David Brasher

A Jedi that accepts contracts to rob people from both male and female Thieves Guild quest givers? That sounds more like Sith behavior to me.

You could build a broken savegame patch mod. All you have to do is go into the CK and create a copy of the item you deleted in the same position as that item. You would only use this patch when playing this one particular character and would deactivate or remove it otherwise.

Bethesda has not seen fit to give us a new version of the CK that does Dawnguard scripts yet. Hackers who have been trying to edit or use Dawnguard scripts have had to perform some pretty wild procedures and have had very mixed results. Dialog in custom quests is broken with the latest updates of Skyrim. Nobody seems to be having any luck with it anymore. The consensus seems to be that one of the best ways to get the dialog to work is to save the game after the new mod with dialog is installed and then load up your game and try it again. Maybe now there will be dialog.

Skyrim is so unreliable for making quests that I don't think I will do it anymore. I made lots of quests for Oblivion, so it is not just that I have absolutely no clue what I am doing. It really burns me that the stuff I properly enter into the computer does not always work. A program should always yield the same results from the same input. With Oblivion, you could be quite confident that if you built a quest that worked on your machine, it would work whenever you played it, and it would work the same on everyone else's machines too.

Skyrim is pretty awful to work with as far as clothing and armor on NPCs is concerned. It is not like Morrowind and Oblivion where actors more automatically equip the best clothes they have. In Skyrim you have to work with outfits. The armor NPCs will wear is their outfit, and they pay no attention to what is in their inventory. So you cannot just put the armor into inventory, you will need to create a custom outfit and change the outfit box. To make things worse, I have heard tales that if you are using a vanilla Oblivion style custom follower, the game is sometimes set up to make them always use steel armor as their outfit regardless of what outfit you give them. I am not sure what the workaround people use is. To copy items from one mod to another, you open them both in the CK at the same time, with the mod you are building set to be the active file. You change the name of an object. The computer will ask you if you whether you want to rename the object, or whether you want to create a new one. You respond that you want to create a new one To get the CK working properly with multiple masters, you will need to add this line to the SkyrimEditor.ini under the (General) heading: bAllowMultipleMasterFiles == 1

In this early phase of Skyrim modding, the software options are limited. Here is the page about merging on the wiki: Mod Merging.

It is said that 3-D animation is one of the hardest types of modding there is. If you look at the selection of mods available, you will see that there are not a lot of mods that add new creatures to the game. You have picked a rather ambitious project for your first mod. I have gotten the impression that people do that sort of work mostly in 3-D Max, with some work in Blender, NifSkope, and then the CK at the very end of the project. So it sounds like the CK is not the tool you need right now.

I downloaded ASIS and looked at in the CK. I was quite surprised. It looks like I need to revise what I recommended: It looks like ASIS does not edit any vanilla leveled lists and only adds three leveled lists of its own. It edits most of the NPCs, but this in not a bad conflict because the edits Skyrim Scaling Stopper makes to NPCs are not absolutely essential to its core function if there is a reason to override them. Most of the work ASIS does appears to go on within the patcher instead of the .esp files. So it is my guess that the mods might actually work together okay. This is the load order I am thinking of: SSS ASIS Skyrim Scaling Stopper would remove the level scaling, and then ASIS would increase the number of SSS non-leveled spawns and edit things like their spells, potions, and AI. It would be great if you tested this load order and reported on what happened in your game.

Why is it that everywhere you look in Skyrim, there are massive stone ruins? At some point, the people of Skyrim were exceedingly industrious builders. But now everything is falling apart and nobody troubles themselves to repair the masonry. Windhelm and Whiterun are both crumbling.

Wrye Bash is real good for detecting missing masters too. Look for a box that is red instead of green.

You are going to have great fun with the beards. The best procedure might be to change each male so that he is barefaced before you turn him into a female. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to remove the beard from an NPC once she is a woman.

You might try out the Mod Detectives thread.

Overhaul mods tend to totally conflict with each other, so you can usually only use one at a time. I have not used ASIS, but reading the description, it looks like it edits all sorts of stuff in many categories. The base Skyrim Scaling Stopper file focuses on only editing leveled lists. So its edits are in a pretty tight cluster that does not conflict with things outside of its action area. I would say that SSS would pretty much totally override the ASIS leveled list edits. But if you reversed the load order you posted, then it would be like you didn't even have Skyrim Scaling Stopper because it would get totally overridden. I recommend that you safely back up your savegame, and then try out the load order that you posted. Since Skyrim Scaling Stopper does not change game mechanics type of things, those edits from ASIS would shine through, but you would have Skyrim Scaling Stopper level scaling removal and enemy difficulty distribution.

