Darklocq

Follow-up question: some meshes with multiple nodes have them way off in space, and maybe sideways (much like Facegen NIFs usually have the hair nowhere near the head, and often the eyes floating in space). They still render okay as worn gear. When merged following the above instructions, you can get one part of the imported NIF aligned where the original ground mesh was, but the other "out of place" part(s) won't be, and they may be extremely resistant to being moved around (often have their axes wrong, so that Z move sideways, etc). I had slightly more luck in Outfit Studio moving their positions, but in the end it just wasn't practical. Is there a way to just sort of "re-set" it? In my case, I was doing a ground mesh for a helm that's actually an overlap of two pre-existing helms (to get to top and side horns from both). The one with the top horns worked fine, but the node with the side horns wasn't where it belonged, or at the right angle, and trying to rotate it swung it in a huge arc instead of rotating in place. Ideally, I could just turn the messed up one back into a regular helm at right angle, and move it like the first half, without trouble.

The CK tutorials don't seem to cover this. I want to create a Topic that's only available under particular circumstances. In the tutorials, you create a topic, and the responses available can be given conditions, but the NPC has the topic available forever and ever. There seems to be no option to make it conditional. My guess is that there's a scripting mechanism for injecting and removing topics from NPCs (maybe an SKSE-only option). I see various mods give people topics (e.g. followers get new topics when they enter follow mode, and things like prostitution and slavery mods add topics based on the "relationship" between the NPC and the player, often after some spell effect has been triggered. When I look at the scripting of this stuff, it's a huge pile of complicated mess that gives me a headache. Looking for a very simple version. All I want to do is this: * You find NPC prisoner in bandit dungeon, and initiate dialogue. Topic available, something like "Where's all your stuff?" * "These bandits stole it all from me. I need help getting it back. It's very important!" or the like. Starts quest whether you agree to go help look right now or not. * If you agree, you go find the goods and the quest ends. * If you agree, but leave the dungeon without the goods, NPC will bug you periodically (if in follower mode) to go recover the goods (quest is still open). * If you didn't agree in the first place, ditto. Basically, quest remains active until the gear's recovered. After quest ends, no dialogue about this ever recurs or remains available. The topic about it should just go away. No "Oh, thank you for helping me get my gear back three months ago" crap. Need to keep follower menu clean. I could live with the topic appearing in wait/dismissed mode, I suppose. Also looking to change this character's appearance based on whether rescued from the cell she was found in, or left there still (dirt/wounds equipped as nonplayable items, removed after escape). I'm not sure of the best way to do that. I can see several, that range from OnUnload to OnCellLoad to quest status to a timer and a cell check, but Papyrus scripting seems fraught with stability danger compared to the TESscript stuff I'm used to in Oblivion and Morrowind, so any assumption I make about the best way to do this is probably wrong.

Anyone know of a good source of bruises and other wounds? At minimum, I'm looking to add an alternative right-cheek cut and bruise (black eye would be perfect, too). Maybe also UNP body bruises and minor cuts would help. This is for a mistreated prisoner, and I would work this into an unplayable item that's worn as clothing, then removed by script after they're freed and have time to heal. I did find a CBBE body wounds mod and it might work close enough for UNP. The vanilla wounded dead women in Winterhold and Solstheim might also work for the body part. I really need a face one that isn't the vanilla scars used for char-gen purposes (nor a makeup tintmask; needs to be something with regular alpha that I can layer).

Since you asked, it's called a moiré pattern, and is definitely a curse in gaming graphics. :-)

