Changing the mods you download to fit your own personal tastes

[Megatarius]

I will sometimes open up a mod in the CS and continue to tweak it past it's original state. I do it for my own use of course. I would never consider distributing it without the author's permission, and in fact wouldn't really even consider asking to do it at all. I respect their visions and rights to share them as they want them to be.

 

However, sometimes it doesn't fit my vision, so I do a little surgery.

 

 

The two that I've done are:

 

1. I changed a few things in the courtyard of Hoarfrost Castle. Moved the chapel and stables around a little and added a few architecture meshes to the top so it looked more like a palace. Don't get me wrong. I love this mod. I just wanted the courtyard to look different.

 

2. I changed Crowded Cities so it no longer spawned Argonians, Khajiits, and Orcs. I have problems with the way the Argonians look and actually consider them immersion breaking most of the time. Same thing with Khajiitt's, but not as much. As for Orcs, well, they were so foul and disgusting in Lord of the Rings, which I loved, and thus could never really stomach the lovable Shrek-green oafs in this game with names like Bumph Gro_Malog and Rugdumph. Again, my own personal tastes. I've even gone through the Oblivion.esm by hand and changed a lot of the Argonians and Khajiitts into humans (with original names, but that's all right, and I made City Swimmer a Khajiitt just for irony), and replaced the Orc skin texture with something desaturated and gray. Darned if the Orcs don't actually look kind of awesome and menacing like that....

 

 

So I'm curious as to what other people have done. What are your personal tastes that have motivated you to change the mods you download?

[Pushkatu]

To only changes that I make are of a different nature. What I mean is that I don't edit the mod in the CS, instead find other uses for it then the author had in mind when he/she released the mod. The reason why I don't use the CS is that at over 200 mods installed with many patches and many custom tweaks, changing a mod might corrupt a patch or crash my game due to incompatibily problems. I do think it's nice to be able to change that little something that buggs you about a mod, but without the proper CS skills I never did it.

[nosisab]

For particular usage there is no problem changing the mods, to publish the changes is another issue that depends on author's permission, explicit or implicit.

 

Changing placeable position need to be done carefully since it may break things, mainly the doors and activators of any type.

[Vagrant0]

Looking at and altering other peoples mods is often a good way to learn how various things work within the game. For personal use, it's not a problem, but if you come across another person's mod which shows you how to solve a problem within your own mod, it is usually a good idea to give them credit for providing a solution even if everything is made from scratch.

 

As far as my own practices go, I rarely look at mods to see how they function any more unless they are broken or creating problems. If I do edit a mod, or re-use resources it is almost always in order to combine aspects or solve for conflicts. On those rare occasions where it isn't, it's normally things like reducing the insane item costs that some people put items in shops at, or changing NPCs within the mod to work better with my own leveled lists and game settings. But yeah, in nearly every case, you should know what you're doing or be working with a small loadorder/backup before you go around making changes. Instances where people screw up their games due to the load order changing from saving over an older mod are fairly common.

[SavageArtistry]

I do a lot of tweaking. Mostly it has to do with trying to make HGEC armors work with the FF body type. Since I don't do any modeling this is usually limited to changing the mapping a bit for areas showing skin (which is not perfect but suffices) or using a colored HGEC body texture to put a "modesty layer" where the skin would be showing. I usually do this only if it makes sense for the character to wear something under the armor. Some armors look funny if I do that.

 

Since I tend to collect large numbers of armor and weapon mods I've also edited one of the many store mods, removed vendors and armors I didn't care for, and assembled my large collection of armors into containers inside the store building. I also changed the store's sign, interior pictures and lighting.

 

In a house mod I've changed the paintings.

 

I've edited the saddle bag textures for Shadowmere (Slof's original) to be dingy and bloody.

 

In my own cosmetic mod (MHE) I've changed so many things it doesn't even resemble the public release.

 

So yeah, I am a tweaker, and I also do it to other games where I use mods. You should have seen me wasting so much time on getting my Neverwinter Nights 2 mods working again. It had been so long since I installed it that I forgot how the mods worked. :P

 

Now of course I am only talking about personal mod tweaking for myself. As you mentioned, I'd never think about sharing these. Besides being rude to the actual creator of said mod, the customizations are so personal that they wouldn't really work for someone else.

[socksftw]

Normally I'll just delve into a mod to see what makes it tick, mainly at scripts. Although, if I see something strange that I don't recall seeing after a scan of meshes/textures (Which I very normally do after downloading a mod) I'll take a look into the CS. It's actually quite surprising what you can do with just vanilla meshes/textures etc.

[madman132]

I don't do that much; if i don't like something about a mod the Quests are most likely over before i bother. Or something i really don't like is beyond my Skill to "fix".

Sometimes i play a Quest mod, see something i don't like and then search for other things to "fix" while i'm at it and then the Questline is over all of a sudden. Then i'll lose interest in the Mod.

[Branimirzg]

If i would change anything in a mod i would loose interest for playing that mod.

[SrJoben]

The only thing i've done so far is modify streamline 3.1 to work with Vampire Face Bug Fix

[David Brasher]

I mostly fix bugs and ugly places in mods that are good enough that I don't just want to remove them upon discovering that they have problems. Often I want to see how the story ends, but the mod is broken and I can't get to the end without debugging it.