godescalcus

1 - "ALSO NOTE, YOU CANNOT DO THIS FIX UNTIL THE MAIN ELFX MOD IS INSTALLED." (CWIELnFXPatch.esp editing) It should also be noted that you need to run LOOT after installing ELFX, otherwise xEdit won't load CWIELnFXPatch.esp, since EnhancedLightsandFX.esp will be last in your load order (you just installed it) and it needs to be loaded by xEdit before CWIELnFXPatch.esp, as well as the main plugin for ICW. 2 - And regarding the Better Quest Objectives merge, I've noticed all 5 patches are fully merged into the bashed patch, so they don't take up any slots. I haven't checked but maybe someone can confirm if the merged file is also incorporated into the bashed patch, otherwise you'll actually be losing one slot. In any case, it this merge still needed?

Good to know. And if I add stuff to the load order (I plan to do it carefully this time, one mod at a time and only when I'm finished with the guide) what can I do to find conflicts between these and new mods, and eventually patch them?

Is this procedure outdated? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtLolEgVMTg (creating a merged patch with tes5edit). From what I've gathered it's not the same as merging esp's and should add to stability, in conjuction with the bashed patch.

Guess I'm going to be sticking with you guys for a while longer. Heres all that's left of my last two days: That's all history now I'm starting over. Steam download at 17%, about 34 minutes to go. On my list of "Things That You Read About All The Time But Never Put In Practice Until..." are, 1) follow the guide first, then do my inputs 2) add new mods to a complete, working, tested game and test each mod individually... Guess I was going by the devil's whispers all the time. After much tampering with files that probably should have been left alone, I even managed to get dyndolod to complete its run. But run the game did not... LOL

Trying to remove AAE from the masters list of the CR file. xEdit reports no errors and the plugin references finder script doesn't find any references, but the 'clean masters' options still doesn't remove it. Is there another way to remove it as a master, given that, for all I know, there are no references left to it?

I think Maximan is thinkin about the displacement of the "mods" mo folder, which I don't know if it's possible. I've thought about it but from the way I see mo working, it would indeed lead to longer load times even if it WERE possible, because those are the actual files that get loaded into the game, through mo's virtualization engine. That's one very noticeable difference between this build launced by mo or wrye bash: in my system, mo takes about 75 seconds to load the game, while wrye bash does it under 30. No big deal, anyway! Nozzer66's suggestion, though, is NOT to move the mods folder but the DOWNLOADS folder. This can lead to confusion if you're not downloading through mod organizer at all - that's actually my case. I also keep those files in another drive. Follow his guidelines if you want to download via mod organizer, but use another drive to store those downloaded files. I keep my downloaded mods filed in my own folder structure, which reflects in general the structure of this guide (each folder is one main section, containing in general between 20 and 40 mods. Each file inside that folder has a 4 digit prefix, the first two refer to the folder it's in, the next two to install order within the folder. When I install the mod I keep those digits in MO's mods folder. That way my whole mod list inside mod organizer looks like a sequentially ordered list and the digits in the mods match those in my downloads file. If I remove a mod I move it to an "unused" folder and keep its digits, so I'll always know which section it was in without even thinking. This saves me hours of sifting through this huge mod list to find the mods I need. For example, if you need to find the mod containing a certain plugin, you hover over the plugin and it tells you which mod it is, but without the prefix I'd have to remember where in the list it was (well, maybe not, if I sorted it by name temporarily - but it STILL saves me time). The only downside to not using mo to download nexus links is you need to manually add the version numbers in mod organizer if you want to use the version check feature. Only mods containing a meta.ini file will usually give you this information. But, again, if I want to go back to modding pad and use another mod manager, my folder structure will always serve me well!

