Skyrim Special Edition + Fixes + Mod suggestions.

[Lynx98]

Hi everyone I was wondering, apart from using USSEP + CC fixes.

What other mods I could use in combination with those ? I already check the thread with additional mods that work well with USSEP but I wanted to know about more fixes and patches engine wise or scripting wise that could make my experience smoother.

And also a small question regarding if I should bother cleaning the master files and use BethINI. I feel like as much as I browse google, reddit and Nexus I can't have a definitive answer to this.

 

Thanks in advance and happy holidays everyone !

[Wasarion]

Hi.

I dont clean the masters anymore (or the new cc addons), but i do clean individual mods unless author say not to.

I use BetINI (basic high settings). But i dont think it is a must in any way... after all... most people dont use it.

When it comes to "fixes" and such things i follow the STEP Guide (i do not use all the mods in the guide but the first sections and the fixes are good, a good start and method).

[Lynx98]

I've mostly used this as a starting point for just fixes and patches https://dragonbornsfate.github.io/index.html

I mostly want mods that fixes things at a engine level or USSEP kind of mods such as Flora Respawn Fix

[Wasarion]

In that case for me the most important would be: USSEP, SSE Display Tweaks, SSE Engine Fixes.

I have just start looking at "Unofficial Skyrim Creation Club Content Patch" after i got AE. (said to be compatible with USSEP).

Another classic is ofc SMIM, one of the few model/texture mod i use (i tend to like vanilla). But you must install BBB4K Better Browner Bread, best mod ever!

A few small ones: "D13 faster get Up Stand Up" "Sound Hammering Sounds" "Immersive HUD"

 

 

[smr1957]

As to cleaning the Masters, I have personally moved away from recommending it, as in previous versions of the 4 series of xEdit, using autoclean on the Master files resulted in sections of world space going missing.  Though this has supposedly been fixed in the latest version of xEdit to be released, I am still leery of using it on the Master files, especially given how the team is researching and developing their changes for xEdit in this regard.  I should point out that in the initial test run (approximately 100+, hours) of my current build, which, at the time, had over 1500 plugins (merged down, of course, and with no .esl files at the time), I was not using cleaned Masters, and did not encounter any issues whatsoever.  And while I do not like to extrapolate from personal experiences, given the size of my build, if there were going to be issues, I would have expected to see some - and there were none.

 

As to auto-cleaning in general, unless you are using very old mods made with a much earlier version of the CK, or using mods that have not been properly ported from Oldrim to SSE, then autoclean is perfectly and absolutely safe to use on mods (though it should be pointed out that some mods may require "dirty" edits to work and should not be cleaned - though this is much less common these days with the newer CK - the general rule of thumb has been - in the past - to NOT clean mods unless the author or a trusted and reliable individual says it is safe to do so).

 

To answer your other question regarding what mods to use other than the Unofficial Patch and the Unofficial Creation Club Patch, there are almost as many answers as there are players - LOL!  The two unofficial Patches are what I would consider to be absolutely necessary - regardless of whether you choose to use any other mods or not.  However, you may want to look at this basic guide (it is one of the very best there is) as well as maybe scan through these three other topics pinned on the Steam SSE forum (which I am much more familiar with due to my long association with the Steam forums for Skyrim, so I often thing of posts there, first) - the first being one which details with why to use the Unofficial Patch and what it fixes.

 

First, the three pinned topics from Steam SSE forum:

Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch (USSEP) - A Must Have

Skyrim SE: Guides and Resources

Helpful Links and References - more of a resource to be skimmed through than something to actually read completely in one go

And the guide:

2021 Complete Load Order & Basics+ for Skyrim SE

 

And, of course, there are all the various resources on this site, to be found here:

TES V: Skyrim Special Edition - AFK Mods - Forum for all things relating to TES V: Skyrim Special Edition

 

As always, should you have a question or are unsure of something, ask first - it is easier to prevent a problem than it is to fix one!  Good luck and have fun!

 

[Scythe Bearer]

One point which is missed in all this is that quite a few mod authors will clean their mods before release.  It is a trick I picked up on my first sojourn into modding over a decade ago.  Now, I do not release a mod without cleaning it and then running a last test after that.  I, as do most authors, never want a mod to interfere with a players experience or to cause adverse affects.  

My point here, if you find a mod which needs to be cleaned, consider looking for an alternative.  An author who makes dirty mods may have other bad habits. 

[smr1957]

13 minutes ago, Scythe Bearer said:

One point which is missed in all this is that quite a few mod authors will clean their mods before release.  It is a trick I picked up on my first sojourn into modding over a decade ago.  Now, I do not release a mod without cleaning it and then running a last test after that.  I, as do most authors, never want a mod to interfere with a players experience or to cause adverse affects.  

