Harpalus

One thing I've always been unclear on is resolving navmesh conflicts between mods when neither mod edits the same vertices. (Unlike the 15EBB example given in the screenshot). That is, two mods have altered the same navmesh, but neither one has modified a single vertex that the other has (and the navmesh record shows as green text on a red background). Theoretically, the only changes they have made to the navmesh don't conflict with each other, and I fail to see how forwarding the unchanged vertices in this particular situation is a bad thing. Am I missing something? I always see the "never resolve navmesh conflicts in TES5Edit" advice, but I could easily resolve most of my current navmesh conflicts in my load-order as-is without touching the changed vertices in a navmesh. Is this also incorrect? If so, why? Given that most navmeshes that I see change a relatively minimal subset of the vertices in the navmesh, its clear that the unchanged vertices are still referring to what they do in vanilla: the values are the same and this occurs too often to be coincidental. If resolving conflicts as I specified above is bad advice, then I would expect to see completely new navmeshes whenever a mod needs to change them, rather than this patchwork of changed vertices interspersed with unmodified, vanilla vertices.

Apologies for further sidetracking, but Shurah has indicated that they were mistaken: I suppose that leaves my concerns about Multiple Floors Sandboxing, but that's not particularly relevant to either STEP or directly relevant to this mod. I'd love to see this in STEP if it gets further testing and more compatibility patches. EDIT: Recently posted explanation by Shurah about Multiple Floors Sandboxing, for posterity:

Well, the author does seem to claim that fAIMinGreetingDistance is not reset. Even a simple game setting can cause problems if (for example) the pathfinding code wasn't built for those values.

That's not my question: I know how to remove it. Shurah seems to be making broader claims about these mods than just their effect on Immersive Citizens. The claim that Multiple Floors Sandboxing causes infinite pathfinding loops is particularly worrying, and if No NPC Greetings reduces conversation distance between NPCs then its possible that STEP inadvertently disables some NPC interactions, with or without Immersive Citizens installed.

I can't help but notice that Shurah claims that two mods are problematic. On No NPC Greetings: On Multiple Floor Sandboxing: Any thoughts? I consider both plugins to be fairly essential, and one of them is already in STEP. (I thought that Multiple Floor Sandboxing was also in STEP, but I seem to be mistaken).

First of all, thank you. I took another look at your posted patches and it's clear that you've put a lot of work into this. It's appreciated. Searching through the available patches, I don't see one for TTRSO/Immersive Potions? Did I miss a patch? I noticed that TTRSO adds a rank to the Benefactor perk that didn't previously exist. This additional rank needs to be patched in order to work with Immersive Potions, which only patches the base Benefactor perk and not any other (non-existant in vanilla) ranks of it. The base perk also needs to be patched: depending on load order, either the second rank of Benefactor will be locked out (and the value incorrect), or the perk will not function properly with the new effects. I also believe that TTRSO's ingredient values should be forwarded for consistency with the values of the ingredients not touched by Immersive Potions. If you've got this already in one of your patches, then apologies! I missed it. Personally, I did a lot of editing and balancing here: TTRSO's ingredient values (for consistency with the rest of TTRSO), the longer durations from Longer Duration and Annoyance Fixes (overwriting TTRSO's durations, not Immersive Potions' durations), and the effects of Immersive Potions. It feels to me like a nice balance between curtailing spamming and encouraging the use of non-health/stamina/magicka potions. This is probably not a good idea for the pack, however, considering its modular nature and the lack of Longer Duration and Annoyance Fixes.

I think that moving to Morrowloot Ultimate might be worth looking into. Any other thoughts? I posted a message there about TTRSO compatiblity, but the author seemed to imply that a patch isn't necessary. Looking through TES5Edit I disagree, but it was easily remedied and I believe the patches here already address the issues. I don't think it goes "out of bounds", as many of the included features are either already a part of MMO in the form of separate mods, or have been considered in the past.

