Kelmych

I currently use the Sneak part of the mod; I think this mod would be a useful part of a STEP pack. I'm using Locks Overhaul in STEP but I'm a little disappointed that the change it makes to ordinary lockpicking seems only to be that it adds a minimum skill level for each lock difficulty level (novice, apprentice, ...) below which picking is impossible. This is reminiscent of the very simplistic lockpicking in the earliest TES games. Stealth Skills Rebalanced says it changes the actual difficulty of locks which is closer to what I was originally expecting with the ordinary lockpicking component of Locks Overhaul. The two mods thus seem complementary as they don't have the overlap I thought they would have; I plan on using Lockpicking from Stealth Skills Rebalanced.

Since it supports lighting mods shouldn't it be in Landscape and Environment?

The XCE mod in STEP includes female feet meshes so FemFeet shouldn't be needed. Neovalen doesn't include much of XCE in Skyrim Revisited, and I'm not sure that any of the mods included there have a female foot mesh (it isn't included in the standard UNP body mods, for example).

Okay I'll try to explain to you what I mean: - Normally the Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini have included variables and values. Each variable has a specific value. All variables are separated from another by a line end. [Display] ... iMaxAnisotropy=16 # LINE END iMultiSample=8 # Next line ... - If I apply any ini tweak through WB my ini files look like this if viewn with Windows Editor: [Display]...iMaxAnisotropy=16iMultisample=8... - If I view the ini files with wrye bash for further tweaking it still looks like this: [Display] ... iMaxAnisotropy=16 # LINE END iMultiSample=8 # Next line ... - If I view the ini files through the Editor and copy all the content and paste it somewhere else it looks again like this: [Display] ... iMaxAnisotropy=16 # LINE END iMultiSample=8 # Next line ... All in all... weird. I cannot correctly tweak any values anymore except with wrye bash. Some of the vanilla Windows editors are not tolerant of both of the standard conventions used in indicating line breaks. Some Windows editors can only function when the Windows convention (a carriage return byte followed by a line feed byte) is used. Notepad++ is tolerant of multiple forms of line breaks. I'm not sure which convention Wrye Bash follows; it might be using the Unix convention of having a single LF byte.

Perhaps it might be affected by using a TES5Edit-cleaned version of these mods; when you initially setup WB you likely had the original versions. It shouldn't complain since I thought it recreated any checksums it might use for the modlist when you startup and during periodic rechecks (but not for the installation packages). Based on your description it sounds like there is a package in the installation tab that expects files with these names. I don't have an installation package that expects any of the vanilla esm files; these esm files are just in the data directory.

Although the region boundaries aren't as accurate as many would like I prefer version 3 since it is simpler and less involved with the inner workings of weather mods (which could change as the mods change). Overall I do feel it adds to immersion having areas not just be called "Skyrim".

Now that it is finally compatible with other mods and USKP I think it should be in STEP.

Like a number of STEP forum users, I've been using the updated Frostfall in my game. I find that the Campsites in Skyrim mod is a good complement to the various climate and cooking realism mods, the new Real Shelter mod, and the portable tents/campfires included in Frostfall and some other mods. Campsites in Skyrim adds 30 permanent campsites to Skyrim. These campsites have a full set of navmeshes so they are highly companion-friendly. There are two versions, one with all the map markers visible, and the other one that I use with hidden map markers (shown only after discovery). The mod also has optional NPCs that move around among the various campsites. If you use this mod you will still be using portable tents and campfires most of the time when you travel on foot and horseback. The campsites are generally not directly on main roads and are spread across Skyrim; they are a little more common in the colder northern regions than in the south.Â

For a long time it has bothered me that I can't see any terrain details of the islands north of Winterhold or the mountainous areas north of Solitude. The updated version of EzEs -Remove 3D Map Camera Limits mod removes much of these limitations and I can finally see these details, as well as being able to zoom into higher detail views everywhere on the map. I use it with the STEP mods "A Quality Map Installer" and "High Quality 3D Map". Setting up proper Skyrim.ini parameters for maps is important but a little tricky since some of the recommendations are outdated or don't work with some mods. STEP doesn't currently have recommendations for these parameters. The ones in the mod description page are largely similar to those mentioned in "A Quality Map Installer" and in FireHawkX's Improved 3D World Map and other skyrim ini tweaks  and are generally good. My suggestions are to use these but: as mentioned in the description, the two LOD parameter settings often don't work with some mods and I don't use themalthough the first 3 parameters are default in Skyrim it's a good idea to at least add the minheight parameter since it is much smaller than the recommendations from other mods (this mod does support very low minimum height as shown in the videos on the description page)the speed-related parameters give very slow scrolling for me and I use the much higher values for these recommended by FireHawkX

Skyrim Gems has a category for item weight mods and there are several that sound reasonable and fairly comprehensive. I've been meaning to compare some of these as STEP adds new packs for various aspects of improving realism and immersion. I am just starting to look at them. I agree that the weight of the pickaxe and axe are too high in vanilla, but it would be useful to look at whether the more comprehensive mods provide better overall immersion.

For me, adding an esp that just changes the weight (and assault value if desired) of only two items is hard to justify adding. If the goal is to add mods to make weights more realistic I think there are more comprehensive mods worth considering.

