On the Subject of Skeletons.

[PeterComputer]

I've never been too keen on skeletons, in-game or in real life. In fact, that's actually one of the things that put me off Skyrim and Fallout for so long.

 

But a few years back, when I finally decided to give New Vegas a try, I had a really good time. One of the few issues I always had with the game, was facing skeletons and grabbing loot on/near them. I knew what I was getting into when I started playing, but I guess I underestimated the amount of skeletons that there are in the game. That said, I built up my courage throughout the game, and got through the main game and DLCs slowly, but surely. There were some extremely uncomfortable moments in Dead Money and I just bailed out of the facilities in Big MT that had those skeletons in radiation suits, but somehow I lived to play another day.

 

Until Honest Hearts.

 

You see, near the start of Honest Hearts, you get given a quest to go gather some pieces of pre-war tech (if I'm remembering this correctly), and one of those items is in a school bus that fell into a pond. Thing is, between you and said item, is what looked like a child's skeleton floating in the water. I know I probably mistook a regular (most likely dismembered) skeleton for a child's one but no matter how hard I tried, I just couldn't bring myself to get close to the bus. So I didn't. I just... stopped playing. And I never finished that playthrough because of that.

 

To be fair, I was already kind of tired of playing NV after finishing all the other DLCs and I hadn't really heard many good things about Honest Hearts, but I wanted to play it so I could be done with the game and be satisfied with my playthrough. So even though I wasn't going into Honest Hearts with a healthy mentality, the child skeleton caught me off-guard and finally broke my desire to play any further.

 

Recently though, I've started a new run, this time with a few mods and although I'm enjoying the game once again, dealing with skeletons is actually tougher than I remembered and I'm afraid I'll just quit playing once again because of them.

As such, I'm writing this as a way to ask if there is a mod out there that replaces or just deletes skeletons from the game entirely. I've searched for one myself, but I haven't really been lucky, as you would expect.

So, if you know of a solution to my little problem, then by all means reply! I'm all ears.

 

 

TL;DR: Is there a mod that replaces/deletes skeletons? Thanks.

Edited September 6, 2017 by PeterComputer

[dubiousintent]

I feel for your situation. Nothing like a phobia to ruin your enjoyment.

 

If you are talking about "creatures", there is the mod "Zombie World NPC and creature replacer" by thelonewarrior, which replaces 99% of NPCs and most creatures with Ghouls.

 

However, if I understand you correctly what you are troubled by in "Honest Hearts" are not "skeleton creatures" added by a mod but "clutter": static objects used to dress that scene which are part of the vanilla game. Their files are located under the "Data\Meshes\clutter\skeleton" and "Data\Textures\clutter\skeleton" folders. There are 19 meshes and 24 textures. What is needed is to replace those with something that doesn't bother you.

 

I looked but didn't find anything replacing clutter like that. There was one mod: "Clutter B Gone" by sortitus, but it removes ALL clutter. You could try simply renaming those "skeleton" sub folders to something else (like "skeleton.fnv") and live with the red "!" marks where they would normally appear. Otherwise someone will need to create replacements for each of those files.

 

-Dubious-

Edited September 5, 2017 by dubiousintent

[vforvic]

I am pretty sure I can make a mod getting rid of the skeletons for you. I'll just get rid of most of them or replace them with some simple item.

[PeterComputer]

I was actually going to try renaming the skeleton folders, as Dubious suggested, but I wasn't expecting someone to volunteer to replace the skeletons! Honestly, from the bottom of my heart, thank you vforvic, that's really kind of you.

 

Exploring the wastes without worrying about having a skeleton possibly show up around any corner seems like a dream come true, I cannot thank you enough.

 

I can wait however long you need, so take your time.

Edited September 6, 2017 by PeterComputer

[YanL]

haha, I know a person who does not play any game that has spiders.

Funny, I love skeletons, as a kid I kept drawing lots of them.

I remembered now the author of Dust. The guy just hates the Geckos' eyes.

edit: A little help for vforvic. If I´m correct, all the skeletons are located in clutter/skeleton. BUT, there´s some skulls in the gore bags, that need to be take care off too. And of course, the living skeletons in OWB. Since the skulls are armors, you can replace by space helmets

Edited September 6, 2017 by YanL

[PeterComputer]

I also know a few people who won't touch Skyrim because of the spiders and I honestly cannot blame them, Frostbite Spiders are kind of terrifying. Weirdly enough though, I've never had a problem with gore, so you could replace skeletons with corpses and I'd probably be fine with it. The textureless armor works just fine too.

 

I do worry that replacing skeletons might interfere with some EVE animations and AWOP self-destruct collars. There are a couple of situations where corpses turn into skeletons for a split second or into bone fragments so I would assume that could cause a few conflicts.

 

That said, I'm not a modding expert so I might be wrong. If you need my load order, I can post it here.

[vforvic]

I put the mod up for download. If I missed anything or there are any bugs let me know and I'll fix it up. Skeletons No More

[PeterComputer]

Thank you! I already noticed some other people are also grateful for the mod, so that's really nice to see. So far, I haven't found any bugs, but I'll report back in case that happens.