Help restoring vanilla version of an overwritten file?

[Daarka]

Edit: SOLVED!! Thank you so much for the help!!

 

 

Hey! So this is what I'm struggling with today.

I've always used the "Demon" eye color (vanilla, the last one on the slider) that turns my dark elf's eyes completely black. For reasons that are irrelevant, I had to do a complete clean uninstall-reinstall of everything, and in the process, I reinstalled the Fair Skin Complexion mod with the eye-replacer addon included when it hadn't been prior. That mod specifically overwrites the "demon" eye colors (and only them, because of course), so after playing for a little bit... I realized that hey, wait, my elf suddenly had pink eyes and white sclera and definitely not what I picked for her.

 

After a bit of sleuthing, I figured out which mod was to blame for the change. So I uninstalled it, which seemed like the next natural step. Load up my game, and... still pink eyes.

 

Mind you, I use Vortex and I do deploy my load out after every change, so by all logic, the change should have taken effect because the guilty mod was no longer loaded into the game.

 

A lot more hunting and pulling my hair out later (along with several purges and reinstallations of that mod with the proper addon settings selected, intending to exclude the eye replacer from the install), I'm starting to heavily suspect that the issue is that this mod thoroughly replaced the vanilla texture. It's the only reason I can think of that would explain why the pink eyes remain even after the mod has been super duper scrubbed from the entire system. So... the question then is how to amend that.

 

Using TES5Edit, I hunted down the problem file (FormID: 000401A7), though... I'm not entirely convinced that means anything for me fixing this. I thought maybe I could delete that file in TES5Edit, but it doesn't appear to give me that option, though I've been able to remove content that way before. My hope was that, if I took out one of the vanilla files, Steam would reinstall what was missing the next time I launched the game? But maybe that would have failed, I'm not sure.

 

Regardless, does anyone have any idea how I can address this? Would verifying my files via Steam reset the eye texture to vanilla? Is there some other way to do that, to overwrite the mod's changes back to the vanilla version? I'm losing my mind and my poor elf looks like a dork so any help would be dearly appreciated. Let me know if there's any other info I need to provide, I'm not even sure what would be relevant here.

 

Thanks in advance!

 

(I also made an infographic to illustrate both the matter at hand as well as my distress)

Edited March 18, 2021 by Daarka

[HadToRegister]

Did you try making a rule on the MODS tab to have Your Eye mod LOAD AFTER the mod that is overwriting your eye mod?

[IsharaMeradin]

Did you try making a rule on the MODS tab to have Your Eye mod LOAD AFTER the mod that is overwriting your eye mod?

Daarka stated that they were using a stock / vanilla eye which accidentally got overwritten by a mod and despite uninstalling said mod, the eyes never reverted back.

 

@Daarka

What you found with FormID 000401A7 in TES5Edit is not a file but rather a form / record entry within a plugin. The initial 00 indicates that the form / record originates in the Skyrim.esm. If the only plugin using that record is Skyrim.esm, then you have a loose file that is overriding the default. If you look at form 000401A7 in TESEdit, you should see an entry labeled TNAM - Texture Set. Hold Ctrl and click on the assigned entry. This will take you to the Texture Set record used by the Eye record. Find the Textures (RGB/A) section. Make a note of the file paths and check to see if they happen to be in the data folder.

 

If you do find the files in the data folder, you'll have to figure out what mod is supplying it. You can always try manually deleting from the data folder, but if it comes from a mod installed by Vortex it might reappear the next time you deploy your mods.

 

Do note, that the offending texture files could be packed in a BSA that is loading after the Skyrim BSAs. If this is the case, your only recourse is to test "new games" with fewer and fewer mods until the eye becomes normal. Then add mods back in one at a time until the eye goes "bad" again. Check the last added mod by itself and confirm that that indeed is the culprit. For this particular purpose a "new game" can simply be using "coc qasmoke" in the console and then using "showracemenu" in the console. After all, in this particular case, you are only concerned about the appearance of that one eye.

