OCDCoder

I don't remember finding left-handed rings back when I used it with SLE, there was something you could do to turn any ring to be left-handed or right. (I'll have to read the page again when my husband isn't waving food at me.) All Glory to the HypnoToad !!!

OMG, thank you!!! I spent an hour last night trying to figure out why my character couldn't sleep. I wasn't getting a message or health bar (turned the hud on, still no), just that "dunk" noise, and nothing was showing in active effects. I just went in now and started a healing spell, and sure enough, she was injured. Healed her, and gave her a nice 10h sleep. I've honestly been avoiding playing tonight because I thought I either had a corrupted save or was going to have to start mod testing again. (Honestly, if you're injured, you'd think sleep would be a good thing.) She'd just visited the Inn of Lost Souls, whatever that creepy thing is. I thought they'd done something to her. LOL Futurama mod? Sorry. Yep. Circlets or Masks with all Robes and Hoods. I also have this one: Left Hand Rings Modified SE. Disclaimer, I haven't actually tried either of these yet because I've only found one ring and no circlets... (Edit: Yeah, what redirishlord said.)

Oh, thank you! Also *facepalm* I've gotten so used to having that problem because of my being stubborn about the overhauls I want that I didn't even think to check there. Edit: What it says to do is simply load it and save it in the Creation Kit like we've done for some others, to save people the trouble of looking. However I haven't tried it yet because I've been updating my mods and patches for a few hours now, I'm finally playing, and I'm REALLY not wanting to stop right now. (Heavily modding your game has that horrible side effect that you never end up playing your game... :-p) I'll be sure to not overwrite the save where I was seeing her, though.

FYI, extracting the BSA files didn't fix the problem. But maybe, like the others, they need to be put somewhere else in the load order and the .esp added to the patch? I have no idea, it doesn't look like it's overwriting anything or being overwritten by anything... Same with Jobs of Skyrim, but like I said, I haven't seen the bug happen with that one.

Finally catching up on the changelog. Since we updated KYE on May 22, it says to rebuild the KYE merge, but we need to rebuild the Animals merge as well, don't we? (I need to anyway to add Peaceful Mudcrabs, a mod I HIGHLY recommend unless you like continually losing your followers to those things.) Oh, speaking of followers, I LOVE the feature in AFK where you can draw your weapon and your follower (usually) teleports to you. It's really helpful especially when I decide to mountain goat up or down a mountain. (When I started using Inigo, I LOVED that he had a similar feature. I was always losing followers. Same with Convenient Horses.) BTW, again speaking of followers, Faendal has his standard bow and steel arrows, but I notice that his quiver glows and he actually shoots the arrows you get with a bound bow. Also, when he starts to attack with the bow, at least outdoors, I often hear a sound that sounds like a loud gunshot. Any idea what that's all about?

