Looking forward to the Beyond Skyrim stuff releasing in the next year to three years

 

So a few updates...Firstly, huge one,

https://www.wabbajack.org/

Wabbajack is an autoinstaller modlist. If you like the guides that completely improve skyrim in so many ways, this will auto download and install mod lists for you. What once took days can now be done in 2-3 hours. @VanRopen So you don't have to remod.

Secondly,

Apotheosis will be releasing soon.
https://www.moddb.com/mods/apotheosis

Features

• A dark, epic story set across hand crafted worlds, sprawling dungeons and exotic locations. Scour the 16 Realms of Oblivion, Dreamsleeve, home of the forgotten dead, and Battlespire.
• Unique setpiece boss encounters with challenging mechanics.
• Fully voice acted quests with memorable characters and personal stories.
• Discover and assemble rare and powerful artifacts, armors, outfits, spells and weapons.

Apotheosis leaves progression to the player. You are tasked with assembling the Heart of Lorkhan, but the means and order with which you do it is left up to the player. All 16 realms of Oblivion are available to tackle in any order you like.


Fun days ahead for Skryim Modding

 

Wasn't there some controversy around Wabbajack and mod author permission earlier or am I misremembering?

 

I've been waiting for Apotheosis to release for years now. It's been pushed back from 2017 to 2018, then to 2019, then to 2020... frankly I thought it'd be languishing in the half-finished state forever. I'm very happy that there's been some news in the shape of the environmental trailer released a month back - ever since the 3min trailer was released there's been complete radio silence afaik.

It seems a great mod to retire your character, sort of like Vigilant but hopefully with better gameplay - a victory lap, if you will, because Alduin is a complete pushover even with mods and the 'ending' is incredibly unsatisfying. I think I'll finally give the SSE a chance once (if?) it releases, which will hopefully be around the time Nvidia drops the 7nm cards.

There was and still is. I'm glad that Nexus is building their own modpack manager because they have the muscle to force the mod authors to stop being unreasonable asshats, which hopefully means modpacks will become mainstream rather than some weird, bootleg offshot.

Skyrim has quite possibly the worst modding 'community' amongst the popular modding scenes in existence. The sheer amount of drama, witch-hunting and general bullshittery is staggering. Many prolific authors would rather swallow glass than make a single part of their mod available to be changed/altered in any way whatsoever, even for trivial stuff like a compatibility patch or a patch that fixes bad spelling in quest mods. Some will attempt to get you banned on nexus if you release anything that touches their content in any way, shape, or form, even if it changes a single record in the entire mod.

As an example, Arthmoor (Alternate Start, USLEEP custodian, Open Cities and many more) wrote a monster blogpost shitting all over mod users that dare to use more than 10+ mods at once - his great insight as a chief Skyrim modder (anointed by god, I assume) allows him to know with absolute certainty that it is so, never mind the fact that many people run hundreds of mods at once and if the build is done properly it's definitely stable enough. He's been so toxic that he got banned from /r/skyrimmods entirely, which isn't exactly a community with a high entry barrier.
And there's a lot of Arthmoors in the Skyrim Nexus community.

Wabbajack is still in its infancy, especially since Nexus still hasn't really clarified how the modpacks etc should work. Nexus itself has their own modpack manager called Vortex in the works but nothing is really known about how it'll work or if particular mods are given the option to opt out.

As it is, I can't wait for it to take off - it took me about two weeks (!) to make my Oldrim modpack years back and it was pure hell to get everything working properly and make it so it's stable-ish. If I could get ~90% of the work done by a modpack that I'd just tweak to my liking, as you can do with Minecraft and such... well, hopefully it'll come soon.

 

Well, that's all well and good, but if most of the assets being used are yours, then... why are we mad that you're mad that your assets are being used?

 

This isn't a case that somebody took a graphical mod and built an entire new mod using the other mod's assets without asking the original author if it's cool - that's obviously a dick move.

I'm talking that there are authors that will literally try to get you banned on Nexus if you mention on their discord that they have some grammar mistakes in their mod, or those that are violently opposed to people making compatibility patches between different mods, because... reasons, I guess?

 

Aye, the community is definitely weird.

I’d throw out there thoughthat wabbajack isn’t technically a mod pack. It’s not that someone edited and the combined a bunch of mods as a single download.

Rather, Wabbajack automated mod list guides. It still downloads directly from nexus and the mod author. Etc. I do know they have removed certain mods at the request of authors, but I just don’t get that personally. You’re still getting the downloads, so why be a jerk about it?

As blob said, it’s different if you’re using their work to build your own and claim it. That’s obviously bad. But creating patches for combatibility between mods, combining mods to make it easier for others etc. is going to make the community healthier.

 

If you remember ApolloDown of epic overhaul fame, he had a breakdown over Trump and realized that there might be Trump voters who use his mods, so he pulled them that way his work wouldn't bring joy to Nazis.

His civil war, magic, UI, dragon combat, etc mods were some of the best you could find. He crafted a better dragon combat UI by chaining animations together manually, the madman.

