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Never heard of that mod before now. No - that mod looks like it just changes people's IDs when you are close enough to interact with them with the 'use' command. I'm talking about being at a distance from a creature or person in the game and not knowing, for instance, if you are facing a "bear" or a "rogue bear". I'm sure there is a vanilla example I could give, but I can't think of one right now. For example, a mod called "Skyrim Immersive Creatures" has different creature variants and the creatures at different level tiers have different names to them. So if you were a low-level PC and you happened to see a bear in the distance, you wouldn't know if it's a low-level variant (Bear) or a high-level variant (Rogue Bear) without getting close enough to get 1-hitted by the Rogue Bear or firing something at it to put it in combat with you - then it tells you what it is. Nice way to find out you shouldn't have approached your death. But once again, I could be missing a command...

There's a lore breaking issue with the mod. It changes the "cave bear" to be like a real life black bear. It's obvious that the author was assuming that the cave bear was meant to be a black bear. It doesn't help that prior to USKP fixing some issues with regular bears and cave bears that the two types of bears were kind of messed up. You might be saying, " well, isn't it a black bear?" Nope... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_bear Cave bear - prehistoric bear that was closely related to a modern day brown bear, same size to larger. Of course, since there's no real life record description of what the skin of one actually looked like, it could be dark-colored too like a black bear. It really bothers me that this was done in SkyTEST, because it is not lore friendly and messes with the stats of the animal to make it lesser than a regular bear. SkyTEST nerfed the cave bear... doing so, it breaks lore, reality, and can cause bear type stats incompatibilities with other mods (the last one is actually my biggest gripe) - especially mods that alter level lists of NPCs.

Yes, it is mixed up. USKP fixes for this were done back in March and October of 2013 (I see, according to the changelog). I guess the SIC team never realized the corrections.

Maybe I'm missing something, like a particular command/keystroke/etc, but does anyone know how to view the name of a NPC before actually getting into combat or close up with them? All too often, I feel like I can be hiding somewhere and looking straight at NPCs for a while trying to figure out what or who they are just by their actions or visual look, with my crosshairs right on top of them. I get no text to tell me what their name is or what type of creature they are unless I initiate combat with them, or get so close to them that I can pick their pocket. In some cases this might be a good thing, because like real life, how do you know who or what exactly someone is if you never met them before. We don't get heads up displays to tell us who people are when we see them in real life... In other cases, and in this game it can really matter especially if you use any mod that delevels the game, you can be looking at a level 60 variant of a creature that looks just like a level 1 variant trying to decide if you are going to fight it and stand a chance or get 1-hitted. Those are the cases that make not being able to tell ahead of time retarded. Also, other NPCs seem to know exactly what they are looking at. What am I missing, or do I need to install a mod to "fix" this? thanks.

And beyond that, there is the other issue I mentioned - many variants (at least bears - I haven't looked into other creatures in this regard) using the wrong skin textures and attack data, or so it would seem.

Is it worth modifying the guide with some of these instructions to improve the way this (and other) mod(s) work with the bashed patch - or is this expected to be resolved by LOOT soon?

The only other mod I'm using that plays with leveled lists of creatures is High Level Enemies, but it's the SIC version that's made by the SIC authors that I am using. Maybe this is the problem with that: If you go into "Skyrim Immersive Creatures.esp", under "Leveled NPC", and look at "_00LCharBear", for example (there are other areas too that do the same thing, but not all of them). Look at the "Leveled List Entries". It shows the different level bears, but all of them say level 1! So they are supposed to all appear at PC level 1? Why? Then if you look at the "NPC (Actor)"s being referenced to, all of them have "0" for "Calc min level". I don't see anything in there that actually figures out what level the player is at in order to generate an appropriate leveled opponent. Some creatures are different though... example - Giant Berserkers, Minotaurs... those do seem to have a Calc Min Level of 10; or in the "Leveled NPC" lists - "_00LCharAtronach", which seems to have the different types of atronachs tiered. I'm confused what's going on here, because it looks like it doesn't consider the player's level at all for a bunch of these creature spawns. And some of the possibilities are insanely high, not just a bit of a challenge. EDIT: Maybe it's meant to do that - to delevel certain areas of the game or something. I don't know. If it's actually meant to do that because it makes the game more exciting and causes the player to have to decide when to fight and when to run, then I'm OK with it. I just don't want to be getting results that are not as intended.

I noticed issues with the way SIC handles bear variants. It uses the wrong skin textures for many varieties - uses [black]/cave bear textures for many of the [brown] bears. It also uses the [brown] bear attack data for many [black]/cave bear variants. I also had level 21 variants appearing on me at level 1 (feral-type bear variants) - I don't know if it's supposed to do that or not.

Looks good now. ;)

"Go through the left side and click each tag one at a time and stop at Global." Do we want to check Globals also? (Are we stopping on Globals or before Globals?) I also don't see anything in the revised instructions about unchecking "Fallout.esm" under "Import Names". Are we no longer supposed to do that part?