So I'd mentioned on here earlier about REALLY wanting to get SkyrimSouls - Unpaused Game Menus to work. It's always really bugged me that time stops when you read a book, and the only other mod (don't know if it's been ported) causes it to take an hour to read every book, which is silly if the book is one page. Or... any number of pages, really. Some are long, but not an hour long. The only real immersive option is to read a stack of books at once that takes about an hour of real life time, then wait for an hour. But in the interest of making the game harder, the overall goal is to not pause the game when opening ANY menu. So no more pausing a battle to chug five health potions. (And setting it to JUST keep the book reading unpaused didn't seem to work.) Problem is that loading it as-is causes an immediate CTD with a message to wait for an upgrade. And the mod author, though still active on NM, seems to have given up. BUT I finally got it to work (well, people in the forum did) so I wanted to share the method in case anyone here wants to try it. Someone on the forum posted a fixed DLL. I was still having some CTDs using it (and BAD stuttering, even temporary freezing when opening the console) so I tweaked the .ini file in SKSE/Plugins like so. A one means keep the game running, a zero means to pause it. I kind of went with a combo of logical and stable. [spoiler=My settings] bConsole=0 bTutorialMenu=0 bMessageBoxMenu=0 bTweenMenu=1 bInventoryMenu=1 bMagicMenu=1 bContainerMenu=1 bFavoritesMenu=1 bBarterMenu=0 bTrainingMenu=0 bLockpickingMenu=1 bBookMenu=1 bGiftMenu=0 bJournalMenu=0 bLevelUpMenu=0 bStatsMenu=0 bMapMenu=1 bModManagerMenuu=0 bCustomMenu=1 bSleepWaitMenu=1 (No, bModManagerMenuu isn't a typo. That's copy/paste up there.) So far in my testing it works perfectly, EXCEPT that I get a CTD occasionally when I quit the game, which is honestly fine by me, it just means it quits a bit faster. :-p Some people are saying they get CTDs after a couple of hours of play, but I've probably put about 12h in since I got it working and no CTDs EXCEPT when I tried opening my inventory menu the second the game started. Give it a few seconds. Some people are saying it was a problem with moreHUD, which we aren't using, though it could still be a HUD thing, or some other conflicting mod. It could also be where I have it in my load order. Overall, I think stability is related to which menus you allow to pause and which you don't, so if you get CTDs or stutter on a specific menu, set that one to zero. Oh, and I just found one saying to delete SkyrimSouls.mem, so I just did that (actually I just gave it a .disabled extension in case that actually causes more problems) but really, I LOVE this mod. A random CTD sometimes when I exit the game really isn't something I mind compared to the extra difficulty and realism this mod provides. BTW, if you use Take Notes, it doesn't consider that a book, it does pause the game. Which is a good thing, because even with my timescale set to 5, I'd probably use about 3h of game time to write about my character's adventures. LOL

Um.... Ok, so I have quite a few perks in dealing with load order and a few with dealing with patches and xEdit, but I don't think I have the right one(s) to quite understand your last paragraph... I did a bit more troubleshooting. Originally, with just WICO, 3DNPC Overhaul, and my custom patch of those files, this is what I ended up with Aela: https://www.ocdcoder.org/skyrim/aela.jpg BTW, in that image (one of the reasons I went ahead and posted it, I know you know what this bug looks like), notice how my character is looking to the left? She's stuck that way. Any idea how to get her eyes back to normal? I've tried going into Racemenu and even switching her race and going to presets and all of them have stuck eyes. Ok, anyway, Aela looked fine with everything installed. (Actually better, at some version of "fixed," she had a big handprint of war paint on her face.) This is Frailia, the left as-is in the guide, the right with Consistent Older People. I made sure to unpack the bsa in COP, placed it after the others, and made a LOOT rule to load it after the patch. No difference. (I don't have a shot with just WICO and 3DNPCs, but she essentially looks like herself there.) https://www.ocdcoder.org/skyrim/fralia.jpg If I look REALLY close, she does still have very light wrinkles, they just look kind of... drawn on. Not like normal wrinkles. And I found the NPC that STILL has that problem after all of that: https://www.ocdcoder.org/skyrim/fakreela.jpg Google tells me she's from Immersive Patrols. I notice that one has two BSA files. One thing I'm wondering, I also have Jobs of Skyrim installed, and it also generates random NPCs. It's WAY down in my left pane, though LOOT puts it above Immersive Patrols. (Your patch is way down near the bottom. I have the global priority set, but I've never understood how that affects things.) BUT the difference between those two is that Jobs of Skyrim doesn't have BSAs, just loose textures and meshes, Immersive Patrols does. Do you think unpacking those might fix this problem?

Are you talking about manually editing specific NPCs using xEdit or did I misunderstand? I tried adding Consistent Older People. It still didn't affect Fralia Gray-Mane. With or without, she still looked the same - much younger, just mean and with a bad complexion. I did create a patch just like you described, one with just WICO and 3DNPC. The first NPC I've seen in a long time with the dark-face problem using the patch I had created was Aela, who was the one I was trying to fix by re-installing these others to see if it was a problem with my patch. So right now, I have everything installed and that fixed her. But as I was running through Whiterun, I saw some random NPC with that same dark-face problem. And I've checked and double-checked, and every single overhaul is installed according to instructions, as is your patch (and its LOOT rule), and the Conflict Resolution Patch that relies on it. (And any other patches you provided and the requirements.) I have no idea what to try next except getting rid of overhauls completely. I think it's way past time I go to bed.

