You can quick slot weapons, spells, potions, scrolls, etc. Maybe look into that.
Also, the combat in default Skyrim is bad. It's slightly more evolved than what it is in Oblivion, but not by huge leaps and bounds. More like a little smooth because they brought in people who knew what they were doing.
One last also, I do kind of find it annoying that the only means of doing anything in Skyrim is kill. I really felt like in Oblivion and Morrowind that there were more than a handful of quests in each that you could resolve without fighting everything all the goddamn time. Skyrim is just half a step away from being Diablo, which is kind of fun sometimes, but also really shallow to me other times.
Skyrim quests rely too much on dungeons.
Like oblivion a quest would be “go meet the constable, find a criminal out in his house in the city, kill him and return to the constable”
In skyrim its “ go meet the constable, find a criminal in the bottom of a dungeon of bandits, now go back to the constable, who has been captured and is now ALSO IN A DUNGEON OF BANDITS.
Sorry, your constable is in another dungeon full of bandits.
"I will write your name in the ruin of them. I will paint you across history in the color of their blood."
As announced through Reddit of all places, it looks like The Elder Scrolls Legends is basically dead. Shame. It was the only card game I still played regularly.
We would like to provide an update on Legends in regard to new content. Our previous roadmap indicated we would be releasing one more set this year. We decided to put any new content development or releases on hold for the foreseeable future. This decision will not in any way affect the release and development of GAEA’s Asia-specific version of Legends, which is operated separately, but will inform our decisions on content and feature development going forward.
Until then, you can still download and play Legends on all existing platforms and compete online as well as in the single-player modes. We will also continue to support the game with monthly reward cards and regular in-game events. New expansions and other future content, however, are no longer under active development. We will continue to provide ongoing maintenance support.
To thank you all for supporting Legends these past few years, and for continuing to play with us, we are giving away The Tamriel Collection – an assortment of new, three-attribute cards and more – to all players for free upon their next login. We are immensely grateful to work on The Elder Scrolls: Legends, to have you as a community, and we sincerely appreciate the love and support you’ve given us.
god damn it ZeniMax just because it isn't THE MOST PROFITABLE EVAR doesn't mean you just... ughghghglkjfdlj
I genuinely liked this game a LOT more than Hearthstone.
As announced through Reddit of all places, it looks like The Elder Scrolls Legends is basically dead. Shame. It was the only card game I still played regularly.
We would like to provide an update on Legends in regard to new content. Our previous roadmap indicated we would be releasing one more set this year. We decided to put any new content development or releases on hold for the foreseeable future. This decision will not in any way affect the release and development of GAEA’s Asia-specific version of Legends, which is operated separately, but will inform our decisions on content and feature development going forward.
Until then, you can still download and play Legends on all existing platforms and compete online as well as in the single-player modes. We will also continue to support the game with monthly reward cards and regular in-game events. New expansions and other future content, however, are no longer under active development. We will continue to provide ongoing maintenance support.
To thank you all for supporting Legends these past few years, and for continuing to play with us, we are giving away The Tamriel Collection – an assortment of new, three-attribute cards and more – to all players for free upon their next login. We are immensely grateful to work on The Elder Scrolls: Legends, to have you as a community, and we sincerely appreciate the love and support you’ve given us.
god damn it ZeniMax just because it isn't THE MOST PROFITABLE EVAR doesn't mean you just... ughghghglkjfdlj
I genuinely liked this game a LOT more than Hearthstone.
Hold on, there's quick slots for weapons in Blades?
Or was that statement made in confusion if the discussion was about Skyrim?
Because I fully agree that the expected weapon switching in Blades, with no means without menu diving to change them. At least they made it so you can switch them regardless of any actions being taken (or taken against you). Before you had to basically stand there and be wailed on for a gap to open the menu to change equipment.
You can quick slot weapons, spells, potions, scrolls, etc. Maybe look into that.
Also, the combat in default Skyrim is bad.
Oh, yeah, but I was whining and complaining about The Elder Scrolls: Blades - out now on all mobile platforms and coming soon to the Nintendo Switch! Now marginally less tedious and predatory!
Sorry, I must have missed that completely!
0
Options
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
edited February 2020
Alllllright I might need some help. I decided to finally give modding a Right Proper Go and used the wonderful SE guide in the OP, and surprisingly my game launched first try even with like 90 mods. But I get stuck on the intro quest, for exactly the same reason as happens in the video that got me in the mood to try Skyrim again:
I had the floppy cart and when I arrived, the captain was dead. But the game just wouldn't resurrect the captain unlike the video. I tried it raw, I tried doing a kill on them and then resurrecting them, nada. I killed and resurrected one of the nearby guards to make sure that'd work and it did. Anyone have any idea what the heck is going on there?
