Modmapper: every Skyrim SE mod on an online interactive map

[dactyl]

My mod was removed from the site for being too popular and not technically a mod, so I am creating a thread here so people have a place to post feedback, bugs, and suggestions.

 

View the map at modmapper.com

I started this project because I wanted to know where the most untouched areas of Skyrim are. If I'm building a house mod, for example, I need to know what other mods would potentially conflict with my placement.

I downloaded every SE mod from Nexus Mods, extracted the plugins, and recorded the cell edits in every plugin. Then, I used the UESP skyrim map tiles to display all of the edits as a heatmap.

You can click on a cell to see all of the mods that edit that cell sorted by popularity. Clicking on a mod in that list will show you all of the cells that the mod edits (across all files and versions of the mod). You can also search for a mod by name or a cell by x and y coordinates in the search bar at the top.

All of the code for this is open source:

modmapper: program to automate downloading, extracting, and parsing plugins
modmapper-web: website code for displaying the cell edits as a heatmap on a mapboxgl map
skyrim-cell-dump: library for parsing skyrim plugin files and extracting CELL data

Anyways, hope this is useful to others. I thought it was pretty interesting to see the most popular places for modding in Skyrim.

I'm now keeping track of features I'm working on on this Trello board.

[SnowFox35]

Thank you. I'm sure this will help out plenty. We appreciate your efforts into making this, along with making it open-source!

[Max235]

At worst they could have said modding resource because I'd like to know mods that edit particular areas before I install mods. Not knowing three different mods conflict before I actually go to a cell is mfw times.

[ZenOokami]

Thank you for your work and contribution to the community. This is a phenomenal tool for many of us looking to plan ahead for potential conflicts!

[dactyl]

Hello again! I just updated the site with a bunch of new features.

 

The feedback I got on releasing the site was great and there was a lot of great ideas for how to improve it. The most requested feature by far was allowing you to view the plugins you have installed in your current load order on the map. Luckily, web technologies have really advanced in the past few years and made this possible. The same code I ran to process every Skyrim SE mod on Nexus Mods can now be run in your browser on the files in your Skyrim Data directory. Just drag and drop the Data folder onto the page. All of the cell edits across all of the enabled loaded plugins will be highlighted on the map and any cells with multiple plugin edits will be highlighted in red to indicate a possible conflict. This means that you can now see edits from plugins not even on Nexus Mods as long as you have them downloaded.

 

Additionally, you can drag and drop your plugins.txt to sort the plugins and automatically enable them based on your actual load order.

 

I also made some other tweaks based on suggestions:

• filtering and sorting for mod and cell lists (you can now exclude translation mods)
• sidebar page for viewing data of a specific plugin which links to mods and files where the plugin was found in on Nexus Mods (these are linkable without having the plugin installed and loaded as long as it's been uploaded to Nexus Mods, e.g.: https://modmapper.com/?plugin=1y7g5aqj13p6t)
• show site last updated time (the last time new mods were downloaded from Nexus Mods)
• show exterior cell edit counts for every mod in the list
• collapsible sidebar
• etc. smaller tweaks

I have more things planned that I'd like to get to eventually.

 

Hope you all find it useful!

 

[Pickysaurus]

I've pinned this thread to get some more eyes on it! Nice work!

[dactyl]

I just released a Vortex extension for Modmapper that adds a "See on Modmapper" button to mods and plugins. Clicking on them will show the Modmapper page for that mod or plugin.

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/site/mods/371

[Angerer]

Wow. Ive wanted something like this for years. I was thinking NEXUS or Mod Authors could just put cell edit coordinates on the mod pages but this.. this is definitely better. Shame theres no LE version for us still living in the dark ages but many mods are on both LE and SE so it can still be useful. Thank you for this.

[Jyotai]

I'm hesitant to hit the 'upload' button on the Data directory for my mods.

 

That's a 65.2gb upload.

 

But I find about 2/3rds of my mods show up as plugin unknown when I right click them with the vortex extension because they come from other sites (or for about 1-2mbs of it are my own custom patches).

 

Were I to do that upload, with those plugins from other sources start to show when even other people right click them in their own vortex library?

 

In other words is there value in people uploading their data files in order to create a public repository of how "all mods out there" impact the game? Or is this 'upload' only for my own personal benefit?

[dactyl]

That's a 65.2gb upload.

 

The files you select or drag-and-drop onto the window are never uploaded anywhere. It's just confusing wording of the dialog that pops up which I have no control over unfortunately. The files are simply transferred from your hard drive to the browser's memory and processed on your machine.

 

So the "upload" is only for your own personal benefit. The database of mods I've processed contains only mods from nexusmods.com currently.

 

I've been meaning to add an alert dialog before the upload dialog that explains that your files are not actually getting uploaded anywhere since everyone is getting confused by that.