Tiger

I'm getting an issue with SFO. At night in the tundra, I'm getting tiny white "sparkles". Just single pixels that flash white for a second. I've tried many different versions and it seems worse with the later ones. I know it's SFO as that's literally the only mod I have installed at the moment and I don't get it when I uninstall. Has anyone else experienced this? Wondering if it's my drivers. Here's an example. It's hard to see unless you click on the image to see it maximised:

I played for about 4 hours with it last night. Too early to tell but so far so good. I was getting the odd ILS in the usual places. Whiterun, Solitude etc which was annoying but none last night. I was also getting a few random CTDs exclusively in dungeons. Doubt this will be the miracle cure for that (I imagine they are script related, though nothing is showing in logs) but every little bit helps. Will put in a solid 8 hours later and see how it goes.

Hi all I'm Tony, 36 years old from London, UK. Left school at 16 and worked dead-end jobs all my life. 6 years ago, I jacked it all in and went to university as a mature student to study Multimedia Technology & Design. Just graduated with a first and now looking for work. Been a keen gamer since getting a Sinclair ZX81 and have had pretty much every console and computer since (gave up on consoles after the PS2). Now strictly a PC nerd. I somehow missed Morrowind so Oblivion was my first TES game. Been in love with Bethesda ever since. Got into modding Skyrim after discovering Vurt's Flora Overhaul a while back and now have a pretty solid modded game focused on survival + Skyre (with a lot of STEP thrown in). Just started a Dark Elf archer (solo, he's a loner who hates followers) and having a blast. Glad I found this place as it's improved my game immensely, nice to meet you all :-)

This is witchcraft!

Brilliant! That's very well done, love the fireballs :-)

I was looking for the same thing recently but haven't installed any yet. I use Skyre so wanted something relatively compatible. Apocalypse Spell Package is one I was looking at: https://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/16225/? but I haven't really looked into them properly regarding Skyre compatibility.

This is a bit off topic but regarding this, since the high res texture packs do have an ESP for them does that mean I don't actually need to load them for the textures to appear in game?Sorry I was assuming you had extracted them to loose files. If you do that (recommended) with BSAopt, the ESP files are not needed. I feel like such a noob so I really appreciate all the help you've given me so far. For the high res textures, are they all contained in the Skyrim - Textures.bsa? Just wanting to make sure I do this correctly, once I do it, it's not hard to figure out what to do from there. I already had BSAopt downloaded but I was a little concerned using it, as far as I understand you just open the BSA with it, select *.*, click apply, then click Unpack?If you follow the guide here you can't go far wrong: https://wiki.step-project.com/Guide:BSA_Extraction_and_Optimization The High Res DLC each come in their own BSA. HighResTexturePack01.bsa, HighResTexturePack02.bsa and HighResTexturePack03.bsa. You are correct in that you simply open the BSA and unpack it. If you just want to extract them, open each BSA in BSAopt, unpack to some folder. Repack it using winrar or 7zip and copy it back to your mod folder. You can then move the original BSA files out of Skyrim/Data to a safe place in case you want them in the future. Once repackaged, each DLC should just contain a "Textures" folder. When you reapply the mod with whatever mod manager you use, it simply copies the textures over. It doesn't require an ESP file.

This is a bit off topic but regarding this, since the high res texture packs do have an ESP for them does that mean I don't actually need to load them for the textures to appear in game?Sorry I was assuming you had extracted them to loose files. If you do that (recommended) with BSAopt, the ESP files are not needed.Â

Wow that's a lot of mods! BSA are just a compressed archive of textures meshes etc. You can extract them to loose but some mods will still require the ESP as well so that probably won't reduce the plugin count much. I've no experience with merging plugins myself but in any case, I would suggest you're simply running too many mods. If you go through your mods I'm sure there is a lot you can do without. I suggest a cleanup before you start thinking about merging.

When you say "mod load count", do you mean esp (plugin) count? The 255 limit is the number of plugins, not the number of mods. For example, the official high res DLC mods do not count as they simply overwrite textures in the data folder, they do not actually require a plugin to be enabled.

