Anosognos

I've played with it a bit and the mod generally seems to work as intended. There's a bit of a delay between input and action. The delay is long enough that I thought it wasn't working at first. The Nexus description says you can lean on objects against which you've seen NPCs leaning, but I've never successfully activated the animation. Also, the random nature of the mod means that you may see some odd behavior like getting out a book and reading in the middle of the street or sweeping in some stranger's house. I guess it's a bit weird to be standing around in some stranger's house in the first place. Comes with the RPG territory, it seems.

I think More Village Animals by Michele Angelo would fit side-by-side with this one. Similarly, it adds content which is technically interactive. With the mod, you could kill and skin two cows in a given settlement instead of just one. But cattle rustling clearly isn't the point of the mod. I suppose you could use it that way. I doubt that's how the average user would treat it, however. I'd call it graphic/immersion. BTW, it's a solid mod with no bugs that I've run into. It makes the towns and villages feel a bit more real. I suggest it along with Birds & Flocks.

Heheh, I didn't think of if that way. It's a good general statement, though! @frihyland I did try to say that testers reported it could be avoided with a new game but I guess I didn't write it clearly. Sorry. I figured people here would be interested in this. I'm glad my report was well received. I'd really like to see this mod succeed. Lack of enemy variation has always been rather annoying in games. I know Bethesda had to prioritize core game elements (ex: the general uselessness of vanilla horses was intentional), so animal pelt variation was probably never on the drawing board at all. That said, I think a good design choice would have been to give them a single equip slot for pelts. That way they could have easily be re-skinned the same way as humanoids without making additional races. Oh, well. This mod is a very good band-aid.

I searched the forum and haven't found any mention of this anywhere. I apologize if it has already been discussed. When I first found Bellyache's Animal & Creature pack, my excitement was tempered as I realized it was a replacer and not a randomizer. Over on the Bethesda forums, Leviathan1753 has been testing a mod that adds just that functionality: beth forums: Automatic Variants Nexus: Automatic Variants The most current incarnation of the thread has links to the newest version (1.2.4) as well as some packages that it can use, including a version of the animal pack. The author considers this mod to be in alpha phase with good reason. It works but there are some serious bugs. I've tested it quite a bit; my impressions follow. Installation - The mod should dragged/dropped by hand. It comes with empty, nonstandard folders required for it to work. I couldn't get Wrye to unpack the archive properly even with "Has Extra Directories" checked. - Content is installed via AV packages which are processed by a Java application to create an .esp file. The packages contain both textures as well as specification files. They are not BAIN friendly and require this mod to work in any case. They can be generated from any existing texture set by any computer-literate person with enough patience. That said, they are a pain to make and the average user will definitely want pre-made AV packages. Functionality -The mod currently only supports actor textures. The author explains that this should be the hardest part and that functionality will be expanded to weapons, armor, etc. once the kinks are worked out. - I've tested it with the pre-made Bellyache's AV package. I manually added polar bear variants, as only one is included in the current version. It does exactly what it's supposed to do. I thought chauruses weren't working but it turns out the textures are just very similar and they can't really be evaluated separately. Using player.placeatme made it clear they work. - I also tested giant, drauger, falmer, and troll variant packages created by StarX of the Bethesda forums. All of these work great except trolls. Browsing an older version of the thread reveals a discussion between Leviathan and Star about the fact that troll skins are coded in an odd manner (the exact reasoning is a bit opaque to me, a non-programmer). Leviathan intends to fix this in a future update. Bugs - The aforementioned troll incompatibility is a known issue. - The mod seems to cause some actor animations to freeze such that they "skate" rather than walking. Their bodies don't animate at all, even when they are killed. I've personally observed this with chickens and chaurus. I've read that it can affect drauger as well. I observed it upon fast travel and when spawning actors from the console. I can't reliably reproduce it but forum posters have suggested it can be avoided with an entirely new game. The author seems to think it is an unsolvable problem due to the nature of the game code. Overall Assessment I think this is a fantastic mod that I'm actually kind of surprised hasn't been around for a while. Unfortunately, I consider the animation bug to be a deal breaker as it breaks immersion, which is sort of the whole point. I hope the author is wrong in his pessimism about a fix (though I certainly have no technical expertise to argue otherwise). I would certainly use a bug-free version. TL/DR: Great mod, serious bug. Not suggested for immediate inclusion; watch for now.