nomaddc

In my understanding Uncapper with stock settings should be doing what you're looking for - if I read the documentation right, it introduces a hard cap for stats in formulas, which is set to 100 by default. So unless I read it all wrong, you will not benefit from any fortify potions or enchantments once you reach 100 in a skill. Which makes fortify skill a rather situational and temporary type of bonus, with stuff like magick resist, raw health/mag/stam, spell cost reduction more valuable in the end. That said, I'm not 100% of that so if anyone more knowledgeable on the Uncapper would correct me, I'd very much appreciate it. Edit: after testing some stuff at 100 skill and with buffs what I said does not seem to be the case, although to what extent I'm not sure. That said I rarely do fortify restoration loops (and iirc it gets patched in USSEP), so I really don't know.

Correct. I'm using LOOT and not custom. Also FFF does recommend using only C3DL - Meshes, which is what I am using.

In case this helps (although YMMV since I am using a different ENB) I've settled on: 120 direct - 180 ambient dyndolod sse ini file tweaks: ComplexGrassGlowMap=50 ComplexGrassBacklightMask=90 This by far looked the most acceptable out of all of my attempts and I was ready to be done by that point This does result in LOD grass being ever so slightly brighter than normal grass just when it gets dark outside, but otherwise it looks pretty damn good. As per Shesons suggestion playing with backlight mask improved the grass lighting during the day (it was too damn dark), so I would guess if yall would be doing your own tweaking that would come into play as well.

Correct. I've kept CL, got rid of Cathedral Landscapes Complex Grass for ENB, installed the Cathedral - 3D Landscapes and Grass Library (it's a prerequisite for Freaks), then Freaks Floral Fields. Did all the rebuilding too naturally. As for load order I've rolled with what LOOT suggested, so (just the relevant plugins) CL first, Freaks Floral Fields right after, then 2 Freak's submods closer to the bottom. Non-LOD part looks great, LOD part requires to be toned down in brightness a bunch, I think I was getting close to good result with 115 direct and 110 ambient, but now it's a bit dark during the noon.

I'd be happy to list conflicts, since I'm still using 99% STEP as a core, and the 1% is not landscape stuff, so I could just snip MO conflicts tab. Would likely need different TexGen settings, I'm currently in the middle of fine tuning that while waiting on some help with a grass lod bug I'm suffering from.

Probably just boils down to the ENB used. I feel your pain here, would be much better if mods like that were presented with a more neutral preset to give you a better idea about what you're actually getting. But the author seems to be active on Cathedral discord and quite responsive, so could make a suggestion about that! And yeah, I did too notice the floaty shadows you've mentioned.

Yup, saw it. Understandable, I will not be updating this thread moving forward.

Yeah, I figured as much. Entirely reasonable, juggling multiple combinations of those is likely a sizeable headache. I hope I didn't come across as complaining or anything, you guys are doing a great job and I understand how hard it would be to have broader support/higher tolerance for deviations from the list. I hope anything I post comes in useful, but that's not my call to make. As for the grass: full disclosure, the issue came to my attention only after I started using Silent Horizons 2 ENB, so I can't really verify if it happens with STEP ENB. I was using exact STEP setup for grass/landscape/weather mod combo (but not the lighting as I've outlined above, which shouldn't affect outdoors skylight and complex grass to which this is isolated), other deviations in my list are isolated to character/equipment meshes and textures, and vampire rework - in other words I don't believe they would be significant for this specific area. First time I've seen it was in the Dawnguard vale area - the landscape there is rather dark, and the grass was sticking out quite a lot, looking unnaturally bright/lit. I did go on to check other areas like Whiterun and Rift, and it looked alright there, so it's probably specific to the DG Vale area. I have narrowed that down to complex grass option in the enb and got to investigating. I was suggested to try out a newer grass mod, Freak's Floral Fields which is actually using cathedral 3d landscape and grass library. It also does have some options that can be used to stay close to vanilla visuals. That switch solved the issue entirely and I think it actually did make the grass look even better across the board. I will try to attach some comparison screenshots, but again I apologize if it's spurious due to me using a modified modlist, and feel free to discard this feedback if that's the case. A detail worth mentioning is I ran into some dyndolod issues after rebuilding grass chache, lodgen, texgen, and dyndolod and that mod does produce some warnings (the mod author did say some are to be expected), so I'm currently in the process of troubleshooting it, will update when it's resolved (but basically I just have some lod grass sticking around and not unloading, so it may be even unrelated to this. Either way, I'm in the process of sorting that out). Screenshots before: After:

Fair enough. I still figured I'd share at least the bit about the incinerate bug in case anyone else runs into it, and the rest was more of a question which was graciously answered Edit: the Embers XD mod author has fixed the mentioned issue in his today's (yesterday's?) release.