Yeah the only thing I did was take the waterfall and rapids ambient sounds and ran an amplify cut in Adobe Audition. Repackaged and reinstalled. I probably cut them a bit too much actually. I may redo them. Apart from that though, the mod is great. I love the bow twang and distant impact.

Been trying this the last few days myself. Really impressed. At first, I thought I wasn't going to like it, the sound of moving in armour was a bit of a shock but you really need to give it a chance. I don't think I could live without it now. The only thing I'm not so keen on is the loudness of waterfalls/rapids. I know it's realistic but I tend to lose a bit of dialogue when NPCs are being drowned out. On my headphones, crossing the bridge East of Whiterun is deafening. I altered the mod to lower the volume of waterfalls and rapids a bit and am very pleased with the result. Still loud but not so deafening. Fantastic mod.

I have a pair of Sennheiser HD202 which were £30 or so but I'm selling them. I wear glasses and they're too uncomfortable as the cups are rather small and tight. Just ordered some AKG K550 for £130 from Amazon: https://www.amazon.co.uk/AKG-Closed-Back-Reference-Class-Headphones/dp/B005CNR7B0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1382861198&sr=8-1&keywords=k550 I borrowed some recently and the difference in quality is amazing. Nice large cups, very comfortable. The only thing I need to sort now is the soundcard. I'm using onboard at the moment but need to get a proper shielded soundcard as I get a slight buzz from the onboard.

I can't thank you people enough for all the helpful advice in this guide. I installed full STEP a week ago. I used Alternate Start in Riverwood and did a test run through Bleak Falls Barrow. This was the result: The most worrying thing was the memory peaking at 2.9Gb. I also had the common CTD in the wilds randomly. I then spent the next few days carefully going over every mod. I cleaned everything in Tes5edit, extracted and optimized the official stuff. I then did the same for all STEP mods and used half sized normal maps where appropriate. I also got rid of a number of less essential mods, Birds, Ants, Footsteps etc etc. Did another clean install and reapplied all remaining mods and did another test run: Peak memory has been reduced by a huge amount and I can notice no real drop in quality. The game looks the best it has ever been for me. Admittedly with my initial install I chose a few mods at higher resolutions but after redoing everything I always took the lower resolution versions. With everything clean and optimized, I played for 8 hours solid last night without a stutter, crash or anything. I never imagined that the game could run so much better with the right care and attention. So, thank you to everyone involved in this project. You've made me a happy Dovahkin.

I use Hunterborn. Great little mod, works very well with Realistic Needs and Diseases (Includes a patch for it during install). Should work very well with Frostfall too though I'm not using that at the moment. It adds a couple of shout type effects. Forage and Scrimshaw. Foraging lets you find things like edible mushrooms, ingredients etc. You can also forage a sharp rock, which you need to start down the path of scrimshaw. Scrimshaw is the art of bone carving. You can harvest different types of bone from animals and use them to make items like bone hunting knives and a variety of amulets that have small bonuses to attributes. My favourite is an amulet that gives night vision. Very handy as I use RLO and have pretty dark dungeons. You can increases all the skills such as skinning pelts, butchering meat etc. At first skinning pelts will only give you ruined and poor pelts which you can only use for leather strips. As your skill increases the quality of the pelts increases. You also gain more meat from butchering as your skill increases. The default settings do give you rather a lot of meat but it's supposed to be realistic (imagine how much meat you'd get from a fully grown Elk!). All settings can be tweaked via MCM. You can enable "Monster Hunter" which adds things like Spiders and Chaurus to the things you can hunt. You can also buthcer dragons for their meat if you wish. Loads of new recipes to make use of all the meat too. It works great with RND. Hunt an Elk, skin it, butcher it. Drop a tinderbox and make a fire with a cooking pot to make a meal. Drop a tent with bedroll to sleep it off. I love it :-)

Yes I reported the same a few posts above. I think the author is aware of it. It happens in another spot just outside WR too.