I don't really see how this can replace Loot and Degradation, as it doesn't even try to offer the same feature set. Loot and Degradation lets NPCs use higher tempered gear, which corrects a vanilla oversight, makes NPCs a little more powerful, and makes the player feel a little less like the game world revolves around them. The degradation feature also helps slightly mitigate the standard vanilla sequence: Step 1) Level up crafting as much as possible Step 2) Make your enchanting set (maximum possible stacked bonus to alchemy and smithing) Step 3) Make your final set of gear, reach the armor cap, and use nothing else the entire game. I sometimes hit this point even before level 30. That's 51 levels (without legendary mode and uncapping) using the exact same armor and weapons, selling literally everything else (Morrowloot helps mitigate this, at least). 1.9's legendary mode lets me refund all of my perks afterwards, making the crafting trees functionally useless in the grand scheme of things and further breaking/unbalancing gear progression. I think that anything that helps to mitigate or undo this "feature" of Skyrim helps improve gameplay. To that end I enjoy turning on the breaking feature (including artifacts), as it forces me to think on my feet and occasionally use armor and weapons that I find lying around, rather than view them as vendor fodder. The Looting feature may not be for everyone, but the more factors discouraging players from treating Skyrim as a hoarding game the better, in my opinion. It's also good for game balance with mods installed. Immersive Patrols, Civil War Overhaul, WarZones...anything that adds significant numbers of dead NPCs can also have a dramatic effect on the amount of gear that you sell, a problem that MMO specifically tries to address (eg, Scarcity). Looting helps reduce the amount of gear lying around and also helps me feel like the game world doesn't always revolve around me. For the above reasons, I personally think that Loot and Degradation is pretty irreplaceable at the moment.

Firstly, I apologize if this is in the wrong forum. I'm posting this because the new Painterly warpaint replacers are out, and look better than vanilla on my character even when resized down to 256x256. I thought I would look into exporting NPC faces in the Creation Kit to allow NPCs to benefit from the new warpaint, thinking that this would be a reasonable simple process. However, not only does it complain that my textures are sized incorrectly, but every character's face that I export seems to be garbage data. This is a little frustrating, and I've not found a wealth of information on this nor found any easy way to simply re-export all NPC faces. Does everybody else using warpaint retextures simply ignore the fact that they don't affect NPCs? The new textures make warpaint look actually painted on, but they're not particularly useful to me if the only person using them is my own character. I'm not using skse to increase the resolution of the warpaint and I'm already working with downsized textures, so their high resolution shouldn't be affecting the Creation Kit's output here. Considering that the garbage chargen output doesn't seem to affect anybody releasing mods with NPCs, I'm thinking that there's something basic that I'm doing wrong.

Why? Almost every mesh in the mod (129 of 149 meshes) are in USKP, and it's listed on the list of mods made obsolete. For the remaining 20 meshes?

Ignore the USKP conflicts. They're atmospheric at best and interfere with CWO at worst. The only exception to this might be the respawn flags on some of the guards. The USKP fix that CWO partially overwrites is below. This might be intentional. If this concerns you then either forward the flags and hope for the best, refrain from killing guards, or ask Apollodown for advice. The AOS conflicts are minor but you can forward the relevant sound records if you like. Load CWO after CRF and ignore the conflicts. Conceptually, both mods do the same thing: restore cut content. Anything CRF might do to the civil war will be done better by CWO. CWO includes all cut civil war content. I don't use TCIY or EBQO. My intuition says to ignore the TCIY conflicts because you can't guarantee they'll function properly with the redesigned quests. In any case, the potential reward (ability to skip a civil war quest) is far outweighed by the potential problem (broken civil war halfway through a play-through). Let CWO override TCIY, and check TCIY's dialog records to see if it's affecting any civil war dialog that CWO doesn't touch. Ignore the EBQO conflicts and load CWO later. More specific quest objectives can't be written because the same quest will be used for several different battles and locations. There are a few quest text records that are safe to forward if you want to look through them. Ignore all conflicts that aren't quest objective text entries. STEP has a few script-heavy combat mods that may give CWO trouble, such as Enhanced Blood Textures, Deadly Spell Impacts, and Burn Freeze Shock Effects. These types of mods trigger often in large battles. I don't use them, personally. The best way to test things other than running through a civil war quest or two is to spawn some hostile actors a town. Start a new game and teleport to a city (coc SolitudeOrigin), turn on god mode (tgm), and spawn about 100 hostile actors. (help bandit => player.placeatme <code> 100). The goal is to test script lag and FPS with large numbers of hostile actors. This isn't exactly "scientific", but if your frame rate drops to unplayable levels or Convenient Horses indicates bad script lag then you can reasonably expect CWO to have problems. It usually takes them all a minute or two to figure out that they're supposed to be killing things, so some delay is normal. I suspect STEP will be fine. EBT, BFSE, and DSI have all given me problems in the past, but that was before the memory patch. If script lag proves to be an issue you'll need to remove some mods, and edit the STEP patch afterwards if necessary. EBT probably contributes the most script lag in large battles but you're likely to notice its absence.

