460-skyrim-se-for-beginners-v-319-3bbb-hdt-smp-hph/

https://www.loverslab.com/topic/94228-se-compatibility-tracking-apr-23/

https://www.loverslab.com/topic/126227-sexlab-index-se/

[nilead]

 Same as before. Go to nexus, follow a guide to make a game you'd actually want to play. Then come here to add adult content to it. 

Some advices:

MO2 - use it. its just better. You either wont go far, or your future self will thank you. Its worth the learning curve.

Community shaders - those are seriously good, and probably will make ENB obsolete soon, if not allready.

Pandora - same as community shaders, but for animation processing. 

Lastly - time of xEdit patches is mostly gone. Mods like SPID, KID and CID eliminated vast majority of their use cases. Learn what those are, and how to use them. Will save you a ton of headache down the line.

Oh, and for visuals - lighting is king. No amount of texture upscaling or polycount ramping will beat good lighting. 

[libertyordeath]

6 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

Why not follow a fucking guide rather than post here and get a load of disjointed "facts" and recommendations for mods you aren't interested in.

 

For SE
https://www.loverslab.com/topic/136543-mod-organizer-2-other-tools-from-zero-to-hey-sexlab-is-working/

https://www.loverslab.com/topic/118460-skyrim-se-for-beginners-v-319-3bbb-hdt-smp-hph/

https://www.loverslab.com/topic/94228-se-compatibility-tracking-apr-23/

https://www.loverslab.com/topic/126227-sexlab-index-se/

Because the "guides" are no actual guides. They are just collections of everyone's favorite mods. Out of all so called "guides" i've seen, STEP is the only one providing some actual "guidance".

[Grey Cloud]

31 minutes ago, libertyordeath said:

Because the "guides" are no actual guides. They are just collections of everyone's favorite mods. Out of all so called "guides" i've seen, STEP is the only one providing some actual "guidance".

My post wasn't directed at you but you are talking through your arse because you haven't even bothered to look at the links I gave.

Do you not see the irony of you posting your favourites in points 2, 3, 4 and 5 then in your next post claiming that guides are "just collections of everyone's favourite mods"?

[libertyordeath]

5 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

My post wasn't directed at you but you are talking through your arse because you haven't even bothered to look at the links I gave.

Do you not see the irony of you posting your favourites in points 2, 3, 4 and 5 then in your next post claiming that guides are "just collections of everyone's favourite mods"?

Do you not see the hypocrisy and fraud in ignoring point #1, and the elaborate reasoning in #4 - both of which you will not find in any so-called "guide"?

 

Or the irony in you only posting a list of links, while i posted text? I'm not the one "talking outta my ass" (your words) here. You're the hyprocrite, calling me a hypocrite. Go fuck yourself.

Edited August 23, 2024 by libertyordeath

[Grey Cloud]

On 8/23/2024 at 3:31 AM, libertyordeath said:

Do you not see the hypocrisy and fraud in ignoring point #1, and the elaborate reasoning in #4 - both of which you will not find in any so-called "guide"?

You should look up what hypocrisy and elaborate mean.  In point #4 you wrote "I recommend cathedral landscape".

 

On 8/23/2024 at 3:31 AM, libertyordeath said:

Or the irony in you only posting a list of links, while i posted text?

Also look up the meaning of "irony".  I posted links to four excellent resources, what did you expect me to do - type out the content manually?

Edited August 27, 2024 by Grey Cloud

[Storms of Superior]

6 hours ago, Grey Cloud said:

You should look up what hypocrisy elaborate mean.  In point #4 you wrote "I recommend cathedral landscape".

 

Also look up the meaning of "irony".  I posted links to four excellent resources, what did you expect me to do - type out the content manually?

You're not helpful. Step out of the conversation.

[SkyrimOne]

I see you got already some help.

 

It's very hard to provide a full guide as there are so many variables to make everything working. 

 

I can only share my experience and the mods I am using.  

 

If you like what you see, you should start with downloading the Nolvus build. After that, you integrate the LoversLab mods of your choice.

https://www.nolvus.net/

 

You can compare my selection of Loverslab mods, but those are just my selection. There are plenty of more mods to select. I would suggest not to integrate mods that are too "experimental" as Nolvus is a very complex build with over 2700 plug-ins. If you know what you are doing, everything will result on a stable build. And lastly, most or if not all pre-requisites for Loverslab mods are already into the Nolvus build as it is so large that has about every most used core component.

