Baubledorst

It's mostly notable re: the esl files because you can effectively exclude the total esl count from the 255 limit when you're adding additional mods yourself. Your shuffling for merges is one thing, but technically the esl count of the unofficial sound / music mod alone means you have space for 7 more personal esp inclusions without disabling anything when it comes time to actually launch the game. That said I have been tamping / tweaking a lot for my 'above and beyond the pack' mod selections and trying, generally, to get the most 'bang for my buck' with some of my last few additions. Chiefly this is by way of really big, well-received quest mods like Project AHO, which effectively adds an enormous amount of high quality content for the 'low price' of a single esp. Compared to 'spending' an esp on something like giving Nazeem a cloud district crown (though arguably, that should take precedence.) Unrelated, I would love a mod that makes the Dawnbreaker actually give off light so I can wield it in these super dark dungeons and navigate them all fancy-like.

Bear in mind that a lot of the 'slots' are technically esl files, so you just uncheck those temporarily when loading e.g. SSEEdit and it will proceed as fine. The most recent 'fixed BSA' version of the Unofficial sound/music mod weighs in at 7 esl files, for example.

I found a mod that addresses Improved Closefaced Helmets compatibility with Helgen Reborn to fix the headless issue I ran into: Closefaced Helmets for Helgen Reborn For nominal inclusion - Argonian Improvements SSE - Horns no esp or anything, just a simple drop and activate that improves all the horns for Argonians with nicer from-scratch textures. They look pretty good in game!

100% agree with the 4.2 XP32--I was fairly stable but still CTD'd at least once a session for the longest time, with some cases where I'd keep CTDing repeatedly and consistently until I narrowed it down to XP32 4.32 as I mentioned in this thread before. After that post I already rolled back to 4.2, and I have sincerely not had a single CTD since I did that over what is now almost 20 hours. On a different note, Helgen Reborn's Hattu heavy helmet made my character headless. D'oh! Also worryingly, though potentially a low priority issue since in theory everything's going to the museum instead of wherever: the Helgen Reborn player home reward has a dragon mask display that I activated unthinkingly while I had a dragon mask. When I activated it to retrieve the mask, it disappeared from the game entirely. I tested it a few times, and the display consistently 'ate' any masks. Yikes.

For what it's worth, now that I've got everything cinched in nicely with the SE guide, I went for 15 hours without a single CTD, which is completely nuts to me given historical Skyrim modding experience. It's really, really well put together as a cohesive whole. I am pining hard to swap from Vivid Weather though, but I'm too deep in this playthrough to swap out weather scripts now.

Couple of random consistency / tweaking / patching questions: -Where do other folks land on the various merges and consistency patches in regards to NPCs and followers having a max level set to 0 vs. a max level raised higher than the Unofficial Patch? I'm just tidying up in SSEEdit and e.g. different components of the guide keep going back and forth on Lydia, etc. -Presumably you don't want to re-merge / re-build armor and weapon mods mid-playthrough to add additions, as that will potentially juggle / jostle the record IDs and make a bunch of gear disappear, right? -I really like Immersive College of Winterhold; it is also incidentally the biggest source of conflicts in SSEEdit at the moment over files disputing lighting, perks for NPCs, facegen data, the works. What should ultimately win out in these scenarios? -Just for my own knowledge, I relatively often run into minor edits that seem to set aggro on various NPCs either to 0 or into the hundreds, or change a faction from 0 to -1 etc. Are these wild edits? Are they something that should be paid attention to?

A subtle but fun mod: Player Size Adjuster and Fist Person Camera Height Fix SSE Translates height discrepancies by race / etc. into the first person camera and has an adjustable MCM menu if you'd like to adjust exactly how tall your character is. The MCM menu also has options to make werewolf and vampire lord forms scale based on your character's height, rather than the defaults for those forms--just overall a neat little mod for seeing how short / tall you are as a Breton or Nord, etc. It can even influence jump height / stride length / speed and all that jazz if you'd like the whole kit and kaboodle.

Triple check which files you're modifying for the snow pines--I kept on being convinced that I had followed the guide and on the third time of very closely checking the actual file names I had a face palm moment and fixed them correctly. I suspect that may be the same situation you're in with your snow pines because I had the exact same dilemma after (thinking) I'd followed the special instructions in the guide correctly. It's easy to hit the wrong mesh there.

Just a curious spot check--roughly how large are folks' save game files between 50 - 70 hours in (if someone has a file around that mark with this setup.)

It's worth noting also that as of 3.1.0 the mod author took conscious steps to make the add-on modules very merge-friendly, so you can cleanly smoosh them all together when you have the combination that suits your preference of mod expansions and fixes.

A mod has been released to give Moonpath to Elseweyr a fully custom soundtrack, using tracks from Beyond Skyrim: Elseweyr. An excellent candidate for inclusion in the guide, IMO! Same author reports being almost done with a second mod for Moonpath that tweaks the entire mod to give it proper skylighting and other clean-ups / tweaks.

It's intended for someone who doesn't use fast travel in their playthrough, and basically presents another level of access to work in tandem with the carriage / ferry rides, and by default you're spending soul gems to power it (configurable to player preference) it involves questing and exploration to get it operational and it looks great in the environment. In my opinion it is a lot more reasonable than a 'teleportation hub' in the sense I believe you're mentioning--heck, it takes more legwork than just using carriages because you have to discover the wayshrines and activate them with soul gems before they're valid destinations in the first place. The #1 reason I like it is because it feels like a fun and rewarding expansion of your travel options that you grow into as your character levels up and explores more and more regions of the world space, and you can make it as involved as you like to gain access to it.