I think that these are STEP worthy. I'd flag it as testing if I could.

I also hope people consider Gamwich's performance textures. I don't know if they're better here, but I think it warrants a comparison. I would make comparisons myself, but I somehow deleted all of Skyrim (including custom mods, meshes, and textures) a week ago and I'm only now trying to piece what I had back together. I was consistently impressed with Gamwich's performance textures. It's unfortunate that people don't consider them simply because of their low resolution.

I've had nothing but positive experiences with Civil War Overhaul. It really puts a burden on load orders with too many scripts, however. I strongly suspect that most of the people reporting issues have too many scripts that proc on all actors in a scene, which will not play nicely with CWO. Personally, the only bugs I've noticed in the civil war were in my last playthrough without CWO.

A new version has been posted to give freshly killed dragons bloody skeletons, eliminating the need for Bloody Dragon Bones.

Unless Pure Weather is updated separately, your options are realistically to either drop Realistic Water 2 for Pure Water and switch to Purity, or stick to the older version of Pure Weather.

Why do you want to run Purity? Purity is largely Pure Water and Pure Weather put together, and one of the main selling points of Pure Weather is that it makes the game more saturated. Taking out both Pure Water and the saturation of Pure Weather is somewhat analogous to taking out half of the mod, if not more than half. If you want to use it anyways, then you'll be better off using just Pure Weather on its own. You can always restore saturation to vanilla levels with TES5Edit. The result still won't play nicely with many ENBs, if that's why you want it less saturated.

Steam sale is on for Witcher 1 and 2, in case anybody missed it. I picked up both for less than $5 CAD. Witcher 3 is 10% off, but nowhere near as cheap as the first two.

I love your mods and have almost all of them installed. I hope you find the right balance between modding and everything else. I suppose this is an unpopular thing to say, but if modding isn't fun for you, then don't do it.

Thanks for your thoughts. I look forward to seeing your patch. I don't use SIC, HLE, and RotE primarily for compatibility reasons: it would be nice to see some of these options unified better.

I also get great gameplay using Grim & Somber ENB, even in battles with 100+ actors. ENB has a performance hit, but many users still get good performance using it. Alternatives might be ICIBINE or ZeroENB (not an ENB preset), if ENB is too much for your system.

Do you use an ENB or ENBoost? If so, is ExpandSystemMemoryX64 in enblocal.ini set to true or false? The same guide also warns against using EnableUnsafeMemoryHacks in conjunction with sheson's memory patch. My game consistently crashed on startup until I set ExpandSystemMemoryX64 to false.

I really wish I had more time to play Skyrim as well, or I'd be able to help out more with the suggestions. From CrushBoss: However, CrushBoss seems to have since contradicted this. Later post: I don't really know what would be best for the pack without more playtesting. I'm also interested in Animal Tweaks, because the author is correct that animals, trolls, and giants don't provide much challenge for most of your playthrough past a certain point. I've had bad luck in the past running both HLE and Combat Evolved, so I'm considering dropping High Level Enemies for my own game: then the game will get relatively easy in the end-game, but at this point I'm not sure how much I care. Might be a good tradeoff, if Combat Evolved is decent. The last time I tried using both High Level Enemies and Combat Evolved together I found combat to be unnecessarily annoying.

It attempts to automatically deconflict your load order. It can be useful as it covers more ground than the Wrye Bash patch. It doesn't do a perfect job, of course, and the Bashed patch works better for the records that it does deconflict, but the TES5Edit Merged Patch can be very useful at pointing out issues in your load order that you might have missed. If you really haven't checked your load order for conflicts and there are a lot of them, a good strategy might be to make a Merged Patch and then check its contents to make sure it didn't screw up. The name was poorly chosen, I think, because it has nothing at all to do with merging ESP files. Checking through everything yourself is superior, but frankly most people don't do that. I don't know why its considered essential for PerMa, other than a large load order with Perkus Maximus is likely to have many conflicts and they're probably thinking (accurately), that most users won't try to solve their own conflicts. Presumably asking everyone to get a Merged Patch is considered superior to letting users ignore conflicts. Honestly, it should be in more use by the community in my opinion: plenty of users install whatever they feel like, run it through LOOT and make a Wrye Bash patch and assume everything is fine. Using the Merged Patch (even if you don't examine it) is likely to be superior to not bothering with conflict resolution at all in that situation, especially with a large overhaul like Perkus Maximus in place.