Here’s what I’ve figured out so far trawling old forum posts and a wiki page (https://beyondskyrim.org/texturesets/), and it’s not making much sense when compared with actual practice: [Apologies for the pseudo-table, but this forum has only half-assed BBCode support, and there doesn't seem to be a way to make it render a real table with text and markup.] There are serious issues with this alleged information (which I've updated with the Outfit Studio names, too): First off, no one but that wiki page appears to call *_s.dds files "subsurface" anything, ever. They’re almost universally called specular (the CK’s "backlight" label notwithstanding). The wiki does say that this is *_s.dds files, and a comparison of the same items in NIFskope and CK or T5E (or Outfit Studio) shows the same path in NS’s 7 and CK/T5E’s TX07 and OS's 7 Specular, so that part seems correct. I think the labeling and description of this as "subsurface tint" is simply wrong. Especially since there’s no semantic difference between "subsurface tint" and "subsurface color" (which is TS’s 3, CK/T5E’s TX03, OS's 3 Glow/Skin – the *_sk.dds files). Everyone but TexBlend calls *_sk.dds files "subsurface" (or something else, never specular), and *_s.dds files "specular" (never "subsurface"). But it gets worse. The CK and T5E apply "subsurface tint" to TX02, which corresponds with NS’s 6. So, we have three conflicting things claimed to be subsurface tint/color. Next, I keep finding outfits that have the same *_m.dds texture used in the NIF for both NIFskope’s textures 6 and 8 (CK/T5E’s TX02 and TX06, respectively) at the same time, but which in TXST records have CK/T5E’s TX02 and TX07 (= NS’s 6 and 7, respectively). So, I don’t know if this is an error on the part of the modder who made the gear, or an error on the part of whoever wrote the wiki material about what the NIFskope texture slots really are. Given that the gear looks great in-game, I suspect it’s the latter. And it’s not clear that CK/T5E's TX06 Multilayer really does correspond to NS’s 8 Backlight. There appears to be no connection between the concepts "backlight" and "multilayer". In this case, "backlight" doesn’t mean "light shining through or around something from behind or within it", but "light reflecting off a surface from a light behind the viewer/camera", as I understand it. Then again, it was the iffy wiki that suggested this meaning. Another thing is the claims about the *_g.dds, *_p.dds, *_b.dds, and *_bl.dds filename patterns. I've never encountered a Skyrim texture with any of these names (though I admittedly do not use parallax stuff, so maybe *_p.dds is legit). Every single time I encounter something in NS's texture slot 3, it is a *_sk.dds, for example. Next, I can’t find anything anywhere other than the wiki page suggesting that the environment mask has anything to do with cube maps. And finally, the order and numbering of the texture fields in Outfit Studio matches neither NIFscope nor the CK/TES5Edit order. Anyone got more authoritative information sources on this stuff?

Well, follow my 'structions and you get the whole thing for about the cost of a burger and fries. :-)

You're using the original vanilla bodies. You need to install either Dimonized UNP or Caliente's Beautiful Bodies Edition (CBBE), or some variant thereof, to replace the vanilla bodies and their permanent underwear textures. Doesn't matter much which you install. CBBE is said to be more of a "fantasy" body (big and gravity-defying boobs) and UNP a bit more naturalistic, but there are so many variants for BodySlide now that you can get whatever shape you want. By this point, most really good outfit work has been converted back and forth, and the best of it is available for BodySlide so you can just make it fit whatever downloaded or custom variant body you are using.

Thanks. I'll give that a shot. Already have VSync on. I have a frame rate capped at 57 since exactly 60 was said to allow it to peak at over 60, so I'll try 50 or so. I'm lucky to get 20 most of the time anyway.

In response to post #64087966. #64088311, #64089056, #64092636, #64102471, #64102756, #64103211, #64113171, #64129041, #64142976, #64155221, #64158531, #64170001 are all replies on the same post. Yep. This is definitely a keen idea. Many sites do things like this. You'd be surprised what peeps will pay to get a special icon or label. PS: Use better naming though. "Lifetime + PLUS" is redundant, and reads as /lifetime plus plus/ both aloud and in one's head.

Long since overwritten. If I run into it the issue again (i.e. if I'm not careful about how I enter data into a NIF in NIFskope, and invisibly break another NIF), I'll save a copy. As I said: .It should be simple to reproduce. Get NIFskope 2.0, open a NIF, and paste in paths to some distinctive textures from a mod in place of vanilla ones, save it, then load it in CK and observe that it still loads the vanilla textures. Or manually, line-by-line, change them to something invalid, then paste back in the legit, correct vanilla paths without many any keyboard edits to these paths, save, load in CK, and watch the errors pop up mentioning the bogus paths. I've not tried NIFscope 1.x; I figure it's better to deal with one regression with a now-known workaround than downgrade to a version with multiple bugs that have been fixed in the current version. I would rather have a migraine than a stroke. >;-) Anyway, I filed a detailed bug report about this (based on this thread) at the NIFskope GitHub.

That's just the base game, not the LE bundle. If you use links like this and the ones to the individual DLCs (or dig them out of Steam after buying the main app) you pay full retail for all of it. Why pay something like $50 when you can pay $6-$15? And most posts of links to where the game is (was) on Steam don't actually work. They keep moving it around. Looking at that specific "offer", it may not even allow you access to DLCs at all. Note that "Downloadable Content for This Game" is blank/empty. I'm hardly going to waste money to find out! >;-) Same issue. If you get the DLCs separately, you waste money. And not everyone follows or is even aware of STEP Project; I'd been heavily modding Skyrim for months before I even noticed STEP existed. (It's no longer well-maintained and some of its advice is wrong in 2018, anyway, BTW.)

