Thalioden

I used Vividian for a while and liked it, but switched to NLVA for my current playthrough. Not only do I like it better (brighter days, darker nights and dungeons, more varied weather + True Storms compatibility, which is awesome!) but I also regained almost 10 fps (subjectively, since I didn't do an exact measurement).

Deadly Dragons has an option to make all important NPCs essential. Is that what you remember?

I got up to mid 30s with Extended before refitting for LotD. I'm now level 15 on an LotD playthrough.

Realistic water has 3 options: High (1k), Medium (512), Low (256). Are you saying that you used the "High" 1k textures?

By "4k vurts foliage" do you mean TreesHD?

Currently, my dragon build is DD+DCO+Diverse Dragons (I don't use AAE largely because of the BYS conflict), but I have yet to fight dragons. Too much time modding and tinkering with settings! ;-) My last dragon fight was with DD+EMDR+DCO, and I LOVED it. I was playing a Nord knight build with heavy armor and enchanted ebony battleaxe. Most of the dragon fights were between levels 17-30. Some of the weaker dragons were dispatched fairly quickly (at Ivarstead I had help from followers and guards). But one memorable Elder Dragon fight lasted about 30 minutes (about level 30 on Adept difficulty). It was epic! The dragon kept calling invisible flame atronoch reinforcements. When I finally dispatched it, it was seriously a feeling of accomplishment.

Disparity adds a bunch of options that make races and genders (including NPCs) behave differently in game. If you don't want this, and you are using Imperious or another race overhaul, and since it appears you are not really using Disparity classes, then I don't think you'll be missing anything if you remove Disparity.

I don't think this is possible without simply not using Disparity. If you select a Class or Race in Disparity, then it will most likely have some impact on levelling, whether directly (XP Rate) or indirectly (Starting Skill). Theoretically, if you choose Fortify Skill only for both Class and Race, then Disparity will have no impact on levelling, but my testing has cast some doubt on whether this theory actually works in game. In theory, your 0-point-skill adjustments with Starting Skill should have a similar levelling impact to choosing Fortify Skill. But as you've experienced, theory does not always work as expected in practice.

This will have the opposite effect of what you are trying to accomplish. Your changes will make levelling harder. To make levelling easiest with Disparity, use XP Rate only for both class and race; do not use starting skills or fortify skills. Based on my analysis of how this works, I recommend Starting Skill + XP Rate for Classes; XP Rate only for Races for a good combination of roleplay and gameplay mechanics.

I've done some testing on this as well. Here are the issues that need to be considered: Part of the class definitions is to reallocate skills to distinguish one class from another and from vanilla. There are 3 options available to do this in Disparity: Starting Skill (alters the base skill points), Fortify Skill (does not alter the base, but adds a fortification) and XP Rate (alters the rate at which class skills are learned). In addition, two combinations are available: Starting Skill + XP Rate and Fortify Skill + XP Rate. These same options are available to determine how your race's skills affect your character. Starting Skill: when this is selected the base skill points are adjusted. One side effect of this is that the buffed skill is harder to level up because it's starting at a higher level. This can lead to the awkward position that it is easier to level up your character by using non-class skills (the ones your character should not be using) because they will increase much more easily especially when they start at a mere 5 skill points. Additionally, it would reduce the capacity of a character to level because of the reduced opportunities to level up skills (going from 35 to 100 instead of 15 to 100). This may (should) be overcome the uncapper settings allowing level progression for skill gain over 100, though I'm unclear on whether the uncapper actually allows this. Fortify Skill: When choosing fortify skill by itself for the class selection (but not the race selection), all skills will start at 15 skill points like Vanilla (not considering the race skill modifications). In theory, the Fortify Skill overcomes the problems presented by Starting Skill by allowing faster levelling (because the actual skill level starts at 15, or 5 if you choose fortify skill + xp rate) and more opportunity for level advancement. In my recent test, however, this did not seem to improve the skill progression issue. I chose an altmer mage (fortify + xp rate class choice; xp rate race choice) using only flame and healing spells (no weapons or armor), and after killing about 12 wolves, 6 horkers, 2 goats, 2 draugr, and a chicken, all with flame, I still have not levelled up my destruction (or restoration) skill even once (though it's close to levelling), but I did level up speech 4 times just from selling loot. Additionally, Fortify skill has its own issues. The fortification is not considered when determining eligibility for perks, for example. And my mage was unable to enter the College of Winterhold because he lacked the requisite magic skill level (5 base + 20 fortify where 25 skill level in any school is required). XP rate: Each class has a specialization (Magic, Combat, or Stealth) which will give the character a 20% boost to learning skills associated with that specialization. But when choosing XP rate (or one of its combinations) this buff is reduced to 5% for specialization skills. This is to compensate for the XP rate bonuse applied to the class's skills. The XP rate selection becomes particularly important for classes that do not heavily concentrate in a single specialization (like Spellsword). For example, with XP rate (or a combo) selected, the Spellsword will learn Conjuration 5% faster (because of specialization), Destruction 25% faster (class skill + specialization) and One-Handed 20% faster (class skill). Without XP rate, the Spellsword will learn Conjuration 20% faster (specialization), Destruction 20% faster (specialization), and One-Handed at the normal rate (no specialization). For gameplay purposes (maximizing levelling rate and levelling cap) the best selections are probably XP rate only for both class and race. For roleplay purposes, XP Rate is important for class selection to help balance cross specialization classes. And I'd argue that Starting Skill makes the most sense for class selection for role play purposes over Fortify Skill because a class represents knowledge your character is starting with. For classes, Disparity is essentially reallocating the Vanilla 15-skill-points-across-all-skills into the skills in which your character has "actually" trained. Since it does not appear that Fortify Skill offers much benefit over Starting Skill (and Fortify Skill presents its own difficulties), I can't recommend it at this time. For race selection, IMHO, the race skills represent merely predisposition or facility with a particular skill not knowledge and/or experience in a particular skill. From a roleplay perspective, this lends itself best to an XP rate only setting. Using XP Rate only for race selection has the added gameplay benefit of not compounding the problems presented by using Starting Skill in the Class selection. TLDR: Starting Skill + XP Rate for Classes; XP Rate only for Races.