The intro is horribly glitchy because of how heavily scripted it is.
Primary recommendations:
Turn off Immersive Armors at the outset, if that's one of your mods. It's what causes the cart glitch. It will hopefully resolve the rest of your problems.
Install this alternate start mod - even if you choose to do the vanilla start after doing that, it'll allow all your mods some "pre-load" time before jumping in with all the scripts, and will probably still help. It also lets you bypass the intro altogether if that tickles your fancy. :P
Neither one of those options helps with having to re-make your character, though.
NEO|PhyteThey follow the stars, bound together.Strands in a braid till the end.Registered Userregular
Isn't skyrim one of those games you need vsync on because the physics flip the fuck out if you go over 60fps?
It was that somehow, from within the derelict-horror, they had learned a way to see inside an ugly, broken thing... And take away its pain.
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
Isn't skyrim one of those games you need vsync on because the physics flip the fuck out if you go over 60fps?
The engine limits you to 60fps, if memory serves, unless you explicitly uncap it. If you want to uncap it, you need this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/18160 which apparently hasn't been updated for latest SKSE, but still works.
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
Alright, lesson learned. Skyrim combat is never going to be good so I should leave out combat mods that make things annoyingly difficult for no reason.
Alright, lesson learned. Skyrim combat is never going to be good so I should leave out combat mods that make things annoyingly difficult for no reason.
why are you fighting people anyway
the endgame is cabbage farming, real estate, and seeing how many husbands and/or wives you can collect
Alright, lesson learned. Skyrim combat is never going to be good so I should leave out combat mods that make things annoyingly difficult for no reason.
why are you fighting people anyway
the endgame is cabbage farming, real estate, and seeing how many husbands and/or wives you can collect
I was refraining from saying "why would people even want to make the combat harder, that's not remotely the point of the game"
There are definitely mods to make combat more fun and engaging.
Smilodon is my go-to general upgrade to combat. It improves enemy AI, adds timed blocking (reduced damage with well timed blocks), and higher damage for you and enemies to stop that mid and late game HP bloat.
"Attack Commitment No turning during attacks" does what it says. It makes it possible to sidestep attacks because enemies no longer track your movement while attacking (you also get locked in place, though). This pairs well with TK Dodge, which lets you press a button to do a quick sidestep or roll.
To make combat feel a little meatier, I like TK HitStop. It pauses the game for a fraction of a second when you hit an enemy with a melee attack.
The thing with these mods, though, is they tend to make the game a fair bit easier. To compensate, I use mods like OBIS (makes bandits a lot more varied and difficult), Deadly Dragons (again, more variety), and SkyTEST - Realistic Animals and Predators (animals are smarter and sometimes come in packs).
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
I was playing with commitment and OBIS, yes. Though the combination of OBIS and Combat Evolved may have made things worse because it causes the extra bandits to immediately aggro and circle you.
I’ll second a like for Smilodon - doesn’t make the game significantly harder (if anything the player being a bit more vulnerable is made up for by enemies being less bullet spongy), makes combat feel better.
0
Options
The Escape Goatincorrigible ruminantthey/themRegistered Userregular
Fixes a bug where if you have more than 128 actors in the same place they start floating around weirdly. Also fixes bug where NPC lips stop moving when a lot of them are nearby.
Install all the wildlife and populated cities mods you want, it shouldn't wig out anymore.
In much, much, much less interesting and exciting news, Elder Scrolls: Blades has updated to version 1.6. There are a bunch of small fixes, but the two biggest things are:
- logging in is much, much faster. Which is good, as before I didn't even open the app to get the free daily bonus, because it just wasn't worth the time to open the app.
- it is the year 2020, and so they have finally added loadouts to their game that requires constant weapon-switching. It's pretty good! It's still kinda dumb because instead of each loadout being an icon on the side of the screen, you still have to open the loadouts menu, but 2 taps is still tons better than 8!
Now they just need to patch in some fun, and they might have something.
So I'm effectively "done" with making new patches for the time being, so I thought I'd take a moment to discuss the various tools which are out there, and also pimp what I made. As @Elvenshae can attest, doing Lexy's modlist manually actually forces you to get and use a number of tools (mostly Creation Kit and xEdit, along with Wrye Bash, zEdit, and Mator Smash for what I'll be talking about).