The above isn't 100% accurate: You have 30 sec. to select the item, enchantment, and soul gem, and then enter item creation. Time then stops, when you are seeing the prompt to create this item, or you have opened the option to rename the item (after which you return to realtime and quickly need to trigger the prompt to create the item). Note: For extra expediency, pick the elements in reverse order: soul gem, then enchantment (which greatly shrinks the inventory list in most cases), then inventory item, and sort by name so you can find it alphabetically instead of scrolling around looking for it (if you have a big inventory, anyway). This saves precious seconds. Some enchantment options pop up a dialogue to accept a default or futz around with a slider first; I do not know yet if this pop-up also stops time, but I don't trust it and do it quickly. Actually, my new solution has been to use TES5Edit (could also use the CK) to change the Fortify Enchanting effect to "Power Affects Duration" as well as "Power Affects Magnitude", so I get potions that last 10 minutes or so, which makes more sense for ingested stuff anyway, given that the game clock is faster than realtime in many aspects. (What I mean: drink a lot of beer; are you sober again in under a minute? No. Eat a cheeseburger and fries. Are you ravenous again in 30 seconds? No.) There're also some ingestibles mods that extend and vary the effects of booze, etc.

I changed some details in the custom race records and head parts of a downloaded follower mod, to "re-mod" it. I have followed the Ctrl-F4 and NIFmerge instructions in various tutorial for patching up heads. And it's not working. No matter what I do I get: * Wrong head color * Wrong head geometry. I get the default head with the default texture. I've even tried exporting the head in my original copy of Skyrim under Steam and using it in the playing copy on my desktop, and I still get the goofy-looking, big-jawed default Nord woman head, with the default texture. Other glitches are that it's outputting incorrect (that is, default, and correct for vanilla) paths for some of the textures in one head part or another, and clearly sometimes using incorrect (vanilla) head parts, despite all this: 1. The head part record is saying to use the parts in meshes/actor/character/Whatever/ 2. The texture record for that part says to use the textures in textures/actor/character/Whatever/ 3. The NPC and race records are saying to use those custom parts and textures 3. The NIFs mentioned in part 1 are, inside them, pointing to the textures in part 2. Where is it even getting the idea from to use some of the default parts and textures? Weirdly, it's even using some default textures for some of the non-default parts. I just don't get it. When I use NIFmerge (to apply the originally downloaded follower's pretty face to the just-generated export), I get a resulting NIF that looks correct in NIFskope (other than that weird thing with the parts often having mismatched Z heights, which seems to have no effect when rendered in-game). I put it in place with the ugly head's default filename, and get back into the game, and the NPC still has uglyface. I can remove the entire ESP and do a savecleaning routine and put it back in, so the NPC is freshly re-generated, and ... uglyface again. It's like the FaceGeom/MyModHere.esp/ material for this ESP is simply being ignored. It doesn't matter if I have NIFmerge overwrite the original directly, or save to a temp filename and move the original and put the new one in it's place. Always, always uglyface. The stuff about creating a face (or importing and re-exporting) in RaceMenu doesn't apply here. It's not a face I created, but one I just modified (though it probably was originally created in RaceMenu). It did not come with a .jslot file. I've looked at a bunch of .jslot files from downloaded RaceMenu presets, and they've all been radically different, so faking it by making a new one seems out of the question, even if re-exporting the head via RaceMenu and re-NIFmerging it would somehow help. My next guess is that when you "change something" and change it back before doing the Ctrl-F4 that you have to change something specific, not just anything, to get it to regenerate the head properly. ?? I'm at wit's end here. Been trying to resolve this for over a week, and it'a affecting every NPC I try to modify, e.g. put a new hair on.

