tyrindor

With zMerge released, can we expect to see a revamp of the merged section? As far as I know, since this program supports loading 255+ plugins at once we should be able to create our merges much easier possibly without even needing separate MO2 profiles for each. It also has relinker built-in. https://www.reddit.com/r/skyrimmods/comments/9sgnpy/zedit_v050_zmerge_successor_of_merge_plugins/

JK's Skyrim has major NPC pathing issues in some towns when using Immersive Citizens. I tested it the other day and sadly they still exist. Personally I would rather get rid of IC than JK but it's not possible when using this guide since it's so deeply embedded. Apparently there is a team working on getting the 2 mods to work together so there is hope. I do agree though, it's very hard to play with JK's Skyrim for years and then be without it... I really hope we see it in the guide at some point.

You messed up a merge somewhere most likely, they should be in there.

Woo experience is in. I think we should keep Misc Quest XP at 0. There are followers and other mods that are constantly running and completing misc quests in the background for their scripts. 10XP is a low number so it might not be a big deal, but I've heard some followers (like Sofia) runs a misc quest script every time they do an action (like drinking, dancing, etc) - haven't tested it. You aren't the first person to report crashing around Dragon Bridge on the latest version of the guide. Might need to be investigated. I remember a few months back DynDOLOD was causing CTDs for me. After hours of testing, it was the it was caused by the Realistc Water Two update and after reporting it to the DynDOLOD author he patched it. A mod might have recently updated that DynDOLOD is not liking. The first thing I'd try is disabling no snow under the roof and stunning statues because I was getting CTD around certain statues despite renaming files exactly how the guide suggests.

When experience mod is officially added to the guide, 1-20 will be vastly faster than it is in the current version of the guide unless the leveling curve is adjusted. If we want to keep the XP rate about the same, adjusting base XP will be necessary. 1-10 with experience mod is probably upwards of 3-4 times faster than the current OMEGA uncapper preset the guide uses. We should try to somewhat match the XP rate to the same speed as the OMEGA uncapper preset. By not doing that, it's hurting the early game in my opinion and OMEGA definitely does not intend for players to hit level 10 within an hour of playing. You want your game's early game to be faster/easier and that's fine, but you are leveling waaay faster than anyone who followed the current version of the guide.

I was level 3 before stepping out into the world (just alternate start completion + starting scripts). Level 10 felt like an hour later. You don't level that fast in vanilla and surely OMEGA works with vanilla leveling speeds (or it'd be fundamentally flawed). As the guide currently stands (without experience mod), the current uncapper preset has us leveling even slower than vanilla and I haven't seen anyone have issues with leveling too slow in the early game. With deleveled zones you can rarely follow the intended main quest path. Having a quick boost to level 10/20 kinda defeats the purpose of deleveled zones and the "RPG feeling" of being weak and overcoming your enemies with time and effort. It's gonna be preference based, some examples... 400 + L*15 for people who want more of a "flat" curve. I agree though, you'll probably get way too high of a level in the late game with a flat curve. 200 + L*25 for people who want a more reasonable starting leveling speed with default vanilla curve. A base of 200 will make 1-10 take over twice as much time which will probably still be faster than vanilla leveling speed. I honestly might play around with a base of 250 or even 300 while keeping the vanilla leveling curve.

The exploration XP values are already really low that I don't think they make much of a dent later. I will be leaving the XP values default (but enabling kill XP) and adjusting the curve instead. If it's too fast, we could always do something like 400 + L*20 or something. Personally I feel vanilla leveling is waaay too fast (I slow it down by 3-4x using uncapper). It's on the test bench. https://trello.com/b/V4o4FPSl/lexys-legacy-of-the-dragonborn-special-edition-suggested-mods

I'd always recommend not changing anything on an existing save because it almost always causes more bugs than it fixes. Set the guide up as-is, play, and leave it be. When you decide to start a new playthrough, do the guide from scratch again. The guide updates A LOT currently and it can be pretty hard to keep it up to date. Mods are still being added/removed/changed and it doesn't always play nice on existing saves. If you only want to do this process once, I'd at least wait until the guide is no longer considered beta. I've done the guide from start to finish in about 10 hours, but my first time through was something like 30 hours. Buying a month of Nexus Premium helps if you have decent internet.