The way to restore parts of the game that are deleted by mods is to do modcleaning. The Navmesh is part of an .esm or an .esp. It is not an external file. So verifying game cache will do nothing for you in this case, but you can easily fix it by modcleaning with the CK. You just have to find the cell with the deleted navmesh, select the unwanted edit to "ignore" it, reload the mod in the CK, and then save again. Here is an old Oblivion tutorial: Mod Cleaning Tutorial. It looks like the information on modcleaning with the CS/CK is still valid.

You will want to be careful not to delete any vanilla Skyrim references or certain other things. This creates what the Wrye Bash folks refer to as a UDR reference and they can cause CTDs if another mod tries to edit the reference you deleted. If you upload any of your work, you will want to be sure that things are disabled or moved to where nobody can see them rather than deleted.

Skyrim seems to be less stable than Oblivion. In Oblivion, lots of people were way up at the maximum 255 mods and they started merging mods so they could cram more in. But with Skyrim, it seems that few people get more than 100 or 150 mods installed before the serious problems start. I would not be surprised if a soft cap such as you describe is discovered.

I am doubtful that it could be built to work with whatever mods you dropped into it. That would be very hard to do. A more viable approach would be to make a mod that would require a certain long list of required armor mods and that mod would randomly distribute all the content of those mods to NPCs, loot chests, and vendors in the game.

An .esp cannot see any content that is inside another .esp unless you follow special procedures. So there are several options you could use: (1) Build your follower inside your copy of the armor mod, or else merge the two mods. (2) Copy the armor into your follower mod by giving all the aspects of it new FormIDs by renaming them. That armor will then exist in both the original mod and your mod. (Note that you may not distribute mods such as the one in example 1 or example 2 unless the armor is a modders resource or the author gave you permission.) (3) Use Wrye Bash to master your follower mod to the armor mod. This can be tricky, and one false click at a certain time and you have ruined your mod and need to start over. You use the .esmify function to temporarily make the armor mod an .esm while working on your follower mod in the CK. When play-testing, you have to .espify it again so it is not an .esm while you are playing. To make more edits to the mod, you have to .esmify it again. If you ever fail to .esmify and then save, you have ruined the mod and may as well delete it. (The connection to the master is lost and the armor will no longer be in your mod and your follower will be cold and immodest.) Be sure to make lots of backups of various ages so you can revert to one if you discover you have ruined your mod. (It may take you awhile to notice the mod is ruined.)

Could you please be a little bit more vague? Nobody likes reading such long posts that are so full of information about your situation and what your modding project is about.

Dawnguard glitched out the first three times I tried to play it. I could not really get it to work until my fourth attempt. On my third attempt, when I first went to Fort Dawnguard, everyone attacked me even though I was not a vampire. I couldn't even receive the quest because the quest-giver was ceaselessly attacking me. I don't know how exactly the problem got fixed. It just sort of went away on my forth attempt to play the buggy DLC.

If you wore a claymore on your hip, wouldn't its tip always drag in the dirt and look pretty bad with the way it clipped the ground?

I have been doing compatibility work lately and building lots of patches. A gamer complained that when he uses Morrowloot and SkyRe together, he successfully makes it so you can't find any rare weapons anywhere except in the special locations where Morrowloot hand placed them. This is good. But what is bad is that rare weapons can be easily crafted, and what is the point of having the items be so rare and special to find, when it is so much easier to just craft them? A modder could sabotage the recipes one by one by placing an impossible condition on each one, so that the player can't meet the condition and can't craft the item or even see it on the list. But there are many many mods that add weapons. Is there an easy way to universally stop the player from crafting weapons of a certain type? like could I change a setting to make it so that no player can ever craft any item made of glass no matter what what mod it comes from?

Skyrim Monster Mod has harpies and minotaurs. But I like mods that add monsters and would be happy to use your mod alongside Skyrim Monster Mod. The more harpies and minotaurs, the merrier!

The optional Skyrim Scaling Stopper mod: Skyrim Scaling Stopper - Misc Edits makes it so a lot of quest items such as many of the dragon claw keys are not quest items and you can drop them whenever you please. (We are all responsible people here, and if we choose to break a quest by losing a quest item, that is our responsibility and right, and we aren't going to cry and whine and say that someone needs to protect us from ourselves.)

Bethesda royally fouled up Skyrim. They built it for console use, and then as an afterthought converted it to PC. So the menus are designed to be used with a video game controller and not with a mouse, and the computer cannot accurately tell where your cursor is aimed. (Oddly enough, the computer can sense where your mouse cursor is aimed while in game mode.)