Except texture set record in the ESP is NOT messed up. Like I said, I've checked it in the ESP and in the NIFs over ten times. What I've figured out so far, through trying everything over and over and over, and screaming a lot and breaking things, is that it seems to be a NIFskope bug. I'm using NIFskope 2.0 (2018-02-22) x64 in Windows 10. When I open the NIF and go to the record that the CK says has "UNNP" in it, it does not (visually, in the NIFskope interface). It says "UUNP", as it should. If I make it say something else (anything else, via a manual edit to that path, not a copy paste), the click away from that editing field, then re-edit that path to make it say "UUNP" again, the issue in the CK disappears next time I try the ESP and these NIFs in the CK. No other change is required (and nothing else works). It turns out that if you copy-paste a path\filename into a texture record line in NIFskope, it may not actually be recorded properly. This is how I got those paths in there, since they're long and tedious and I was applying them to something like 30 NIFs for BodySlide. You have to actually edit the line in some way by manual keystrokes, and exit that line cleanly (e.g. by clicking on something else in NIFskope, like the next texture record down or up), and you have to make an actual change. Otherwise, NIFskope just ignores what you were doing in that record. I tested this. If you change it to to "ZZZZ" or whatever then back to "UUNP" without first exiting the edited texture path, and do this to every texture path in the NIF, then NIFskope will just close the file without prompting you to save, because it thinks nothing was changed. In my case, I just went through them all and changed things like "textures\actors\character\Mango\Chinese UUNP\phototex.dds" (or whatever – maybe "...\phototex_n.dds", depending on the line) to "textures\actors\character\Mango\Chinese UUNP\XXXphototex.dds" (or whatever), one after another, then went back and changed them all back to "textures\actors\character\Mango\Chinese UUNP\phototex.dds" (or whatever) then saved the NIF, and it finally worked properly. So: * You can't reliably paste a path\filename or part of one. NIFskope will DISPLAY this change to you, but does not properly save it. * If you edit the line that looks right but which is showing up in CK wrong, and set it back to what it should be then exit that line, it WON'T fix it. You MUST edit the corrupted line twice. Once to introduce a dummy change, and once to actually set it to what it's supposed to be (and regardless whether it looked correct to begin with, if the CK is reading something different). * It SEEMS to be safe to use copy-paste as long as you re-edit the field again afterward. My technique for this is to paste in something like "textures\actors\character\Mango\Chinese UUNP\phototex.dds" but delete the last char, so it's "...\phototex.dd", exit the field, then re-edit the field to correct the filename. Very tedious, but way less tedious than the CK barfing on the NIF file for unclear reasons. I only figured this out through random trial and error; it literally could have taken months to discover the fix, but I got lucky, and it "only" took four days. I really don't know how it's even possible for NIFskope to be recording one thing in the NIF data ("UNNP" from a previous typo the first time I edited the NIF file), yet displaying "UUNP" in its GUI (which it got from a later correction, probably via copy-paste, which wasn't saved just right). NIFskope seems to be caching in some way. PS: This was not a one-off error, but affected a body, a foot, and an eye, in two different NPCs. And it had nothing to do with data in the ESP file, only the in the NIFs as edited by NIFskope.

Well, I've got ENB enabled for graphics mode. Overall it does look a little better, and the performance hit has been tolerable so far. However, I'm seeing a lot of glitches, most notably strange, cycling shimmers on things (even outside in the daylight, and also affecting the shadows - I noticed this in clear-sky weather on an archway and the shadow it casts); and some floors changing instantly from dark to light and back as I walk across them (happened in the bar area of the Winking Skeever). I haven't messed around with it enough yet, or even played the game, visual bugs or not, enough after this setup change to know if it's even improved what I set out to improve.

Well, the entire point of this was that I spent hours Googling around looking for how to get the @#$&ing game on Steam after they've gone to such lengths to hide it, and I kept running into misinformation and dead ends. The step-by-step that I figured out is good; definitely works. Maybe there are other ways, but I'm sharing a tested one.

As far as I can determine through forums and testing (not very extensive) enblocal.ini's entire point is to override enbseries.ini with user-specified preferences. This seems supported by recommendations at STEP, etc., to edit enblocal.ini while no one seems to want you to edit enbseries.ini (for this sort of thing, anyway), and ENB having moved some stuff from enbseries.ini into enblocal.ini over time presumably in response to user pressure about further customization.

Well, I AM using ENB (for the memory "speedhack"). I don't know if ICBINE would conflict with that. Will go have a look at it, though.

Oh, I didn't realize that would actually do anything without you installing an ENB preset. I will have to give that a try!

This is driving me nuts. I apparently had a typo in a texture path at some point, and had "textures\actors\character\Mango\Chinese UNNP\phototex.dds" when it should have been "textures\actors\character\Mango\Chinese UUNP\phototex.dds". Every time I try to render this NPC in the CK, I get: TEXTURES: Texture Set missing texture textures\actors\character\Mango\Chinese UNNP\phototex.dds"and an "abort - retry - ignore" from the renderer, then the two follow-on errors about the missing map and the bodypart missing a map (this seems to be a consistent series of events any time the CK's decided a texture is missing). However, the associated NIF file has no such invalid path in it any longer. And this invalid path does not appear in the ESP. I have dectuple-checked this. I've been trying to fix this for TWO DAYS. It just will not stop looking for "UNNP" no matter what I do. Where on earth is it getting this from? The only things I can think of are a) that this path really is in there somewhere (but where??), or b) that the CK caches stuff long-term and is highly resistant to letting go of what it's cached, or c) the fact that an instance of this NPC has been placed in the game world "locks in" every bit of data like a texture path so that it can't be changed without nuking the in-world instance and adding another (something I don't want to do just yet, because it's been placed in a very complicated way I have not figured out how to reproduce yet). I get the impression this invalid path is coming from the NIF side because of the leading "textures\"; in ESP language, that part gets dropped in a texture record and you just give "actors\character\Mango\Chinese UUNP\phototex.dds". (Then again, maybe the CK translates this into "textures\..." on the fly when reporting such an error. I really don't know.) This has been so frustrating I've almost given up on the mod, especially since the CK just crashes pretty frequently after putting out these errors (and it takes a really long time start back up and reload the ESMs and ESP).