Creation Kit is an astonishingly robust tool for making things for Bethesda's games, and I feel like I've only slightly been scratching the surface in that (despite having 29 patches uploaded right now) I've never actually made a plugin in it - I manipulate things, find what I like, and save in xEdit, because I'm more comfortable with that. As I've learned more and more keyboard shortcuts (and there's a MULTITUDE of youtube tutorials out there), I'm getting faster and faster - it's genuinely impressive. But xEdit ( https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/164 ) is nothing short of absurd in what it's been able to convey about how the guts of the game works. When we play a Bethesda game, we're playing a spreadsheet, and I'm only slightly exaggerating with that. Just going to grab one of the screenshots in there (All the images are kinda shrunk due to the 1MB limit for the forums, but if you open any of them up and delete the last "l" in the name, you'll get full size.):
This is cabbage soup.
Each column is a successive plugin. So the original game Skyrim.esm created cabbage soup. And then Dragonborn.esm edited it. It adds a keyword to it, noting that it's a vendor item (some other sections of the database will use these keywords to, for example, insert the item into vendors' inventories to sell). It gives it an alternate texture (so now you can have cabbage soup LOOK different). Further down there'll be stuff about how much health it restores, or what other effects it has. By changing one cell, you can make cabbage soup poison you. People who add needs mods can have add an additional effect that makes it take care of hunger, or warm you. Like....as far as the game is concerned, the rightmost column of that entry is cabbage soup.
And like...that's Skyrim modding. Mods take these entries, modify them, or add their own. Down in the "Cell" or "Worldspace" records, objects get placed with an x/y/z location. Lights get placed but also have a "color" and a "radius" modifier (there's a default, usually 512 of whatever the units are, and we give a + or - modifier to it), among others. Now, once you get into scripts and stuff there's obviously a whole lot more going on, and the engine itself has a ton more going on, but in terms of "this is what I see in this place, and this is why" and "this is why this guy sells this thing in this store" - like...it's usually as simple as the seller's inventory is located in a box which happens to be floating in space below the store. And you want to know what's put into that box? It's defined with percent chances in a plugin, which this tool can read like a spreadsheet/database.
And that spreadsheet/database tool comes with a bunch of scripts to help clean, apply mass changes, etc - it's super great.
And then on top of it you've got things like Wrye Bash which goes "hey, you've got all these items getting added leveled lists from all these different mods - let's combine them all so you get ALL of them." And then you've got Mator Smash which goes "hey, you've got all these different levelled lists/settings, let's combine THEM." And then you've got zEdit which basically scrubs for specific field types (armors, people, etc) which are added by mods which are different from vanilla, then automatically generates patches for them to get different behaviors. There's so much in there.
Anyway, I learned the basics of all of this by doing the mod list, as mentioned. Then this time around, I'm building my own, and came across Cities of the North - Dawnstar. Now, the non-main cities all are a little lackluster because they don't have their own "look" the way the major ones do. So he comes out with a mod that makes those buildings look like this:
And not just the exteriors, either:
and I immediately perk up. So I install it, walk inside the Windpeak Inn, and....stare into a ton of floating objects, openings into space, the whole thing was broken:
But because of what I'd learned, my reaction wasn't "well, shit, it's broken" it was ".....I think I can fix this."
Patches for Interesting NPCs (two different ones - one fixes an obvious problem, I haven't been able to test the other stuff, but it SHOULD work), Amulets of Skyrim, BadGremlin's collectables, Blowing in the Wind (only needed if using JKs), Cloaks of Skyrim, Distinct Interiors, Elder Outfit Overhaul, ELFX (more on this in a sec), Equippable Tomes, Helgen Reborn, Immersive Citizens AI Overhaul (4 patches - two different ones for JK/not to match landscapes, an "interiors only" one for people who didn't want to deal with it and have other city overhauls, and a tiny thing which intersects with one of the Interesting NPCs patches), Immersive Wenches, Keep it Clean, Lanterns of Skyrim II (whose author was an awesome guy and noted to me what needed to be done to make the MCM work for some newly placed objects), Mystic Condenser, Open Civil War, Skyrim's Unique Treasures, Skyrim Immersive Creatures, and Snazzy Furniture and Clutter Overhaul. There's two more liable to be uploaded once I get greenlight from the original mod owner/get it tested by the person who requested it, respectively.
Aside from ELFX? Honestly not that hard now! But seriously, fuck lighting in Skyrim. From what I've gathered, there can be 4 light sources within the player's view at any given time, ignoring walls which can cast shadows - if there's more than that, you start getting flickering. Additionally, there can only be four light sources emitting on any given surface at a time, otherwise...that's right, more flickering. The White Hall took me WAY too long to try to resolve that from every angle (and it never got 100% done - there's one spot which has some minor issues still, but most people won't go over there and look in that direction, so....whatever).
