EthanII

You need to merge all the scripts, but something is wrong. You should not have KDiff opening up for conflicts between Friendly HUD and Friendly Meditation. Did you install the Unification Patch properly? You need to unzip it directly to your Witcher 3 folder. Do NOT install it using Witcher 3 Mod Manager.

That's odd. All of those mods are by Wasteland Ghost, and she takes pains to ensure that all of her stuff plays well together. What do you mean they're not merging properly? You're not trying to merge "Non-Bundled XML" or "Bundled Text", are you?

I wouldn't merge anything under Bundled Text. For all of us using Ghost Mode, it gets (and needs) priority over both Scabbards and Nitpicker so I've never really looked at the specific conflicts between those latter two mods. However, I suspect that you'll want to give Scabbards priority. Ditto for the LoD mod. Nitpicker's is just bug fixes on vanilla assets, and I think giving it priority over those other two mods runs the risk of it resetting the changes those mods make. The easiest way to set Nitpicker's as lowest priority is to go into your Mods folder and rename it to "modZNitpickerFix".

I should have pointed out that adding mods to your texture merge above and beyond what is recommended in the guide definitely has the potential to screw up Neovalen's intended conflict resolution. Conflicts for mods that Neovalen did not explicitly assign a priority to in the mods.settings file will simply be resolved alphabetically assuming that neither of the mods in question are in your texture merge. This is why if you follow the guide to the letter, Brutal Blood should win the conflicts with Improved Particle Systems ("B" comes before "I" alphabetically). However, if you throw Improved Particle Systems into your texture merge, its files will now be used by the game instead of Brutal Blood's because your Merged Pack is set to Priority=2 by mods.settings and will be loaded first. You can work around this, but it takes some thought and an understanding of which mods Neovalen intends to win when there are conflicts. In the example above, we would be better off putting Brutal Blood in our texture merge because that's the mod that needs to win. If you can't put a specific mod in your merge but need it to win conflicts with a mod that IS in your merge, you can edit your mods.settings file to set the mod that needs to win as higher priority (for example, add that mod as Priority=2 and change your Merged Pack to Priority=3). This situation is why Neovalen has ModGeraltChestHair set as Priority=1 in mods.settings. Tl;dr: If you add additional mods to your Mod Merger texture merge beyond what Neovalen recommends in the guide, you need to use Script Merger afterwards to ensure that the proper files are winning any conflicts. Generally, when two mods conflict you will want to put the mod that would be listed first alphabetically in your texture merge. And if you're not hitting the mod limit, please just follow the guide to the letter...

Here you go: https://i.imgur.com/IdNPlXK.jpg Generally you don't want ANY conflicts in Mod Merger. To check for them, tick all the mods that you're planning on merging and then hit the "Conflicts" button at the top. Hopefully nothing shows up in the box on the right hand side of the screen. Nearly every time I've tried to merge mods that conflict it hasn't gone well, regardless of where I put them in Mod Merger's list. If you do have two mods that edit the same mesh or texture, you're best to put only one of them in your merge and then edit your mods.settings file to decide which one wins. For example, both "Lore-Friendly Silver Swords" and Rustine's mods edit several of the witcher swords, so I put LfSS in my merge but have modArmorModsRustine set as higher priority than [mod0000_MergedPack] so that Rustine's stuff wins. Once you have completed your merge and have edited your mods.settings file, use Script Merger to ensure that the proper mods are winning conflicts. One more tip: official DLC counts towards the mod limit too. Brutal Blood was throwing me over the mod limit (it has two DLC bundles in addition to it's Mods bundle, and I have no idea how to merge DLC bundles), so I uninstalled the Skellige Armor Set (I'm not a fan) by unclicking it in Steam. As soon as I did that I was good to go. Hope this helps!

Sounds like you guys are hitting the mod limit. Neovalen can likely explain this better than I can, but in my experience the mod limit is "soft". When I get close to it I will have problems like you describe, where sometimes the game doesn't start even though witcher3.exe is running in Task Manager. Or, I might be able to get into the game normally, but certain textures will fail to load. Generally if I add more mods I then get the classic "infinite loading screen" bug. I think the mod limit varies from person to person, so while Neovalen may be able to run this guide without issues you may not. The secret is to merge everything you possibly can using Mod Merger. Neovalen suggests a rather conservative merge IMHO. I merge damn near everything that Mod Merger will allow me to (granted, I run additional mods on top of this guide). DJ_Kovrik's post below lists some mods (including Halk Hogan's HDRP) that should not be merged even though Mod Merger will technically allow it: https://www.nexusmods.com/witcher3/mods/1931/?tab=posts

Just an FYI for anyone using a 21:9 monitor - the uiHorizontalFrameScale tweak no longer seems to be required, even for the non-GOTY version of the game. Also, you need to modify the game executable per the instructions in the following post in order to eliminate black bars in cutscenes and properly expand the in-game FOV: https://www.wsgf.org/forums/viewtopic.php?p=160343#p160343 It's super easy and takes about 30 seconds to do. Without it I was getting a ridiculous amount of image stretching peripherally despite the game resolution being set to 3440x1440.