Sadly none of those presets work all that great for experience mod in my opinion, so we have to open it up in SSEEdit and adjust the curve ourselves. The mod is just adjusting 2 vanilla settings, so permissions shouldn't be needed to make a version for the guide. It's gonna take testing to figure out whats a good XP rate with this amount of content. Like someone else said, something like 400+(Lx15) might be ideal for a more linear leveling curve. This ensures you don't level too fast at the start, but also makes sure leveling doesn't become impossible later on.

Woo big updates. Thought I'd share a couple texture/mesh only mods I feel should be in the pack. I let the first 3 get overwrote by other mods in the pack, while Chappers/MAPS need to be loaded after certain mods that overwrite them. Hybrid's HD Plants and Herbs: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/1546/ Bellyache's Animals and Creatures: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/6839 Misc Retexture Project: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/13578?tab=description Chapper's Demonic Alduin Maship: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/5455 MAPS: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/66819/

Thanks Lexy, I assume your aware but Ultimate HD Fire Effects now has an SSE port: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/20654

We're back up boys (and girls)!

Testing further. Not sure enabling Misc Quest XP is ideal. Looking at Sofia follower, some of her scripts seem to run as misc quests. You can see them by typing "help sofia" in the console window. I'm sure there are many others, which is why the experience mod author has it enabled by default. It doesn't seem to give an XP popup either, so you are just getting hidden XP in the background. Might be better to only enable Kill XP. Sucks you wont get XP for misc quests, but then again you wouldn't in Vanilla either.

Yes, all those work together. I slow skill leveling way down but make it more of a linear curve using uncapper. Hitting skill level 100 so fast, especially with deleveled zones and XP tied to quests and exploration, just leads to a quicker boring endgame IMO. I boost my caps to 125 and make 100-125 take a very long time to keep a endgame sense of progression. A target of 80% completed quests would be rather high. I wager most people won't even touch 50% of the content this pack offers before starting a new character or quitting. It'd take probably 1000 hours to do everything in this pack, and you'd probably run into the gamebreaking vanilla bug after visiting more than 4096 zones. I think the best solution is to leave Experience mod values at their defaults but Enable Kill XP and set misc quest XP to something low (I'm gonna use 25), then increase the curve itself using Level Rate Rebelance + SSEedit. Testing would need to be done but right now 1-10 is way too fast using experience + default curve in my opinion. Let's look at setting experience to 300+(L*25): Level 1 would now be 300 XP versus 100 XP. Level 50 would now be 1550 XP versus 1325 XP. Level 100 would now be 2800 XP versus 2575 XP. This keeps the stock vanilla leveling curve of L*25, while making it so early levels aren't so fast. But is it slowed down enough? Since we enable Kill/Misc Quest XP, and have a lot more quests and areas to explore, we will naturally still be leveling much faster than the experience mod author intended. Let's look at 300+(L*30): Level 1 would now be 300 XP versus 100 XP. Level 50 would now be 1800 XP versus 1325 XP. Level 100 would now be 3300 XP versus 2575 XP. The early levels won't be much slower than they were with 300+(L*25), however the later levels will slow down more to help prevent over leveling. Again though, is it slowed down enough given we are enabling extra XP and have so much more content? Let's take it even a step further and go with 300+(L*35) which would look like this: Level 1 would now be 300 XP versus 100 XP. Level 50 would now be 2050 XP versus 1325 XP. Level 100 would now be 3800 XP versus 2575 XP. I feel that looks better. That allows us to get XP from kills and misc quests without leveling too fast, and slows it down enough to help make up for the fact we have a lot more content to do. It should hopefully offer a "real" RPG-like experience. My biggest concern is if we level too slow, we could be forced into doing content we don't want to do (or grinding mobs). I think we'd have to slow it down much further for that to happen though. If someone doesn't want to mess around in SSEedit here are the files I made for testing (You don't need the original Level Rate Rebalanced mod): 300+(L*25): https://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=06693669677303588852 300+(L*30): https://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=90669941849371898883 300+(L*35): https://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=66142344797591327809 Here's my personal uncapper preset (WIP) : https://s000.tinyupload.com/index.php?file_id=11995438338031416091 (Designed for experience mod with significantly slower skill leveling and long term playing in mind!) No idea how this will all play out in the actual game yet. All theories and rough math at this point.