But anyway, the above taught me so much that I actually took the original mod and greatly cleaned it up (no more references that were missed, fixing a bunch of shadows in the interiors, in particular). It's fairly pride-inducing!
So anyway, I'm done with that now, and am going back and updating my mods from like...the past 3 months and maybe I'll start playing. Except that the process ALSO taught me what to look for, and I just KNOW in my gut I'll need to make a couple more for PCE and Immersive Citizens. And then on top of that, the guy who made the Dawnstar mod is done with exteriors in Morthal, so I might be starting the whole damn thing over again :V Because once more, these look SO much better than Vanilla:
Anyway, all I'm trying to get into is that understanding how mods work is actually not that difficult, so you should go out there and try to find things that you like, and not despair if they don't work at first blush: you might be able to fix them!
Also, DynDOLOD is a magic tool and everyone should learn to use it because it makes things look so much better that it's a bit insane, and also everyone should download some of my patches and endorse just because :V
Fixes a bug where if you have more than 128 actors in the same place they start floating around weirdly. Also fixes bug where NPC lips stop moving when a lot of them are nearby.
Install all the wildlife and populated cities mods you want, it shouldn't wig out anymore.
This is probably very obvious, but I'd think that my machine would slow down to a crawl at 64 or 32 NPCs on screen at once due to 4K textures mods and high-poly clothes and body meshes with hair, body and clothing physics. Ah well.
So, I realized how much I miss Parallaxing from LE. Presently, the only landscape overhaul that has it built in is Skyrim 2020 which, while having some very nice ground textures, has very unpleasant walls I'd argue (I've been using Skyland myself). You could, in fact, take the alphas from the mod and turn them into the according Parallax data, but that's a lot of work when you could just hold onto hope that the mod creator gets around to it at some point.
Also, saddened by painfully high frequency of CTD on changing cells (usually into cities like Whiterun). I suspect the only way I'll ever make a cut into that is to uninstall JK's Skyrim, though I would certainly miss it.
Yo, that is an A+++ post. Also, you are doing saintly work with the patches. Congrats on accomplishing all this!
What's funny is that the small ones (moving objects) are like super easy now! The last one which anyone asked for was the equippable books one. I timed myself - 3 minutes to make the patch, 2 minutes to test it, 4 minutes to make a slight adjustment and re-test. So less than 10 minutes total, and that includes boot times for each program.
So, I realized how much I miss Parallaxing from LE. Presently, the only landscape overhaul that has it built in is Skyrim 2020 which, while having some very nice ground textures, has very unpleasant walls I'd argue (I've been using Skyland myself). You could, in fact, take the alphas from the mod and turn them into the according Parallax data, but that's a lot of work when you could just hold onto hope that the mod creator gets around to it at some point.
give it a few months, that's how long it seems to take to get people to update their stuff.
Also, saddened by painfully high frequency of CTD on changing cells (usually into cities like Whiterun). I suspect the only way I'll ever make a cut into that is to uninstall JK's Skyrim, though I would certainly miss it.
It's not consistently in the same place, is it? If so, it might be a broken mesh
It's not consistently in the same place, is it? If so, it might be a broken mesh
It seems to happen a lot while entering Whiterun through the main entrance. A lot. Not only there (though I can't exclude something else causing a CTD, and I was getting a few even without mods installed months ago). But it's hard to ignore the pattern after running in and out of interior cells in modded Rorikstead, and running in and out of Solitude (this time) wasn't causing CTDs.
The fact that using the console to teleport into Whiterun doesn't cause the same issue leaves me even more suspicious.
Random stab would be to look into whether there's something which is in the guard's levelled lists (or maybe other NPCs if it's only certain times of day) which could randomly spawn near the main entrance with a broken mesh. But that's a COMPLETE shot in the dark.
Random stab would be to look into whether there's something which is in the guard's levelled lists (or maybe other NOCs if it's only certain times of day) which could randomly spawn near the main entrance with a broken mesh. But that's a COMPLETE shot in the dark.
It's a good idea, but I wouldn't really know what to be looking for. I'm pretty new to leveled lists (despite having being modded Skyrim since 2011, I only recently learned about bashing leveling lists), and I wouldn't recognize a broken mesh.
But I should check the thread on JK's Skyrim and see if anyone's having the same issues.
And Legendary Edition just got a leg up on Special Edition again.
So right now, every NPC has the same animations - there's a variety of them, and for like idles they can choose from a selection, but everyone has the same animations. The only exception to this is that the PC can have unique animations, if you generate them, via FNIS.
With this mod (which doesn't use a plugin and doesn't require any regeneration with FNIS/Nemesis), animations can be applied to specific NPCs or animals. This has a ton of potential.
