godescalcus

Ok, here's a full day's worth of wastefully modding with xEdit: tweaked nothing but one light bulb in the Winking Skeever. No imagespace edits, no lighting template edits. Just the good old combo with one tweaked bulb. There are shady corners for you shady rogues, a well lit central stage for Lisette, atmosphere and all. No funny ELFX flickers that I noticed (I didn't add or remove anything, just changed the light bulb and tweaked the radius, fade, etc). Original first, then tweaked. Not saying it can't be improved, but at least it's done in accordance with ELFX's direction, just tweaking it a bit.

I agree with your conservative approach and use the same "if is isn't broke don't fix it" attitude myself. I just don't agree that the setup can't be improved, while I do agree that it's probably as perfect as it can be without touching the mods themselves. And that it can be a matter of taste. All of the main city taverns are a bit too dark IMO, and so is the temple of the divines and a few other places. But there are times when I like the darkness. Here's one that makes me think of Caravaggio:

Don't think I'm calling for any ELFX removal. On the contrary, I just spent half a day looking into the damned winking skeever in xEdit to try and find ways to make it not so dark, but couldn't find a way to change ELFX with only xEdit. You can get static formids from the game but not light bulbs, so I tried guessing those from the x,y,z positioning and tweak those - but with limited results. Only thing that made the blasted inn brighter was to delete the whole cell record from ELFX - which fixed the darkness to some extent, but not in every corner. And it made the whole place poorer, for sure. The truth is ELFX disables some of the main lights in that place in favour of smaller, more close to the ground sources with very tiny radiuses. Cosier, yes, but in that particular place it'd damned not realistic. Dark dungeons? Sure. Pitch black taverns is another thing. And it does come from ELE and not ELFX. It's the lighting templates from ELE that make it so that when ELFX disables some light sources it gets so dark. Matter of opinion, but while I defend ELFX I still think that crawling in dark dungeons is great as long as it doesn't take part of the game away with it. I really like to be able to see how huge some spaces are. Look up the making of skyrim video and see how the devs wanted those dungeons to be perceived as huge. I don't want to say we're forced to see things the way Beth's guys see them, and it's not that many that are too dark for that IMO. From todays crawling I can say this issue is much less apparent on this build than it was with the SLE guide. I guess different versions of the mods may account for it. If it were something we could manage, and I've been stretching my limited skills trying to achieve that, I'd tweak this lighting combo in those places where it needs tweaking, and leave it as it is, which is next to grand.

I think you have a point here. When I checked ELFX for imagespaces it makes no changes to vanilla, that I know of. ELE, on the other hand, makes extensive changes. Here's an example with one dungeon I really don't like to see pitch dark. See how ELE edits/removes fog and changes both the imagespace and the lighting template for that dungeon: Now if you look at vanilla (DwarvenImagespace01) and ELE (1ELE_Dungeon_IS) imagespaces: ELE reduces brightness but I don't know how much of a difference .1 brightness would make. Better look at the lighting templates: vanilla (DLC1ArkngthamzFar) and ELE (ELE_Dark_dwemer_LT): Brutal reduction of ambient light, resulting in a pitch black dungeon where only point light sources have any effect. ELFX adds some, which actually helps gameplay but the dramatic scenery of that dungeon is completely lost for the sake of "realism". For gameplay I'd prefer a more sensible approach of tweaking ambient light colors and fogs, but leaving enough that you can actually grasp the size of the cave you're in... Screw realism IMHO. There should be a sweet spot between dark enough to make you feel you're in a dark place and use a torch or night vision to find stuff, detect traps, etc... and enough ambient light to at least see the edges of the space you're in. Otherwise, every dungeon will be the same, crawling in darkness and killing falmer, regardless of whether you're in a narrow tunnel or in a huge cave. This may be "tweakable" without removing ELE and without making global brightness changes with the ENB or game settings. Many interiors do look just fine with your lighting combo, so for each cell we do want to change, maybe forwarding the original imagespace and/or lighting template or using a different ELE one could do the trick. ELE does offer different templates and not all seem to be the same darkness: by forwarding either vanilla imagespace/

Loot is sorting the main plugin of Landscape Fixes for Grass Mods right at the top of my load order, can anyone confirm this? Shouldn't it be told to sort after the Trees and Flora merge?