Ah so! Didn't realize Steam would let you do that at all. Now I wonder if Steam can be reinstalled, and the game simply moved from the old Steam install to the new one, the old Steam deleted, and the new one started up, perhaps after tweaking a Steam config file or something ...

Great stuff! Could you elaborate on this please? I do want to do this but have no idea how (in fact, I'm not even sure what it means. "Normals" to me are *_n.dds or *_msn.dds textures. Heh.)

How to Legally Install Skyrim Legendary Edition and Creation Kit in 2018 - Often at a Steep Discount by Darklocq v1.4, 2018-10-05 As you may have noticed, Steam has removed "Oldrim" Legendary Edition, and makes it look like the bundle is simply no longer available. Don't believe it. And don't pay full price. (They're even hiding the original base Skyrim game; you can't get to it on Steam without a direct URL from way back when.) If you Google around, you'll find many threads suggesting that: * "If you just go search on Steam, you'll find it." They're wrong. They were right when they wrote that in, like, 2014. But this is 2018, and Steam, perhaps at the behest of Bethesda, has made it stupidly difficult to get this game and the editor for it. * "If you Google around, you'll find a link to get to the actual game, but the DLCs have to be bought separately." This works, but at great expense - as in more than the cost of Skyrim SE. You end up paying full original retail price for the base game and all DLCs. * "It's just gone. You have to upgrade to Skyrim Special Edition." Not true. * "You'll just have to pirate it via BitTorrent or get a DVD rip from a friend." Sure, you can try that if you're unethical, but various mods including SKSE and several plugins for it, and FNIS, go to some lengths to try to figure out if you have a bogus copy of the game, and you'll also probably find that the Creation Kit, if you obtain it one way or another, doesn't work properly or at all. Plus, it's just not a nice (or legal) thing to do. Here's What You Do ================== 0) Install the Steam application first if you don't already have it. Go to Store.SteamPowered.com, and click on the prominent "Install Steam" button at top right. Start the app and create an account in it if you don't already have one. If the current Steam installer still allows you to install Steam outside of the "Program Files (x86)" folder, definitely DO that, since it will solve various problem and avoid a step below. 1) Google for Skyrim Legendary Edition Steam. Ignore all the forum talk; you are looking for game code reseller sites. (These are sites where bulk buyers of wholesale game codes liquidate codes for games that are past their heyday.) As of October 2018, the best price I found was US$7 (minus 6% discount code and 10% cash-back, so really only $5.88!). The prices fluctuate with the sellers and their individual inventories. If all you found were prices around $30-$50, keep looking; I found numerous options in the $7 to $15 range, about the price of one meal or a movie or a couple of beers at the bar/pub. * BE SURE you are buying an instant-delivery Steam code for the PC game, not ordering a PC, PlayStation, or Xbox disc though postal mail! * BE SURE you are getting Skyrim LE, not Skyrim and not Skyrim SE! * Pro Tip: If you wait around on a game codes site, or attempt to leave it, it may pop up a discount code, so you can get it even cheaper. Buy your Skyrim Steam code (I would avoid getting one off eBay - it's less likely to be legit). Depending on whom you buy from, you'll either get the code popped up in a window after ordering it, or get it in e-mail. Note: An alternative to all this online code hunting is finding a copy of the game on disc in a still-sealed package in a retail store's bargain bin or on eBay; this will come with a valid Steam code. Just make sure it's the LE version. 2) In the Steam app, go to "Games" > "Activate a Product on Steam". In the pop-up, click "Next", then "I Agree"; enter your product code; click "Next". After the code is validated, you have the option to install the game on the spot, or you can do it later (it will show up in your Steam app's Library tab, though you may need to leave that tab or restart the Steam app to get it to show up. (If the code doesn't validate, you've been ripped off. Demand your money back, and order from the next-cheapest site. Every multi-user site has its bad apples; we all know that.) 3) Install the game one way or another through Steam; just follow the prompts. You'll find that the old tricks of getting Steam to use an alternative library location no longer work in 2018 (except on a second hard drive), not even editing libraryfolders.vdf to try to force it. You can move the game later (carefully) – or better yet, make a copy of it – so just let it install to the default location. IF you have a second drive (and not a slow one – you want an SSD for this) go ahead and set up an alternative SteamApps library on that drive, then install Skyrim there. You don't actually want to use the default location for your gameplay (we'll get into that later). Update: This install location stuff doesn't apply if you installed Steam itself outside of "Program Files (x86)". 4) After the install, in the Steam app, go to "Library" > "Games" > "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" (or just "Library" > "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim", if it already opened to the "Games" section). In the righthand pane, scroll down to the "DLC" section. You should see that Dawnguard, Dragonborn, and Hearthfire are all "Installed" and "Added Today" (if they're not installed yet, they should be downloading; check in "Library" > "Downloads"). Below them, click on "Find More DLC in Store". Scroll to the bottom of that page and click "Install Game" on "Skyrim: High Resolution Texture Pack (Free DLC)", which actually is free. Click on the "Click to Install Now!" link on the subsequent page; it doesn't actually appear to do anything, but what it's doing is adding it to your account. Go to "Library" > "Games" > "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim"; you should now see "Skyrim High Resolution Texture Pack" listed in your available DLCs. If it's not there, go make a snack and come back in a few minutes. Restart the Steam app if necessary. After it appears, you should see it marked as "Added Today" but "Not Installed". Because Steam is broken, user-hateful trash, clicking on it does not work, nor is there anything you can do in the menus to just intuitively install it. What to do: Uncheck the checkbox next to this DLC, wait a moment, then re-check it. Now to go "Library" > "Downloads". After a moment, the entry for "The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim" should show on the righthand side that the DLC is downloading, that it's just finished downloading, or will say "Update Required" with a button to click to "Download Now". Don't fear; these aren't really HIGH-res textures by modern standards but medium-res – not 4K and 8K stuff, but just 2K at best. Most of the vanilla stuff is 512 to 1K, so you do want this unless your system is TOTAL crap. I've also heard that some textures were fixed, so you want this regardless. If you have a badass machine, you'll end up overwriting most of this with even higher-res textures, but you might as well get this stuff, so no ancient 512-bit textures are left around. 5) Now, in the Steam app, go to "Library" > "Tools". In the search box, type Creation, and you'll find the otherwise entirely hidden "Skyrim Creation Kit". Double-click on it for install options, and it should quite quickly get the job done. Except for one thing: You need to manually extract the file "Data\Scripts.rar". 