I've gone through and installed and reinstalled things so many times that I usually don't read carefully (since 99.9% of the time, the instructions are either fomod or deleting files) so when I see BSA Extracted, I say yes to MO2. So yeah, it might be helpful not to have the tag for things that we shouldn't extract during installation? Will Merge Plugins let me remove some of these from the patch you provided? Right now, I'm reinstalling all of these overhaul mods to try to troubleshoot this dark face problem. I don't like a lot of the changes (my character has a real hard time having a crush on Hadvar when he has a pornstache), and unless there's some way to make the old people keep looking old (Fralia Gray-Mane was my test for that), I'm very happy with just WICO and the 3DNPC Overhaul. Although since I have all of these installed again (almost), I may keep some to see what I think if I can fix those two problems. (I'm sure I could delete the data for them individually, but that's not exactly my point... I just want enhancements, not massive changes or making everyone look like they're in their 20s.) You probably remember that I'm the one who made my own patch, but obviously something didn't work for a very very few of the characters. Although technically, that whole section is marked Optional. With that patch, it's kind of all or nothing. I ran into the same thing having to install two optional followers that I don't want because a patch needed them. Oh, another idiot check (I can give you a lot of these at 3-3:30am and later LOL), maybe also move the instructions about renaming Valerica before the fomod instructions. I just caught that at the last second before installing. BTW, I just want to thank you again, for all the hard work on this guide, for taking our suggestions seriously, and for helping people like me who are stubborn and try to find ways around having to install everything in the guide that you've so carefully patched.

Quick suggestion for idiot check. Like, one out of 100 NPCs, if that, have dark faces. I'm reinstalling WICO to see if I can fix that. While there is a notice that the BSAs must be extracted manually, I've installed this multiple times so I didn't read carefully, it's 3am, and since I have MO2 set to ask me every time if I want to extract a BSA, since I saw the tag on this one, I went ahead and did it. Then kept reading ahead and went, "D'oh." Maybe a message right above the FOMOD instructions saying not to let MO2 auto-extract the BSA?

I hope it's ok, I wanted to post some of the mods I've added here that I think go really well with the build. First some small simple things: The Joy of Perspective: This allows you to look down and see your own body. (I didn't install the custom animations, although I may try them later.) You'll need to reinstall the XP32 Maximum Skeleton Special Extended using the instructions in the guide, but adding support for this. Pick up books simple SE-VR: Note, despite the name, it's not just for VR. Lets you pick up books without reading them. That way you can read them later and get the skill points from The Eloquent Reader (Coolest mod ever! Now if you could only get speech xp for completing quests...) without just having glanced at the first page. College Spellbooks: Makes all of the spellbooks (except master ones) available from the start of the game. I just added this because it bugged me last time I played that I had Conjuration up past 50 and still couldn't find anyone to sell me a Storm Atronach spell. Jaxonz Positioner and some script fixes: Lets you move things using the keyboard rather than Skyrim's wonky physics engines. Also lets you copy or pick up things into your inventory so you can take them to your home/cave/campsite to decorate. (Although that's really a cheat, I just haven't tracked down the mod that lets you construct furniture yet.) Or delete things, like dead bodies, furniture, weird mod conflicts like the overlapping paintings I have in the Bannered Mare... Just be careful assigning hotkeys, I accidentally hit Faendal and stuck him in my pack... Oh, you can also use it to duplicate quest items to put in the Dragonborn Gallery. (I haven't tried the part of it that lets you recreate such items in a long time, so I don't know how well it works now.) EDIT: I'm seeing some people recommend Placeable Statics over this one. I haven't tried that one, but it sounds like another, possibly better option I may test, especially since it mentions crafting! Jaxonz Renamer: Does what it says. Rather than "Search Chest" you can now "Search Items to Sell" or whatever is appropriate. Careful renaming followers, I renamed a wolf follower once and when I'd dismiss him, I couldn't interact with him again. But if you look around the pages or in the forum (you may have to look in the one for SLE) there are instructions on renaming followers without breaking them. But it has an undo feature in case you do break anything. Simple Actions: Lets you sit, sleep, or meditate anywhere you like. I fell in love with this mod when I was playing a character who was REALLY into her Dragonborn training with the Greybeards. Take Notes - Journal of the Dragonborn SSE: If you're into RP, this one is a MUST. Write down your character's experiences and thoughts. Really make them come alive! Also lets you export to a text file in case you happen to have a blog for your character, or just want a backup. (Also exports to XML.) That export feature was really nice a few times way back when a couple of my saves got corrupted and I had to revert to an old one. I was able to re-import the entries so I didn't lose what had been written. (I back up after every entry, just in case.) Now the ones you have to work for: Racemenu: An extensive addition to the character creation menu. Thanks to @Kneph13 for pointing me to this link, and to @Lauren for the link to this video, because the one I found on that first link was horribly confusing (to me) and I couldn't get it working. Campfire, Frostfall, and Wearable Lanterns: I've always considered these vital. As is, they work in SE, but only via powers, not by menus. Thank you to @redirishlord for showing me this page on how to get them working in the MCM. First, I uninstalled them following the instructions on Chesko's website and then reinstalled them after that, following the MCM instructions before reloading the game.. (This only mentions Frostfall, but I uninstalled all three at once using this method.) I did this because of the warnings about problems using this on an existing character. You'll need to reinstall YOT to add support for Frostfall and Wearable Lanterns. Disclaimer, I haven't been playing with these for too long but so far it seems stable. Finally, OSA - Skyrim Ascendancy Engine and the mod from which it originally came are both available on the Nexus for SE, although having adult-oriented features, I'm not going to link them. But OSA has added some pretty cool support for other types of animations and the ability to see characteristics of your character and NPCs, like weight, height, and other attributes. Also, there's a setting to turn off all of the adult-oriented features. If you do install these, BE SURE to watch the video on the OSA page because it's a bit tricky to install, and the menu system has changed yet again and is, well less tricky to use than previously, though that's not saying a lot. Sorry for the long post, but I feel like there are all either ones that a lot of people use (except maybe OSA, but as an animation engine, I am hoping people start making a lot more OTHER TYPES of mods for it), or that would fit in really well with this guide, since there's so much focus on immersion.