I think it'll end up being preference. I think it should vastly slow down at higher levels because the game has a sweet spot and it's around level 30-60 in my opinion. I think something like 300+x*10 or 300+x*15 might work well. How did you make it in the CK by the way? What did you set Misc Quest XP to and how is it working for you? It says "for testing purposes only" so skeptical to enable it. I was gonna just set it to something low like 20 XP so misc quests don't feel as worthless. Another thing to note is, might want to go into the OMEGA AIO and adjust the uncapper INI. No point in having skills go past 100 when you have experience installed, the formula is capped at 100 in this guide anyway.

I suggest "slow down" preset over "slow and steady". For the main reason that Slow and steady will have you shooting through higher levels just as fast as lower levels. At level 100 it's effectively 1/6th the XP needed over the vanilla curve which will probably become an issue if you plan on playing a long time on a single character. Slow down preset makes 1-20 take about 2x longer and only barely touches 20+. Ideally we could make our own leveling curve for the pack that's based around experience mod. I hear it's pretty easy to do in the CK. Awesome to hear, I can't wait for this to go 1.0

Having built this from scratch 2 times this week I do have some suggestions to improve the installation flow and noticed some minor bugs. - Tell the user to add merged titles AKA "Extended UI [HEADS UP DISPLAY MERGED]". This makes the merging process so much easier and faster when using MO2's search function. - Instead of having us make "XXXX Patches" mod folders during the merge section, have us create those folders right after installing the mod it's suppose to go after. This automatically puts them in the ideal place on the left hand side, which removes a step during the merging process. - After installing a merged mod, tell us to move the ESPs into other folders immediately and remove those steps from the merge section. With the above change, those folders will already exist. The guide already does this for the KYE Patches and Majestic Mountains ESPs (which is nice!), but then it tells you to do it again during the merge process which is confusing. - In the main section it says make a new mod called "KYE Patches" but then in the merge section it says make a new mod called "Know Your Enemy - Patches" and then tells you to move the same ESPs in. It's unnecessary and confusing to do it twice. - It jumps between saying "OMEGA MLU MERGE" and "MLU MERGE" but they are the same merge. - The stunning statues mesh renaming does not work for me, it results in no NSUTR snow on the statues. Recommend switching to the statues included in Revamped Assets Skyrim and deleting the Talos mesh. They match vanilla better in my opinion and work out of the box with No Snow Under The Roof. - For consistency sake, Song of The Green merged name is missing a dash, "---" should be "----". - Legacy of the Dragonborn Patches is missing the merged icon. - Move the "Prerequisite" and "Mod Installation Advice" section to right above the Essential SKSE Plugins section. It's really easy to miss the Prerequistite link with the way the site is formatted. - I am still a bit unsure if we are suppose to verify/sort masters/clean all ESPs we convert using the steps at the start of the guide. I've never had an issue converting plugins and not doing that. - Instructions for files to delete for Improved Eyes can be simplified: Textures/Actors/Character/eyes/eyeargonian*.ddsTextures/Actors/Character/eyes/eyedemon.ddsTextures/Actors/Character/eyes/eyekhajiit*.dds In-game: Gorr (Interesting NPCs) in Riverwood is butt naked. I've been trying to fix this, and it is not related to bash/smash patches or anything like that. ----------------- So why does moving that stuff out of the merge section improve workflow? It lets you handle it more on a one-mod-at-a-time basis instead of having the jump around, then move folders around on the left hand side. The merge process is already the most complex part of the guide (in my opinion) better to just have all the patches and folders where they need to be before getting there. Pretty sure it's not suppose to be "Morrowloot Ultimate" because we're using OMEGA MLU, not MLU. The patch is likely included in one of many Lexy's MLU patches. This is the same reason why many patches are not checked in various FOMOD installers throughout the guide. Follow the guide exactly. You really can't test a huge modlist until your done with the entire thing and merged it all. Masters will never be in order, and we have a 255 plugin cap to deal with. Not a fault of this guide... You follow the guide correctly from the start, the game will launch and be playable by the end. That's all that matters. The order is very logical and I am pretty sure anybody could follow this guide. Mods are installed in the order they should be loaded on the left hand side of MO2, not in the order of their masters.