 

That is what I did, as it would have been a lot of work  just to improve the graphics and then integrate Loverslab. At least, I got 1 side done, or the next-gen graphic from Nolvus.

 

Good luck!

 

Edited August 23, 2024 by SkyrimOne

[Grey Cloud]

1 hour ago, Storms of Superior said:

You're not helpful. Step out of the conversation.

So four good resources are not helpful?

 

In spring I came back to Skyrim after a two year absence from LE. I decided to go with SE and MO2 neither of which I had any prior experience with. Using those four links and after a lot of reading I had a stable, working SE with 200+ mods.

How far have you got in the 48 hours since your OP?

Edited August 23, 2024 by Grey Cloud

[Storms of Superior]

On 8/22/2024 at 7:45 AM, libertyordeath said:

Some quick tips from me, as someone who made his 2nd try a year ago:

 

1. GO SLOW. Do not install too many mods at a time. Start by installing all the SKSE-DLL dependencies, like engine fixes, papyrustweaks, papyrusextender, FISS, and so on. Plus USSEP. No actual "mods" yet. Play for a few hours to see if it works. Then add 1-3 mods at a time and play for hours. Yes, this means you will need over a hundred hours to complete your skyrim setup, and yes, you will occassionally need to start a new game, when you add mods that require a new game. BUT: You will never have a situation where shit breaks, and you have no idea where to look. You always know: "it worked until i added the last 1-3 mods".

 

2. Go with community shaders, not ENB. Yes, existing ENB users should stick to ENB, but for new modsetups from scratch, CS is the better option.

 

3. ELFX + ELFX Shadows seems to be the current king when it comes to lighting mods.

 

4. Landscape & weather: I recommend cathedral landscape + weather. Mainly because cat-land has hyper fast grass so performant, you can have grass all the way out to the furthest loaded cell - and virtually no performance impact. Moreover, the cat-land ground textures are designed to blend with grass at distance, so actually you can barely see grass pop-in. It works so great, you don't even need any of the new distant LOD grass tricks. Cat-weather, because it's designed to look well with cat-land.

 

5. Bodies: CBBE + 3BA currently is the most supportand and mature female body. For males, The New Gentleman (TNG) provides both a body and acts as an SOS-replacement.

My rig is at the upper end of the lower tier in terms of hardware. Is cathedral going to nuke it?

[SkyrimOne]

17 hours ago, Storms of Superior said:

My rig is at the upper end of the lower tier in terms of hardware. Is cathedral going to nuke it?

 

Go Nolvus. I am using just a 1080 Ti and it does good. You can setup as high as you want. And clearly, you will get greater quality.

[libertyordeath]

On 8/25/2024 at 12:44 AM, Storms of Superior said:

My rig is at the upper end of the lower tier in terms of hardware. Is cathedral going to nuke it?

Out of all landscape overhauls, Cathedral Landscape is the fastest. If your system cannot afford cat-land, you cannot afford landscape mods and are stuck with vanilla Skyrim.

 

My rig for comparison: 2 generations obsolete 8-core Ryzen. GF 1660 Super with 6GB VRAM. 16 GB sysmem. Framerate with Cat-Land, Low quality ENB and DynDOLOD: 75 FPS average at 1920x1080.

 

EDIT: Since you're worried about performance, here's some extra info about the recommendations i made in my prior post:

 

ELFX + ELFX Shadows is basically free eyecandy. The original ELFX just moved some lights, but had lots of bugs and accordingly lots of patches surfaced. Among all lighting mods, it actually seemed the most obsolete and flawed. And then came ELFX Shadows and moved it from loser position to pole position. What is ELFX Shadows? Every ELFX bugfix combined, plus window shadows. Wait a moment, what the hell are window shadows? You might know window lights, which are just that: Windows glowing at night, to simulate light from inside. BOORING. But what are window shadows? Imagine walking into a shop: The shop has windows right? So imagine entering the shop and approaching the shopkeeper. Except what the hell is this? You can see the literal window frame casting light and shadow on the NPC face - and all objects, floors and walls around him. Basically it's fake raycasting of sun shining into the shop from the window. At ZERO performance.

 

Sounds too good to be true? It is! Here's ELFX Shadows at its worst. This is 10% of what you'll ever see, but you will see it:

 

 

Right and wrong side-by-side: Notice the overbright illumnation left of our favorite Whiterun shopkeeper.  Also notice in contrast the right side of the picture being illuminated in detail unheard of for skyrim. Since ELFX Shadows is just fake raycasting, it kinda doesn't know when it's too much or too little. Nobody notices the too little part, but everyone can see the "too much" part.