In other news, for SSE people, the latest steam update appears to have broken the "force download of older versions" functionality, so if there's another update and you want to roll back, you won't be able to. Turn off auto-updates!
And I'm currently dealing with the above - mostly finished updating, but I apparently missed something which uses SKSE, because I'm immediately crashing on boot. Bleh. >_>
In other news, for SSE people, the latest steam update appears to have broken the "force download of older versions" functionality, so if there's another update and you want to roll back, you won't be able to. Turn off auto-updates!
And I'm currently dealing with the above - mostly finished updating, but I apparently missed something which uses SKSE, because I'm immediately crashing on boot. Bleh. >_>
Yikes. Time to backup SkyrimSE.exe again by the sounds of it.
On the subject of JK's Skyrim, I realized I was missing the compatibility patch with The Cutting Room Floor. It probably wasn't Whiterun issues, but still, a good idea.
Seeing how I've been using Great Cities as well as JK, I probably didn't give a full account of JK's Skyrim also modding (to a lesser extent) Dragonbridge and some other outdoor areas (beyond the outdated compatibility patch). I think Great Cities' modifications are much more extensive and necessary, so in choosing between them, I'd go with that...but maybe it'd be worthwhile breaking up JK's Skyrim into just the city interiors (Whiterun, Solitude, Windhelm, Riften). It could also help with potential troubleshooting.
That being said, I wonder if it would be possible to use the separate JK Skyrim files for those four cities, and merge them in Xedit, rather than adding three more ESP entries, on top of all the other ones JK Skyrim compatibility requires.
Seeing how I've been using Great Cities as well as JK, I probably didn't give a full account of JK's Skyrim also modding (to a lesser extent) Dragonbridge and some other outdoor areas (beyond the outdated compatibility patch). I think Great Cities' modifications are much more extensive and necessary, so in choosing between them, I'd go with that...but maybe it'd be worthwhile breaking up JK's Skyrim into just the city interiors (Whiterun, Solitude, Windhelm, Riften). It could also help with potential troubleshooting.
That being said, I wonder if it would be possible to use the separate JK Skyrim files for those four cities, and merge them in Xedit, rather than adding three more ESP entries, on top of all the other ones JK Skyrim compatibility requires.
I mean, this is a shotgun approach instead of a scalpel, but if you want to remove JK's changes in the interiors and want a single plugin, just back-up a copy of JK's or keep an install around so you can revert, open up the plugin, and go down to Worldspace.
There'll be a few sub-categories inside: Tamriel, SolitudeWorldspace, WhiterunWorldspace, etc. Just remove everything but Tamriel - that'll remove all object placements in city interiors. Now, the mod will still have models for buildings, references for the new NPCs, etc - but it won't actually PLACE anything, so none of them should appear.
It's slightly more work to get the stuff outside the city walls, if you want that too, but hell - for a first pass, it's better than nothing.
e: FWIW, if it makes you feel better, I actually did this with JK's and Winterhold. That combination is common enough that the guy managing JK's actually made a quick guide in imgur of what to delete:
So in your case, you'd keep everything under "Tamriel" and delete all the other worldspaces inside of JK's.
E: wait, I think I read that backwards. So if you want JUST interiors, you'd remove the stuff in Tamriel, instead.
Yes, that second part, haha--I was perplexed by your shotgun analogy. This is more like taking a really sharp scalpel. I haven't actually looked at JK's Skyrim in SSEedit yet (just intimidated, I suppose), but I guess I could manually do the cropping myself to clear out everything in the overworld space and leave the city interiors.
I have never played Skyrim before. I enjoy mods, and cabbage collecting sounds like a treat to me. Which version of the game would you recommend I pick up (PC) when I get around to clearing out a few more games from my backlog? Does the Special Edition also include the Legendary edition? Is there a Super Special Legendary edition for this almost 10 year old game?
Posts
sometimes the dungeon is full of draugr.
Sorry, your constable is in another dungeon full of bandits.
The Monster Baru Cormorant - Seth Dickinson
Steam: Korvalain
god damn it ZeniMax
I genuinely liked this game a LOT more than Hearthstone.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
well that's a low bar tbf
Or was that statement made in confusion if the discussion was about Skyrim?
Because I fully agree that the expected weapon switching in Blades, with no means without menu diving to change them. At least they made it so you can switch them regardless of any actions being taken (or taken against you). Before you had to basically stand there and be wailed on for a gap to open the menu to change equipment.
If there's a quick swap I'd sure like to know!
And if there's not, I'd sure like to know why!
