noobzor

I do use FNIS, and it just occurred to me that I did not rebuild behavior files after re-doing my load order this last round...thank you for the reminder! I will have to see if that clears up the creepiness.

So, I have noticed an interesting behavior from random NPC's lately that I have never seen in previous Skyrim play-throughs before... When I am walking through a city, sometimes I will see some random NPC (a guard, or one of the townsfolk, or something) standing with their arms stretched out in front of them, palms upwards, like they would look if they were worshipping at an altar or something. I can still interact with them normally in every way, and if I wait a while they will eventually stop and wander off, so it doesn't seem like anything is broken. It is just a little bit creepy. Like I said, I have never seen this behavior before on any playthrough, but now I am seeing it in pretty much every city. I am asking here because the only mods I am using now that I haven't used on any previous playthrough are some of the things in the REGS guide. Has anyone else seen this before, or have any idea where it might come from?

I will, but I wanted to give a heads-up here because it is listed in the REGS pack.

A quick note...I ended up removing "Lost Wonders of Mzark" because I discovered that it just kept accumulating instances of the "_lw_finalboss1" script in my savegame. I don't know if it actually caused any issues, or if anyone else would have the same problem. I keep a tight control over my script lag, and measure it occasionally to make sure it stays in a good range (average less than 75ms), so I know I was not having any script lag issues. I felt it was just better to be safe, though, and nix it early rather than wait until an issue does come up. I have plenty of other things to keep me occupied anyway.

I have come to the conclusion that it is better to leave all BSA's alone in MO, and not unpack any of them. The way MO handles BSA's is not the same as how the game normally handles them. MO handles the BSA's to have exactly the same priority as if you had unpacked them. As far as the game is concerned, everything resolves exactly in your MO mod order regardless of whether you unpack the BSA or not. The cool thing is, even when you don't unpack, you can still see all of the individual file conflicts between the mods. The only thing you can't do is hide specific files from the BSA...you have to unpack in order to do that. I just found all this out recently (there is a big long thread about it in the MO forum here)...previously I was unpacking everything. So, as an experiment I re-installed all my mods, leaving all of the BSA's packed, and noticed a significant improvement in loading time and fewer stutters when loading cells with a lot of stuff. Now, I don't unpack any BSA's unless I need to hide specific files (which is very rare). As for the ASIS stuff, NPC's don't really need a lot of potions. If you give them too many, they won't use all of them and you just end up handing out more potions for the player. The followers should all be taken care of already in the "Improved ASIS ini's"...I think it has something to do with some follower faction settings somewhere, but I never messed with that. As for the spell exclusions, you are supposed to put the EditorID in the list. You don't have to put the whole EDID, you can just put part of it and it will match it, so "00" would match all spells where the editorId starts with 00. Those vanilla spells, that actually is the EditorID, it just looks the same as the name in some cases.

That seems like it should be okay. I am not sure what that mod does with the esp's and bsa's that are different from the USP files, but it seems like it should probably work that way. I missed that...was it the question about ASIS-Dependency.esp and ASIS.esp in the load order? Those should always be at the very end, after all of your various other patches. The same goes with any other SkyProc patches. The only thing that should ever go after them are things specifically intended to go after them, like the Post-Reproccer patches for SkyRe. I've been seeing this with a lot of files over the past few days. I don't know what is going on with the Nexus.

Yeah...if someone asked me whether they should renumber or not, I would say, "Yes, renumber." But, I am willing to take the risk of not renumbering and I know how to find and fix issues that come up from that, and it makes it easier for me to maintain my "whole load order super-compatibility patch" if I update and re-merge esp's at some point later on. CJ has said that you should not renumber when merging the ETaC esp's. Aside from that, it is probably a good idea to go ahead and renumber the majority of the time.

Yes, Lonewolf and dreadflopp are correct. This is weird, and the USKP team debated about this for a long time, but that is how it should be now. The reasoning is that anything in "Unofficial Skyrim Patch" assumes that you have no DLC installed and so it should come before any of the DLC. If Dawnguard makes a change to one of those records, for example, it should override Unofficial Skyrim Patch, and if that change needed to be carried forward it will also be in Unofficial Dawnguard Patch, and so on.

I think the only ones I actually renumbered the FormID's was "WeaponsArmor Merged.esp" and "Character Customization Merged.esp", but I can't remember for sure. I know for sure I did not renumber FormID's on anything related to ETaC, or any of them that were just merging compatibility patches either into the main mod or with each other. I almost always try to merge without renumbering first, if it can be.

No, the script lag from ASIS is negligible. The scripts are attached to NPC's and thus will take up some space in your save file, but they only fire off when the NPC spawns, and never again. This is far more lightweight than pretty much anything that uses cloak spells (like Wet and Cold) or even the combat scripts from Duel (which fire off whenever anything happens in combat).

Yes, that is correct.

Don't look at the Level Lists at all, level lists have nothing to do with it. You only need to look for new NPC's in the "Non-player Character" category, aka the actor list. The same goes for NPC's to get perks, spells, increased spawns, or whatever. The way the increased spawns works (very simplified explanation) is that it adds a small script to NPC's so that whenever they spawn, this script fires off and has a chance to spawn additional copies. The leveled list doesn't matter at all...ASIS doesn't look at or care about level lists. Randomized spawns is basically the same, except instead of a chance to spawn additional copies, it is a chance to spawn different stuff.

That has not been my experience with the perk distribution of ASIS. For the most part, the majority of the perks are just adding various bonuses to whatever the NPC's already do. It does affect some of their decision-making to a certain extent, but not to the point that I have seen anything stop using their special abilities. I would guess that you would still see vampires do all those kinds of things at about the same frequency regardless of what vanilla perks they get...no way to know without trying it, though. I will say that giving perks to dragons has in no way discouraged any dragons from using all the ass-whuppery added by Dragon Combat Overhaul.

Adding a mod to the exclusion list only excludes NPCs added by that mod, it has no effect on NPC's edited by that mod. So, if you want to include most vanilla NPC's, but exclude specific vanilla npc's that were edited by RoE, for example, then you have to add those specific NPC's to the "NpcExclusions" instead of just adding RoE to the "NpcModExclusions". If these are vanilla NPC's that were edited by RoE, then adding RoE to the exclusions will have no effect on them. You would have to exclude them specifically in the NpcExclusions. However, you could just not exclude them and let them get perks. :D Now, for my two bits... RoE makes a whole lot of really crazy changes to a lot of enemies, and in my opinion does a lot more damage than it does good. It is played off as improving enemy AI, but it hardly even touches the AI at all. Instead, it boosts enemy stats a whole bunch and raises level caps a lot. In my opinion, it makes way too many changes to accomplish something that could be done in a much simpler fashion. I believe that you can achieve as good, or better, results simply by using "high level enemies", a decent enemy AI mod that doesn't actually edit the NPC's themselves, and letting ASIS assign perks/spells.

Yes, definitely do this! There is a particularly insidious issue when you merge esp's that are not contiguous in your load order in TES5Edit (e.g. there are other esp's in between them that are not being merged), and it very commonly causes the merged esp to not save the master references correctly and you end up with all kinds of unresolved references. It can save you a lot of headache (and seriously cut down on the number of issues that come up after save, reopen, check for errors) if you make sure all of the esp's to be merged are right next to each other at the bottom of the list in TES5Edit before merging.