Great rant, thank you. I agree completely. I have a desktop pc with a 24" LCD screen that has a very bright image and helps me play with dark settings; but when I'm using my 17" laptop I constantly feel many places are very dark, even storms during the day may be too dark at times. I also think that not only gameplay, but, sometimes, "dramatic" atmosphere is damaged by ELFX's removal of ambient light. Have you ever wandered into a large cave with a follower who commented something like "wow, have you ever seen anything like this?" but all you see around you is pitch black darkness? Some caves are worth seeing in all their spacious glory, no matter if realism has to give way, to some extent.

To use the havok fix, shouldn't we disable the framerate limiter with NVidia Inspector?

I agree, been using this mod for a while. I've never used it as an "immersive extortion" mod but I like the idea LOL I use it on my "comic relief" section along with "Scream of Wilhelm" which is a little mod that works wonders with literally no incompatibility. Found "Draw!" while looking for a way to beat that stinking "I said alms, you backbiter" Markarth beggar's nose to a pulp.

Why did Ravengate get chopped? I did read a few days ago it was probably going to, have there been any issues? It does add content to LOTD - "Ravengate - Riften Underground by EnaiSiaion Adds trophy displays in the Hall of Secrets for each Blacklist enemy you have defeated. "

Good to know that works with ETAC as well. It does make you wonder about how those mods were converted to SSE. Reportedly, some modders just edit the form number and don't run the esp through the CK at all. Not something I'd think Jenna would do, but there you are. Arthmoor says that way of "porting" will get you everything from crashing to corrupt saves. Others say it doesn't matter at all. Maybe it depends on the plugin's contents and some will break, others won't.

You can use the same "fix" with Fakreela, but I don't think console workarounds should be needed in a guide like this. Eventually, Fakreela's fix was made into a nexus mod by someone and added to the guide, but you could achieve the same result by running Immersive Patrols through the CK, grabbing the new facegen files and turning those into a mod. I don't say that using the console breaks your savegame at all, I use it all the time, but I don't like to depend on it to fix my build. BTW, I have the same problem with ETAC's children in Riverwood, looking for an alternative solution. Either way, console or other, a fix for this should be added to the guide if others confirm this is a common problem and not specific to a few users. Maybe this is addressed by the "Complete RS Children Hotfix Patch 0.3.1", we just need to fix the file so it works with the Riverwood modular plugin? Don't know, have to check.

It's not a bad thing, though, that Lexy has own ports in her test build, making it quicked to update the guide when the official release comes. Thanks for the ENB tips, I'd also add that making dungeons brighter will also make all other interiors brighter, which, depending on each cell's imagespace, might not look great. The definitive answer woud be, IMO, to fix each dungeon's imagespace to look brighter or darker, according to its context. For example, I don't see any reason why the East Empire Company's warehouse should be as pitch black as the darkest caves in the game. It's an impressive, very ample space that you can't appreciate in its fullness if you're "realistically" making everything invisible outside the range of torches. IMO the pitch black caves is merely a trend born of hurriedly creating a dark setting that makes it possible for the point lighting to stand out against. Removing ambient lighting throughout the game achieves this with minimal effort. More troublesome would be to tweak each imagespace for the best dramatic effect, but much more rewarding, I thing... If you visit Arkngthamz or the Wolfskull Cave or Blackreach or the Broken Oar Grotto or even Fort Dawnguard with vanilla lights and then check them out with ELFX or RLO, you see what you're losing. You need some degree of ambient light if only just to appreciate the immensity of the caves - that was very intentional in the game creators's plans. If you take it out, all dungeons look the same, a dark maze with some traps and some mobs to fight. I need my eye candy! If it weren't the fact that I also like the new point light sources added by ELFX, it'd already have got the boot. Damned mods, there's always choices and tradeoffs.

About NAT, upon reading further down the description, it seems it does more than just weathers, including its own subsurface scattering shaders, which have been made obsolete with the later ENB binaries, so, I'm not so sure. Colours look great, though. Only NAT and Vivid seem to nail them right - IMHO!