Origin: Galedrid - Nintendo: Galedrid/3222-6858-1045
Blizzard: Galedrid#1367 - FFXIV: Galedrid Kingshand
Sorry, I must have missed that completely!
I had the floppy cart and when I arrived, the captain was dead. But the game just wouldn't resurrect the captain unlike the video. I tried it raw, I tried doing a kill on them and then resurrecting them, nada. I killed and resurrected one of the nearby guards to make sure that'd work and it did. Anyone have any idea what the heck is going on there?
Primary recommendations:
Neither one of those options helps with having to re-make your character, though.
In other recent news, since it's been a bit:
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/31915 - Sekiro combat mod
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/31963 - Parallax shaders released for SSE (this isn't ENB Parallax)
HDT-SMP has continued to grow, including a physics based wind: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/31936
Legacy of the dragonborn v5 dropped: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/11802
Giant lantern mashup, probably the best one of these: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/30817
EnaiSiaon of Ordinator, etc, fame has done a werewolf mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/31245
And finally, I'm up to 25 fucking patches for that Dawnstar overhaul and can't stop myself so I've got at least three more on the docket, maybe 6 before I'm done
Warframe/Steam: NFyt
The engine limits you to 60fps, if memory serves, unless you explicitly uncap it. If you want to uncap it, you need this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/18160 which apparently hasn't been updated for latest SKSE, but still works.
why are you fighting people anyway
the endgame is cabbage farming, real estate, and seeing how many husbands and/or wives you can collect
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
I was refraining from saying "why would people even want to make the combat harder, that's not remotely the point of the game"
but I see I am among comrades here
And then I forget all that and drag like 7 followers with me everywhere because I like the conversation, so it's all easy anyway :V
Smilodon is my go-to general upgrade to combat. It improves enemy AI, adds timed blocking (reduced damage with well timed blocks), and higher damage for you and enemies to stop that mid and late game HP bloat.
"Attack Commitment No turning during attacks" does what it says. It makes it possible to sidestep attacks because enemies no longer track your movement while attacking (you also get locked in place, though). This pairs well with TK Dodge, which lets you press a button to do a quick sidestep or roll.
To make combat feel a little meatier, I like TK HitStop. It pauses the game for a fraction of a second when you hit an enemy with a melee attack.
The thing with these mods, though, is they tend to make the game a fair bit easier. To compensate, I use mods like OBIS (makes bandits a lot more varied and difficult), Deadly Dragons (again, more variety), and SkyTEST - Realistic Animals and Predators (animals are smarter and sometimes come in packs).
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/32349
Install all the wildlife and populated cities mods you want, it shouldn't wig out anymore.
I can hear it now: "Do you ge-- Do y-- Do you-- D-- Do y-- Do you g--..."
With enough vocal power to actually yell a dragon out of the sky.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/32599
ENB which uses weather tags to allow for landscape bleaching to simulate real-time snow cover, which....looks pretty good?
It doesn't allow for collecting in piles, obviously, but here's a before/after someone posted of a snowstorm in the college:
- logging in is much, much faster. Which is good, as before I didn't even open the app to get the free daily bonus, because it just wasn't worth the time to open the app.
- it is the year 2020, and so they have finally added loadouts to their game that requires constant weapon-switching. It's pretty good! It's still kinda dumb because instead of each loadout being an icon on the side of the screen, you still have to open the loadouts menu, but 2 taps is still tons better than 8!
Now they just need to patch in some fun, and they might have something.
Creation Kit is an astonishingly robust tool for making things for Bethesda's games, and I feel like I've only slightly been scratching the surface in that (despite having 29 patches uploaded right now) I've never actually made a plugin in it - I manipulate things, find what I like, and save in xEdit, because I'm more comfortable with that. As I've learned more and more keyboard shortcuts (and there's a MULTITUDE of youtube tutorials out there), I'm getting faster and faster - it's genuinely impressive. But xEdit ( https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/164 ) is nothing short of absurd in what it's been able to convey about how the guts of the game works. When we play a Bethesda game, we're playing a spreadsheet, and I'm only slightly exaggerating with that. Just going to grab one of the screenshots in there (All the images are kinda shrunk due to the 1MB limit for the forums, but if you open any of them up and delete the last "l" in the name, you'll get full size.):
This is cabbage soup.
Each column is a successive plugin. So the original game Skyrim.esm created cabbage soup. And then Dragonborn.esm edited it. It adds a keyword to it, noting that it's a vendor item (some other sections of the database will use these keywords to, for example, insert the item into vendors' inventories to sell). It gives it an alternate texture (so now you can have cabbage soup LOOK different). Further down there'll be stuff about how much health it restores, or what other effects it has. By changing one cell, you can make cabbage soup poison you. People who add needs mods can have add an additional effect that makes it take care of hunger, or warm you. Like....as far as the game is concerned, the rightmost column of that entry is cabbage soup.