My point here, if you find a mod which needs to be cleaned, consider looking for an alternative.  An author who makes dirty mods may have other bad habits. 

Yes, this, absolutely!  Mod authors have become much more diligent in good mod creation practices than they once were.  Still, there may be a mod that has a legitimate reason for not being cleaned - but with better creation practices, the authors will often state why they should not be cleaned and hopefully have a good reason for it.  And then there are the ones like Scythe Bearer refers to, above, who just don't know proper mod creation - and those are the authors (and mods) that you shouldn't go near no matter what.  So do your due diligence, and if not sure, ask.

[Tasheni]

Quote

My point here, if you find a mod which needs to be cleaned, consider looking for an alternative.  An author who makes dirty mods may have other bad habits. 

No, no, and another no. A mod becomes dirty if you just look into one vanilla record into ck without altering anything. You will not recognize if you don't use TESVEdit after every load in ck.

To provide dirty mods is mostly not by intention. It just happens. Because ck is a garbage. It is very unlikely that you know about cleaning if you start creating a mod and never did before. I learned it years later. And to conclude the author has bad habits is simply bullshit. Sorry if I sound a bit harsh. But I have the impression that with the huge amount of content that is available for Skyrim players are just effeminated. And don't realize anymore how incredible much work it is to create a good mod and under which terrible circumstances this happens. And all the hours spent on this... it happens that mod authors upload their mod without cleaning because of limited time, just forgot it or just did not know.

[Arthmoor]

2 hours ago, Tasheni said:

A mod becomes dirty if you just look into one vanilla record into ck without altering anything.

This isn't entirely true. While simply looking at something can cause a dirty edit to result from it, it's far more likely that an unnoticed change crept in. In either case, the mod must then be saved with the unwanted change.

There ARE in fact bad habits that will cause this to be more of a problem, and in some cases a few authors have weaponized this to overrun changes other people might want made to the same areas their mods occupy.

A few examples:

When checking navmeshes, don't click on any verts, edges, or triangles because this will induce a dirty edit.

Don't drag an object around through several cells in the CK. This will result in the CELL records becoming dirty edits.

Don't make an edit and then attempt to undo it using CTRL+Z, or attempt to reverse the edit by putting the unmodified values back. The CK will save this as a dirty edit.

To avoid the possibility of looking at something causing an unwanted edit because it moved slightly when you clicked on it, open a second session of the CK just for the purpose of looking at other parts of the game while the work you're actively doing sits in the first instance.

 

The bottom line is that many ways a dirty edit is caused are due to bad habits when using the CK. You may not be able to avoid this, but you can cut down on it quite a bit by just being a bit more careful.

In any case, there's literally years worth of information about cleaning mods out there. There's no real excuse for someone to ignore it or pretend the issue doesn't exist. Cleaning takes all of 2 minutes to do these days. It'll take 10 times that long to prepare a good mod page for the release. So there's no real excuse not to.

[DayDreamer]

Agreed. Cleaning unwanted edits has been part of modding since the beginning.

There's also a known problem with CK navmesh Finalize. It saves the navmesh for all adjacent cells. As other plugins are loaded for those cells, they will override the relevant changes.

That is, for your plugin M, the CK will save the navmesh for 2, 4, 6, and 8:

      2
    4 M 6
      8

If you load any plugin after M that is in cell 2, 4, 6, or 8, it will wipe out the navmesh for M. If you load any plugin before M that is in cell 2, 4, 6, or 8, then M will wipe out its navmesh changes.

That's why everybody needs to run the xEdit script Skyrim Clean navmesh, then save and quit. That will ensure navmesh changes at 2, 4. 6. or 8 become Identical To Master. Then run xEdit autoclean to remove them. You need to do it for any mods that aren't already properly cleaned, particularly those that add a building with a door.

[Scythe Bearer]

This I did not know.  Thank you.  I will now have to revisit the cleaning process for one of my mods.  Thank the deities I have it open right now, so ...

 

[Wasarion]

So why would all the mod authors that made the cc-mods in the AE bundle release them not cleaned? Loot say 40 of them are dirty.

[Scythe Bearer]

Your guess is as good as any. 

 

[Wasarion]

4 hours ago, DayDreamer said:

Agreed. Cleaning unwanted edits has been part of modding since the beginning.

There's also a known problem with CK navmesh Finalize. It saves the navmesh for all adjacent cells. As other plugins are loaded for those cells, they will override the relevant changes.

That is, for your plugin M, the CK will save the navmesh for 2, 4, 6, and 8:

      2
    4 M 6
      8

If you load any plugin after M that is in cell 2, 4, 6, or 8, it will wipe out the navmesh for M. If you load any plugin before M that is in cell 2, 4, 6, or 8, then M will wipe out its navmesh changes.

