Survival Mode R11 config for Tuxborn 1.2 (Campfire version)

This proposed R11 config for Tuxborn 1.2 is to add support for Survival Mode runs. This version of the config is for using Campfire as the camping mod. For those interested in Campsite instead of Campfire, have a look at Survival mode R11 config for Tuxborn 1.2 (Campsite version) instead.

Also, see Survival Mode R11 config for Tuxborn 1.2 (SunHelm settings) for my intended setup for SunHelm’s portion of this configuration.

This config is confirmed to work so far on Tuxborn 1.2 beta 3.

Current expected list of mods and patches

All setup info called out on the Survival Mode R11 config for Tuxborn 1.2 (SunHelm setup) page is relevant here.

In addition to the SunHelm mods, note that Campfire is heavier weight than Campsite. So as a result, there are more patches I recommend considering adding for a Campfire-based version of this setup. Here is the full list of things I recommend adding to Tuxborn’s load order, in their expected order:

• Campfire
• CC Fishing Campfire Patch: This lets you cook fish added by the AE at any campfire (multiple patches appear to be available to do this, so if you don’t want this one in particular, find any other one that you want to try)
• Campfire – Script Optimization: Fixes some script-level issues, recommend trying this given Campfire being script-heavy
• Campfire – Bits and Pieces Hoarding Fix: Recommend this one because I personally used it in a pre-Tuxborn playthrough, fixes an issue with Sayma in Bits and Pieces spawning infinite copies of Campfire items in her store inventory
• CS’ Campfire Item Descriptions: Suggest this one because Tuxborn does make an effort to give descriptions to things that don’t otherwise have them visible in your inventory, and this would be in keeping with that
• Campfire Skillrate Alternative: Since we have Static Skill Leveling in our load order, this makes Campfire play nicer with that
• Denji – Custom Skills Menu for CSF v3: First of two mods needed to plug skill trees for both Campfire and SunHelm into the custom skills menu Tuxborn is already using
• Survival Skills – Custom Skills Framework for Campfire and Add-Ons: Second of two mods to plug both Campfire’s and SunHelm’s custom skill trees into the custom skills menu Tuxborn is already using
• Campfire Powers Decluttered: Creates a unified “Resourcefulness” power so that various abilities from Campfire can all be invoked from the same overall power, and cut down on menu clutter
• Campfire Sunhelm Water Integration: Eying this because it merges SunHelm’s Fill Bottles power into Campfire’s Resourcefulness power, added by the previous mod

Optional: Skills of the Wild and related requirements and patches

The Survival Skills patch in the above list leave four empty slots in the Custom Skills UI. Those are meant to be filled by the four skill trees from Skills of the Wild. So with that in mind, everything in this section pertains to including Skills of the Wild in the setup. If you decide you don’t want these mods, I consider them optional for getting a Campfire-based config working. So if you do want to skip them, you can ignore this entire section of the guide.

If you want to also try Skills of the Wild in this configuration, the following are mods I recommend for this. Make sure that when you’re running the installers from the above list, you take appropriate options to account for the presence of Skills of the Wild. This means the installer for SunHelm, and also the one for Survival Skills – Custom Skills Framework for Campfire and Add-Ons. Those two installers should be run after you install Skills of the Wild, so that they can pick up on its presence and set appropriate options.

• Dynamic Activation Key: Requirement for Simple Hunting Overhaul.
• Simple Hunting Overhaul: This is a requirement for Skills of the Wild to work. It adds additional hunting functionality to the game. It includes two optional patches that are also relevant to our load order, on its Files tab on Nexus:
  • SHO – Beyond Skyrim Bruma Patch
  • SHO – Gourmet Patch
• Skills of the Wild: This fills in the four empty slots in the custom skills section added by the Survival Skills mod linked to above. It adds skill trees meant to enhance your experience of adventuring in the wilderness. SotW includes the following patches that I recommend also adding to the load order:
  • SOTW Inventory Injector Patch: because we’re using Inventory Interface Information Injector in the beta build)
  • RE-enable Map GPS (Visible Map Cursor): use this if it annoys you that SotW hides the cursor showing your map position when you’re looking at the map
• Skills of the Wild – Re-enable Compass: Skills of the Wild turns off the default compass completely and makes you have to unlock a perk before you’ll see it. If you don’t like that, this patch will allow you to have the compass back on by default out of the gate. This is a separate patch from the RE-Enable Map GPS patch provided by SotW itself.
• Skills of the Wild Trainers: What it says on the tin. Sets up chefs, stablemasters, and hunters as trainers to let you buy training in the Skills of the Wild skill trees.