It's not a direct conflict. It's a design conflict. The issue is that the player gets BYS debuffs and enemies get AAE buffs, so they double. I suppose one could delete the AAE buffs in TES5Edit that conflict with BYS debuffs, but figuring out which those are (and deleting them and all of their references -- e.g. are the referenced from any scripts?) is part of the issue. Edit: The proper solution is for AAE to do a check for the presence of Bring Your Silver.esp, then set a variable that tracks its presence. Then AAE effects and/or scripts use a conditional to check the status of the variable. If BYS is present, then buff and/or resistance effects on enemies that have counterparts in BYS would not be applied. This solution requires an intimate knowledge of the inner workings of AAE (and its script source files) and its BYS counterparts to know where to put the conditionals -- thus it's best left to the author, or someone with a LOT of extra time on their hands.

Thunderchild already modifies dragonrend, and these would conflict with those changes. Are Thunderchild's changes not enough? (I've never used dragonrend, so I don't know)

The problem is likely a combination of the uncapper settings (slows down leveling - or rather increases skill points needed to level a skill) and Disparity. SRLE:LotD's recommended settings (starting skills + xp rate) for Disparity result in much harder levelling. The reason is that the higher your base skill, the more points you must acquire to level that skill (which then adds points to your overall character level). But with the "starting points" setting (even with +xp rate) you are buffing some skills so high (sometimes over 30) for a starting character, that it becomes very difficult to acquire sufficient skill points to advance a skill. The upside to this is that when you do advance a skill you have access to more perks because the skill points are counted for perk selection. For faster levelling, select the skill buff (I don't remember what it's called) instead of the starting skills option in Disparity. This will let you gain xp and level faster, but it also means the buff is not considered when determining available perks. Personally, I prefer "starting skills" (without +xp rate) for my class setting, and "xp rate" without buff or starting skills for my race setting. Incidentally, if you choose a combination with xp rate for your class setting then, the xp rate buff for your class specialization is reduced from 20% to 5% according to kryptopyr. My loading times are atrocious, too. I was wondering about the cause. I think on my next play through I will try eliminating texture mods to see how that helps.

Yes, Mator's tutorial is still relevent with the newest version. The newest version has some additional help though because all of the bash tags have been replicated in Mator smash, and you can now assign bash tag equivalents to plugins instead of creating custom tags. It's very useful to understand custom tag creation, however, so that you can combine bash tags for plugins. Also, Mator Smash seems to read bash tags in plugin headers and auto-assign relevant tag information. It's an extremely powerful program, and it's much more flexible than Wrye Bash. But the learning curve is a bit steep. It took me about 3 hours to figure it out, then probably another 2 hours of experimenting with settings and load orders. But now, its fairly easy to run. I don't consider myself a Mator Smash expert, and I really think I've only scratched the surface of the programs capabilities. But with proper settings, this program has the potential to create a nearly flawless conflict resolution patch.

I don't use the CR patch, primarily because I don't use some the mods included in the CR patch, and I do use some mods not in this guide that need conflict resolution. I'd suggest putting in some time to learn how to use MatorSmash to create a patch -- essentially an automatic bash patch and conflict resolution patch. That's what I've been using. In my last play through I still had some conflicts (a few headless bandits, for example), but the game still worked with minimal CTD (maybe 1 for every 5-6 hours of play time). While the MatorSmash CR is not perfect, the upside is that it only takes about 10 minutes once you've figured out how to use it properly and input your settings.

I don't see how this (reinstalling the npc retextures) could have helped you unless you are not using MO. You are using MO, right?

Do I understand correctly that the SkyTEST-RealisticAnimals&Predators-Dawnguard.esp and SkyTEST-RealisticAnimals&Predators-Dragonborn.esp from the Skytest page should not be used? if I am wrong, and they should be used, then is there a reason that they are not included in the Animals Merge?

There seems to be an overlap between Bring Your Silver and Advanced Adversary Encounters. The perks created be each mod stack with each other, potentially creating impossible enemies (unless you are using the right equipment). Does SRLE Extended LotD address this overlap? I couldn't find anything in the guide about it.

Awesome! Thanks DoubleYou. That (the AppID) did the trick. And thank you, too, fireundubh. That would have been my next question. ;-) Now on to conquering script editing and compiling through Sublime through CK through MO. I know ... I'm a glutton for punishment.

Alright, this is strange. Now I'm also having this problem (CK does not show MO loaded mods). I've tried different permisssions on MO and CK (run as administrator and not) without any change. I've also checked the permissions for the Skyrim folder, and it already has full access for users. Any clue what I should try next? Edit: BTW, I'm running Mod Organizer 1.2.10