Also in order: You mean that blurry thing? It's weird, I don't mind distant objects being blurry (so the time I did disable DOF, I turned it back on), but when I'm walking to a door and go from sharp to blurry to sharp in a few steps, yeah, I need to turn that off. (I still need to remember what I adjusted in SLE to make the load screen "sparkles" go away. It was something with the sharpening I seem to remember. Or some FXAA setting? IDK, I work with graphics as part of what I do for a limit, but as far as making adjustments for games...) My main issue with the in-game menu is that I have to at least mouseover anything before I can use the enter key to expand it and the arrow keys or others to adjust the values. Hitting up and down doesn't work. And the problem with mousing-over is that occasionally I forget I don't have to click, then suddenly my character is attacking things... And no, I hadn't seen that tutorial! Thank you!!! I'm honestly not sure why he left the menus in there in that condition, but there's a lot of things I don't know about converting to SSE, like how easy those are to disable, my mods never included menus. But even some that seem more "done" still have things in the mouseover text like "[variablename] description." I'd probably never finish getting a mod like that converted, I earn the OCD in my username, especially when it comes to coding! As for Faendal, I never found him creepy, but he is a bit of a jerk until you sell out Sven, then I'd always find him pleasant. But I really like what the dialogue overhauls are doing this time around, he's doing things like giving me advice about using my bow, stuff like that. Last time around, can't remember which one I used, but he kept bragging about himself and I couldn't wait to get rid of him. As for physically, I'd never realized how old he looks, especially being a Bosmer, I'd love to know! I haven't run into Stenvar yet, but I saw a video with one of the overhauls and never realized how much older he looked. First time I ever played, my character married him, I had no idea he was old enough to be her father! (Although common back then, granted.) And god, Stenvar's husband dialogue, just... blech. Anyway, she's only wearing it tonight because right now she REALLY needed to get out of her armor and wash the Draugr off her (and those rags), her stuff is scattered between her pack, Alvor and Sigrid's house (where her one dress is - I guess the scarcity mod, which I ended up going down to the 2x version, includes scarcity of clothing?), and the little treehouse mod I found that seems intended to replace the hunter's treehouse. Snapneck Shack, be careful, it earns its name! (Cool activators for what it is, though!) I am following the guide, although I've since taken things out here and there. I mostly came here to ask dumb questions... (Or occasionally talk about Draugr fashion and hovering carrots.) LMAO!!! Wow, I SO don't want to think about that! (I always thought he looked good in (sleeved) fur armor, although I kept wondering if that would be a little like me walking around in leather made from people. (It puts the lotion on its skin...))