Why I’ll be using the Skills of the Wild mods

In my testing, I saw that Skills of the Wild enhances the parts I like about Survival Mode: the immersion and RP aspects. I really like that it enhances hunting, riding horses, and cooking. And in particular, I like that it adds an extra level of consideration for when you kill a wild animal. You will spend a little extra time in-game when you loot the dead animal, to represent the time you take to skin it and get useful meat off of it.

And that means you can get additional pelts that can be tanned for leather. If you have skeever pelts, you can use those at a cooking pot to make Charred Skeever Hide, which is pretty cool.

What really sold me on Skills of the Wild, though, was discovering that one of the options on its perk tree allows you to bury fallen friends and foes. Which I really like as an immersion/RP enhancement!

And last but not least, as noted above, running Skills of the Wild will also fill in the empty slots in the survival-related group in the Custom Skills UI.

Important note about the compass when using Skills of the Wild in this config

My playtesting of Skills of the Wild so far is showing signs that No Compass in Dialogue is interfering with SotW’s intention of turning off the compass until you unlock the final perk on its Wayfaring skill tree. And by interfering, I mean, the compass is showing up again very early even though you come out of chargen with it off.

In my testing this had two immediate consequences:

1. The compass showed up again way earlier than SotW wants it to, and I think this was a consequence of my having just conversed with someone. No Compass in Dialogue probably turned the compass back on again as soon as I was out of that conversation.
2. And even if you don’t converse with someone, you can easily turn the compass back on again if you hit the single quote key, which is No Compass in Dialogue’s default hotkey for toggling the compass yourself.

Given that Skills of the Wild really wants to keep that compass off until you earn it by unlocking the relevant perk, this is obviously contradictory to SotW’s intentions.

These are possible ways to deal with this problem:

1. Since this is a Rule 11 situation anyway, turning off No Compass in Dialogue would handle this. This may or may not work for you depending on how annoying you find the compass showing up in dialogue in Tuxborn.
2. SotW’s page on Nexus says that if the lack of a compass bugs you, you can toggle it back on again with this console command: Set CompassCheat to 1. If you choose this route, you should then save, quit the game, and restart to make the command take effect, as per the mod’s instructions.
3. Using the Re-enable Compass mod I linked to above would be a cleaner solution than option 2, because not only will it re-enable the compass on startup, it also removes the relevant perk off the skill tree so that you don’t have a useless perk you have to try to unlock.
4. If this all just seems like too big of a PITA for you, you can just skip running Skills of the Wild entirely. As I noted above, I do consider SotW optional for this setup.

My personal recommendation for this, and the way I’m probably going to handle it, is to use the Re-enable Compass mod. I don’t necessarily think that JaySerpa’s intentions with hiding the compass are bad! But No Compass in Dialogue is important to me just because in Tuxborn’s load order, I do in fact find it visually distracting to see the compass showing up when in dialogue with NPCs. If that doesn’t bug you, you might consider just turning off No Compass in Dialogue instead.

But since I’ll also be setting up SunHelm to be able to toggle off the Needs icons along with the compass when I use the single quote hotkey, this will also put me into a position to try to adhere to the spirit if not the letter of the law, when it comes to what SotW wants to do with the compass.

Where I’m putting things in the load order

I noted this on the Campsite version of this config and will say it again here: the most critical thing to remember when doing a Rule 11 on the Tuxborn load order is that everything you want to add, and I do mean everything, needs to be somewhere above the map mods we’re using. Our map mods really, really, really want to be last in the load order, full stop. It doesn’t matter what you’re adding. If it stays after the map mods in the load order, the maps will break.

Where to put Campfire in the load order

I learned during investigating this version of the config that Campfire has an issue with containing a DLL which has since been supplanted by PapyrusUtils SE. Tuxborn includes PapyrusUtils SE in our load order. So it’s important to make sure that Campfire is before PapyrusUtils SE in MO2.

If you don’t do this, then you’ll see what I did: a big string of bizarre error messages as soon as you fire up the game. Here’s an example of what the first of these error messages looked like, so you know what to look for. You do not want to see this when trying this config:

These errors all went away when I put Campfire into a better spot in the load order. My solution for this was to make Campfire last in Tuxborn’s “Master Fixes” section, which is right before the “Engine Fixing” section. Campfire’s main file added is Campfire.esm, and that file name suffix indicates that it is a master file. So I deemed it appropriate to stick the file in that section. And more importantly, “Engine Fixing” contains PapyrusUtils SE! So this made sure that the proper version of the DLL gets loaded when the game starts up.

