Odd NPC behaviours

[PlanetExp]

I suppose this is my 'hello' thread. I might get some abbreviations wrong and it will be long, so I apologise in advance.

 

I am pretty new to Skyrim (only about a hundred hours in!) and never finished any main quest lines. At first I promised myself not to mod because I recall modding destroyed oblivion for me - I ended up just fiddling with mods, got bored when it bugged out, uninstalled and never looked back.

 

But after a while the interior lighting of Skyrim started to bug the hell out of me: why is it so bright? Why are the windows so ugly and why in the world don't the NPCs or tables have shadows?! One look at nexus and I was lost in the mod swamp. 25 hours later I had read up on stability, compared hundreds of mods and got a stable great looking game (based on footsteps, HRDLC, wet and cold, get snowy, head tracking, books of Skyrim, pure water, and a few added weapons and armours for the diablo nerve I've nurtured, AOS).

 

I tried Vurts FO, RCRN, ENBs and COT and while it was looking great it was not at all close to the rugged cold Skyrim the vanilla had (it's my first playthrough so I want it near vanilla).

 

Then I stumbled over STEP and I realised it was exactly what I was trying to do with my own game: take out the dumb bugs from vanilla and make it look great but still PLAY and FEEL exactly like vanilla.

 

But reading through the STEP guides for the last three days made me realise it is far from a pleasant experience getting Skyrim behave under the weight of all mods. Top that with a 1GB VRAM card and I have to redo all textures (although I never experienced stuttering with the HRDLC I realised all loading screens are twice as slow and loading cells cause a millisecond freeze once in a while).

 

Now on to my topic :)

 

After installing said mods above I notice strange behaviour of animals, critters and NPCs alike. It could be my attention being more aware but sometimes NPCs do animations like lifting barrels, working with tools and chopping wood without any tools in their hands. Critters seem to leap around and jump into rivers and swim around or glitch out getting stuck on rocks and the like. Guards on patrol don't keep to the roads at times and I find them walking in the middle of nowhere.

 

I didn't see this with vanilla but of course I only played vanilla for about 50 hours or so.. But do you guys notice this behaviour? Is it due to some scripts of my mods or is it common that NPCs bug out in Skyrim? Does it also appear in a STEP:Core install?

 

 

I'm asking cause after the holidays I'm going to attempt the full STEP install and get my game running smooth as silk and play the game through. Or if I should just give up and play vanilla right away :)

 

Best regards

Fred

 

 

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[Smile44]

Normally I would recommend playing vanilla first then modding, but if what you are looking for is a vanilla game but fixed then STEP CORE is what you should go for. Step Extended is a lot more mods but still doesn't go very far away from vanilla, certainly in terms of gameplay but it does look great, though not as great as when you have some lighting mods and ENB installed which between them fix the shadows and the weird lighting. For instructions on how to install these you will need to look at one of the packs linked on this site, e.g. Weather and Lighting - LINK.

 

I would recommend using MO, BOSS, BUM, TES5Edit and WB. In order to get up to speed using these I would follow the Skyrim Revisited guide (LINK)which is also in packs. If you follow that at least up as far as The Dovahkin Comes section then you will have all the correct mods installed as well as the best mod manager and have skyrim properly set up for modding. Following that guide further will provide a very non vanilla experience but also a crash course in modding. So at that point you should turn to the STEP guide and either go with Core or Core plus Extended.

 

If you then choose to improve the lighting etc then the guide linked above is well tested and works very well, but with your card you would possibly have an unacceptable frame rate loss but if you installed Skylight ENB (LINK) instead then it is quite easy on graphics cards gives a Skyrim that cold look that you like as well as better colouring e.g. blue sky there are good instructions for using that mod and improving lighting on the main page so it would be a good alternative.

 

Anyway, welcome to the site and have fun.

 

:)

[PlanetExp]

Thanks for the excellent reply! You've helped me tons with the links. The perfect combo for me would be two profiles in MO: I uninstalled all mods and reverted to a clean save so I'll play the game through first without any mods or texture packs whatsoever, in a clean profile. Then I'll create an alternative STEP profile I can play around with without saving the game, switching back whenever I like to progress in the game. Would that be advisable? Is there any way the "STEP" profile can corrupt my clean saves (adding stuff to old saves so to speak)?

 

Also does playing around with ENBs affect the saves in some way? Or am I free to play around with it?

 

Thanks again!

Fred

[Fereval]

Also does playing around with ENBs affect the saves in some way?

 

Not in any way :).

Just delete the dlls added to your main Skyrim directory if you want get rid of the ENB effects.