Caladcholg

So, I apologize if this is intended behavior or already known but I was futzing with some main menu replacers and noticed that the background mesh (spinning Skyrim logo or any wallpaper image replacer) was really dark and difficult to see and after spending awhile trying to track down what was causing it I found that the culprit was BethINI setting fShadowDistance to 0, though only if you select the "Poor" preset option or manually set fShadowDistance to 0 and save and quit. If you select the "Remove Shadows" checkbox it will set fShadowDistance to 0.0001 and you don't have the shadowy main menu problem. Also "Remove Shadows" overrides manually setting to 0 if you don't exit first (giving 0.0001), while conversely selecting "Poor" overrides "Remove Shadows" if done before exit for what all that is worth. Anyway I thought poor=fShadowDistance=0 could have been intended (even if the main menu thing was annoying heh) but I figured with the inconsistency with "Remove Shadows" behavior at least one of the two was likely unintended?

Oh, me too, I also use the Steel Plate, Elven, and Nordic Carved from CNHF - Vanilla Armors and Clothes with their Ebony and Daedric from CNHF v2_5 Female Body Replacer and the Stormcloak Officer armor from Morrowind Armor Compilation using its Bear armor as a replacer since the male skirt looks weird from PFA and I prefer the pants and sleeves. Speaking of sleeves a bunch of mods that add sleeves but that's a different issue. The only one I can't decide is whether to use the Ancient Nord from PFA, CHNF, Skyrim Modesty Mod, or just Vanilla because it seems a bit like the Vampire Armor in that it seems special and makes sense that it's s bit impractical. That said, I get why everyone loves their UNP/TMB/CBBE or what have you and that it fits with the beautification theme in option 2 for the NPC retextures in the guide so, oh well.

You might want to rename the second [Wiseman303's Trap Fixes] to [Wiseman303's Trap Fixes - Vivid Landscapes Merged Mesh].

Since you guys are already using SSE High Quality Music had you considered grabbing the smaller High Quality Daedra Voices while you're at it? Like High Quality Music I need my good headphones to be able to hear a difference but since you already have one why not the other right?

Personally I install the sections of Book of Silence as separate mods in MO, just because I'm a bit anal about the sections everything goes in. So I have "aMidianBorn Book of Silence - Creatures" and "aMidianBorn Book of Silence - Dragonborn Creatures" at the start of Vanilla Creature Retexture and then just move all those mods you mentioned in alphabetical place in the section they belong, they overwrite Book of Silence and my fragile sanity is preserved.

Thanks for checking this for me, I appreciate it :) This is great news! the whole "The Care Taker" idea sounds great, especially considering the number of mods the guide has already had to drop in the past due to their removal.

Hey, sorry if this has been asked already. From the Gemling Queen Jewelry mod description: "Update 27 January 2015: The weight slider fix for the Amulets of Night Power is included in the Unofficial Dawnguard Patch as of version 2.0.8 and is thus obsolete. I will remove the plugin from future updates of Gemling Queen Jewelry." There obviously hasn't been any updates so the "GQJ_DG_vampireamuletfix.esp" file still appears to be in the archive and following instructions in the guide is still installed. Do you guys know if this is still needed since the mod itself hasn't been updated (Last update 10/11 Jan 2015), or is this the kind of fix that is completely redundant because of the updates to UDP/USLEEP and can be removed after installing the archive?

It seems like there could be some value to installing the Book of Silence creatures sections separately since I was also confused about why the creature retextures weren't in the section of the same name the first time I was following the guide. You could just move the whole Creatures file to just before Ancient Dwemer Metal as "aMidianBorn Book of Silence - Creatures" and then do an install called "aMidianBorn Book of Silence - Dragonborn Creatures" with "Ash Spawn" and "Ash Guardians" selected and then just omit the Creatures file later then have the Dragonborn DLC fomod instructions just say to install "Bonemold Armor" and "Acolyte Masks" (additionally "Black Fur default" for Nordic Carved, but that is included in the Content Addon so is redundant) during the main install under Vanilla Item Retextures. Obviously you'd just then move the Skeleton/Draugr/Dragon Priest mods to their normal alphabetical place under Vanilla Creature Retexture. Edit: Also thanks Darth for the great guide it's been really invaluable in giving my Mod Organizer profile some much needed structure and as a resource to find some really great mods, hopefully you'll be able to actually enjoy some non Skyrim freetime now :P

Oh, of course, makes complete sense. Hah, with all the crafting overhauls and recipe changes it's easy to forget what from the vanilla game isn't already craftable. Is it different than this link because that's what my mod organizer is linked to... I don't know if that was a link from Neo's guide or wherever but I must have been directed to download that from one of these guides since I don't even use it myself, is that a different version than was used in this guide?