I added a sidebar on the "STEP Mod Texture Properties" page of the guide mentioning this. I also added a sidebar in "DDSopt Optimization" about BSAs vs. loose files, mentioning the need to extract resources from STEP mods in addition to the vanilla BSAs and the two reports about potential problems with the optimized addon DLC BSAs. I still haven't added the Golden Shrine exceptions to the DDSopt.ini file; soon.

I looked at the Airborne Perching Birds mod with TES5Edit. The only conflict I see is with Harvest Overhaul. Airborne Perching Birds has a Spawn script attached to a number of of Flora such as Scaly Philiota. Airborne Perching Birds uses the standard ingredient name, but for Harvest Overhaul to work the ingredient name it assigns must be used. There are 12 such conflicts; it would be easy to fix these with a patch.

Sometimes the registry entry for Skyrim gets lost or corrupted, and this will cause both BOSS and TES5Edit to be unable to find Skyrim. It's fairly easy to fix. You need to go to the Skyrim directory and run the Skyrim launcher (not the SKSE launcher); this will install the proper registry key. When you run the launcher it will overwrite your Skyrim.ini and SkyrimPrefs.ini files, so if you feel these are already correct then save them and restore after the you exit the launcher. I'd strongly suggest you follow the steps in sections 1B and 1C in the STEP 2.2.1 guide unless you are certain these two files are already properly configured; even then it would be helpful to go through these steps anyway since something might have changed. If you have an AMD card there are some recent updates to the guidance that show the screens for the current version of the AMD configuration tool; you can find this in the list of guides.

Roughly half of these have been discussed in various STEP threads. You can use the search function (with mod name as subject of the search) to find the particular threads. You can also find some of them discussed in the Skyrim Revisited thread. In general, mods that have a lot of scripts are the ones that have the most potential to be problematic; unfortunately you have to either find comments on these or try them to see how they work for you.

What tool(s) did you use to install mods? TES5Edit uses the registry to automatically find the Skyrim Data Directory; if there is a problem with registry entries for Skyrim then it won't work. BOSS also uses the registry. What directory is your Skyrim installed in? You shouldn't have to reinstall anything to add DLC's, but you might need to change some mods to versions that support the DLC you are using.

I have two monitors, and on the 2nd monitor are (among other things) a CPU/RAM monitor and a GPU/VRAM monitor so I can always see what is happening with these. So far I've never seen CPU usage get above roughly 70% in Skyrim. I've had cases where it seems to be running out of RAM (I get an error warning); when that happened memory use was 3.2 Gb or less vs the 4Gb that is available to Skyrim.

It also seems to me to be a tradeoff. Yes, BSAs provide faster loading but the decompression uses CPU cycles. Which is more important in Skyrim, reducing CPU load associated with decompression or decreasing the load time (and perhaps some CPU loading, and chipset loading) for the resources?

Thanks for this one also. I'm still impressed that you wrote a wizard for CQLA.

There are no reported problems with the 6 non-texture BSAs you listed. The optimized versions of these have been in use for quite a while. I converted all the addon BSAs including the Hearthfire BSA to loose files and, after DDSopt optimization of the textures, I converted them back to BSAs using BSAopt. I received the letter from the Jarl and there isn't any problem with it in my game. I don't have one of the Dawnguard Crossbows so I have not been able to confirm the problem that alt3rn1ty mentioned. I'll change the guide to mention the problems so users can choose if the want to use an archive of the loose files for the addon DLC BSAs if the textures are optimized. I'll also add a note so that users understand that if they use an archive of loose files, then all the BSAs in all the mods being used also need to be extracted so the mod uses an archive of loose files. This includes all of the unofficial patches as well any other mod being used, at least those might overwrite one of the vanilla resource files that came from an addon DLC that is not being used as a BSA. I do this anyway myself, but I want to make sure other users are aware of this.

Once Wrye Bash supports BSAs as an achive method, some of the advantage of archived loose files vs. BSAs will go away. The first two reported problems with BSAopt compression are for the two vanilla BSAs that contain audio data which, as alt3rn1ty mentions, can be problematic. We don't yet know exactly which resource is causing the recently reported problem with Crossbows in Dawnguard.

The main reason I know of to not repack the loose files as BSAs is if there are problems with the repacked BSAs as there apparently are with three of the repacked vanilla BSAs. Loose files can be read more efficiently, but I doubt this has a noticeable performance effect. The advantage of repacking the vanilla BSAs is that you can continue to mix mods with BSAs and loose files knowing that the vanilla resources will be overwritten independent of whether the resources in mods that load later are loose files or in a BSA. If a vanilla BSA is unpacked into loose files, particularly the addon DLC BSAs that have many different types of resources, then you need to unpack the resources from all mods using BSAs that load later (at least for all mods that might overwrite a resource in the unpacked vanilla BSA).

REFRs have been in the Bethesda engine for a while, so the no-longer-being-used REFRs problem preceeds Skyrim (there is a version of this mod for Fallout New Vegas, for example). The recent fix capability added to SKSE is for scripts that are no longer associated with an active mod, and scripts were first added for Skyrim. I expect that these two fixes are independent.

The new set of screens is great. Are the settings in screen 5 true for users in all three STEP categories (performance, baseline, and extreme)? We eventually also need to add some screens with the new GUI (perhaps from z, I have only one card myself) that include crossfire settings.