Bushranger

This is a great one, thanks @CleverIdiot. I have no idea or say about an alternative to aMidianBorn Book of Silence armours/weapons but I do like the look since xavbio has based their designs on them. I also like that there are patches included for LeanWolf's Better-Shaped Weapons, I've also no idea if they're needed but it's nice that it's also taken into thought for the designs. So far I've added the CC options for Common Clothing Retexture SE along with the Leather Armors Retexture SE for the Netch armour, Silver Armor and Weapons Retexture SE for the armour and crossbow, and the Vigil Enforcer Retexture SE. Xavbio's Iron Armors and Weapons Retexture SE is just as dark as the texture in aMidianBorn's iron weapons so it doesn't help with my own lighting issue not seeing details well when I tried it. I have seen that it does cover the Headsman's Axe, the Iron Plate and the crossbow bolts aMidianBorn doesn't so it's also a nice addition.

Update here to say that I should do what I read rather than try to work things out myself later. I'd read the Majestic Mountains Readme when I installed the mod in 04 - Foundation but I didn't try to do anything with snow until much later so by then I had forgotten the instructions it provides and became so confused. Following the instructions and replacing /textures/effects/projecteddiffuse.dds with renamed snow01.dds in RIS - Real Ice and Snow works as @T4GTR34UM3R instructs. 04 - Foundations Far Object LOD Improvement Project SSE Icy Mesh Remaster - Ice Glaciers - LOD - other fixes 06 - Models and Textures Icy Cave Remaster Icy Mesh Remaster - Vale cracks RIS - Real Ice and Snow (replaced /textures/effects/projecteddiffuse.dds with renamed snow01.dds - this is now RIS - Snow Only as RIM is providing all the Ice) RIS - Blended Roads Patch RIM - Real Ice reMastered Fixed Mesh Lighting (Ticked the Real Ice and Snow box) This is now how my Load Order looks and all seems to work well!

Now I'm back to looking through Community Shaders again if I understand this correctly CS Light and Light Placer replace ENB Light. That also means I should remove all these mods from the list and look for possible replacements as they use ENB Light: Elytra and Bliss Bug ENB Light ENB Lights For Effect Shaders ENB lights for Aetherium shards ENB Particle Lights - Dwemer Lanterns Particle Lights for ENB - Nordic Ruins Candles Particle Lights For ENB SE - Paragon Gems Radiant - Candles (ENB Lights) Rudy HQ - More Lights for ENB SE - Glowing Mushrooms Rudy HQ - More Lights for ENB SE - Torchbugs and Moths More Lights for ENB - Blood Splatter Fix Saints and Seducers Flora ENB Light I'm also debating with myself about Wetness Effects - Community Shaders which seems like a great addition. @doodlum Has a post there not to use it with Splashes of Storms so it would also replace Rudy fix for Splashes of Storms and ENB

Discussion topic: Riekling Aim Improved by PixieBomb Wiki Link Rieklings are the best on Solstheim! I've added it to my Gameplay - Combat list and when I become the next Chief of Thirsk Hall this mod is certainly going to help my new tribes-kin

I've been trying to battle Lighting, Snow and Ice on Skyrim for weeks! The Performance Benchmarking steps are to select "Breezehome" so that's become the standard I've used, then I would catch the wagon to Winterhold to see snow and ice and go into the Frozen Hearth. Ice worked well with RIM - Real Ice reMastered and though it took some time for me to remember what I read in the Majestic Mountains Readme the snow from RIS - Real Ice and Snow has been great once I replaced it's projecteddiffuse.dds with a copy of it's renamed snow01.dds. Lighting on the other hand has been confusing for me, no matter how I edited things or if I disabled lighting altogether it always looked like things were darker than it should be. It got me so confused I disabled everything except the 02 - Extenders and Alternate Start to follow the Performance Benchmarking steps and there were no longer dark shadows over the swords and shield on the wall... I tried again to work out what was causing that outside of the 18 - Lighting. Was it Soft Shadows that I'd installed in preparation for 2.4? No it wasn't that, I also removed RIS - Real Ice and Snow and reinstalled Fixed Mesh Lighting without selecting the patch for RIS just on the off chance since I was so confused... I'm posting it all here because it's not Lighting at all but the Sword and Shield textures themselves that make them look like they are in shadow and I found a post in aMidianBorn Book of Silence SE's page talking about it. aMidianBorn Book of Silence SE iron textures are extremely dark for me so I've a screenshot of it disabled and enabled with 18 - Lighting but without 21 - Post Processing: Are the Iron Weapons that dark usually for aMidianBorn Book of Silence SE or is it because I've installed the Weapons pack modular? As I'm using Ancient Amidianborn Dwarven Armory I've not included Dwemer in the Armors or Weapons pack and I'm now thinking of not including Iron in the weapons pack as well because how dark they are make it hard for me to see any details on them.