6) Start up the game (via SkyrimLauncher.exe in this case); don't play it, just start it then quit. This will generate the initial config files. Next, start up and quit the Creation Kit for the same reason (via CreationKit.exe). The CK's initial configs are actually broken; see here [ https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/21690 ] for 1-minute instructions on how to fix it. (There are several variants of these instructions by others, some with various iffy .EXE installers and "please endorse my mods" spam; just use this one - it's just instructions on how to correct a couple of INI file lines). Restart the CK and load the main game and two or more DLCs at once to ensure that the fix works properly (you have to go to "Data files" under the "File" menu then double-click each ESM or ESP you want to load). 7) Next, make a copy of the game in a "safe" location (like your Desktop), outside the "Program Files (x86)" folder. Running the game from there causes all sorts of problems with mods and third-party tools (Google it). To actually MOVE the game installation is complicated and is NOT just moving the files in Windows Explorer! (And it's gotten worse, because old tricks for getting Steam to recognize multiple SteamApps folders on the same drive no longer work; you will almost certainly have to use a second hard drive for that.) However, making a copy is very easy: just copy everything in "Program Files (x86)\Steam\SteamApps\Common\Skyrim\" to somewhere else, like "Users\[You]\Desktop\Skyrim". But delete the Creation Kit from this version; you cannot run it from here. For reason explained below, you should make this copy even if you did an install to a second hard drive (in which case the "Program Files (86)" problem won't affect you). Update: The NEED to copy the game outside of "Program Files (x86)" doesn't apply if you didn't install Steam to that folder, but (see the points below) you way want to create a copy anyway for several reasons. You kill six birds with one stone by doing this copy job: * You get the game (that you're actually going to play) out of "Program Files (x86)", avoiding all kinds of headaches. * This copy can be run without Steam and the memory it wastes. You can nuke all Steam-related crap with Task Manager, and prevent any of it from auto-starting at boot time, and all will be fine. Just start the game manually with TESV.exe (or skse_loader.exe if you've installed SKSE). You can't start this copy from within Steam. But that's a bad idea anyway, since it leaves Steam running and wasting memory. In this setup, the ONLY time you'll have to be running any Steam stuff is automatically when you start up the CK, or when you are using Steam for some Skyrim-unrelated reason. * This copy will work just fine, other than FNIS will throw a pointless warning (it thinks you have a pirated game, but doesn't actually do anything about it in this case), and the CK cannot be run in this version, only in the original Steam copy. * The original "official" Steam copy can be kept as a clean development and testing environment for your mods, as well as a source of a clean third copy of the game if you want to try something different, or set up a copy for your spouse who prefers different mods, or whatever. In my case, I have absolutely nothing installed in the original location other than the CK, the DLCs, Update.esm, the High Resolution Texture Pack, and (so I can work on HDT stuff) SKSE, FNIS, HDT Physics Extensions, XP32 Maximum Skeleton Extended, then whatever mod I'm currently working on (which I remove, along with its files, when I'm done). I don't even have Unofficial Skyrim Legendary Edition Patch in it. * Even if you find some kludge to make the CK work in another copy of the game, you get a faster and less crashy CK if it you run it properly in the Steam copy and it never loads anything but vanilla resources plus the mod you're working on (and any dependencies it has). You also help ensure that you don't end up with accidental dependencies in your mod (e.g. textures and meshes you have from some third-party mod and mistook for vanilla resources; you'd be surprised how easy it is to make that mistake - with a hair model, a clothing item, an eye color, you name it). * You can extract BSAs as needed in the development copy of the game (e.g. to mess around with BodySlide, Outfit Studio, and NIFskope, which don't seem able to read from BSA files), while leaving them as-in the playing copy (better performance - it's faster to read textures and meshes and stuff from BSAs, auto-extracting them as needed in fast RAM, than it is to load them as individual files off the drive – people have benchmarked this and proven it). If someone has late-2018 instructions for moving a Skyrim installation completely, I'll be happy to add them. I seem to recall it requiring some Windows Registry tweaks, in addition to forcing Steam to accept two libraries on the same drive somehow. Why Write This? =============== People love this game, and new mods are created for it every single day. But Bethesda and Steam are strongly pushing Skyrim SE and TES Online. So, Skyrim LE is verging on abandonware these days. Neither newer game is suitable for low-end machines. Thousands of "Oldrim" mods do not work in SE. And of course none of them work in TESO, which is a totally different animal. However, just Googling around about "how to get Skyrim Legendary Edition", etc., generally pulls up a lot of old forum posts and crap that provide once-good information that's no longer valid today. Or just links to Steam pages for individually paying full-retail for the game and every DLC. It took a lot of ferreting around to figure all this out, step-by-step, and it may help someone save hours of wasted time as well as some money. It will also help people enter our "Oldrim" community who don't have all day long to try to figure out how to even get the game. Someday even this may not be possible, if Steam really just deletes Skyrim LE entirely from its available wares, but for now, I'm providing the key to their hidden door, as it were. All you need is a game code to validate with them, and the door appears and swings open. Boilerplate =========== This mini-tutorial is dual-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-By-SA) 4.0 International License [ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode ] and the GNU Free Documentation License 1.3 [ https://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl-1.3.en.html ]. I.e., you may reuse/re-release/repurpose any of this content (or all of it) as long as what you include it in is also released under one or both of these licenses (or a compatible one). Thanks to IsharaMeradin, chanchan05, and AnvilOfWar for some tips and clarifications which have been integrated into the current version of this. Followup Notes ============== I'd originally posted this as a mini-tutorial on the main Skyrim Nexus, but it was removed (as neither a mod nor a mod-related tutorial - howto material is permitted, but only if modding-related). They suggested a forum post instead. There was also some suggestion of working some of this into the Skyrim category on the Nexus Wiki, though I haven't edited it in a long time and would need to review the procedures, category structure, yadda yadda first. The admins don't want specific codes sites mentioned, and perhaps it might seem "spammy" to some to do so anyway; I don't favor any particular site or any vendor on one; I just looked for the best deal available that particular hour, and took it, then worked out every kink in the installation process, and documented it.