Found this error: [00:00] MerchantCaravanAChest "Chest" [CONT:0007434B] [00:00] CONT \ Items \ Item \ CNTO - Item \ Item -> Found a STAT reference, expected: ALCH,AMMO,APPA,ARMO,BOOK,INGR,KEYM,LIGH,LVLI,MISC,SCRL,SLGM,WEAP [00:00] MerchantCaravanBChest "Chest" [CONT:0007434D] [00:00] CONT \ Items \ Item \ CNTO - Item \ Item -> Found a STAT reference, expected: ALCH,AMMO,APPA,ARMO,BOOK,INGR,KEYM,LIGH,LVLI,MISC,SCRL,SLGM,WEAP [00:00] MerchantCaravanCChest "Chest" [CONT:0007434E] [00:00] CONT \ Items \ Item \ CNTO - Item \ Item -> Found a STAT reference, expected: ALCH,AMMO,APPA,ARMO,BOOK,INGR,KEYM,LIGH,LVLI,MISC,SCRL,SLGM,WEAP while cleaning the conflict resolution for master removal. This item referenced is the 1stPersonCarnelianWarhammer [sTAT:18002E1F] - apparently, a static object that shouldn't be in a container. Is it safe to remove? Makes sense, but I don't want to break any collector/treasure hunt quest, which seems to be what this points to. I wish I had seen your link sooner, I have been editing the version 1.45 for the last 2 hours... ;)

In the 3dnpc merge, shouldn't "3DNPC CCOR Cloak Leveled Lists.esp" be left out to be included in the bashed patch? I mean, if I merge that file, will it be "bashed" as well? In that case, why were the CACO_3DNPC and CACO_Gray Cowl leveled lists left out of the CACO merge? Can the realistic boat bobbing esp be merged into the landscape and clutter merge? I don't seem to find any dependencies, especially since the guide doesn't tell you to install the realistic water 2 patch.

And thank you for that!

If you're happy with the way your game looks and don't plan to make any further changes in textures, you could look at conflicting textures and remove the textures that are being overridden from the respective mods. Especially the HD base game textures you install right at the beginning are there to patch up whatever's not covered by noble skyrim, aMB, vivid landscapes and such. Even those mods override textures of any of the previous. Deleting textures one by one will take a long time, but if you can isolate groups of texture mods that have no conflicting mods in between, you can install them as one mod, in the same order as given in the guide, using the same mod name and telling mod organizer to merge. MO will overwrite the textures that were already installed. You can then place this mod after the lowest order mod of the merge, and remove the original mods. Be careful that no mods were left behind that should be overridden by textures of that newly merged mod. This might give you a few Gigs back. Another option is to dump mod organizer and install this list with wrye bash LOL. You can then have your installers in another drive and your steam contents will be 10/20 GB shorter, because wrye bash installs files to the data folder and automatically overwrites what needs to be overwritten. I have done this and the only inconvenience is that you can't use relinker with wrye bash, so you'd better check all merge lists for scripted files especially, and leave those out of the merge. May lose a few slots, but if hard drive space is your main concern, it will be a good tradeoff.

I removed a few myself, bear in mind some things: 1- The "best" mods to remove - IMO! - are mods that add recurring/pending scripts like most in the survival section. Much as I find it interesting to experiment with, they'd probably contribute to script lag and you might find at some point in your playthrough that constantly having to eat/drink/bathe/sleep/piss ;) or changing your gear to face the weather is distracting and you might want to disable them. Although most, if not all, can be disabled via MCM, you might be tempted to uninstall them and compromise your savegame... So better decide beforehand. But - please read #3... 2 - If you want to remove because you need room for other mods you want to introduce, consider also that those mods may need some patching to work well with the rest. For example, I have Wyrmstooth (which has been discussed here) and want to include it, so I dug for patches available. And try to merge those patches with other patches in a logical manner (like patches having master in common). It's easy to get lost here so you might want to note down what you will need to add and where. 3 - This guide has a lot of pre-made merges and conflict resolution files that save you a lot of trouble, but they'll be dependent on the mods they affect as masters. In the case of pre-made merges, if you decide to go by without some of its master mods, you'll have to download the separate remaining files and do the merge yourself. But the conflict resolution is more tricky, you'll have to edit the file in xEdit before you can remove the masters. It will take a long time. I've done it before and the game loaded and played without crashes. Still I haven't tested extensively and can't guarantee a good result, someone else might want to comment.