I have only changed to Azurite Weathers this week, before that I was using Cathedral Weathers in the Step Guide and Relighting Skyrim + Ambiance was just as dark in places like Frozen Hearth screenshots I've posted before in 2025 are all with Cathedral Weathers. Also when I said that If I change the Graphics Driver gamma to 2.2 it became blown out I wasn't just talking about in Skyrim, everything was blown bright then. I took a screenshot of the Graphic Driver settings because it was washed out when I adjusted the settings. My Monitor is the ASUS ROG Swift PG329Q and I've found today that it does not have uniform brightness that many recommend using when a monitor is calibrated. There are several suggestions around the internet which preset to start with and then adjust the RGB to what they recommend (which always seem random to me because it's often very different person to person). Because I don't know what I'm really doing, and because I find it looks reasonable, I've been using the RTS/RPG GameVisual preset with Normal Colour Temp. What makes me extremely confused is that when I set the Graphics Driver gamma to 2.2 and took screenshots of what the monitor shown was washed out driver settings and the Frozen Hearth, those Screenshots then looked nice when I set the Graphics Driver gamma back to 1. Also while Shadow Boost with Dynamic Adjustment seems to not place the Frozen Hearth bar in such gloomy shadow it also makes the smoke particles in the Loading Screen worse. I'm starting to think almost all of this is because of the monitor.

I have Relighting Skyrim - SSE together with Ambiance - A Vanilla(plus) Ambient Lighting Overhaul The only difference in Lighting and Weather is I'm currently using Azurite Weathers in place of Cathedral Weathers. My game Display Settings were at default brightness, I've just gone in again to test it and used sg 1 in console before the screenshots to ensure gamma is 1. xLODGen was changed to 1.25 but when I edited the ini for TexGen and DynDOLOD I'm fairly sure that was about grass as I've only followed the Step Guide, I checked now and both are sRGBGamma=1.3 I can edit this to 1 and run DynDOLOD again. Monitor Gamma has been 2.2, but Graphics Driver has been 1. If I change that to 2.2 then the monitor seem to be very blown out. The screenshot does not show that though so now I'm really confused. With all this extra testing I have found that instead of Shadow Boost off having Shadow Boost - Dynamic Variable: On helps but the screenshots are not very different.

HDR off is a good instruction. Unfortunately I have always kept HDR off. I had also noticed that LOOT had placed both RealisticWaterTwo.esp and Ambiance.esp below step patch - conflict resolution.esp and step patch - lighting and weather.esp so I added them as masters to adjust the load order. It was not mentioned earlier because I have been altering CR quite a bit. Colour blindness also does not help trying to find a calibrated colour balance so I usually pick from the pre-made options on the monitor or just leave RGB all at 100 for the Colour Temp. Gamma 1.8, 2.2, 2.5? After trying again to get things sorted I've spent another hour with this reply window open. I tried lowering the Digital Vibrance % and I switched Colour Accuracy Mode from Accurate to Reference but still quite dark in some civilized places like Frozen Hearth. : From the Abandoned Prison to Frozen Hearth with Ambiance.esp : From the Abandoned Prison to Frozen Hearth with Darker Interior Ambient Fog.esp : From Abandoned Prison to Frozen Heath with Ambiance.esp after another hour calibrating monitor and graphics card again. NVIDIA Output colour settings. Ensuring HDR and shadow boost is off. Changing from accurate to reference colour accuracy mode. It still looks to me like he would have his bar brighter in the morning even if there are few customers in Winterhold. These screenshots are without ENB or CS.