LOL, I never could have strung them up that neatly. But I definitely made sure to have screencap proof that I wasn't hallucinating! (I sold all that Skooma I found to the caravan, I swear!) I'm just glad to have Jaxonz Positioner back in my life. Playing SLE on the PS3 recently made me realize how IMPOSSIBLE decorating is. Even with SLE, I accidentally knocked over a cauldron in Arcadia's and had to use that to get it upright again, and then safely locked into place. (I've gone into places a couple of times in the past and locked everything in the entire room in place, stupid Skyrim physics.)

I'm starting to love the look. It's weird, though, maybe I'm doing something wrong, I know the Re-Engaged ENB was the one chosen for this build, but trying the others, Real Lighting, PhoenixVivid, Ultimate Natural, none of them seemed to make ANY difference. I mentioned that I only gave them a quick glance, but I'm wondering now if there was something else preventing them from working correctly. What I'm trying to figure out this time, I can hit shift-enter and change settings in the Shader parameters section that seem to change things, but once I apply changes, save the configuration, and close it, when I reopen it, that shader parameters section is empty and it's just showing me settings from the two enb .ini files. (Which I've found I can edit outside of the game and they still take effect (I just have to make sure to copy them back to the ENB Manager slot), without looking around the room and accidentally drawing my weapon and such because the keyboard keys don't seem to work for navigation...) I've also found I can change things by editing stuff in the Vivid Weathers MCM. And I realized yesterday that there are a TON of things you get special powers to edit, and that entire CLARALUX house in Riverwood that I haven't visited yet. I was overwhelmed enough going through the settings in the MCM part of this guide, it sounds like there's still a whole lot I haven't even begin to set up that I'm either going to have to figure out or wait for a section on that in the guide (she says hopefully... ). Oh, speaking of, anyone who, like me, was waiting anxiously for Campfire and Frostfall, they, and Wearable Lanterns, DO work, kind of. They have MCM menus full of garbage, but you can configure them via powers. I should add the disclaimer that I haven't built a campfire yet, but I did appropriately almost freeze to death a couple times last night. LOL Oh, random, since we were discussing braziers, ahem, the latest in Draugr women's wear (not really SFW but it came from this build, so....): https://www.ocdcoder.org/skyrim/draugr-fashion_front.jpg https://www.ocdcoder.org/skyrim/draugr-fashion_back.jpg Not sure what it looks like on the guys, but I'm with Faendal right now and don't really want to know. LOL Oh wait, I can make that on-topic. :-p The first thing I usually do out of habit in Photoshop is auto-balance the light and colors (well, depending on what I'm doing), and doing that made me remember the complaint I had about how orange everything was indoors, ESPECIALLY before I had the ENB working. I undid the changes on those images and just uploaded them as they were, but here's what the auto-correct gave me: https://www.ocdcoder.org/skyrim/draugr-fashion_front-corrected.jpg I should add that when I do that to daytime outdoor shots, it doesn't change anything. But you can see the dramatic indoor changes, and Faendal's fire just isn't that big. I'm trying to figure out what setting causes that, somewhere in between would be nice. Vivid weathers has a saturation setting, but that affects everything. And IDK if it's related, but the reds and oranges on some of the load screens are WAY oversaturated as well. Oh, crap, I just realized! Someone needs to warn Gopher, those most definitely aren't pants!