More a request for a pointer than for a new mod. What's the absolute lowest-impact ENB? I can barely tolerate my current frame rate and have 2GB VRAM. I'm looking to have only the ENB effects that will make low-impact improvements, and I really only care about: * Better lighting. I hate how light in the vanilla game just cuts off after X number of distance units, as if your torch light hit a wall. The entire game is really just too dark (for a follower-monger like me, anyway; I spend too much time on skin texture crafting and outfit tweaking to not be able to see the results!) * At least some minimal subsurface scattering so skins look less plastic, and you don't get the bronze sheen effect (I know you can black out the skin *_sk.dds files, but this just ends up giving you fake-looking skin; it's a no-win scenario, other than Leyenda hit on the idea of very dark sk files, available in one version of his skin pack. This works, but it's still plasticky, just not utterly plasticky). * Less of the "everything is made of triangles" look. Definitely do not want increased blur, either motion- or distance-related. I get the aesthetics of the "filmic" approach of depth of field and motion blur, but I simply do not want it in a video game. The game camera has no idea where my real-world eyeballs are looking and I have a wide monitor for a reason. LOL. Don't need fancy god rays and complicated shadow effects and yadda yadda. I've turned off a lot of the fancy-pants graphics stuff in the game's INIs. I did try one ENB marketed as low-impact, but it was for an old version of ENB, and the settings were wrong (even what file the put them in was wrong). Despite trying to work around those issues, it was a total disaster and I had to revert it all and remove it.