Thanks! But... LOL I'm facing at least a couple hours fixing the conflict resolution file to remove masters I didn't want to install :) With the tip "get the value on the left instead of removing the record" I got here in mind! BTW, in the 3dnpc merge, shouldn't "3DNPC CCOR Cloak Leveled Lists.esp" be left out to be included in the bashed patch? I mean, if I merge that file, will it be "bashed" as well? In that case, why were the CACO_3DNPC and CACO_Gray Cowl leveled lists left out of the CACO merge?

In AOS 2.5.1 there's a ton of compatibility patches for mods that are actually used in this guide - EBT, RW2, GDO, DSI, TAD, UU, WAFR, deadly dragons, IWIE, wet and cold... Why shouldn't we install those? And if we do, where could we merge them to get rid of extra plugins (if there are any)?

1. Hey guys, when I do the various texture optimizations with ddsopt (configured as per the step guide) should I always use the default constraints (compression and size, lossless, 8k) suggested on the step page and this image? 2. Why does Neovalen's instructions tell you to process *.dds and *_n.dds (color and normal maps) separately? Can you just process the bunch to make it quicker? 3. After you get the optimized textures folder, can you simply copy all the files over the original mod's and thus save a lot of hard drive space (instead of keeping the originals and adding the optimized next in mod organizer)?

Add -sse as a command line parameter to DynDOLOD/DynDOLODx64.exe or TexGen/TexGenx64.exe to start the tools in Skyrim SE mode. See DynDOLOD-Shortcut.txt for help. This was the answer to all my problems. Should have read more carefully. I did read the f... manual. Sometimes you just miss the most important bits of information!

To better explain my problem mention above, here is the log from texgen: Please note the first lines, it's defaulting to skyrim folders, not SSE and I can't find a way to change that.

Hi, I have BOTH Skyrim Legendary Edition and Skyrim Special Edition installed. I have previously run DynDoLOD for my Skyrim Legendary build without problems. I'm now trying to run it for the Special Edition but TexGen x64 defaults to the legendary folders (steam/steamapps/common/Skyrim and corresponding my games/skyrim) instead of the special edition folders (steam/steamapps/common/skyrim special edition and so on) and aborts. I may add that in both cases I have DynDoLOD standalone installed in its own folder inside the game's main folder. How can I force it to detect the correct (special edition) game folders? Do the executables accept arguments?

Ok, not a zillion but a few and I don't know if or how I should address these errors reported by xEdit:

DynDOLOD threw an error and told me to check the whole list of plugins for errors in xedit. So I'm doing it and it's finding a zillion errors! What am I to do?! Should I manually fix them all? Or is there a particular type of error I should be looking for and fixing? Note that LOOT reports them all clean, and I did the manual fixes where and when the guide told me to.

That's it! Thank you! I was going through the records one by one. You just saved me a month! LOL

Going through the right pane and inspecting the records, one by one, I see that the "error: could not be resolved" also shows in the table (see image): It allows me to right click and remove it. So this is how you do it?

Maybe after checking for errors in xEdit you don't need to look for color on the left pane, but to read the report on the right pane? Then, what's there to do about those records, just remove them on the left pane? Going to try that.

LOL does he??! Does it??! :D Great learning, though. And it does work!

I'm removing masters to some Conflict Resolution esp's because I chose not to install some mods. How do I accomplish step 4? If I dig into the records list, there are some green, orange or pink colored records, but I have no idea what the color coding means. What do broken records look like when you run check for errors? Maybe colors (left pane) don't have anything to do with it, but the report generated on the right pane when you check for errors tells you what to remove? What should I do, then? Thanks in advance for any helpful suggestion.

Don't select the meshes folder as data directory. You need to do a manual install and select the folder that contains the meshes folder ('Data') as the data directory, then uncheck all of its contents except for the meshes folder and install. Do it again for the textures and plugins, and don't forget to rename the mod for each one (or mod organizer will ask if you want to merge or replace the same mod successively, which you don't).