sattyre

LOL. I understand that perfectly.

there are a lot of RS children patches out there. If you can't find one for a mod, I simply take an existing patch and forward the record into a new patch, change the formid to match the child and then take the facegen texture and mesh and rename them to match the new formid. Generally, I use a kid of the same race and sex. Easy peasy. The other black face you have is solvable. If you use Mod organizer, check the conflicts tab and see if something is overwriting them. If they're in an archive I suggest extracting the archive and then looking. Black face is easy to solve once you know how. One thing I forgot to mention was file corruption. It can also cause black face and the first thing I do with NPC overhauls is re install them to see if that fixes them.

I've been down this road before and honestly hated steam from the moment I heard of it. I'm old. I like having my game in my control. I don't want a third party involved. I'm good with just me and the devs. I'd love to burn valve to the ground with thier ideas about ownership and control. I preferred buying a cd from a store and bringing it home. The first time I bought an empty CD with a steam key, I was pissed. I hadn't realized it was just a steam key. Anyway that's a long way of saying I keep backups of the original downloads for everything from the start of the steam era. Cause they can go f%$k themselves.

I've heard some fo4 f4se mods will need to be manually placed in the game folder under f4se and the relevant folders to work as they don't otherwise recognize GOG. I haven't actually tried this myself, but it's worth trying if you're wanting to use one of those mods.

if you don't know how to modify your appmanifests, then the next easiest solution is to copy your entire FO4 directory/folder and then allow steam to update. It will change the appmanifest to show it's been updated and you can simply delete the new FO4 folder and rename the old folder back to the the original name. Then go and mark the appmanifest as read only. Voila. You have now got an updated appmanifest, but an old FO4 version.

Sounds like it may be asset based. If you have assets for NPCs that change appearance in any way those assets can overwrite the assets of npcs, especially if the NPCs are in an archive, because everyone should know, Loose files always overwrite archived files, regardless of where they are in your mod list. So if it isn't a problem of race records, which will or can affect only a single sex or race or vampire, then it is one of several issues. 1: out of order assets and esps. 2: Assets from a mod overwriting assets needed for the NPC faces. 3: Loose assets vs archived NPCs, (which is actually the same as 2) or 4: sometimes it is that a mod created in Skyrim LE hasn't had the head assets imported from the creation kit for SE. If I was going to make a guess, it would be an asset overwrite somewhere, unless of course you got your town overhauls from LE If the problem isn't asset order, but Loose vs archive, the answer then is to archive the offending assets. It will also work the other way around, but SE works best with everything in archives. It seems contradictive, but the game actually retrieves and uses archived assets faster then it does for Loose.

Is that you can simply stop it from updating. Check the box and it will never update. Steam on the other hand, likes to be heavy handed even when you check the box to only update when I start it. It does this by forcing you to go online to start the game periodically, as it's Steam connection software needs to update. I've had this multiple times with Stellaris.

Mostly what you need to copy is the FO4.exe and Data, though I usually simply replace the entire folder since it doesn't take much more time and there's no guessing. They definitely changed the archived .ba2 files since the regular archives can no longer be opened by my regular archive extractors or Xedit. So that's everything in the Data Folder, esp/esl/esms included, since the strings no longer match, and at minimum, the base folder exe's.

I also agree. I personally don't care for it either. It's a meaningless distraction.

Yup that's all true, but those are the easy things. (Easy is a relative term) Other issues don't show up till higher level when the engine starts to stress more. I find as you level issues can crop up. Minor annoyances at level one can become more at higher levels. It's just an observation I've consistently had over the years. There are conflicts between mods that don't always show up in xedit. What we see in Xedit is the top layer of programming. What lies beneath isn't so apparent.

I create the build, and add profiles as needed. You can sync the new profile to be the same as the main profile and then tweak it as needed. For Instance, I copy my main game profile, but disable all the mods and call that new profile vanilla. That way I always have a vanilla profile for certain tests. I create another profile to merge NPC overhauls. It's worthwhile to read Lexy's Lotd setup page for her mod list. She's got so many very useful systems documented for new MO users for her Mod List. I still brows through it periodically looking for new tips. Her ModList is SSE, but the setup stuff can be used for all Bethesda games, and even the different games use the same types of tweaks. Merge profiles are extremely useful.

absolutely. Do all your testing in a throwaway profile with as high a level character as you can get without deleted mods. You should download a high level vanilla character from the nexus, that way you're testing "your" build and the tests aren't polluted with deleted mods. The higher the level of the pc, the greater the stress on the engine, and the better your test results will be.

As with all bethesda games, you really shouldn't delete mods on an existing playthrough. It does have the nasty effect of eventually trashing the save. What's misleading to most people, is that the problems can take awhile to start showing up. That mod you deleted at level 10 without issue, comes back to bite you at level 30 or more and often prior to that.

At the top of MO, you see a credit card icon. That allows you to set up profiles. Inside you'll see three check boxes at the bottom. Make sure they are ticked and MO will import the vanilla .ini files into each profile. Bethini will need to be told where to look, but it's all pretty self explanatory.

If you use Mod Organizer, I have multiple portable installs, each one can be completely different. When Fallout London shows up, I plan on making a build dedicated just to that. Just to be clear, I do install MO2 multiple times. You are stuck with the same enb as well as other Root level mods, but even the enb can be gotten around with an enb swapper. I don't remember what it's called off hand.