I dare you, then, to try and build the "SRLE - LOTD All Yashed Up" or the "SRLE - LOTD Req'tified" guides for Legendary. Check them out, even if you don't build them, read them as if you were going to. They take a different approach, breaking the conflict resolution into different patches making entire sections of the guide optional and actually providing different options for some of them. I can only imagine the work that Paul, JD and the rest of the people had putting that up. To me as a user, it seemed an ever greater challenge, but it does address the flexibility and "mutability" that some of us are always asking for. Providing alternative mods and all the patches needed makes the work of building the guide grow exponentially. I'm an experimenter and my first instinct is to try new things and even to think I can improve on what I've been suggested. I never could simply follow the guide to the letter, yet, my build has, over time, grown closer and closer to the full guide. I'd rather see the guide stabilize one build first, then maybe hope Lexy and her team won't be able to stop modding and alternatives do come. I'm a Wyrmstooth proponent, too - and in no small measure for the fact that it has a really absorbing, fast paced main quest that doesn't really take that long to play through. Comparable to Moonpath, maybe. Certainly quicker than Falskaar. Then, you're free to explore as you wish! And it adds content to the museum, too. Second that, I'm using it. And run The Great Equalizer all over it as some bows are a bit overpowered. I actually dropped by to suggest another alternative weather mod. Has Natural View Tamriel been tested with this build? https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/12842/

I've actually run or tested almost all of those mods. I like many of them and I think I'll keep adding and taking mods as I build and rebuild this guide. From my experience, it's impossible to play them all in the same playthrough. I'm usually fed up when I level up to 80 or above and in getting there I never play even half of the content I add... Rigmor alone took me from level 0 to 30 without deviations using the LE guide. Another mod I've played was Beyond Reach, which I also liked very much but it took me a week to play through and in the end there was nothing to remember it by. It was a completely independent part of that playthrough. With LOTD, all of the supported mods feel somewhat connected by the relic gathering for the museum. I love Rigmor, Beyond Reach, Qaxe's Questorim, but I'd probably enjoy them in a dedicated playthrough with a much smaller build. Yet, of course, this guide has grown to be more than just LOTD, with a graphics and gameplay overhaul that wouldn't look bad in any build, so you might still want to build it and add the mods you want to play, but I can hardly see anyone playing them all in one playthrough. I do think that the first three and, in general, all mods that add displays to the museum could be added, unless it is for some reason broken. As for the rest, I have come to enjoy taking mods out of the way more than adding others in ;)

I'd check the development thread at afkmods, I started to get that when they added compatibility with FNV and FO3.

I have the same problem with ELFX and my monitor. Gopher reported the same problem with his video recording, and I do have trouble seeing what he says he's seeing in the videos. Eventually he said he dropped ELFX for the second part of his SSE series. I don't know an ENB that completely reverts this, but Phoenix is the brightest of the ones I've tried. Not sure about an easy way out of ELFX. I might try xEdit to fix the ambient light in places as I go.

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Who knows? ;) But the guide is considered to be in a finished state and now is mainly being maintained for mod updates, etc... There is a greater effort being directed towards advancing the SSE guide. Users can (and always could) make their own changes, taking care to resolve any conflicts with the new mods they add.

That's goog to know, then. I'd miss the sweetrolls, still. Been seeing too much Gopher lately!

We use Ordinator, which overhauls all perk trees, although it should be possible to resolve conflicts in favour of that mod. For pregnant women, go to loverslab, if you dare... There it's all about active scripts and havok extravaganza. If you want to see up to where you can push the game's engine, that's where the bleeding edge goes.

Guys, don't lose it... I checked YouHunger and it sounds very immersive but to dynamically sample an area and set the available food and drink sounds like a lot of script action to me. This isn't the only mod running in the build... I'd take a more conservative approach regarding scripts. I don't even activate iNeed's features to dynamically remove food for the same reason. Don't disagree that it can be considered "immersive", but do these extra scripts running all the time really add that much to gameplay? I must say I'm terrified of trying Frostfall and Campfire, mods that I've been waiting for months, because of the reports of crashes while selling. Sounds ridiculous to me that we should accomodate to selling in a particular way or avoid doing it too fast in order to not crash. This is not flickering ELFX lights, it's trashing the game's stability. Some sense is called for...

Just a dumb question from someone who never tried to use Ordenador (but read about it and thought)... Why would you use Ordenador when DDSOpt is so much better and this guide even tells to use it when optimizing Beth's textures, Falskaar, Helgen Reborn, etc? Here's an example thread discussing both (there are many threads on this): https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/2vtn9m/ddsopt_vs_optimizer_textures/

You should ask around that forum, someone has an updated version of Wheels of Lull.

While not so visual as a spreadsheet, the Discord channel does have a topic for suggestions, you'd have to load back the discussion if you wanted to know which mods have been suggested and any feedback on those. But it's probably the best place to post and get feedback.