Solving a few issues in Harrowhark’s playthrough

I alluded to this in the post I put up yesterday about Harrowhark’s latest session, but wanted to call this out separately here: I got a solution to my missing MCMs!

User Grayblood on the Nexus Mods Discord helpfully pointed me at the Menu Maid 2 mod, recommending this as a way to fix my missing MCMs rather than trying to use Jaxonz’s MCM Kicker. Menu Maid has several dependencies, but I had most of them already except for Powerofthree’s Tweaks. So I installed both Menu Maid 2 and Powerofthree’s Tweaks… and just like that, boom, my missing MCMs showed up.

However, this wasn’t the only problem I’ve now solved in Harrow’s playthrough.

Bedlam Jobs broken in Thieves Guild Alternate Routes

First big one I’ve bitched about repeatedly: Delvin refusing to give me Bedlam Jobs in the Thieves Guild. I went digging more on this tonight, looking at the forum posts on Thieves Guild Alternate Routes, as well as its original version–since the mod I’m running is a port over to Skyrim Special Edition, of the original. And I poked around looking for Reddit threads or Steam forum posts about this, too.

And this is what I learned: apparently, the mod code that’s in charge of letting you choose one city at a time to run for the Guild jobs, or run them all concurrently, can get thrown off if there are other mods that also edit information about cities. In a couple of places, I saw workarounds of moving the Thieves Guild mod down in the load order.

I thought about my load order, and realized that the main thing I’m running that actively edits cities is Dawn of Skyrim.

So just to see if it would work, I got into Vortex and figured out how to set a custom sort rule to explicitly tell it that the Thieves Guild mod explicitly has to load after Dawn of Skyrim. And then resorted the mods. Did this first on the VM to see if it would work–and it did. Delvin was suddenly able to give me Bedlam Jobs properly again, at least for purposes of the jobs I was doing in Solitude.

Noting for benefit of Future Me as well as any other Skyrim players who come across this post, this is what I had to do:

1. Saved out my game so it wouldn’t be active
2. In Vortex, under Mods on the sidebar, clicked on Plugins (because this is where load order is actually controlled)
3. Clicked on the Manage Rules button on the toolbar
4. On the first Select Plugin dropdown, scrolled down the menu and chose tcbm.esp
5. On the middle dropdown, selected Must Load After
6. On the second Select Plugin dropdown, scrolled down the menu and chose dawn of skyrim.esp
7. Clicked the Add button, then the Close button
8. Clicked the Sort Now button on the toolbar, and confirmed that the Thieves Guild mod was now after Dawn of Skyrim in the listed load order
9. Reloaded from save and went to Riften to test by talking to Delvin
10. Success!

Here’s the caveat, though. When I finished up doing Solitude, including running the Dainty Sload quest, I swapped off to trying to run jobs in Whiterun. And the problem reproduced again.

So I tried a couple other things at that point.

One: I got back into Vortex, and this time I removed the rule I’d created in the previous testing. Instead, I poked into Vortex’s Groups functionality, and assigned the Thieves Guild mod to a group called “Late Loaders”. Once I did this, and resorted my load order again, this chucked the mod clear down to the bottom of the list.

This however did not entirely fix the problem. Because I couldn’t get Delvin to give me a Bedlam job concurrent with the Sweep job I had from Vex.

Then I realized that the previous successful conclusion of the Solitude jobs was a situation where I finished a Sweep job for Vex first. So I tried running Vex’s standalone Sweep job, then bounced back to Riften and tried again. This time, I did get a Bedlam job as well as another Sweep job.

I’m not a hundred percent sure that moving the mod’s position in my load order really addressed this problem. But I’m fairly sure it did, just because I tried repeatedly earlier in the playthrough to get Bedlam jobs from Delvin for Solitude.

And if I just need to do a workaround of doing a solo Sweep for Vex first before doing paired Sweep and Bedlam for the rest of the Thieves Guild jobs in this run, I can work with that. I’ve now finished up Markarth and Solitude for the Guild, and just need to do Whiterun and Windhelm to finish off.

Setting skills Legendary with the Y button

And lastly, I found a workaround if not an actual fix for another thing I’d noticed–that I couldn’t set Harrow’s Smithing skill Legendary. Turns out this is not actually a mod problem, it’s a bug with Skyrim itself.

And this is actually also a bug I noticed during Shenner’s run as well, though I didn’t remember this until I went back and checked her posts. But yeah, I wrote about it before.

From what I’m seeing in Reddit posts I’ve found this time, the issue is just when you’re playing with controllers. What’s not clear to me here is, if it’s a bug only in the PC version if you happen to be playing with a controller, or whether it also repros on other consoles. My initial read on this is, it’s probably just a PC-side bug? I’d think that if it was completely broken on any platform that requires a controller, Bethesda would have made a greater effort to fix this?

I can at least say here that I’ve definitely now reproduced this problem on both the Deck and in my VM on my Mac. And for all intents and purposes here, the Steam Deck kind of counts as “PC + controller”, I think.

The workaround of using the spacebar does help. And this time through, at least, I realized that I could remap a key on the back of the Deck to actually be “Spacebar”. So now I don’t have to actually switch over to the VM if I happen to be in the middle of playing on the Deck, and want to set one of Harrow’s skills Legendary.

So all in all this playthrough is still not entirely bug-free, but I’m pleased to have found some outright solutions for some things, and workarounds for others. This should see me safely to the end of Harrow’s run!

Notes

• Editing to add 3/28/2028 11:44pm: Hit Whiterun after I wrote up this post, only to discover that Delvin’s ability to give me Bedlam Jobs was still erratic. He gave me one for Whiterun, but refused to give me one for the final paired job with Vex’s last Sweep Job. So I wound up doing a Numbers Job instead. I’ll have to see how running Windhelm winds up behaving.