That's why everybody needs to run the xEdit script Skyrim Clean navmesh, then save and quit. That will ensure navmesh changes at 2, 4. 6. or 8 become Identical To Master. Then run xEdit autoclean to remove them. You need to do it for any mods that aren't already properly cleaned, particularly those that add a building with a door.

Will "QuickAutoClean" be sufficient?

[smr1957]

4 hours ago, Wasarion said:

So why would all the mod authors that made the cc-mods in the AE bundle release them not cleaned? Loot say 40 of them are dirty.

It is important to remember that LOOT is NOT a diagnostic tool, it is a sorting tool - and the information that it relies upon is what is supplied to the team, and that information is not always entirely accurate - it only informs if a mod is dirty according to the information it has, it does not know in and of itself whether those "dirty" edits are in fact needed to work or to ensure that the mod will work properly with future releases.  So, while one may use LOOT as an indicator as to what to check, the information itself as to what should or should not be cleaned is not something that you can take to the bank - or anywhere else (and the same applies to how it sorts mods - the larger the load order, the more necessary it is to actually check it yourself, and not rely upon LOOT to sort it 100% correctly).

 

Bottom line is that people need to check everything to the best of their ability - modding the game involves a lot of reading and work, and there is just no way around that.

[Arthmoor]

6 hours ago, Wasarion said:

So why would all the mod authors that made the cc-mods in the AE bundle release them not cleaned? Loot say 40 of them are dirty.

Because those are not mods, they are official DLC, and 3rd party utilities are not permitted for use when you are a contract employee for the company.

IMO they should be treated as such and not cleaned as a general rule.

[Wasarion]

7 minutes ago, Arthmoor said:

Because those are not mods, they are official DLC, and 3rd party utilities are not permitted for use when you are a contract employee for the company.

IMO they should be treated as such and not cleaned as a general rule.

Then i will leave them uncleaned just like the masters.

[Tasheni]

Quote

This isn't entirely true.

Maybe, but this is what I experienced with my mod. And I only notice it because I clean after every change before testing. That surprises me everytime.

Quote

open a second session of the CK just for the purpose of looking at other parts of the game while the work you're actively doing sits in the first instance.

That works? How do I open a second session?

Quote

That's why everybody needs to run the xEdit script Skyrim Clean navmesh, then save and quit. That will ensure navmesh changes at 2, 4. 6. or 8 become Identical To Master.

I didn't know that. For better understanding: I changed the navmesh of Military Camp Eastmarch, because my farm is there. I pulled the navmesh under the surface and put my own above it. If I clean my mod like this, my navmesh becomes part of the Skyrim.esm?

Quote

The bottom line is that many ways a dirty edit is caused are due to bad habits when using the CK.

I agree. But if you are a whole day productive with ck this happens. It's unwanted but it happens. I'm pretty sure most of the modders try to be reliable and make good work. Am I just to naive? Some people don't care, and I understand that. But I try my best to get it right.

[Arthmoor]

5 hours ago, Tasheni said:

That works? How do I open a second session?

Yep, in your CreationKitCustom.ini file, add these lines:

[General]
bAllowMultipleEditors=1
bAllowMultipleMasterLoads=1

That will both allow you to open more than one copy of the CK, and to use as many master files as needed (especially important for working on SE mods).

5 hours ago, Tasheni said:

I pulled the navmesh under the surface and put my own above it.

This is not a recommended practice. It's better to edit the existing navmeshes, assuming the edits won't result in somehow deleting a navmesh island from the cell.

[Lynx98]

So what I gather from this thread is that I shouldn't clean the masters. But also use BethINI

and a good selection of mods that focus primarily in fixing like I wanted would be: USSEP + CC Fix, Flora Fix, SSE Engine Fix, SSE Display Tweaks. Anything else I should add ?

[Scythe Bearer]

Personally, I would avoid the SSE Engine tweaks, in light of this recompiled engine.  I would wait to see what needs be fixed after the engine has been revved a few times an driven around the track. 

 

[DayDreamer]

On 12/3/2021 at 10:09 AM, Wasarion said:

Will "QuickAutoClean" be sufficient?

Did it clean out the navmeshes at 2, 4, 6, and 8? Otherwise, run the Clean navmesh script, save and quit. Then QAC.

[Arthmoor]

QAC ought to be sufficient, because any other changes made are likely relevant in some way.

[Sah]

ohhhh I went ballistic and cleaned everything

in saying that 20 hours after and have not had one issue or CTD ... am using only the unofficial patch for all my fixes

also am running the game using x3 enemies mod and it works a like a breeze (NO FPS drops)

BLOOD ON ICE this is the first time in 10 years that I have ever see the ending of the quest play out like this, its the first time I have seen Calixto exit the city an start stalking his victim from the stable and the around the city