Just to add, so I now have this really easy way to change ENBs, tried a few, like the original Re-Engaged one the best. At least at night, admittedly I only gave them a quick glance and it's night time, but it's the only one that seemed to do anything. (I'll give them a second go when the sun is up.) And I totally missed the braziers comment the first time. LOL

Thank you for explaining that. The buttons are confusing, I really keeping wanting to save... SOMETHING. Your way seems to work really well, though. I do keep getting errors about access to files like "configs\Slot Names\slot4nameRECALL.txt" being denied when I'm typing the names (even running in admin mode) but it doesn't seem to be hurting anything. I just keep hitting Continue until I finally get the entire name typed... I'd been just using (and enjoying) Re-Engaged, although it was annoying me until I installed Darker Nights and merged it with the ENB stuff. I was tired of it looking like dusk at midnight. I'm just curious and having a tool that makes it as easy as a button click sounds great! Some of these want to install other things in the Skyrim SE directory and I'm trying to keep this as clean as possible. Bad enough I can't seem to quit getting duplicate screenshots, one from Skyrim itself (I assume, or maybe Steam) and one from the enb. Anyway, no, no Frozen mod, no carrots in my inventory, nowhere near anything Hearthfire related, nowhere near anything really, I think the standing stones were the closest things... They were just... there. I'm going to ask the next bunny I see if its name is "Bugs." LOL

Ok, so I have Skyrim Re-Engaged installed now, manually. I just open up ENB Manager and put that name in the first slot. Then I click remove, and manually install another one, then put that name in the second slot? So what is the config button for? That's what was messing me up, I thought I was supposed to be selecting... something... BTW, so I'm assuming this is NOT an ENB problem? LOL (That was about halfway between Riverwood and Helgen yesterday.) https://www.ocdcoder.org/skyrim/carrots.jpg

I tried using UNP but the version I picked seemed to have face changes incorporated as well and it was messing with my NPCs. Moving to UNPB fixed that. (My husband's comment on seeing my character: "Wow! Boobs!" Sigh.) I will say, though, the vanilla (retextured) hide armor does NOT work with the UNPB body. Or at least not mine, maybe she needs to be... less perky? I think the lesser-covering versions of the fur armor should give her a distraction bonus in fights. Sheesh. The sleeved one looks awesome, though! Mai'q thinks so as well: https://www.ocdcoder.org/skyrim/mai%27q.jpg Selfie time! https://www.ocdcoder.org/skyrim/selfie.jpg Those new Draugr rags you can pick up are definitely... interesting... LOL Actually all the new Dragur armor is. The rest I've tried looks like iron tank tops. (God, I was going through Bleak Falls Barrow last night and all I could think of was, "Look for the ones wearing pants." LOL Thanks, Gopher.)

Never mind, it was the ENB I was trying. Can someone please explain in detail using small words how to use the Skyrim ENB manager? I thought I figured it out, apparently I didn't. And some ENBs tell you to make changes to things like skyrimprefs.ini and such. Then there's ones, like one made specifically for Vivid weathers, that want this: https://reshade.me/ I couldn't figure out what to do with that until I did the manual extraction and just got the two .dll files. It sounds like I put those in the Skyrim SE directory. I'm doing well enough I guess handling these by deleting everything in Skyrim's enbseries directory and finding whatever files it put in the main directory and deleting those too when I want to switch. But if there's some way to use that ENB manager so I can just click to try different ones, I'd like to play with some others. Oh, since I'm here, how do I stop getting two sets of screenshots every time I hit the Print Screen button? The .bmp files begin with enb, I'd rather keep the .png files. I changed KeyScreenshot=44 in enblocal.ini to KeyScreenshot= (a blank) but that didn't work.

So, when it's raining, I can't actually see the rain. All I can see are the water drops hitting the ground and me dripping. Did I screw up a patch or something? Edit: Oh, I can see the lightning, if that makes a difference.

That's exactly the type of thing I was looking for! Thanks!!!

Yeah, I do know her story. It is sad. Maybe the kid from Windhelm. If he's not afraid to drag up a dead body for the Dark Brotherhood... It's not that I really want to put a kid in danger, I'm just shocked it lets you recruit them as followers and I'm REALLY curious what would happen. (I may ask one to go with me to pick flowers when I have another follower that can protect both of us. Like that poor little girl in Whiterun whose parents died and she's up there begging for money. Wow, my character has a lot of names and stories to learn.) But the absolute best thing about AFT is that you can ask (almost, sigh) anyone to be a follower. I can't remember the name of the quest right now where you have to sacrifice someone, but Nazeem is so going to take a long walk with me that day... I've never adopted kids. Never wanted any in RL, never wanted one in game. My husband did (I think it was the Windhelm flower girl), and ran into some kind of (PS3) bug where first she became over-encumbered, and he felt so bad when he couldn't give her presents. Then one day he came home and she was running around Solitude naked. He tried playing for a few more minutes, then said, "I just can't..." and reloaded an old save. LOL Oh, the fun of playing on a PS3...