After working on a mod list for a couple of months now I'm so close to getting something I think is wonderful to play and I've finally found that it's a combination of Ambiance, my monitor and the graphics settings that are what need to be solved to get this fixed. I've put up some screenshots before how dark interiors can be and that had me test both ENB and Community Shaders which both have perks. I also followed TheMilesO's advice in the first post on Q/A Post and checked the calibration of my monitor which did bring out that because of having ASUS Shadow Boost and Gamma settings (no idea why) enabled is why other settings have a knock-on effect to cause the graphics settings to cause that but trying to fix them still leaves it somewhat dark. There is the optional Darker Interior Fog Only option when installing Ambiance and that makes the Frozen Hearth not completely black, but it also makes all the dungeons and mines bright. Thankfully I found a solution and if others also find Ambiance - A Vanilla(plus) Ambient Lighting Overhaul (by TheMilesO) is too dark in civilized areas perhaps this could help: Dark Dungeons - Base Object Swapper (by Ness Lowland) has an Optional File: Darker Ambient Light - Dungeons and Caves Only. It provides an altered Ambiance.esp that does as it says. When I used it the Freezing Hearth was nice and visible with vanilla illumination but the Whistling Mine was dark and shadowy!

Discussion topic: High Detail Vanilla Dragon L.O.D. by Pieter82 Wiki Link A "High detail replacer meshes for the vanilla dragon LOD (Level Of Detail) meshes. Mesh replacer only. No plugin / ESP." I found this wonderful little mod while searching through Nexus as I was looking for something to replace a couple of missing textures in DynDOLOD and instead I ended up with a mod that gives dragons better impressions when they fly in from the mountains! After I read that it is compatible with Iconic's Dragon Retexture I had to add it to the ever-growing list of mods Step started me with

While tinkering with this to decide which to pick I've found that the Lightside has one less file than Majestic Mountains or Majestic Mountains Darkside. Both of those possess /textures/clutter/statues/mehrunesdagon_n.dds while the Lightside does not and so is lighter both in colour and in weight!

So I've just read too much into it then, as I do at times, and as it's not essential for playing the game I think I should be good to go then and stop worrying that it's not listed as activated in MO2. I believe I have everything in order then so I'll go through the list top to bottom and make sure it's all set and be good to start playing. Thankyou for settling my nerves

This post is one small question and then mostly Skyrim discussion. Is MarketplaceTextures.bsa a required archive? I'm asking this because I often, and easily, get confused. Yesterday I notice that MO2 is actively keeping MarketplaceTextures.bsa disabled but I assume it's a default asset like _ResourcePack.bsa so it should be used. I've come across textures in the past that were missing such as bench legs or end table sides that I've had to search Nexus for mods that replace them and that has made me nervous this may be causing that, or at least it could do that with other things so I've tried to get it enabled. Search on the forums here has resulted in Unchecked BSAs and other results from google talk about accidentally updating Skyrim (but I'm not trying to remove it to play at a lower edition) or Automatic Archive Invalidation (but that's not applicable for Skyrim). So overnight I deleted everything, cleared %appdata% and started with a fresh clean Skyrim installation and a fresh clean MO2 installation... and MarketplaceTextures.bsa was disabled from the very start. It's been 2 months now that's I've worked on getting a mod installation working and I've had great support here, thankyou! I just think I get too easily confused to do this as I've worked on it every day and something like this always comes up that I might have taken the wrong idea with. I'm starting to think if I'll ever end up simply starting to actually play Skyrim.

I've recently noticed that MarketplaceTextures.bsa is unchecked and so not being used when Skyrim is loaded. As Automatic Archive Invalidation is marked as not required for this game I haven't been able to find a way to enable it. I tried compressing it to add it to MO2 as it's own mod and while it was recognized it was still left unticked in Archives whether it was active or not in the left pane. How can I get so MO2 will have it active as it should be?

Some screenshots to show Community Shaders with the Step Guide Post-Processing: It looks good and it's a lot brighter than the ENB. Outside the Frozen Hearth in the day and in the night: Inside the Frozen Hearth was much brighter than the ENB for me. A comparison between the ENB and Community Shaders renting a room: ENB also needed to be tinkered with to get shadows working. Community Shaders had shadows working without any tinkering: The shadow from the college was much less for Community Shaders, it was the same time of day but I forgot to check for the weather when I took the screenshot. Some interior screenshots, the fireplace in the Frozen Hearth looks good with the Community Shaders and the students rooms in the College are very nice. The lights from the staff and the chaurus eggs by the student do seem a little off though so CS Light and the Light Placer might be a better thing to investigate.