Now that you guys are including TMB Vanilla Armors as the go to female armor replacer should users skip installing Female Blades Light Armor by esmm40 since a version is already included in the TMB installer?

Something I've personally enjoyed about the guide is that it does a really good job of letting people know the reason why certain files are not installed, maybe throwing that it's replaced by that Vivid Landscapes patch would be useful for people to know in the special instructions for Helgen Reborn like you've done for files like Bandlier, etc.

Minerva in the 2.5 update received MCM support for changing her hairstyle in game so in the FOMOD instructions it should probably be changed: Select Hairstyle -> Hairstyle -> "MCM user" (or if you really want to keep type 3 hair without the new MCM option "Non MCM user - Type 3") Also I pointed out on the mod page awhile ago that the installer was installing meshes with incorrectly mapped texture paths for her hair so the hair ended up with the missing textures effect in game. In the interim you should probably also instruct users to install the "Minerva Hair Textures" update file for 2.5 until there is a new 2.6 update that rolls those fixes into the main file. Edit: Actually, I tried playing around with choosing the "Non MCM user - Type 3" option in the installer and I think it's just installing the MCM option regardless since it keeps starting with Type 1 hair and the MCM is working, even more reason to just instruct people to install the MCM option and let them choose in game I guess.

Yeah, talking about disk space was probably a bad example. I was just trying to fill out textures that weren't included in Book of Silence which led me to testing the ones that WERE included which led me to that mesh problem I had with USLEEP and the content addon and after fixing that I realized there were some things that seemed like redundant installs in the guide and thought cutting them would just make the guide cleaner and less confusing for someone like me trying to understand what their individual problem came from when there were a few things overwriting each other. Anyway, don't mind me and carry on since as you said it probably doesn't matter much.

Actually, I keep comparing the steel textures from the amidianBorn Content addon 1.9 "textures\armor\steel\" with the ones from the standalone download "aMidianBorn steel RC4" this guide has us install and just like the iron one I can't tell a difference here either. Could someone point out to me what exactly is updated and why we need to install these separate versions if they are included in the Content Addon or how they are different from those files? I noticed the Content addon was updated in March of 2015 and some of these ones we are overwriting with had their last updates earlier than that. Hide and Scaled armor seems to be absent from the CA so it makes sense to still get those but for Iron and Steel could the fact that they got bundled into the CA just have been missed? For that matter I noticed the FOMOD install instructions for the Armors section of aMidianBorn is a little inconsistent in that it has us NOT install Hide and Scaled options which makes sense to me in that we are installing options later that will overwrite them, but if we follow that logic and are overwriting the files for the iron and steel from the original "aMidianBorn Armors" file with the Content Addon or the standalones then shouldn't we have those selected as "none' in the original installer also? This doesn't really matter for the final outcome if someone is blindly following the guide because it's all being overwritten but it's just a point of internal consistency for the guide and for people like me who install everything as separate mods in MO this will save a tiny amount of disk space.

Okay, I have been confused about the instructions for the aMidianBorn section for a little while now, ignoring some other stuff for now and focusing on the iron armor choices so as not to confuse myself even more let me see if I understand all the options: In the original aMidianBorn Armors installer there are three options for Iron armor, "Iron", "Vanilla Cut", and "White Fur" Then installing the Content Addon it creates three alternatives in game: the "default", "Engraved", and "Fine" (or "Brown" in the filepaths). The instructions in this guide then have us installing the standalone replacer "aMidianBorn Iron and Banded Armor" From looking at the files, the Armors Installer's "Iron" option and the Content addon "Fine" are identical with the "White" version from the original installer being identical to both of these except with white fur; the "Vanilla Cut" in the original installer appears to be unique. The default in the Content Addon appears to be identical to the "engraved" version in Content Addon except the latter adds the engraving layer over top. All of which is fine on its own except that the standalone replacer we are then told to install last appears to be identical to the "engraved" version in the Content Addon causing the default and one of the new options to be identical when following the guide. I could obviously be missing something important here but I dunno. From looking at the options it seems to me that having the "Vanilla Cut" installed and skipping the default install from the content addon and not installing the standalone replacer would provide the most obvious visual variation between the options opened up by the Content Addon, although if the "Vanilla Cut" is disliked for personal choice reasons keeping the Content Addon default and not installing the standalone replacer seems the most obvious way to keep from having duplicates in game. This was kind of a longwinded way to say there are duplicates but I wanted to provide context. The last thing is that I remember earlier noticing that USLEEP edits to the iron cuirass meshes (and maybe the steel ones too, I can't remember) changed the 3Dindex order of the pieces in the .nif so that the content addon's plugin was not correctly mapping texture paths to be overwritten. Is this covered in the Conflict Resolution patch? I remember downloading one of the modular patches when I was looking at the YASH guide and noticing it didn't resolve this but when following this guide I have a ton of stuff I am not installing so am missing masters and don't think I can check the patch for this guide to see if it resolves it either. Edit: The standalone file that we download "aMidianBorn Iron cabals cut 2k" is the one identical to the "engraved" option just as the download page implies with the "aMidianBorn Iron vanilla cut 2k" file being identical to the Content Addon default. I imagine this means that it WAS incorporated into the content addon at some point and the standalone download could just be removed from the guide at this point? Again unless there are changes to like the normals or something that I'm not seeing. It should be noted though that the "aMidianBorn Iron vanilla cut 2k" file is still different from the vanilla cut in the armors installer.