 

Next, a representative example of ELFX shadows working right. This is what you'll see 70% of the time:

Approaching the Whiterun castle, but what the hell is this? The archbows casting proper shadows to the ground? This is ELFX Shadows. Still too much contrast in this example, but do you want to trade this for vanilla?

 

And finally, the technically least worst, but perceptually most artificial example:

Welcome back to Meridian59. That's what it kinda looked like in 90's. Keep in mind: This means Skyrim's #1 castle in vanilla has worse lighting thand Doom, and ELFX Shadows is only slightly better, because it looks just as artificial - just more "HD".

 

For those not seeing what i'm talking about: Those bright flecks on the ground. They're supposed to be light from the windows. If this was Duke3D, we'd be happy. This is not Duke3D. It sucks: ELFX Shadows: Do better, or don't bother. This was better without, and all you have to do is: Reduce brightness.

 

But this is starting to read like an ELFX review. Instead let's move on to the next topic:Community-Shaders? I have three words: "Light Limit Fix". Normally Skyrim can only render 4 (four!) lights at a time. If the limit is exeeded, you get lights randomly turning on and off, depending on where you look. ENB does not fix this. It can only render "free lights" that "do not count", called particle lights. Wait, but that is a solution? Why not just render everything that way? Answer: Techbabble. ENB extra-particlelights only work on demand. Every mod has to manually replace vanilla skyrim lights with enb lights. So guess what? Nobody does it for everything. Because "everything" is a lot of work, and a lot of potential modconflicts.

 

So how are Community Shaders different? Simple: They just fix the root problem. "Four lights" are no longer the limit: 8 lights? 16 lights? No problem, no mods needed. It just works. Oh, and lights isn't the only thing Community Shaders does: You want rain wet effects? Not just as some lameass glossy skin effect on chars, but imagine this: Water puddles and splashes on the ground - all generated dynamically. Now there's other mods that do this already. And they cost double or triple the performance of Community Shaders plus ENB.

 

So why isn't everyone switching to CS right now? Answer: Style and design over tech. CS right now is superior to ENB technologically, but ENB has years worth of designers perfecting presets. And many of the designers - myself included - never release to the public. We just keep perfecting our personal ENB presets, and never share with anyone. And we invested over a hundred days into this. CS has been around how long again? You can't even hope to compare.

 

At this point you should realize i'm part of the ENB ecosystem. I will only switch when i have no excuse left. So why did i recommend Community Shaders to you? Because i'm not an asshole - unlike some people. CS actually is superior to ENB. It's just i personally have so much sunk cost fallacy, i cannot justify a switch for my needs. But you're a clean slate: Your needs and situation do not match mine, so what's good for me (ENB) is not neccessarily good for you (CS). Good luck having Grey Cload make such an admission.

 

 

 

 

Edited August 26, 2024 by libertyordeath

[Grey Cloud]

19 hours ago, libertyordeath said:

Good luck having Grey Cload make such an admission.

Jeez, you still sulking? What admission do I have to make? I recommended guides. Your ego-massage post there rambles on about ELFX, CS, ENBs and Cathedral Landscapes. There's nothing wrong with ELFX and Cathedral but lots of other lighting and landscape combos will produce similar results.  How much time you have invested in tweaking ENB presets is irrelevant. Similarly, whether CS, CS combined with a reshader or whichever ENB preset looks best is entirely subjective.

 

 

 

 

 

 

This one is CS and Orchidshade II with Azurite II weather mod.

 

 

 

 

 

Lighting in Dragonreach

 

 

 

 

 

Probably the same combo as above and before I did DynDOLOD (pretty sure all these images are from before I did my LODs).

 

 

 

 

 

Same again

 

 

 

 

 

I think this was either just CS or with a different reshader.

 

 

 

 

 

All of the above are 'out of the box' results  - I don't spend time tweaking unless I have to. Nearly everything in my game is 2k textures. My point is that achieving great visuals is not difficult these days.

One of the things people usually fail to take into consideration when crowing about their FPS is that getting 60 FPS with a vanilla game plus a few LL mods is not the same, e.g., as getting 60 FPS with a game using mods which add lots more NPCs. This is one of the reasons I always recommend guides as they are designed to get you a stable, ready to be modded however you want Skyrim rather than having to rely on a bunch of disconnected 'this is how I do it' posts scattered over days or weeks.

 

Edited August 26, 2024 by Grey Cloud