Modding
Main category for posts about modding, on Windows or Steam Deck
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A few more thoughts about Inigo and dragon souls
I got up this morning realizing I’d identified another core reason why Inigo harshing on the Dragonborn for absorbing dragon souls bugs me.
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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.
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Minor mod problem with Bards College mod
I’m running the Bards College Reborn/Student of Song Bards College overhaul mod, and am mostly loving it immensely!
But I ran into one minor problem with it, and I’m documenting this here for purposes of linking off to this post from the question I’m putting up on Nexus about this.
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Mod weirdness I can’t solve in Harrowhark’s playthrough
Here’s a post about three problems I’m seeing in my current modded playthrough with Harrowhark. I’ve been poking at this for a bit, and so far, haven’t been able to solve these issues for the most part (though at least in terms of issue number two in this post, I may have a workaround?).
Advice from experienced Skyrim modders is welcome here. Talk to me if you have suggestions!
Issues described behind the fold.
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Spoiler-free short review of the Forgotten City mod
When I put out a call for what mods were recommended for a modded Skyrim run, one of the strongest recs I got was for one called The Forgotten City. This thing got a Writer’s Guild award for the strength of its plot, and the team that created it went pro and turned the overall plot structure into a standalone game, even.
I can now say that I’ve run this mod in Harrow’s run, and I enjoyed it immensely. I had a couple of small quibbles with it, but these were minor quibbles indeed. So if you’re in a position to run mods on Skyrim, I do highly recommend you consider checking this out.
I’ll be going into depth about my experiences with the mod in Harrow’s next full post. But by definition, that post will be chock full of spoilers. If you think you might want to run this mod at all, you might want to skip that post until you do.
In this post, I will limit myself to spoiler-free commentary, just enough to offer up a few tidbits and let you decide if you think the mod sounds like fun to you.
Deets (again, spoiler-free) behind the fold.
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Notes on future mods I’ll want for Survival Mode
What I’ve learned from my experience with Survival Mode in Kendis’ run, and my decision yesterday to bail on it, is that:
- I really still like the overall idea of Survival Mode, but,
- As implemented in Skyrim’s Creation Club/Anniversary Edition content, it just makes things too damned difficult for my personal ability to enjoy.
I will probably take another crack at Survival Mode in a future playthrough. But this will depend entirely upon doing a modded playthrough specifically set up for it, a thing which, as I’ve said before on this blog many times, I can’t do on the Switch. So this will have to be a thing I do on the Deck and/or the Win11 VM on my Mac.
And I’m not going to try to bodge Survival Mode into Harrowhark’s current run–she’s already fairly well in on a playthrough, and she’s got challenges as it is since I’m playing her as a vampire.
But here are some notes about what mods Future Me is probably going to want to have for a modded Survival Mode playthrough.
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Issue with no controller buttons on screen SOLVED
A little while ago today I did a post lamenting a problem I was having with my Oblivion install on my Steam Deck showing me keyboard prompts on screen rather than controller button prompts. I am delighted to report, as of this post, that this issue is solved.
A helpful user on Mastodon (all hail @blake@fosstodon.org) told me that the issue was that the controller config I had on the Deck was sending keyboard inputs, not controller inputs. And that what I had to do was to change to a configuration that sent controller inputs instead.
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No controller button prompts on screen in Oblivion
EDITING TO ADD 1/22/2023 8:25pm, for anybody that lands on this post: I’ve actually found a solution to this issue. Please have a look at this later post.
So once I got Oblivion running on my Steam Deck, I thought I’d try to do the same thing with it that I did with Shenner’s run in Skyrim: i.e., go ahead and mod it, but very lightly, sticking to just bug fix mods, or ones that provide critical enhancements to just improve the game’s quality of play on a modern device.
However, I’m running into an issue I need help with.
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Some notes on additional mods I want to try
Both of my current playthroughs, Kendis and Harrowhark, are cluing me to additional aspects of Skyrim I feel like I’d definitely like to address with further modding. This post is to do a roundup of those things for my later reference.
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Mods for Harrowhark’s Playthrough
My latest Skyrim playthrough, launched on my Win11 VM and which is also running on the Steam Deck as my whim dictates, stars Harrowhark the Imperial. She is named after Harrowhark Nonagesimus in Tamsyn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, and it is very likely she will also wind up being my vampire/necromancer playthrough. I expect she and Serana are going to get along very well indeed.
This, however, is not her first official playthrough post. This is the post in which I’ll document, for the curious, what mods I am running. Because this is also my first official modded Skyrim playthrough!
I have quite a few mods installed on the VM for this–nearly 80 in all. I’m not going to list them here in the actual load order, because the load order is a thing dictated by my mod manager of choice, Vortex. I took pretty much the load order Vortex set up for these mods as I installed them.
Instead, I’ll break them out into categories here. And this post is long, so the full list is behind the fold!