And like...that's Skyrim modding. Mods take these entries, modify them, or add their own. Down in the "Cell" or "Worldspace" records, objects get placed with an x/y/z location. Lights get placed but also have a "color" and a "radius" modifier (there's a default, usually 512 of whatever the units are, and we give a + or - modifier to it), among others. Now, once you get into scripts and stuff there's obviously a whole lot more going on, and the engine itself has a ton more going on, but in terms of "this is what I see in this place, and this is why" and "this is why this guy sells this thing in this store" - like...it's usually as simple as the seller's inventory is located in a box which happens to be floating in space below the store. And you want to know what's put into that box? It's defined with percent chances in a plugin, which this tool can read like a spreadsheet/database.
And that spreadsheet/database tool comes with a bunch of scripts to help clean, apply mass changes, etc - it's super great.
And then on top of it you've got things like Wrye Bash which goes "hey, you've got all these items getting added leveled lists from all these different mods - let's combine them all so you get ALL of them." And then you've got Mator Smash which goes "hey, you've got all these different levelled lists/settings, let's combine THEM." And then you've got zEdit which basically scrubs for specific field types (armors, people, etc) which are added by mods which are different from vanilla, then automatically generates patches for them to get different behaviors. There's so much in there.
Anyway, I learned the basics of all of this by doing the mod list, as mentioned. Then this time around, I'm building my own, and came across Cities of the North - Dawnstar. Now, the non-main cities all are a little lackluster because they don't have their own "look" the way the major ones do. So he comes out with a mod that makes those buildings look like this:
And not just the exteriors, either:
and I immediately perk up. So I install it, walk inside the Windpeak Inn, and....stare into a ton of floating objects, openings into space, the whole thing was broken:
But because of what I'd learned, my reaction wasn't "well, shit, it's broken" it was ".....I think I can fix this."
And so I did.
I've linked it a few times, but here's the mod collection
Patches for Interesting NPCs (two different ones - one fixes an obvious problem, I haven't been able to test the other stuff, but it SHOULD work), Amulets of Skyrim, BadGremlin's collectables, Blowing in the Wind (only needed if using JKs), Cloaks of Skyrim, Distinct Interiors, Elder Outfit Overhaul, ELFX (more on this in a sec), Equippable Tomes, Helgen Reborn, Immersive Citizens AI Overhaul (4 patches - two different ones for JK/not to match landscapes, an "interiors only" one for people who didn't want to deal with it and have other city overhauls, and a tiny thing which intersects with one of the Interesting NPCs patches), Immersive Wenches, Keep it Clean, Lanterns of Skyrim II (whose author was an awesome guy and noted to me what needed to be done to make the MCM work for some newly placed objects), Mystic Condenser, Open Civil War, Skyrim's Unique Treasures, Skyrim Immersive Creatures, and Snazzy Furniture and Clutter Overhaul. There's two more liable to be uploaded once I get greenlight from the original mod owner/get it tested by the person who requested it, respectively.
Aside from ELFX? Honestly not that hard now! But seriously, fuck lighting in Skyrim. From what I've gathered, there can be 4 light sources within the player's view at any given time, ignoring walls which can cast shadows - if there's more than that, you start getting flickering. Additionally, there can only be four light sources emitting on any given surface at a time, otherwise...that's right, more flickering. The White Hall took me WAY too long to try to resolve that from every angle (and it never got 100% done - there's one spot which has some minor issues still, but most people won't go over there and look in that direction, so....whatever).
But anyway, the above taught me so much that I actually took the original mod and greatly cleaned it up (no more references that were missed, fixing a bunch of shadows in the interiors, in particular). It's fairly pride-inducing!
So anyway, I'm done with that now, and am going back and updating my mods from like...the past 3 months and maybe I'll start playing. Except that the process ALSO taught me what to look for, and I just KNOW in my gut I'll need to make a couple more for PCE and Immersive Citizens. And then on top of that, the guy who made the Dawnstar mod is done with exteriors in Morthal, so I might be starting the whole damn thing over again :V Because once more, these look SO much better than Vanilla:
Anyway, all I'm trying to get into is that understanding how mods work is actually not that difficult, so you should go out there and try to find things that you like, and not despair if they don't work at first blush: you might be able to fix them!