*bump*

If I find the time I'll run Skyrim Performance Monitor through the carriage ride opening with each option and see what each average FPS rate is. Right now I'm working on creating a patch for Animal Tweaks and Skyrim Immersive Creatures to give to "Crushboss" to put up on his mod page for Animal Tweaks. "evrymetul" is giving me advice on how to do it - he made a patch for SkyTest and SIC, which is a very similar mod compatibility situation.

Personally, I'm glad you got a break. You seem to put a lot of time into modding FNV and I know how exhausting some of it can be sometimes. It's good to get a break from time to time and do other things. It also gave me time to spend on Skyrim instead. :)

Nice - thanks for the heads up. :)

Yes, SRB walked me through my first baby steps using TES5Edit for more than having the program find and remove dirty edits (UDPs and ITMs), through some recommendation in his Fallout New Vegas modding guide - Fear and Loathing in New Vegas. I've learned a lot since then by deciding to examine my entire custom modded STEP Extended plugin list and creating my own custom patch to correct remaining issues. If you have the time and the patience, and you need a crapload of that when reviewing Cell and Worldspace sections of mods... I mean a lot, especially if you have a custom lighting mod going on in your setup... then that's an option. You'll learn TON and hopefully improve your mod configuration, especially if you added in extra stuff on top of STEP.

So you are saying that having the driver do it will give you a slight FPS gain? I'd personally rather do that method then. If filtering those textures unnecessarily gets better speed and doesn't hurt the textures, then that sounds like the better way to go.

Yes, you are right. It is there. I guess I lost track of why I was waiting. I think after version 2 comes out they are planning on making alternate meshes/textures for baby animals from SIC. I think that's what I was waiting for. :) EDIT: but sounds like as it is complete enough to add. thanks for the info on that.

Green means that they share the same exact edit information. red means there is conflicting edit information. btw - at the bottom of TES5Edit try clicking on the "Information" tab (I think it is). It will give you some basic information about the program... such as the color scheme. The only color it doesn't show you is fuchsia, which I think means a critical conflict. From my understanding, typically you'll only be using "Apply Filter for Cleaning" when you are trying to find and remove dirty edits (UDPs or ITMs). Using the "Apply Filter" option and then just going with the default options on that are generally pretty helpful though any time you are using TES5Edit to review conflicts or create your own patches. It allows you to see the worst conflict by color code from the highest level, then you can follow the trail down through the subcategories by color code. When you clean masters it's pretty much immediate and you get no good indication that it did it as far as I know (IOW - that's normal).

I asked SRB about that before. I thought it looked a little confusing too. What the guide is attempting to say is that you check the boxes on all the categories listed in the guides instructions, and then check every single subcategory of those categories... EXCEPT the Import Names and Tweak Settings categories, which are different in these ways: For Import Names, you check all but 1 subcategory - uncheck Fallout.esm. And then for Tweak Settings, you ONLY check Terminal Speed Adjustment and make sure it's set to "x6". Leave all other subcategories unchecked. I didn't word it the best either just now, but I did it differently and I hope that clarifies it for you.

Yeah, some of the advanced guides still needed to be updated last time I checked earlier today.

Yeah, Bellyache's mod adds improvements to other animals besides wolves, so load the better wolves afterwards and they will only overwrite the wolves from Bellyache's. I haven't installed this mod yet myself, even though it looks nice. I'm waiting for the Skyrim Immersive Creatures version, but really it could be added or removed at any time during a playthrough since it just replaces meshes and textures. I guess I just want all my wolves to have a consistent look to them. :)

That's not what I found, TheDane. "Guide:ENBlocal INI/Engine" says this: It's noted by Boris that it is best to force anisotropic filtering here instead of in the video card drivers. His reasoning behind this is because if forced through video card settings, the filtering will be applied to all textures and some textures should not be filtered. Filtering such textures could cause issues with SSAO and parallax. Forcing anisotropic filtering through the ENB; however, skips these textures. (This behavior has not been confirmed either way by STEP.)" To me that says that STEP currently does not recommend either way, but does point out potential unconfirmed issues with doing it one way. My take from reading this is that you do one or the other. If you want to follow Boris's (the creator of ENB) advice, then force it through enblocal.ini. If you want to be cautious, then do it through your video card driver. I see nothing about doing it in both locations.

OK, so that nullifies one question - about "mining breaks sneak". Thanks for that input on it. I'm still curious to know how NPCs react to other NPCs mining with the "Mining Makes Noise" mod. I have not seen anyone else mention this issue anywhere besides DanielCoffey here in this forum.

Is this still true that NPCs that are mining will trigger other NPCs to go alert and investigate as if their own mining practice is making unusual noises? And also, where is this "Mining Breaks Sneak" mod?

I also learned how to use TES5Edit to make my own patches, since STEP Patches do not carry over all USKP fixes that one of the STEP Extended included mods that hasn't been updated in ages blocks out. I also have a bunch of non-STEP mod conflicts that I needed to sort out myself.