Update, after lots more testing and playing: 1. It appears sometimes NPCs forget to unlock their shops/houses at daytime. Ran into quite a few locked shops during daytime, thought they were closed, after looking for the NPC around town and eventually picking lock on the store found them inside doing business as usual. 2. I got delivered a bunch of creations quest starter letters almost immediately (I think it even happened when I was testing the performance), and at least one of them iirc is supposed to only appear at level 32. Is this intended or I've messed something up? 3. Creations button has returned to main menu. I'm not sure if it was always there, but I thought somehow it was removed sometime in the modding process. Disabled that functionality in inis, the button stayed as the guide says, but doesn't cause any trouble. 4. Found an issue with Incinerate spell where it leaves light trails with ENB. Culprit was meshes/mps/mpsfireboltfire01.nif from EmbersXD. Replaced it with ENB Light one to fix it.

Thanks for getting back to me! That sounds entirely reasonable. Hardware can indeed make a big difference. I myself run a custom icc profile for my monitor and a calibrated profile from tftcentral (back before they started paywalling the profiles), so I have somewhat different color reproduction/brightness even from just stock settings of my own hardware. I did also notice that the game *appears* to be a lot darker when it's daytime/sunny and the room has a generous amount of sunlight flooding in, compared to night time when the game appears quite a bit brighter. The whole lightroom/darkroom thing I suppose. Personally, I liked the old STEP approach where there were just some recommendations for enb mods, for weather, and for lighting mods, and the choice was mostly left to user discretion. I understand that probably there were good reasons to move away from that, it is what it is. Part the reason I do prefer this approach is that it leaves room to do fine tuning to make it look good to your eye and on your hardware. So with that I just ended up using STEP as a base with my initial setup, and by now deviating in some key points to fine tune the appearance and features. Personally, I've been liking Silent Horizons 2 ENB a lot, and as I've mentioned Lux does look better to my eye at least. I did also prune out a lot of the AE CC additions simply because I don't believe them to be either on the same level of quality, or to be extraneous to the experience (looking at you, pets), or just personal preference let's say (anything from the Blades mobile game was purged). I would consider using a different grass mod for the guide, since when running SH2 I've noticed that the grass used in STEP really does not play well with ComplexGrass enb feature. Replaced that with a more recent grass mod, and it looks a lot better. (it was not an aesthetic issue, the grass lighting was just messed up) But also kind of the reason I've not been posting more often here - I understand that it's not the place to troubleshoot mod issues that are not on the guide, and I've pretty much replaced lighting, enb, and now grass, not to mention some personal mods (that are not super high wake, just better vampires and different body mesh/texture replacer with some bells and whistles to distribute different skin textures to npcs based on race/weight).

Gotcha, so it's mostly down to recency/latest updated date? I think that does indeed cover most of the ENB Light questions, thank you! Not sure if the embersxd issue was reported by anyone before, but I did submit a bug report to the mod page, but in the meantime replaced it with ENB Light one.

Did a lot more testing, Lux works just fine with STEP and I think it does provide better lighting overall, so for me it does replace both RS and Ambiance. I did also test Lux Orbis and it's working great as well.

Wanted to ask why exactly do we pick all of the options in ENB Light, only to then hide almost everything that overwrites the installed files? Alpha version STEP guide lists has compatibility with Arctic and the changelog says to let it overwrite Arctic (STEP hides it). Dawnbreaker option seems to imply compatibility with lean wolf's mod, but we hide it too? Fixed Mesh Lighting and Assorted Mesh Fixes get priority over ENB Light. Particle Patch (for ENB) also gets priority over ENB Light. I did check the wiki page for ENB Light but there's no information for why the changes were done. It seems like all of this dates back to 02:06, July 12, 2024‎ change when dawnbreaker override gets added, and then eventually everything else. On a side note: I found that meshes/mps/mpsfireboltfire01.nif from EmbersXD causes Incinerate spell to have a long lasting light trail, so overwriting it with ENB Light is a better option and fixes the issue (but with the current instructions we hide it).

Another bug: over time it seems that some LOD or something fail to load and I start seeing missing terrain/floating buildings. Example: did some questing, ended up outside Solitude, down below in the bay. The city was missing terrain underneath and some walls. Saved, quit the game, loaded again, terrain is there now.