Yup, installed both of those. Sorted it, thanks. Loving this so far, just started up with live another life, grabbed Faendal, ran to Bleak Falls and got absolutely raped. Brilliant stuff :-)

I uninstalled increased spawns in the end but I'm getting a lot of speedactuator error messages in my log. Is this normal? 03:58:13PM] Error: Unable to call AddItem - no native object bound to the script object, or object is of incorrect type stack: [ (FF000D94)].Actor.AddItem() - "" Line ? [None].xxxSpeedActuator.actuate() - "xxxSpeedActuator.psc" Line 6

Ok thanks, I've installed those INI files. Will boot up now and see if this is all stable. Cheers.

Great, thanks for the reply Nearox. I'll see how the increases spawns go. I only have it set very low with max spawns +2 and the chances of that are slim. I only wanted it to give a small bit of variety, I don't want swarms of Draugr handing me my arse. I'm a bit lost as to why these patches are needed tbh. I was under the impression that the reproccer took care of things like Immersive Armor. Certainly, after running the reproccer, it adds IA, IW etc to the masters. The only other thing I'm not sure about are the ASIS blocklists. I added the automatic perks on the first page of this thread, but I'm unsure whether I have to add any mods to it. Am I right in thinking that only mods that actually spawn new NPCs need to be added? If that is the case, I don't think I have any installed.

Hi all Thanks for this guide, been of great use to me. I am a bit stuck on one point though. I have all DLC. I have Skyre + ASIS. I also use: Immersive Armor, Immersive Weapons, Ars Metalica and Apocalypse spells. For Skyre I'm using: Main Combat Enemy Scaling For ASIS I'm using: Increased Spawns Automatic Perks Automatic Spells Customized AI For Qotsfans patches I'm using: Stats Blocklist Ars Metallica SMIM patch Misc Reproccer + IA + Destruction Tweak Atronach 50 Bring out your dead (I have bring out your dead installed) Pre ASIS patch Pre Proccer WA fixes IW aMidianSS IA patch Books HF patch For Balbor and Steelsouls I'm using: Stats Skyre crafting fix Dragonborn armour fix Immersive armour reproccer patch Immersive weapons reproccer patch Reproccer dragonborn fix Where I'm stuck is the skyproc patches. I deselected everything under bashed patch and rebuilt the patch and enabled bashed patch esp. So my next step (I believe) is running the skyprocs. This is where I'm at: I think my next step is to enable preasispatch.esp and asis dependency.esp, run sum.jar, select the ASIS patch, enable the options (perks etc) and run it. Then enable asis.esp. Next I enable "pre reproccer WA fixes IW aMidianSS IA patch.esp" and "reproccer.esp", run sum.jar again and patch reproccer. I then enable "reproccerdragonborn.esp" and the four Qotsfans patch esps. Am I on the right track? Many thanks for any advice.

You can get a 30 day trial of Maya. Would you be able to do what you need with that?

Hi all I've recently installed most of the S.T.E.P. mods. The only one I did swap out was W.A.T.E.R for Realistic Water 2. I always used to prefer Pure Waters to W.A.T.E.R. anyway but thought I'd give Realistic Waters a try. I think it's the best water mod I've seen. As Phazer mentions above, W.A.T.E.R. looks a bit, plastic and cartoon-like to me. Maybe it's the patterns you get on large bodies of water, they seem to be rather repetitive. Pure Waters I used for a long time but it is rather too clear for my tastes. You can notice this at Lake Ilinalta if you go for a swim. If you scroll right out in 3rd person view and look top-down on your character, underwater features and fish are too visible. Realistic Waters is much murkier and hides a lot more of the underwater things. It seems to flow well, has a nice surface texture and just fits in much better on my setup. Had it installed for a week now and had no issues with it apart from two places. In Whiterun where the stream passes under the bridge next to the smelter at the main gate, the water sometimes goes funky and loses the surface texture. The other place I've noticed is just next to Whiterun Stables near the Nirnroot plant where the water sometimes loses texture. I believe others have noticed the same and have informed the mod author.