How to find all the issues with someone else's mod so you can patch it?

[InDarkestNight]

I’ve always loved the concept behind Elemental Dragons. However, the thing has a laundry list of issues that leaves few players playing with it. The makers of Legacy of the Dragonborn dropped support for it with version 5, claiming the thing was an utter mess that needed to be re-made from the ground up.

I don’t see why nobody has taken up the task. Despite its issues, its arguably the best dragon mod ever made for Skyrim. Dragons fights suck no matter what mods you use. At least Elemental Dragons makes them more spectacular. Besides, of all the dragon variety mods out there, the ones from Elemental Dragons are by far my favorite.

I’ve tried to find a list of all the issue the mod has, but as usual nobody will to me about it. I only know of a handful myself, having never done a full playthrough with It myself. Here is what I know:

The mod is hard on performance for some pcs.

Many dragons have abilities that cause an immediate CTD.

You get two versions of the Fus Ro Dah shout that you can only fix through console commands.

The Mystic Dragon permanently changes the sky. Regarding this, I’ve never seen this one myself. Also, the mystic dragon drops a scroll that will revert the sky to fix the issue.

Many of the newly added summons don’t use unique races, instead recycling vanilla ones. One example of this are the Flame Lurkers. They use the vanilla werewolf race, meaning any mods that affect enemy werewolves will affect them (I found out about this one through the mod Monster Facial Animation).

The mod is incomplete. Not all of the named dragons get overhauled. Also, poking in the mod myself, I found two unused builds for the lake twins. I’ve made my own patch to implement them. This does show however that the mod was simply never finished.

The mod has typos, though there is already a mod in existence that fixes that, which can easily be folded into the main plugin with xEdit. I used to do that myself to save an esp slot.

I want to re-do this mod myself, even if its for my own personal use. I love this mod so much, I am willing to take up the task of re-making it myself. Of course, I don’t know yet if I can redo the scripts (I was never able to get anything to compile on this machine when it ran windows 10, I have linux now but I haven’t gotten around to trying that yet). However, before I do that I need to figure out what all is wrong with this mod. Clearly I have plenty of errors to fix, but what else is there? Also, how do I trace down some of these problems? What causes the crashes? Keep in mind, the crashes happen before the dragon even does the animation, giving you no hint as to what attacks are triggering it. I know there’s an issue with the mystic dragon script, but that’s about it. I also don’t know the source of the duplicate shout bug. Besides, I don’t know if anything even can be done; the original MO never could fix these problems, so what chance does someone else? And of course this is all assuming I can even finally get my computer to compile things. I’ve heard linux doesn’t like to do that, but I’ve had quite a lot of luck on this machine. I was able to get the CK working without issue recently.

So, how can I do this? Can anyone else list issues that this mod has? Honestly, some of the changes would be so drastic it would borderline make it my own mod. I mean, I would have to make builds for the named dragons that the mod doesn’t touch. I would also probably make my own patch for LotD v4. I never did like the patch anyway; it re-enables the vanilla dragons, meaning that sometimes you get a boring vanilla dragon fight, and other times an epic ED fight. Screw that.