Cantus

Interesting. Yeah, Pfuscher mentions only having parallax on some of the files and not others. I only ever got the grey shimmer effect when there was a mod conflict (ELFX + a city replacer + 2020, and usually ELFX was the problem) or the one time I accidentally updated Better Dynamic Snow. But I'm probably not setting up parallax correctly. Most of the instructions I've been able to find were confusing, contradictory, or both, and it's not really my area of expertise. But the textures did look pretty good with just the shader from BDS and no other tweaks, parallax or no parallax ... You make a good argument for full parallax not being worth the effort, at least not at my limited level of graphics enthusiasm.

Thanks for the feedback. I did search to prevent duplication but missed the instructions at the top of the page. I went ahead and posted just one of them, using the tool, and will see what the feedback looks like there before posting more.

Discussion topic: JS Instruments of Skyrim SE by johnskyrim Wiki Link As a musician I am picky about the appearance of instruments. This mod provides 4k and 2k photo realistic meshes and textures for the standard Skyrim instruments, which stay true to the original art style. In my opinion as someone who actually plays medieval instruments, these are superior in both image quality and accuracy to Rally's Instruments that are currently in the guide. While I am new to Step, this mod has been in my load order for close to a year without causing me any problems.

Skyrim 2020 is a sprawling mass of meshes and textures, still under rapid evolution, but it makes for a very high-quality base layer that makes many other landscape, city, and clutter mods redundant. Skyrim 2020 Parallax by Pfuscher at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) It definitely keeps to a vanilla-plus aesthetic but in a photo-realistic way. On the down side, it takes up a lot of disk space, and depending on whether you load the 2k, 4k, or 8k version, can be a resource hog. (I'm closer to "minimum" than "recommended" specs relative to the guide, so I'll probably downgrade to the 4k). I'm troubleshooting my first pass through the Step guide but wasn't willing to do without 2020. So far they seem to be playing well enough together but it's a lot of surface area to look at. The areas where I tend to run into conflicts that aren't automatically solved by default load order is some city replacers and JK's Skyrim. I would recommend testing 2020 as a potential base layer for the next version of the guide, but with the assumption that it will be a time consuming process.

I've been using several of the JS X object replacers and find them to be of superior graphical quality to the alternatives, including the ones in the current Step guide. I know we're supposed to do one topic per mod but I think of them as a package, and they should be testable as a group. I have personally used these and can strongly recommend them for image quality, realism, and accuracy to the pseudo-historical setting: JS Dragon Claws AE (Anniversary Edition) at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) (technically I used the SE version) JS Instruments of Skyrim SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) -- (Replaces Rally's Instruments at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)) JS Helm of Yngol SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) (gray version) This doesn't integrate quite as seamlessly as the others because the styling is slightly different and the photo-realistic texture can make other armors look cartoonish JS Purses and Septims SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) JS Shrines of the Divines SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) -- (Replaces Enhanced Vanilla Textures - Shrines at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)) JS Barenziah SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) -- (Replaces Barenziah's Glory SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com)) JS Lockpicking UI SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) JS Armored Circlets SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) -- this is the only one that changes game mechanics, in that it lets you create circlets with the armor value of the helms they correspond to, for those who like to see their followers' faces. I have not yet tried but would strongly consider these (which came out since my last play through): JS Unique Utopia SE - Daggers at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) Note that it is an ESL and may have conflicts JS Attunement Sphere and Lexicons SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) JS Dwemer Puzzle Cube SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) JS Common Cages SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) -- maybe. This doesn't add as much as the others. JS Dwemer Artifacts SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) JS Dwemer Ichor Barrels SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) JS Dwemer Kitchenware SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) JS Dwarven Oil SE at Skyrim Special Edition Nexus - Mods and Community (nexusmods.com) This is my first post, so be gentle Cantus EDIT: Dimmed and Strike-out links have had forum topics created