One day I'm not going to be able to resist the temptation to take one of the kids (like the bully from Whiterun) as a follower. Looking at the settings, it looks like I SHOULD BE able to recruit Hadvar. Dammit. (I think my character has a crush on him.)

I remember last time I played my heavily-modded SLE, I kept complaining it wasn't difficult enough. I was adding things like Deadly Dragons and such. This... isn't that. LOL As for leveling up, I always pick a perk from whatever primary skill leveled me up. For example, all of the potions I made in my job at Arcadia's Cauldron is what got me to Level 2. I didn't realize I started with a perk, so I put both into alchemy. I'm about to get Sven in trouble so I can hang out with Faendal, and if I end up paying for archery, I'm going to make sure I find something to shoot at. Or if we go out and using my bow otherwise levels me up, that perk will go toward archery. (I tried to find that mod that gives you xp for archery targets, but I couldn't find a similar one for SSE.) IDK if by playing similar you mean wanting the difficulty or hard-core RP, but if it's the second, I find Take Notes (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/13570) vital. My last character on SLE wrote every day, reading books, studying with the Greybeards, meditating, she went from totally not understanding why she was Dragonborn to understanding completely. Writing every day at the end of her day, she, like so many characters do when I start writing journals for them, took on a life of her own, making connections and decisions that sometimes surprised me. It was cool! This one is a Breton. She realizes that despite her ordeal, she has to start sucking up to everyone. Her thing right now is getting to know everyone in town, figuring out how to help them while she's still so weak, and taking notes, which is interesting. I've been playing this game since 2011 and didn't even know the names or stories of the people in Riverwood! BTW, you seem to know a lot about mods and the guide (are you involved?), do you know anything about fixing mods? My characters always do so much reading, I hate that time doesn't pass. There is one mod (don't know if it's available for SSE) that has an hour pass every time you read a book, but that's silly if it's a one-page book. This mod is perfect: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/15170. But trying to start it causes an immediate CTD with a message saying to disable it and wait for an update. Someone posted this https://github.com/yeti1026/SkyrimSouls-SE/tree/master/bin on the bugs page saying they fixed it, but I couldn't get it to work. Although the only CTD was when I ended the game, although I could live with that, I console qqq half the time anyway. I know fixing mods isn't really the point here, but I feel it's appropriate enough since we're going for so much realism, especially with that mod I LOVE that gives you XP for reading books! The mod author seems to have given up from what I can tell. So had I until I watched a video of the best SSE mods and the person who created the video was using it. GAH. A lot of people in the forum seem to have somehow gotten it working, maybe something here is conflicting? Maybe I have a lot of reading the forum to do? IDK. Sigh. I WANT THAT MOD!!! (Just for books, at least right now until I get some combat experience with this build.) I love love love Gopher's new series!!! I commented on it the other day when I was sick that it was the only thing capable of making me wake up enough to try to get SOMETHING done besides sleeping on the couch. Anyway, as for RP, I played some recently on my PS3 while my main computer was down and I was waiting for a huge upgrade of replacements. I just couldn't do it. I tried to RP in my head, but without the survival mods, and especially without Take Notes, I ended up doing quests just to do them. I couldn't keep her a 3D character in my head. And god, if you're a horker hunter, you have GOT TO go to the inn in Riverwood and talk to Gorr. Seriously. He may start out talking about how many men he's killed, but keep going. Just trust me. LOL Edit: I may or may not have just spent the entire time since I got my face patch to include hair going through and taking screencaps of every style I like. (Out of 497 of them...) At least I won't have to do it again? I can't remember who told me how to fix Racemenu, but THANK YOU!!!

Stupid editor won't let me edit my post. Just wanted to say yea, it worked! I took out the esms, rebuilt the merge, and the game loaded fine. She was bald when I loaded it, but no one else is and I have 497 styles to choose from now! So yes, noted, no merging esm files.