What let me figure this out was the second sticky post on the Posts page for Campfire on Nexus. So have a look at that if you want more in-depth info.

Here are screenshots of what my load order changes for Campfire.esm look like:

Where to put everything else

Aside from Campfire.esm, I followed the same idea I went for in the Campsite version of this config: creating a “SunHelm Survival Mode” section in the load order, right before “Late Loaders”. And I put everything else in there, SunHelm stuff as well as all the additional Campfire patches I wanted.

Note that in my example, I’m using four of the five proposed mods relevant to Skills of the Wild. I do consider all five of these mods optional. So if you decide to skip them, adjust your placement of mods in your own load order appropriately.

Here’s what my example load order looks like. Since this list of patches is longer than in the Campsite version of the config, there’s a couple of extra screenshots to show that. Note that in my screenshots, you’ll see a “SunHelm Survival” and a “SunHelm Survival for Campfire”. This is because I have two different installs of SunHelm in my beta build, one for the Campsite config, one for the Campfire config. Nobody besides me should have to worry about this unless you explicitly want to test both Campsite and Campfire in your load order. If you do want to test both of them, you will need to re-run the SunHelm installer for both setups to make sure you pick up on appropriate options. You can either overwrite the previous SunHelm config or just install two different instances of SunHelm; I took the latter option.

Playtesting notes so far

1. Confirmed tents, cloaks, etc. showing up for sale as expected with merchants (I tried Bits and Pieces).
2. Confirming craftable items showing up as expected at tanning racks.
3. With the patches I’m using to add skill trees to Custom Skills, there’s a confirmed “Survival” option now on the Custom Skills section of the tween menu. Going into that, I see Camping and Endurance as available options, one for Campfire and the other for SunHelm. There are empty slots between them, four in total. Those are for if you’re also running Skills of the Wild, as I noted above. Disregard the empty slots for this config, unless having them empty bugs you, in which case add Skills of the Wild and its requirements to the load order. (As well as my recommended patches, if you want those as well.)
4. Campfire adds a few cloaks to the game, and these have clipping issues in our load order. I’ve seen problems when in third person and walking, as well as clipping badly along the shoulders with a couple different kinds of mage robes. Consider not being in third person, or else use some other kind of cloak (like the Guard Cloak craftable with the unmodded Tuxborn load order). If anybody knows of a good solution to this problem, talk to me.
5. Using Skills of the Wild means you’re going to leave a lot of skinned animal corpses lying around, which is a little weird. But arguably no less weird than leaving unskinned dead animal corpses lying around!
6. The custom skills added by SunHelm, Campfire, and Skills of the Wild do not require you to spend base game perk points on them. You’ll unlock skills as you just do stuff relevant to those skills.
7. Identified discrepancy between how Skills of the Wild handles the compass, and how No Compass in Dialogue does. Notes on how to resolve this issue added further up the page.

Things I’ll be testing next

This config has caught up with the Campsite version and I have more things I want to test:

1. Read up on all proposed mods and see if any of them have any known problems with things in our load order ✅
2. Spin up a test config and do the same load order placement testing that I did with the Campsite version of this config ✅
3. Review all mods in SSEEdit to look for any conflicts that will require load order placement finessing ✅
4. The second of the two mods I want to try to plug SunHelm’s and Campfire’s skill menus into the overall custom skills menu tree Tuxborn is using appears to have a bug in it, so I will need to follow up on that when the mod owner releases an update, which will hopefully be soon as it’s getting active and current development ✅
5. Playtest, once SSEEdit is confirmed to not have any obvious glaring problems about the mods I’m dropping in ✅
6. What do I need to do to get Dynamic Action Key to work on my Steam Deck?
   • Option 1: Have Shift bound to a back button, so I can hold down that back button and then hit A to activate ✅
   • Option 2: Shift might also work as a radial menu option
7. Confirm ability to sell carcasses to appropriate vendors ✅
8. Confirm ability to buy training from chefs, stablemasters, or hunters ✅
9. Labernik06 noted that Simple Hunting Overhaul includes patches for Beyond Skyrim: Bruma and Gourmet, both of which are in our load order, so we’ll want those and I will playtest them
10. Likewise, there are a couple of patches provided with Skills of the Wild that I’ll playtest