Sakedo

So I have an itch and I'm creating a mod. I believe, in an attempt to become popular and minimize the installation burden, most major overhauls try and do everything themselves. This lets them control exactly what's in the mod, but it neglects the excellent work of others -- specialists who've already spent countless hours trying to hone and perfect one specific segment of the game. Case in point: Requiem. It does a lot of things really well, and for the most part it fits together seamlessly. The problem is that, as soon as you start adding things, it breaks down quickly. Worldspaces and Cells conflict. Levelled items don't bash together well without upsetting the balance, and certain parts of it are just lackluster (food?) or overly frustrating. My solution is to build a mod that has STEP Core as a dependency, and then layers specific mods (much like the many existing Packs) on top of it. Then, add a custom Patch and extra scripts where necessary to interweave them all together, possibly including some small bits of custom content. I will do a lot of hand editing of values and resolve all conflicts with the various mods. The end result, hopefully, is something that's more easily expanded but likely already includes everything you might want in your experience. I don't really care how many people play it, because it's what I want to play. Ultimately, I am after a lore friendly Skyrim experience that harkens back to the days of old. I want combat to feel fast paced and deadly. It should never involve just standing there clicking the mouse button until something dies. You should be afraid, and you should lose. Often.  It just makes the sweet taste of victory all that much sweeter.  You should be afraid of a man in cloth wielding an iron two handed sword, and you should probably take care of that guy aiming a high velocity pointy bit of steel at your head. Nothing should feel quaint or pointless. With that in mind, I'm interested in what your opinion of the "best of the best" in each aspect of Skyrim. What mods do you install on top of STEP or Skyrim: LE? If you had to delete them all, what's that one piece of gameplay content that you would really miss? Here's some thoughts, opinions, and my own experience: Alternate Start - Live Another Life: I'll likely tweak and balance many of the starts for loot drops. They won't all be completely even, but they'll be a little bit closer. It's a great way of adjusting your starting difficulty while making your decision mostly irrelevant after a few levels. Open Encounter Zones: Things won't just give up when you leave. NPCs will use arrows: You'll be able to take cover and run them out of arrows, if you're very very careful. Weapon damage scaling: Above and beyond whichever combat mod is selected. Similar to Requiem or SkyRe, but without the need for Reproccer Most everything kryptopyr is involved with -- I think they're probably going to all end up in STEP anyhow. Complete Crafting Overhaul, Weapon and Armor Fixes, and Clothing and Clutter Fixes will be the base level that I'll balance the game around. Trade and Barter (activated) seems like a nice choice for the economy. Tweaked Stamina, Health Regen, Magicka Regen, Carry weight - I'm already pretty happy with the values I've found for these. Health will regenerate as slow as molasses, but not be off entirely. You won't be able to carry much, but you'll be able to have backpacks and bags to expand it. And it won't go up as you level. Stamina and magicka regenerate about half what they do in vanilla, and the former has more things that deduct Stamina. Jumping will deduct stamina, but it won't be like Requiem where if you get stuck on geometry and have to jump again you won't have to just stand there for two minutes waiting to recover enough to start moving again. Flatter levelling - Levels are important, but our growth will be incremental rather than exponential. Trap Tweaks - Traps shouldn't deal so little damage, and shouldn't be so poorly hidden. All the DLC - I don't want to fuss with permutations of compatibility patches Some extra content - Falskaar, Wyrmstooth, Civil War Overhaul, Cutting Room Floor, etc. Anything that's well made enough to pass as part of the original game. A lot of mods from Skyrim Revisisted - Legendary Edition and STEP: Extended - I think right now I'm actually running all the mods in STEP, SR:LE, and most of STEP: Extended. Users or either should be able to install just a few mods to get to a usable state. Immersive Patrols - Probably even Battles. With the new Mem Patch, it's perfectly stable and really makes the civil war come to life. You do end up with a lot of loot from the many dead bodies, and the game will have to be balanced around the idea that you'll have a pretty decent set of armor/weapons right from the start. I may add some scripts that looks at the faction of the armor you're wearing and has the various faction soldiers treat you accordingly (you probably don't want to walk around Windhelm in full Imperial regalia) A major combat overhaul - Deadly Combat? DUEL: Hardcore? Ultimate Combat? What's your favorite and why? Make food not worthless - Realistic Needs and Diseases - Or is Imp's More Complex needs better? Something else? Perk Trees - I plan on slicing and dicing perk trees from many sources. Which are your favorites of each? New Lore-Friendly Weapons/Armors - Trying to stay as lore-friendly as possible. Requiring a few lets me adjust the levelled lists by hand and balance the item stats. Customized Loot tables - These will likely need some hand editing to be balanced right from the start. Magic overhauls - Apocalypse seems great but it doesn't affect perks. How might we create a great experience? If you've read this far, then what mods come to mind in your head and make you think "He should add X"?