Prob just crashing due to missing masters and being over 255 plugins. There's a point where it gets hard to test until you finish the merge section. I followed the guide this week from start to finish without launching the game once, and it works just fine. I wouldn't worry too much. What I mean by designed for vanilla + DLC is that it's balanced around having only so much to explore and so many quests to do. With this pack, you easily have 3+ times as many quests and locations as vanilla which means 3+ times the potential XP. If you plan on doing a lot and filling that LOTD museum, you'd probably get very overleveled with stock rates. I feel you level way too fast in vanilla and the experience mod tries to be about the same speed from my understanding. I usually 1/3 the XP rate with uncapper, so I was going to probably 1/2 the XP rate of the experience mod. However, I have never played with MLU and deleveled zones. That might be a terrible idea because I might not be able to actually kill anything due to leveling too slow. Can anyone comment on what this pack would be like at level 100+? Would everything be really easy even on Legendary?

My vote would be remove IC from the pack but that requires redoing the conflict resolution patches. Have never been a fan of IC (I feel it does more harm than good) and Run For Your Lives does everything I want. Not having JK was the biggest reason I never followed the guide all the way through. When I finally decided to give it a go, I kept telling myself i'll get use to the vanilla towns but it seems impossible. I know there was talk in the past about removing IC from the pack, but sadly it never happened. I'm in the same boat. I haven't tested but I see those settings recommend by others and don't understand how you won't get vastly overleveled with this much content. From what I read experience mod is balanced with just vanilla + DLC in mind. Enabling kill XP makes that much faster, and 2x makes it even faster. I feel like you'll be level 50+ and only touched 10% of the content this pack offers. On the other hand, if you slow it down you might have to grind low level areas since everything is deleveled. Depends if your the type that wants to put 200+ hours into a single character or the type that makes a new character every 30 hours.

Damn yup, sure enough there's some issues with IC and JK's skyrim in Falkreath if I stay around long enough. People trying to walk through fences and stuff.

I've been playing with JK for awhile and it's hard to go back, the towns feel bland. I honestly would remove ICAIO before I'd remove JK, however it's so heavily built into this guide that's not really possible. The compatibility issues don't seem very large. JK's skyrim claims "Immersive Citizens - Partially Compatible. Possible NPC pathing issues in Falkreath and Rorikstead and clipping in Dawnstar"

Is there a reason why ETAC is used instead of JK's Skyrim? ETAC is using 4 ESPs and only changing some minor stuff in Riverwood to my knowledge. JK's Skyrim on the other hand overhauls pretty much every city greatly and works fine with Arthmoor villages. I removed ETAC (as it conflicts with JK's Skyrim) and went to every JK village that was overhauled and didn't see any issues. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/6289?tab=files Files downloaded: JK's Skyrim all in one JK's Skyrim No Lights Patch JK's Skyrim - Arthmoor's Patch Pack - Select merged Option #2, Bring Out Your Dead JK's Skyrim SE Realistic Water Two Patch JK's Skyrim SE Thunderchild Patch Blowing in the wind patch doesn't work unless you rename the blowing in the wind merge ESP, but it doesn't seem needed. Lights and signs are all moving without it. You also need to grab the Landscape Fixes for Grass Mods JK's Skyrim Patch. It merged fine with the others. After removing ETAC, you have to redo the RS children merge and add "JKs Skyrim_Arth CRF DA DB IV RO_Patch.esp" to Arthmoor Village LOOT group.

The guide says to deactivate on the left side, that's why you make folders and move ESPs to them so you can keep the core mods enabled.

You are not properly following the provided merging instructions if you still have those ESPs in your list. Merging should be completely done and the merged mods should be disabled prior to bashing, which means there's no way Wyre Bash would be seeing those ESPs if you properly disabled them on the left side of MO2. Because you shouldn't need to, Wyre Bash should not be seeing those individual plugins you listed. Those ESPs should have been disabled long before you got to that step. Slow down, do the merges again one at a time and triple check them, then disable the merged plugins after each one.

I'm thinking the Stunning Statues section doesn't work. Renaming those files does not produce snow on it's statues, even after deleting the conflicting default files and verifying the path is correct. Check the statue outside Winterhold College and it won't have snow on it. Reinstall no snow under the roof default meshes and they'll overwrite those renamed files and once again give snow on statues. There will be mild clipping issue though. I suggest just switching to the statues in Skyrim Revamped Assets (already used in the guide) and deleting the Talos statue NIF in it. They match the vanilla statues better and work out of the box with the default no snow under the roof meshes (no clipping). Also, I don't appear to get gems when mining. It's a stock faster mining bug but maybe the guy who made the custom script can fix it. I mined ~50 nodes for testing and not 1 gem. Did the same without faster mining and got ~15 gems.