Need help. I messed up. :(

[joshpl]

This is pre-DynDOLOD setup. I know it's my fault. I messed up somewhere, but I only found out that something was wrong at the initial performance test at nearly the end of the guide. I have no idea what is causing this. It looks a little different here because I went through the post-processing section hoping it was something that just had an ENB dependency, but as you can see it persisted. I'm desperate because the thought of redoing the guide is enough to make me just give up entirely, and I so want to play the always-wonderful STEP Skyrim. I've followed the guide a handful of times before to entirely successful installations, so this is quite frustrating for me. I am hoping an expert will have a good idea of what to look at or even know the exact cause. One bit of info is this does not happen in any measurable way that I can see when spawning at Breezehome and checking out Whiterun and the surrounding areas. Just when I go to the Rift. I haven't checked more locations beyond these two from the performance benchmark. Please help me, I'm begging you!

https://imgur.com/a/qOh1NTh

[z929669]

  On 4/13/2025 at 9:20 PM, joshpl said:

This is pre-DynDOLOD setup. I know it's my fault. I messed up somewhere, but I only found out that something was wrong at the initial performance test at nearly the end of the guide. I have no idea what is causing this. It looks a little different here because I went through the post-processing section hoping it was something that just had an ENB dependency, but as you can see it persisted. I'm desperate because the thought of redoing the guide is enough to make me just give up entirely, and I so want to play the always-wonderful STEP Skyrim. I've followed the guide a handful of times before to entirely successful installations, so this is quite frustrating for me. I am hoping an expert will have a good idea of what to look at or even know the exact cause. One bit of info is this does not happen in any measurable way that I can see when spawning at Breezehome and checking out Whiterun and the surrounding areas. Just when I go to the Rift. I haven't checked more locations beyond these two from the performance benchmark. Please help me, I'm begging you!

https://imgur.com/a/qOh1NTh

Expand  

I see several issues, but I am not certain exactly which ones you are calling out in each screenshot.

Have you generated terrain LOD? Either way, you need to disable the mod, (TEMP) - Cathedral Landscapes - xLODGen, at all times except when generating terrain LOD with xLODGen. This mod places textures on the landscape that do not look correct in the game. They are only used to bias terrain LOD generation.

Another issue is with the aspen leaves at mid distance from the PC. Enable anisotropic filtering (AF) 4x or 8x in your display driver software for SSE to fix this. It's caused by a mipmap bug with aspen leaves compex grass. AF fixes that.

The game isn't technically ready to play until you finish the guide though.

There's no need to ever "start over", because you'd just be doing extra work for nothing.

[joshpl]

I could give you a big hug and kiss! I have never left that enabled in previous installations, but I missed it this time. Turning off the TEMP LODGEN mod fixed those awful ground texture issues. Thank you also for the tip for AF in the display driver, I'm not sure I've ever done that in previous STEP installs, and it cleared that weird colored grass issue right up.

"The game isn't technically ready to play until you finish the guide though." I knew that might be the case, but I felt I should stop where I was because in previous installs the performance test never showed any kinds of visual issues minus the lack of LOD, so I was concerned something had gone terribly wrong.

One more thing, I really appreciate you.
You saved me more stress than this probably should have caused, but the STEP guide is a hefty one, so I dreaded having to possibly start over because I broke it. But I know now that this forum should always be my first stop because you were incredibly understanding and helpful. 

Edited April 13 by joshpl