No errors merging Beautiful Rocks and Ornamental Knife (I've done it multiple times). Texturememory budget of 4096 also gives me the smooth textures bug using a 1080 Ti. A value of 4000 works just fine. If anyone has FPS to spare, check out Beautiful Grass - it's amazing. You can adjust the grassdensity setting to mitigate the performance hit (the modder recommends a value of 8000 compared to the max vanilla value of 2400.... I'm using 4000 and it seems to be a decent compromise). [edit: typos, wow]

Ditto here RE: thanks for keeping the guide current. I haven't had any time to play lately, but I still check your guide a couple of time per week to keep my install up to date. Really appreciate all the work you put into this. Was going to ask if you miss Compilation at all, or if you feel that HDRP has textures pretty much covered now. I see you just added Beautiful Rocks. Also, are you using the default camera?

Ditto for me, though Black Friday price up here in Canada was $1500 (still a lot better than the regular price of $1950). To expand on #5, the new monitors coming out next year will be using VA panels, which I'm not as confident in as IPS. Also, HDR on PCs still seems to be a bit of a mess and I'm not interested in refresh rates higher than 120 Hz (no game that I actually want to play will be running faster than that by the time I finish modding it LOL). Forgot to add, I'm planning on trying TFT Central's ICC profile when my monitor arrives. If things still look off, I will probably break down and buy a colorimeter. Darkside is right that it doesn't make much sense to buy a $1000+ monitor and then put up with inaccurate color / gamma.

Too funny, I just ordered the same monitor on the weekend. Though I still need to pick up a 1080 Ti to drive it - my 970 isn't going to cut it. Feel free to post feedback when you get yours. Gamma is supposedly off out of the box.

In case anyone is wondering, it seems to work fine. Script Merger handled all conflicts automatically. The only small issue I can find is that the camera winds up being a bit too high when you're in Preparation's meditation mode (not a big deal given that you'll usually be in the Alchemy, Character, or Inventory screens during meditation anyway).

So I finished testing mods with old save games and started fresh.... only to find that I'm back to the default game camera. There must have been something baked into my old save games that was modifying the camera. Does anyone know if we can still add Immersive Cam to this guide?

14-15 texture / bundle mods. It varies a bit.... sometimes I can get the game to load with one extra.

Good to know. Wonder if it's the same with rustine's armor mods? I get errors in Mod Merger about textures not loading. I'm currently trying to merge a bunch of other stuff so that I can fit them in under the mod limit.

OK, maybe I shouldn't be giving out any advice about texture merging. I added some armor retexture mods and merged them so that I wouldn't go over the mod limit. Unfortunately, in-game I either don't get the retexture or the textures are missing entirely i.e. Geralt's torso disappears. Any suggestions?

I had that happen with one of my texture mods in my first go-around. Redoing the merge fixed it.

After firing up my newly modded game, I see that my inquiry about Immersive Cam falls firmly in the "stupid question" category. I'm not sure which mod is adjusting the camera.... but I like it.

Tried to hold out and actually finish my first play through, but an overhaul mode for TW3 is too much to resist. Looks like I'll be spending another couple hundred hours with this game. Damn you Neovalen! (j/k) I'm curious why Immersive Cam has been dropped? Seemed like a pretty core part of the first version of this guide.

Neo, any reason why you're not using Holgar96's High Quality Faces? Btw, thanks for all the time you put into these mod projects. I spent about a year modding Skyrim with your SR and SR:LE guides. Can't resist checking out your take on TW3...

Found it, it's ELFX. Here's a shot with ELFX disabled: https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4vJkuX3SsyERkdWU1FIYkpCWG8/view?usp=sharing Interesting, it looks like the problem is only with the extra braziers that are added by ELFX. The ones that are present in both screenshots look fine.

Anyone know what's causing this smudgy brown mist around the braziers in Whiterun? I just finished updating my SR:LE install and I don't remember having this before. https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B4vJkuX3SsyEREpHdWJEakkyb1E/view?usp=sharing

It's totally fine, I've been using it for over 6 months and highly recommend it. The only issue that I recall is it uses the default Skyrim weights for food and ingredient items rather than the more reasonable ones from Clothing & Clutter Fixes. I just fired up TES5Edit and dragged the CCF values over into the Immersive Potions.esp.

The new Merge Plugins script (1.9) just copied the Vividian ENB Install Files folder as well as Mindflux's textures and meshes into my overwrite folder when I did the Vividian merge. Is this supposed to happen?

Thanks once again Neo, I must have just not noticed the tab last time I finished this quest.