I haven't actually played with TMB in game as I'm still torn on that or just sticking with vanilla, but just opening up the .nif in nifskope it looks like the point of the helm is that they removed the asymmetry of the horns that many people dislike and perhaps more edits than I can tell at just this quick glance, so is likely not an error in being included. If it's just cutting the asymmetry then any mod that combines that with the ICH design would probably be the best replacement while retaining the intended designs of both mods. Edit: I also don't use ICH so I realize it maybe also adjusts the horns already and I just didn't realize.

I could be entirely misunderstanding here but the notice for "Rustic Children" under the "Skin and Body" section reads: "This is optional. Do not install this if you use NPC Retextures - Option 1 Installation above" where I think you meant an affirmative "Install" rather than "Do not install" since "RS Children Overhaul" is already to be installed as the alternative instead for option 2.

The "Mod Notes" for Realistic HD Food appear to accidentally be the same from Realistic Boat Bobbing right before it.

I'd like to reiterate darkside's point about "BPT_2K_ALL" NOT containing files for weapons and various armor pieces in case you hadn't had time to look into it and since I hadn't seen it mentioned again or changed. To quote the sticky with my emphasis: "UPDATE: 7/12/14 - Added an optional download for users with 1GB of VRAM or more. This add-on to the main mod, are 2K diffuse (color) textures of all the main armor and clothing textures. That's ONLY the main pieces, not the helmets, gauntlets, boots, etc. Couple this with my reduced sized normal maps, and you have significant resource savings over the hi-res pack textures... The 2K option added to the regular mod will give you the best combination of performance and visual quality." If you are adding "BPT_ALL_3_0" then don't forget the "BPT - Steel Boot Fix" to fix an incorrect texture with the main file.

Man, I just keep getting excited for the eventual next playthrough. Keep up the great work everyone!

Hey, been lurking around this guide for almost a couple years now and it's been very useful thanks. Thought I'd let you know that "cellHUD and Complete Vault Girl Interface Compatibility" in the optional HUD section has either been removed from the Nexus for awhile now or is linked incorrectly and I can't find it. Also I have a couple basically formatting suggestions you can just ignore if you want: Regarding the whole optional hud section it's so small that it seems a bit odd to have a whole page dedicated to it. Maybe borrowing some of the flair from the fo3 guide such as "optional" tags and leaving those two on the main page might be a bit clearer, or at least more convenient to the reader? The headers for some of the sections, while I enjoy the tone they add for the guide, could probably do with some more obvious and descriptive titles. "Poosh" for instance could really just be "Animations & Effects" while keeping the previous title as flavor text under it. Same thing with "If You'll Be My Bodyguard..." as "NPCs" or "Companions" or something. Maybe it's just me but there have been numerous times scrolling through the guide looking for a specific section when it took me longer than it really needed to because of the lack of title clarity. Maybe it's just me hah... New Vegas Uncut 5 - A Wilder Wasteland. The Gojira encounter is a bit much and doesn't sound like was even intended content. With all the balancing we do to get the combat in the game to feel right being attacked by a super creature randomly has turned me off using that particular mod. I just wonder if including it in the 'uncut' section as-is makes the most sense when (well in my mind anyway) it conflicts with what it seems that section is trying to accomplish. Maybe adding a warning to the description of the mod in the guide to tip people off about the Gojira encounter or even making a patch for it would be helpful. I think that's basically all I can remember for now. I really appreciate what you guys have done, EssArrBee for making the guide and MonoAccipiter and the rest of you for continuing to improve on it, Especially in the last couple months as I'm holding off on a new playthrough to add a lot of the things Mono has been working, primarily the weapon/equipment and casino stuff.