Also, DynDOLOD is a magic tool and everyone should learn to use it because it makes things look so much better that it's a bit insane, and also everyone should download some of my patches and endorse just because :V
This is probably very obvious, but I'd think that my machine would slow down to a crawl at 64 or 32 NPCs on screen at once due to 4K textures mods and high-poly clothes and body meshes with hair, body and clothing physics. Ah well.
So, I realized how much I miss Parallaxing from LE. Presently, the only landscape overhaul that has it built in is Skyrim 2020 which, while having some very nice ground textures, has very unpleasant walls I'd argue (I've been using Skyland myself). You could, in fact, take the alphas from the mod and turn them into the according Parallax data, but that's a lot of work when you could just hold onto hope that the mod creator gets around to it at some point.
Also, saddened by painfully high frequency of CTD on changing cells (usually into cities like Whiterun). I suspect the only way I'll ever make a cut into that is to uninstall JK's Skyrim, though I would certainly miss it.
https://podcast.tidalwavegames.com/
What's funny is that the small ones (moving objects) are like super easy now! The last one which anyone asked for was the equippable books one. I timed myself - 3 minutes to make the patch, 2 minutes to test it, 4 minutes to make a slight adjustment and re-test. So less than 10 minutes total, and that includes boot times for each program.
give it a few months, that's how long it seems to take to get people to update their stuff.
It's not consistently in the same place, is it? If so, it might be a broken mesh
It seems to happen a lot while entering Whiterun through the main entrance. A lot. Not only there (though I can't exclude something else causing a CTD, and I was getting a few even without mods installed months ago). But it's hard to ignore the pattern after running in and out of interior cells in modded Rorikstead, and running in and out of Solitude (this time) wasn't causing CTDs.
The fact that using the console to teleport into Whiterun doesn't cause the same issue leaves me even more suspicious.
It's a good idea, but I wouldn't really know what to be looking for. I'm pretty new to leveled lists (despite having being modded Skyrim since 2011, I only recently learned about bashing leveling lists), and I wouldn't recognize a broken mesh.
But I should check the thread on JK's Skyrim and see if anyone's having the same issues.
So right now, every NPC has the same animations - there's a variety of them, and for like idles they can choose from a selection, but everyone has the same animations. The only exception to this is that the PC can have unique animations, if you generate them, via FNIS.
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/101371
With this mod (which doesn't use a plugin and doesn't require any regeneration with FNIS/Nemesis), animations can be applied to specific NPCs or animals. This has a ton of potential.
In other news, for SSE people, the latest steam update appears to have broken the "force download of older versions" functionality, so if there's another update and you want to roll back, you won't be able to. Turn off auto-updates!
And I'm currently dealing with the above - mostly finished updating, but I apparently missed something which uses SKSE, because I'm immediately crashing on boot. Bleh. >_>
Yikes. Time to backup SkyrimSE.exe again by the sounds of it.
On the subject of JK's Skyrim, I realized I was missing the compatibility patch with The Cutting Room Floor. It probably wasn't Whiterun issues, but still, a good idea.
Seeing how I've been using Great Cities as well as JK, I probably didn't give a full account of JK's Skyrim also modding (to a lesser extent) Dragonbridge and some other outdoor areas (beyond the outdated compatibility patch). I think Great Cities' modifications are much more extensive and necessary, so in choosing between them, I'd go with that...but maybe it'd be worthwhile breaking up JK's Skyrim into just the city interiors (Whiterun, Solitude, Windhelm, Riften). It could also help with potential troubleshooting.
That being said, I wonder if it would be possible to use the separate JK Skyrim files for those four cities, and merge them in Xedit, rather than adding three more ESP entries, on top of all the other ones JK Skyrim compatibility requires.
I mean, this is a shotgun approach instead of a scalpel, but if you want to remove JK's changes in the interiors and want a single plugin, just back-up a copy of JK's or keep an install around so you can revert, open up the plugin, and go down to Worldspace.
There'll be a few sub-categories inside: Tamriel, SolitudeWorldspace, WhiterunWorldspace, etc. Just remove everything but Tamriel - that'll remove all object placements in city interiors. Now, the mod will still have models for buildings, references for the new NPCs, etc - but it won't actually PLACE anything, so none of them should appear.
It's slightly more work to get the stuff outside the city walls, if you want that too, but hell - for a first pass, it's better than nothing.
e: FWIW, if it makes you feel better, I actually did this with JK's and Winterhold. That combination is common enough that the guy managing JK's actually made a quick guide in imgur of what to delete:
So in your case, you'd keep everything under "Tamriel" and delete all the other worldspaces inside of JK's.
E: wait, I think I read that backwards. So if you want JUST interiors, you'd remove the stuff in Tamriel, instead.