Typically it's just certain mods that add themselves to the MCM Menu and then end up with an ID greater than 7F that have problems. Unfortunately, those problems may not always be readily apparently. This is one of the things fixed in the new SKSE alpha.

It's also very helpful to have them in separate directories to be able to just uncheck them for different profiles without having to reinstall the whole mod. Being able to uncheck Requiem patches, SkyRe patches, Civil War Overhaul patches etc lets me jump between different configurations (and with the local save options, saved game sets) very quickly.

If that's the case, we'll probably have to hide (or delete) the two files that conflict with SkyFalls and Realistic Water Two (textures/effects/fxwatertile02_n.dds and textures/effects/fxfluidtile02.dds) and move Skyfalls above SMIM in Conflicting Graphics.If you delete meshes/architecture/solitude/swindmill.SM.nif and farmhouse/farmhousewindmill/farmhousewindmillfan02.nif from SkyFalls (same amount of file deletes) everything can stay where it's at, right?

There's an executable in the mod organizer directory that handles the download links for nexus. I believe it's NXM-something.exe. It's the only other .exe in the directory. If you run it, you should see it has a mapping for mod organizer and the downloads directory, and there's a button you can press to make it register. If it's not set properly it'll just appear like nothing happened. That's what happened to me after I moved MO's directory - rerunning the executable and fixing it made it work fine. Give it a shot.

There's a Whiterun Roof Tile in Project Parallax Remastered - SRO that's parallax mapped to the vanilla texture rather than the SRO texture. It's sufficiently different to cause some distortion. Since it's one of the HRDLC textures, I just hid the SRO version of the file rather than de-parallax the nif. I'll update this with the exact file once I'm back at my Skyrim setup Edit: It's wrroofslate01 as well as wrdragontile01

Indeed it does. I was there for the buyout. It was pretty cool, as an old school Elder Scrolls fan, to get to meet and talk to the Bethesda design folks they flew out about their upcoming game called Skyrim. They said their main goal was awesome dragon fights, saying that he believes it's never really been done well in a video game. I was struck by how excited they all were; most people can't keep the energy going for years on end, day after day, of long hours on the same project, but the end result labor-of-loves are always special. Less than you could probably tell from anyone that's played the beta. I've been out for a few years now, and all they really showed us was some pre-rendered movies during the annual video conferences. Most of the folks making TES Online are folks picked up by Zenimax after EA axed Mythic, and the game IMO feels more like Warhammer Online or Age of Conan to me than TES.

Unfortunately, YASH seems to have some issues. It's reliant on dated version of the USKPs, and has CTD incompatibilities with several mods because of its huge levelled lists. Additionally, because they're all de-leveled Wyrm Bash doesn't play nicely with it. I've created a replacer ESP to fix several of the issues myself, but the author isn't around to ask permission to re-distribute his work because for some of them, I've had to decompile some of his scripts -- he didn't provide any source and, in the various comment threads for his mod, seemed pretty territorial about things. And for the most part of playing it, I kept wishing that it felt more like Requiem combat-wise. The AI gets stuck on too many things, and moves so quickly that it feels very floaty. Additionally, some of his changes seem very strange, such as removing the helmets from guards because he "hates robots", trying to change armor in combat leaves you naked, and the different weapons being crippled until your skill level reaches a certain point seems okay in theory... but in practice makes very little sense from an immersion standpoint and seems to directly violate his stance on things applying to NPCs in addition to you (it's true, it does, but they all get stat boosts to help them out and your stats all start at or near 0) I've concluded that it would be easier to make a mod for Requiem that implements some of the great ideas within YASH, and I'd love some idea feedback and eventually some play testers. I want a lighter weight version of Requiem that doesn't hand place so many things within the world or make quite as many changes to things, but still plays very much like Requiem. And I'd like it to be a little different each time you play it. And I believe that I can do it all with SkyProc.