 

All that said, if you do have a plugin overriding the eye record or the texture set record, you can remove that record from the plugin. You just can't remove records from Skyrim.esm or the DLC ESM files

[Daarka]

 

Did you try making a rule on the MODS tab to have Your Eye mod LOAD AFTER the mod that is overwriting your eye mod?

Daarka stated that they were using a stock / vanilla eye which accidentally got overwritten by a mod and despite uninstalling said mod, the eyes never reverted back.

 

@Daarka

What you found with FormID 000401A7 in TES5Edit is not a file but rather a form / record entry within a plugin. The initial 00 indicates that the form / record originates in the Skyrim.esm. If the only plugin using that record is Skyrim.esm, then you have a loose file that is overriding the default. If you look at form 000401A7 in TESEdit, you should see an entry labeled TNAM - Texture Set. Hold Ctrl and click on the assigned entry. This will take you to the Texture Set record used by the Eye record. Find the Textures (RGB/A) section. Make a note of the file paths and check to see if they happen to be in the data folder.

 

If you do find the files in the data folder, you'll have to figure out what mod is supplying it. You can always try manually deleting from the data folder, but if it comes from a mod installed by Vortex it might reappear the next time you deploy your mods.

 

Do note, that the offending texture files could be packed in a BSA that is loading after the Skyrim BSAs. If this is the case, your only recourse is to test "new games" with fewer and fewer mods until the eye becomes normal. Then add mods back in one at a time until the eye goes "bad" again. Check the last added mod by itself and confirm that that indeed is the culprit. For this particular purpose a "new game" can simply be using "coc qasmoke" in the console and then using "showracemenu" in the console. After all, in this particular case, you are only concerned about the appearance of that one eye.

 

All that said, if you do have a plugin overriding the eye record or the texture set record, you can remove that record from the plugin. You just can't remove records from Skyrim.esm or the DLC ESM files

 

 

Oh gosh, thank you so much! What an informative answer!

 

So I'm mostly following along with you, I went to the file location and sure enough, that pink eye was there instead of the inky black demon eye;

 

I've already done an overwhelming amount of purging and reinstalling stuff getting my game to work--and if that's the only solution here, I'll suck it up and manage. But I am mildly desperate for a less tedious solution, if one exists.

 

Would there be any way to handle it just within Vortex, maybe? Like disabling everything and then enabling one mod, deploying, monitoring this folder to see if the texture image updates--that kind of thing? Or am I sounding ridiculous?

 

Admittedly, I'm not familiar with the "coc gasmoke" thing; would I just put that in the console right on the menu screen? Followed by "showracemenu"?

 

I could have sworn the Fair Skin Complexion mod was the culprit, since they specifically mention "Adds new eye color variations by replacing 'blood shot eyes' textures." ; on dark elves, I think the slot for bloodshot eyes is used instead for the demon ones? But I can't figure out anything else I have that would be messing with the eyes--and specifically only that texture. Don't get me wrong, I'm still gonna test it as you've instructed. I'm just baffled, since it seems like the obvious answer, yet I can't actually manage to undo it.

 

 

Oh--actually, this is probably important to mention. In my messing around a minute ago, I had been trying to use the Skyrim Restore mod (with my actual files extremely well backed up) in an attempt to essentially freshen up the vanilla files with clean, as-god-intended versions. I was really hoping that would reset the eye texture to the black demon one. I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what all the mod succeeded in doing; it said it successfully completed backing up my files and restoring my game to vanilla, but the program was... juuuust slightly weird enough that I'm not 100% confident it was water-tight. All the same, when I booted up a game, I found it had left me truly vanilla with absolutely zero mods registered. And that damn pink eye was still there. Worth noting: part of this experiment was that (after religious backing-up) I deleted the entirety of my Skyrim folder and had Steam rebuild it from scratch.

 

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. This eye in turning into my own personal Tell Tale Heart.