If you get errors like "unable to locate script ActiveMagicEffect" and "unknown type objectreference", "unknown type actor", as if there is no game data present at all, poring over various forum threads provided the answer a little at a time. Example total error message here, for a very short script: 1) Make sure that your paths in Skyrim\SkyrimEditor.ini are correct. Triple-check. Make sure the game runs, and the Creation Kit runs. If something's messed up in the INIs, the Papyrus Compiler or a third-party equivalent like Skyrim Script Compiler or GECK is also likely to fail. 2) Make sure that Skyrim\TESV_Papyrus_Flags.flg is present. If you don't have it, search your drive for it. if still not found, simply create one, since it's just a short text file: 3) Look in Skyrim\Data\ for a file called Scripts.rar (or Scripts.zip for Skyrim SE), provided as part of the CK install. Extract it into your Skyrim\Data\ folder. Or better yet, open it with WinRAR or 7Zip, and selectively drag the folders in it into your Skyrim\Data\ folder so you're damned sure they're going to the correct place and you're getting the ones you want. Let them merge. This RAR or ZIP archive contains the source as well as binary versions of the vanilla scripts, and you need those source files to compile. They are in the Scripts\source\ folder in the RAR or ZIP. It also contains a DialogueViews\ folder with XML files which might or might not be needed, depending on what you're doing, but which are not included in the game's BSA files, just like the Scripts\source\ files were missing. You don't need the compiled versions of the scripts, just the source (the compiled versions are already in the game's BSA files), plus the DialogueViews\ files. So, in my case, I dragged DialogViews\ from the RAR into \Skyrim\Data\, and Scripts\source\ from the RAR into \Skyrim\Data\Scripts\ and that was that. If you want to be thorough, you can use BSA Commander or the like to see what scripts are contained in Skyrim - Misc.bsa versus what's included as compiled scripts in Scripts.rar, but there's about 5000 of them, so I did not bother, and am not going to worry about it. (The reason to leave the BSA files in the BSAs when possible is that it's more efficient for the game (and the CK) to extract them from BSAs in RAM than to pull them from the hard drive. People have benchmarked this and proven it, and it's why this stuff is in BSA archives in the first place. This situation would be void if SSDs and the busses that control them actually reach RAM speed at some point.) 3a) If the extraction of Scripts.rar (or .zip) wants to overwrite something, that's up to you. The most likely scenario is that you have newer versions of a number of scripts in the Skyrim\Data\Scripts\ folder and its source\ subfolder that were provided by SKSE. If you let these be overwritten, you'll have to reinstall SKSE, or stuff will fail badly. In my case, I just didn't let it overwrite, only extract source files that were not already present, and I didn't extract the compiled versions at all. It really depends on how much you've already built up your game with mods whether you'll run into a file conflict like this. You may well have installed other mods than SKSE that provided updated script files, so not overwriting is probably the safest bet. 3b) If you do not have Scripts.rar (or .zip, for Skyrim SE), search your drive for it. If it's just gone, and you do not have core script source files like Skyrim\Data\Scripts\source\ObjectReference.psc in place already (presumably from previously extracting Scripts.rar), then you have to re-download the CK from Steam and have it do a fresh install, so you get that RAR or ZIP file. Honestly, it's completely ridiculous that Papyrus Compiler cannot understand that the referred-to vanilla script like ObjectReference.pex is in place, and instead requires the source version to be present (by way of comparison, imagine if every time you installed a new bit of Linux software you had to download the full source code of every single dependency and every dependency of that dependency!). But such is life; we just have to work with what we're given, in the only way it will actually work. 4) Restart the CK, just to be on the safe side. The CK seems very poor at realizing that a file is in place after already having decided it wasn't before, during the same session. 5) If you have multiple installs (e.g. a development install and a playing install), you'll need to install these source files into the other copy's Data\Scripts\source\ folder, if you expect to be able to do something like use Skyrim Script Compiler in that local copy. 6) If you use Mod Organizer, NMM, or Wrye Bash's BAIN, or some other mod manager, you can either install the RAR's contents manually and let these additional files be "unmanaged" by that app, or have the mod manager install the files from Scripts.rar (or .zip) as if it's a mod, though that may not be the safest option. Doing it the latter way will install the entire contents, much of which you do not need since the compiled scripts are just copies of what's in the BSA. More seriously, it may overwrite newer scripts (from SKSE, etc.), depending on the mod manager. (BAIN will not, being smarter than that; I don't know about MO, since I only use it for extracting FOMODs, and I manage my actual game with BAIN. NMM is generally excoriated, so I neither know nor care what it does.) The magic sauce here is the Scripts\source\ material (and maybe the DialogViews\ material, if you're working on that stuff). Most of what the CK does is BSA-aware; only Papyrus Compiler seems to have dain bramage. See this thread for a quick way to test whether you've overwritten SKSE scripts, which is the likely reason you're still getting errors if you followed my instructions here but still can't compile. I hope this saves someone(s) else a lot of hair-pulling in trying to get Papyrus Compiler to do the one simple thing it's designed to do but which it will not do out of the box.