Kelmych

This description for this one, unlike the previous one, indicates it makes some important fixes to the companion quests and characters. For example, in the vanilla game Farkas has some skills that are not consistent with his character and his skills do not improve properly as he gains levels.

Bethesda provides the resource files they create for Skyrim in BSA format. If you are referring to files named "Skyrim - xxxx.bsa" where xxxx is the name of a type of resource such as Sounds, then these are the Bethesda files and are fine as is.

Except for the last file, all those textures are from SRO. Perhaps they are somehow not in the Required Files/SRO folder. I get an error on skyrimgalaxy.dds because TPC loads it from both Enhanced Night Skyrim and HQ Milky Way Galaxy. I use the medium stars version of Enhanced Night Skyrim which doesn't have this file so the log shows an error; it is however loaded from HQ Milky Way Galaxy later in the batch script.

As others have already mentioned, thanks Cestral for the incredible amount of work you did getting a reviewed set of textures and meshes for Skyrim. Your review and then inclusion of SRO textures add more total SRO textures to STEP 2.2 than were in STEP 2.1.1b. I would have thought that the SRO author might have been pleased that after your critical review the SRO effort was appreciated in that so many of the textures being used in TPC and STEP are from SRO. As Cestral mentioned, if we load the full SRO before TPC and don't add the SRO mod to TPC's optional files folder the resulting set of textures used by Skyrim would actually be the same.

The Deadly Dragon mod has a batch file (Essential_NPCs_bat_file-3829) that can be used to make many of the standard NPCs essential, and you could the syntax from this to make a batch file to protect additional NPCs if they you can find their IDs.

You need to use the Fomod version of Soul Gems Differ to get the right folder names for TPC. Alternatively, you could always rename the folders to the names that TPC expects. By the way, for those using DDSopt on textures it is probably not a good idea to use DDSopt on the Soul Gems Differ textures since the texture dimensions are not powers of 2.

freche: I've been running DDSopt on the TPC textures since the first release and I haven't had any problems with them; there aren't any error messages in the log or summary at the bottom of the log indicating broken files or any other problems.

Chesko has posted an addon for Wearable Lanterns called Lanterns for Caravans that adds lantern to Khajiit caravan traders.

Discussion thread: Less Annoying Barbas by Elliotcroft Wiki Link STEP 2.1.1b includes the mod Back off Barbas which keeps Barbas from being too close to the player. Less Annoying Barbas provides this feature and also solves a issue with Barbas potentially breaking a Mage guild quest.

Since Unique Booze Bottles complements Radiant and Unique Potions and Poisons by the same author are you planning to include it at some point also?

I was reading them when you posted this and I haven't seen any problems.

I use Wrye Bash to manage mods, and I tried using NMM to keep track of mod updates but I don't find it as helpful for this task as I would like. Would Mod Organizer be useful for the task of keeping track of mod updates? I still plan to use Wrye Bash for all the installation, etc.

I certainly agree with your choice for black soul gems and the idea of a relatively clear texture for empty and a more opaque one for filled. For me, I'd like to have every soul gem size be a different color to make it more interesting and easier to tell the size by color. The picture you reference certainly doesn't do this. I don't have strong preferences on which color goes with which size, just that they be different.

Morrowind Armor for Skyrim is now available on Nexus, and the esp and bsa files were renamed.

My choices for Soul Gems Differ have different colors for each soul gem type.

Skyrim seems to have burned out a lot of good modders. There a many good mods that are likely to wither away since they are not being maintained while the game itself is evolving. I don't remember this happening to the same extent in Morrowind or Oblivion.

With the importance of xbox/ps3 to Bethesda it might matter a lot more when these move to a 64bit OS. Until then I wouldn't be surprised if Bethesda keeps bandaiding their game engine to work in Windows without necessarily using the real capabilities of a 64 bit OS. Shadow Striping Fix Indoor and Outdoor is available again; it also had some problems. The author posted a repaired version yesterday.

It was included in a discussion in the DDSopt thread and was included in the optimized version of the High Res DLC that Z discussed there. That's the only place I've seen it mentioned in STEP. My DDSopt version of the High Res DLC includes the potion of these tweaks that Z recommended.

I'm still seeing several hour or longer delays before a new file can be downloaded.

A new version (v2 beta) was posted today,

I haven't used it in Skyrim yet, but Duke Patricks - Archery And Heavy Weapons Combat that he ported from Oblivion seems like a potentially useful combat mod. Using his mod made combat more challenging in Oblivion. It is based on his participation in Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) medieval heavy weapon tournament fighting.

While it was briefly up I looked at the comments and there were some problems with it.

By the way, Steam Mover is at https://www.traynier.com/software/steammover . The download link is on the line after Version History.

While the Companions quest line is short, it isn't that different from the other guilds in the game. The Mage's guild has only a few major quests before you are the Archmage. In Oblivion and Morrowind there were more quests for each guild, but only 2-3x more. Uncapper could be used to make increasing the number of quests feasible, but I don't think many players are looking for a very long game. Personally, 10 radiant quests seems like a lot to me between each major guild quest. The other problem with the Companions is the bugs that Bethesda hasn't fixed. Read the UESP Wiki about the Proving Honor quest. This quest needs to be done while your character is at a fairly low level (<15) because Farkas' skills don't progress properly otherwise (even then they are still bugged).

Apparently the tracks last a fairly long time; I wonder how long.