[IsharaMeradin]

The thing to remember is that Vortex uses a profiling system that allows one to have different mods or different options of the same mods installed on each profile. Unlike MO2 which puts the files in separate folders and only exposes it to programs ran through MO2. Vortex creates links that any program can see whether or not it was ran from inside Vortex. Whether or not any program is capable of following the link and taking care of the actual file in its separate folder, depends on the program. You probably need to dig into the Vortex folders and find where it stores the "installed" files and delete the unwanted textures there.

 

Not being a user of Vortex, I cannot assist in that regard.

[HadToRegister]

 

 

 

Oh gosh, thank you so much! What an informative answer!

 

So I'm mostly following along with you, I went to the file location and sure enough, that pink eye was there instead of the inky black demon eye;

 

 

Oh--actually, this is probably important to mention. In my messing around a minute ago, I had been trying to use the Skyrim Restore mod (with my actual files extremely well backed up) in an attempt to essentially freshen up the vanilla files with clean, as-god-intended versions. I was really hoping that would reset the eye texture to the black demon one. I'll be honest, I'm not entirely sure what all the mod succeeded in doing; it said it successfully completed backing up my files and restoring my game to vanilla, but the program was... juuuust slightly weird enough that I'm not 100% confident it was water-tight. All the same, when I booted up a game, I found it had left me truly vanilla with absolutely zero mods registered. And that damn pink eye was still there. Worth noting: part of this experiment was that (after religious backing-up) I deleted the entirety of my Skyrim folder and had Steam rebuild it from scratch.

 

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. This eye in turning into my own personal Tell Tale Heart.

 

 

 

What you need to do is find your Vortex Mod Staging Folder, by looking here, for the path and folder name.

 

 

 

 

Then navigate to that folder, and do a search for eyeamber.* eyebrownbloodshot.* etc.

When you find the files, look at what folder they're in, because the folder will be named after the mod that contains them.

 

Then you just need to go into Vortex and uninstall that mod, instead of disabling/uninstalling/reinstalling them all one-by-one

 

 

 

[Daarka]

What you need to do is find your Vortex Mod Staging Folder, by looking here, for the path and folder name.

 

Then navigate to that folder, and do a search for eyeamber.* eyebrownbloodshot.* etc.

When you find the files, look at what folder they're in, because the folder will be named after the mod that contains them.

 

Then you just need to go into Vortex and uninstall that mod, instead of disabling/uninstalling/reinstalling them all one-by-one

Oh!! Oh I was wrong!! It's not the Fair Skin Complexion mod, it's actually the 2K version of CBBE!

 

Vortex\skyrim\mods\All-in-One CBBE HDT AP 4.0 Standard Edition (2K Optimized)\textures\actors\character\eyes

 

Oh my gosh, no wonder uninstalling Fair Skin Complexion did nothing!

 

So after investigating, technically it was Fair Skin, but the problem was that CBBE also has Fair Skin addons in it's installation process. So basically I had been installing the same mod twice, and not understanding why turning off one of them didn't remove the features. It was because the Fair Skin features baked into CBBE were still turned on!

 

All I had to do was uninstall CBBE in Vortex, then reinstall it + the 2K version, and make sure I didn't select "Eyes" under the Fair Skin addon options. And my girl is back to normal!!

 

Thank you so much to both you and @IsharaMeradin for your help!! :D

[IsharaMeradin]

Glad you got it sorted.

 

Looks like there was more than just the eyes that were off. The eyes are the most obvious but when looking at the two side by side, there are some other facial differences too.

Probably something to do with the order of various mods / files in your efforts to fix the eye coloring. As long as you're happy with the end result, that is all that matters.

[HadToRegister]

Glad it's working!

 

Just one quick note.

I remembered that I could've gotten you to the Mod Staging Folder a lot quicker, by just having you go to the MOD tab in Vortex, and RIGHT-CLICK on any of the mods and pick "Open in File Manager" which would've opened a new window INSIDE the Mod Staging Folder, rather than having to navigate to it like I initially told you.