Hi folks, I've been lurking for quite some time and only somewhat recently started posting. I'm a Dallas-area game industry programmer, formerly an employee of Zenimax (now employed elsewhere) that spends what little time I have away from my kids tearing down and tinkering my setup in TES5Edit rather than playing it. :) I now have a hand select pack of textures based on STEP's work that still amaze me every time I launch the game. Skyrim always bored me until I found Requiem, which recreated some of my fonder memories of PVP in Eve but without the weeks long slog trying to raise enough money to replace all that money blown up in that one glorious moment of adrenaline, or the hours long wait for somebody to come by to fight. I'm also a big fan of the JawZ's ELE system, which I've patched up the empty spots with his older work on Relighting Skyrim, and Aiyen's Skylight ENB, who seems to share my passion for optimizing code to great effect.

Yes, 95% of what he's changed in the Weapons and Armors is just to copy/paste the Unnofficial Patches over. The rest are to somewhat uniformly scale damage based on the material, to make the rarer types more powerful and special. My thought is to bring over the records from WAF, C&C, etc and then base the damage/armor rating scaling on the keywords. I don't foresee too many conflicts there. It looks like only a few trees are changed, Perk-wise, which may let me bring over Kry's Smithing Tree and possibly a few trees from some other mods. We'll have to see.

I've been trying to play with some alternatives to my usual Requiem gameplay, in the hope of finding something that maintains an old school de-levelled gameplay feel but doesn't overhaul everything so drastically that it's a nightmare to modify and work with. I decided to give YASH a go, as it seems to match my criteria quite well. The author seems to have vanished, but I'm not afraid of stepping in and getting my hands dirty. You can read more about YASH and its aims here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/32562/? The pack would look something like this: STEP Core Frostfall Cloaks of Skyrim Winter is Coming (Craft Only) Immersive Weapons Immersive Armors Immersive Patrols Alternate Start - Live Another Life YASH YASH - All Options Weapons and Armor Fixes Clothing and Clutter Fixes Complete Crafting Overhaul (likely with Jaysus swords, Bandoliers and other already-integrated mods) I don't have a lot of experience in gameplay with YASH. I'm curious, if you're tried it, what your experience was and what other mods may compliment this core.

Sounds fantastic. I was about to take a crack at that myselfÂ

I did this a couple of days ago. Picking up the entire folder works pretty well. Check the .inis in the Mod Organizer directory for links back to your Mod Organizer directory -- there's one for NMM that needs to be re-registered after you change it. Just run the NXM exe for that.

This was removed from STEP because it makes a mess of mountain UVs as detailed here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/nsywjjnn8bzhnil/zGQJC89B4N No stretching contains many meshes other than mountains, however. Would it make sense to use it and just remove the mountain meshes?

I recommend DCE for men: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/38301/? For women I use Mature Skin, but I'm not certain that there's a vanilla body version of it.

I'd recommend its inclusion, but with the caveat that we recommend toggling the .ini to only be active on the load screen. I'd get the somewhat frequent ILS even with just my initial step build (perhaps step extended). Â Now, I've not seen one with a much more complex mod list in ages and with the INI tweak it's simply dormant during cell transitions.Â

I poured over CCF in TES5Edit and it looks like it has a ton of Requiem conflicts. Requiem already addresses the majority of them -- Â changing various material types etc. It makes some gameplay adjusting issues that I'm not entirely comfortable with too: clothing provides armor. I decided not to use it.

I second the Requiem suggestion. It completely removes level scaling from the world and makes the whole thing far more immersive and challenging. I can't go back to Vanilla after trying it -- once you get past the initial difficulty and play smarter rather than brute forcing everything, it's a real adrenaline rush that's like nothing I've experienced in gaming except for high intensity PVP games. Except Requiem doesn't require interacting with a bunch of griefers

I recommend adding the Requiem - Heavy Shield fix here: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/49019/? It fixes a bug in the heavy shields of Requiem 1.7.3 where (only) heavy shields are not getting the appropriate multipliers, resulting in light shields with two to three times higher than their heavy brethren.

Here's another mountain retexture to keep an eye on, with parallax included. https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/49676/?

Looks like the update got posted awhile ago. I'm really enjoying it. I did notice some landscape record conflicts with SFO, where they both add new grasses. Is it safe to merge these, or is it recommended not to?