Just a further update, since I still hold a strong candle for suggesting Skyrim Wayshrines - Immersive Fast Travel - Swift SE for inclusion--the author is looping back around to implement a wayshrine tie-in with LotD as well. I went over the full span of why I'm so geeked about this mod in my prior post, but I'm really keen on the progression this introduces for characters as they develop into higher levels on a no fast travel setup. It's also extremely lightweight on the scripting side, to quote: Although the mod contains scripts, it is actually script lag free. Every single script used in this mod is event based except for a single optional script. A very large portion of these event based scripts are used one time only and then never execute again. Therefore, there is no need to worry about script lag :). The one script that is an exception is a script attached to the endgame artifact you obtain much later down the road, and the script will only be used if you use the artifact. Furthermore, the script itself is only dynamic in the sense that it changes a global variable once after 24 hours of it being activated, then is not used until you use that artifact again. So even the one and only script that runs in the background optionally on your behalf is still extremely light!

Here's the screwy portcullis texture: https://i.imgur.com/IOpnigB.jpg

I was wondering if anyone else encounters this--select bits of flora look 'fullbright' to me regardless of lighting conditions, or close to it, to where it's mildly jarring and annoying. The rest of the foliage looks fine, but here's junipers as an example of what I mean: https://i.imgur.com/89pkOxi.jpg My portcullis texture is also wonky and I'm not entirely sure the source of that little annoyance, as the lion's share of the rest of the package looks fine otherwise.

Not using styles, or really anything from the extra sub-menus from RaceMenu. Most of what I was trying to chase down was CTDs that happened after using soap for Keep it Clean--inconsistent when it occurs, but consistently repeatable when it does occur. I have a small number of mods beyond the guide and systematically worked through disabling / shutting down all of them to see if it would stop the CTD when it was repeatable--and the only thing that actually halted the CTDs turned out to be rolling back the XP32 version / clearing its scripts out of a save. I am still proceeding with my live saves with 4.32 since I'd rather not perform script surgery on an actual playthrough, it was largely for testing purposes for future playthroughs / trying to satisfy figuring out what the blazes was giving me such grief. It's one of the only things that zings me with CTDs with the guide setup. I used a realtime papyrus log on a second monitor in addition to working through the mods, halting quests, shutting things down and toggling things through MCM, etc. That was after spending a couple of hours trying more benign troubleshooting, such as switching around or removing all gear beforehand or experimenting with setting my carry weight high in case if it was some weird overencumbered + removing backpack behavior etc. Even with all that, I'm not 100% sold on it being XP32 in and of itself, but it's the only direct change I've been able to do that tangibly halted the repeatable CTD scenarios for me so far.

Re: Lighting, I feel very silly upon discovering that you can manually turn on the lights in the Legacy of the Dragonborn safehouse, which seem to default to off, and then it looks quite nicely lit. D'oh!

You swapped your weather system during a live playthrough? Or this is on a fresh start?

I didn't have to touch anything but XP32 itself + re-running FNIS to compensate. I did more stress testing though and 4.20 did not crash anywhere I was crashing before. Unfortunately, 4.20 also doesn't really hang with RaceMenu etc. and doesn't support newer things like the new spear animations mod. Grrr.

Just having read people indicate to either use 4.32 or revert to 4.20 specifically. Post-4.20 seems to be when the entire codebase had its big overhaul.

...just to test, I went back to XP32 4.32. I had -not- had skee64, but I did have the engine fixes and whatnot. I added skee64 as well.... and it doesn't crash in the CTD spots -with- the new XP32 4.32 either. Argh. I feel spun around and silly. Edit: Nope, back to crashing on 4.32 again (reloading saves without removing script data, for reference.)

Just a heads up to folks because I feel it might be helpful to share, and YMMV: I am 90% confident that I was able to track down and resolve my last inexplicable but consistently reproducible crashes to XP32 version 4.32. After hours of troubleshooting systematically toggling different mods, going in and out of MCM menus, starting and stopping quests in the console, the works (going back to saves where I had ironclad 'guaranteed to crash' instances on standby) I worked my way through and had found interspersed mentions from people indicating XP32 crashes in some scenarios. I got a realtime papyrus log going on a second monitor, and stressed tested the daylights out of it--and over time, identified that for whatever reason, the XP32 scripts in the most recent version were log-jamming things. I rolled back my XP32 version to 4.20, which I had also seen folks indicate for stability--then cleared out the orphaned XP32 4.32 scripts from the save, fired it up and... voila. No CTDs in any of the circumstances I was able to get them to reliably and consistently occur, no matter what mod or MCM configurations I had done, with the -sole- change being rolling XP32 to the earlier version. IMHO, it might be worth considering recommending 4.20 over 4.32 in the guide for safety sake--and independent of this I have generally been able to play for hours at a stretch without issues--but if there's anyone out there still having grief from hard to pin down crashes, I felt it might be helpful to share my findings in this regard.

Just as a side lark to inquire--the historically wonkiest place I've encountered head-scratching when trying to sort out xEdit records for smoothing out compatibility pretty much always comes down to Unique Uniques, Improved Open-faced Helmets, etc.--the dragon priest masks & unique weapons always feel like a weird musical chairs game trying to figure out which model to give precedence and which stat modifications to put in, etc. Everything else is usually fairly straightforward to fall into place with adjustment patches, it just feels like that's always the quagmire for me.

Just wanted to chime in and say thanks for pointing out the Report masters script in xEdit, somehow I'd never stumbled onto that before! That is incredibly handy as I am trying to navigate some pruning at the moment!

For the most part my interiors have been looking great with the LotD guide setup--the only exceptions of note that leap to mind are The Winking Skeever in Solitude being incredibly dark without turning on my own light, and--unfortunately--the Safehouse for the museum is less dark and more just uniformly 'blandly gray' for lighting, apart from a few motes of light sources here and there.