 

@blob Using Wabbajack, I downloaded the Legacy of the Dragonborn guide, that took about 3-4 hours for 500+mods. Ran it. Completely stable. I then started tweaking and adding a few things i really enjoy that weren't present and it was still good. Rigmor of Cyrodiil caused infinite loading screen and I'm trying to fix that, but Rigmor is a mod that's very difficult to get working anyways because of how intensive it is.

Though just fyi you can't really run LOOT on Legacy of the Dragonborn guide because it's got premade setups.

 

So been playing around.

With Wabbajack, there are two primary modlists I'm enjoying. Lexy's Guide to Legacy of the Dragonborn and Total Skyrim Overhaul

Legacy is closer to your original game and is based around the Legacy of the Dragonborn mod. It adds more new lands and has frostfall/campfire compatibility. This is a bit easier, the character models are a bit nicer, and its storyline is solid.


Total Skyrim Overhaul is a hardmode mod. It makes blocking/parrying a thing and removes health regeneration your character. Adds things like stamina decreasing if you're not trained in heavy armor but are wearing heavy armor, etc.

All in all, i'm enjoying Total Skyrim More. There are more modlists being developed. This is a great time to head back to skyrim and really experince the top tier mods without too much work of modding it yourself.

 

It was funny running into you over there Arthellion, the internet is a small world sometimes.

For the record, TSO has LotD as well. The big difference (other than Frostfall as you mentioned) is Lexy's list uses OMEGA/Enai's gameplay mods, while TSO has a version of Requiem (1.9.8) and AZ Tweaks that Total has ported to SSE and tweaked. He's currently waiting for Requiem 4.0 to come out to do a big update and rework the list around that.

Some of the Wabbajack devs are working on interesting lists too, like a modified Lexy's with more graphics mods and things like Wintersun, another is working on a list using mods from Loverslab which should be... interesting. Definitely a huge advancement for modding, there is also lists for Fallout 4, New Vegas and Oblivion.

 

Nice. I didn't know about the plan for a Requiem 4.0. That should be awesome. The only thing I really miss from Lexy's that TSO doesn't have is frostfall. That said, I've found TSO easier to tweak and add some of my things without damaging stability too much as opposed to lexy. This is more due to TSO having 193 plugins and Lexy's 230 something so there's less chance of it going over the 255 limit.

Mainly adding texture things.

The loverslab modlist....is interesting. Reading over it, its like a Rule34/Hentai Nerd's dream lol. I won't be downloading that one though I respect the work that goes into creating it.

 

Plugin limit only applies to .esp files so you should be fine on texture mods anyway. There is also merging mods and .esl files to get around the plugin limit but they can be a bit more involved, but yeah it's almost a thing of the past now.

Total doesn't like survival mods because he doesn't think they fit into Skyrim, and just introduce tedium. It doesn't really make sense to be freezing to death when you just left a city and all the other NPCs standing around are fine. Food gives passive buffs and so does sleeping in TSO so you'll still have reason to use those mechanics at least. Frostfall can also be a stability/compatibility nightmare at times, chesko hasn't worked on it for a while. For example there is currently a crash upon leaving the LotD museum in Lexy's list because of some weird conflict between Frostfall and a mesh in the dome of the museum roof.

 

Aye yeah. I respect the view on it. I personally enjoy the survival elements and often times just have fun playing the game trying to survive as a hunter in the wilderness, rarely visiting cities.

Different strokes and all that.

But yeah, I'm not a huge fan of the Fair Skin Texture for females used by TSO. It makes the NPCS look almost too ethereal/white. So been testing some different ones. Leaning towards Bijinn's skin, but haven't had time to really sit down and take a look at it.

 

Some fun screenshots from Total Skyrim Overhaul

 

Upcoming Modlist Nolvus Ascension. Should be releasing some time in Q1 of 23.

 

Nolvus 5 Beta dropped. Some screenshots:

 

My modlist has been pretty static for a year or so. What exactly is Nolvus?

 

Here’s the link. Version 5 beta is available for Patreons https://www.nolvus.net/

basically an auto installer list of about 1800 mods.

here’s a few showcases

 

Looks pretty nice, I'll admit. I've been out of Skyrim modding for a bit so I checked the Wabbajack discord and they're not really fans, understandably so as it sounds like the guy decided to make his own installer (with in app ads lol) once he realized he wasn't allowed to paywall a Wabbajack list. That community understandably takes a pretty dim view on putting mods behind a paywall, especially stuff created with the Creation Kit which says charging for stuff made with it is against terms of service - they're not keen to bring the wrath of Bethesda down on the modding community if charging for stuff using their tools gets out of hand. I believe it's also against Nexus TOS to paywall content and still receive donation points for it so we'll see how that goes.

Not to mention it sounds like he's including stolen assets (Jedi trees mod) and it sounds like some stuff is just flat out broken like the Companions questline. Plus without having looked at the patching myself, someone who's opinion I trust did and apparently it's 95% bashed patches so a ton of content from those 1800 mods won't be seen in game.