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LOD: acronym for Level Of Detail. Ingame, around the player, the closer terrain and objects are fully rendered, meaning they are using regular full-poly (and eye-candy) meshes. For short: the more all this stuff is distant from the player, the more it is replaced with simplified meshes in order to save performance. As the distance from the player increases, the LOD goes from 4 (very detailed), then 8 (less detailed), then 16 (even less detailed), and then finally 32 (poorly detailed). LOD files are present in the 'Skyrim - Meshes.bsa' archive. DLCs also bring their own LOD files in their dedicated archives. Once you have extracted the archives, and for the tamriel worldspace, you can find : a bunch of files in meshes/terrain/tamriel with the '.btr' extension type. They are the landscape LOD meshes. a bunch of files in meshes/terrain/tamriel/objects with the '.bto' extension type. They are the objects LOD meshes (mainly rocks and buildings) Both can be opened in Nifskope , but let's have a look at the objects '.bto' files. Their names obey to a kind of logic : they're all named TamrielN.X.Y.bto, where N is the accuracy of the LOD (from 4/very detailed, 8, 16 and 32/poorly detailed), and X and Y are the coordinates on the map. The problem is : is there a way to know in which .bto file I can find a specific building/town ? The answer is YES ! I made custom maps for the level 4, 8, 16, 32 LOD files in order to save a lot of time when looking for the coordinates. All maps for both Skyrim and Solstheim are available at nexus here for Legendary Edition and here for Special Edition. As this is a modder's resource/helper, the files are absolutely identical for both SLE and SSE... I hope this can be useful for modders who are interested about LOD in these worldspaces. If you have suggestions for improvements or conveniency, feel free to express. Please have a look at this topic if you want to learn more about LOD files generation and download fixed vanilla files.

The unofficial DLC patches are currently being distributed as language localized ESP files. What does this mean? It means instead of the ESP being English-only, we are now shipping them using String files found in the Data\Strings folder inside each BSA. What this allows us to do is have one ESP with all of the important changes done and then include standalone translation files to provide support for various languages in the game. Bethesda officially provides support for Spanish, French, Italian, and German in addition to English. When our unofficial patch betas are uploaded, these 4 additional languages will be considered minimum requirements before we release them as live updates on Steam, Nexus, DC, and TESA. To that end, we need translators to assist with this. If you're fluent in Spanish, French, Italian, or German, please let us know. We'd like to be able to establish some reliable contacts to go to when the time comes to update these on each release. There are a few utilities out there that will make doing this work easier. StrEdit, TESVSnip (please only use this for making String files!!!!), SkyrimStringTranslator, and TES5Edit. As long as whatever is used can produce viable String files the game can read, that's fine. The beauty of the String system is that one file can support multiple languages, so we can also support inclusion of language files for Polish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Czech, and any number of other languages. While we will not hold up a live release if one of these languages is not available, we are willing to update a live release after it's made to include as many languages as people feel the need for. So if you know someone who can help, or you yourself can help, feel free to let us know here. Especially if you'd like to become a regular translator for one of the DLC patches. Sadly, due to size issues, it isn't currently feasible to do this for the main USKP since compressed BSA files break the string support in the game. Also, can't stress this enough, DO NOT issue translated ESP files based off of the DLC patches! This will screw up the game text in a big way.