hylskrik

Personally I'm more excited about isoku's take on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sk9tYo6oyFE

I'm using ACE with HLE and Duel - Combat Realism. Really, really like it, although I might have to do some testing, because two-handed weapons seem to be completely overpowered both for me and enemies. You said you wanted AI changes and ACE + Duel delivers pretty well, I think. I especially like Duel's new NPC AI when sneaking -- they'll no longer go "oh, a dead guy, must've been the wind" but will instead go into search mode and come looking for you.

You know what, after reading people's comments and doing some thinking - I kind of prefer the vanilla one as well. I still think this particular lantern deserves endorsements for the very nice work put into it, but I agree that it does kinda look like modern metal work. I've gone back to using the Ruins Clutter Improved mesh (only makes the candles a little taller) with Tobes' rusty texture. It feels absolutely "right" considering I use Lanterns of Skyrim -- outdoor lanterns should probably be really rusty :) If anything, I kinda want to have Chesko's wearable lantern mesh available as an alternative, it doesn't make sense for the handle to stand to attention and the lack of glass is annoying me (it has glass guards [the X struts] for goodness' sake!)

After comparing the two, I wound up using only gradhotcoals.dds and fxembers.dds from Better Embers and the rest from Realistic Smoke and Embers. That said, the difference between the two embers is more of a personal thing than a matter of one being better than the other.

The guy who made the Wearable Lanterns SMIM patch actually made one for this one as well, he commented asking for permission but the mod author isn't very talkative :/ If we could get in touch with the mod author, at the very least maybe we could have it as a Wearable Lanterns enhancement so only the player has one?

Nordic Lantern - Replacer - changes the mesh and texture of the lantern to a more nordic theme. I know we already have Brumbek's new lantern but I figured I'd throw this one into the ring as I much prefer it to the SMIM lantern. Only issue is that it's a bit clean looking. I added a screenshot to the images for the mod with a slightly modified texture, the mod author hasn't replied to the requests for a dirtier version, although it seems he/she isn't too comfortable with English. :(

From what I can surmise, Nexus assigns a download server based on which ever one has the fewest concurrent users. In theory that would work well and help distribute their server load, but when a server hickups or goes down the user count for that particular server drops and it gets pushed to the top of the download priority list, resulting in borked automatic downloads. For me, at least, it seems to be the Salt Lake servers having the most issues.