It reminds me of the old days of organizing every patch in your synth library...by the time you'd finished playing around, trying out patches, moving things, labelling and organizing things...you weren't interested in composing anything.
Well, spent the weekend expanding the mod stack for Skyrim. The winning combination for Whiterun turned out to be The Autumn of Whiterun, with Realistic Aspen trees and the A Noble Skyrim texture pack, and I think that was it; "Autumn" adds a few minor tweaks to the layout of Whiterun, but nothing as crazy as JK's Whiterun, or the Dawn of Skyrim series of hold capitol remakes.
Outside, the scenery is largely Traverse the Uvenwald, which redoes all the trees and much minor vegetation to both be thicker but also to be more distinct in each location, although the grass and flowers (and some of the meshes and textures) are coming out of Skyrim Floral Overhaul. Enhanced Landscapes is adding a bunch of new details and general hole-fixing, itself driving Skyland Landscape Texture Overhaul and Skyrim 3D Rocks. And Nordic Snow is holding it all together. Really. That Nordic Snow has a huge impact on the look, seeing as all it replaces is the texture maps for...snow.
(There's a lot of snow in Skyrim.)
Enhanced Lighting and FX gets the basic look and sky, with the weather coming in from Vivid Weathers, with a little mod called Wet and Cold adding all those lovely little details of how rain gets things wet, and Blowing in the Wind is making sure that things, well, you know. I'd tinkered with two other weather mods and another lighting mod before this and I'm still torn, but sometimes you have to go by age and support, because for every two mods, there's probably a patch out there written to let them play nice together.
This is why load order is so much fun. Get things stacked up so Skyland replaces the rocks and snow then Nordic Snow replaces Skyland's snow...
So that got Whiterun and the countryside. Farmhouses and Farm Towns, in combination with Noble Skyrim, made a lot of the stand-alone structures, little farms and mining camps, prettier. I went and did most of the Great Cities upgrades to the towns, as those add a lot of unique character to places like Dragon Bridge and Rorikstead. And all sorts of file conflicts until I got Karthwasten working properly without breaking something else! Oh, and Farmhouse Inns, which isn't quite the hay bales you'd think from the name but does a unique re-design of the inns of the major holds, each one distinct and different in interesting ways.
Plus Farm Animals and Co., which adds so many different animals, all of them appropriate to the city; the sea-side Solitude has gulls, there are doves and peacocks, and the farms have, well, farm animals. And I am annoyed. The Hearthfire DLC lets you build a coop and pasture and own cow and some chickens, but there's only one mod -- made by an unpaid amateur, of course, because Bethesda isn't that competent -- that lets you get milk and eggs.
But Whiterun gave me an idea. Give a couple of other places a really good identity. Well, Solitude was actually wonderful with the Great City of Solitude mod. I wanted a very upscale and nice-looking Bard's College but the one I really wanted required off-site tools that weren't working right, so instead a simpler JK's version. Which with the Noble textures looks elegant enough.
Frankly HD Markarth (with the additional Expansion) was all Markarth really needed. It was spectacular. And since that package of textures enhances pretty much every Dwemer ruin on the map...
(Picture from the mod-maker.)
The fallen Winterhold is amazing with the Great City of Winterhold mod, but it was time to make the Magic College of Winterhold look really different. Tried four different mods, didn't care for two and the third was done around SkyUI which in turn is based on SSE which is of course not fully supported in Anniversary yet...
Ah, but College of Winterhold Upgraded plays nicely with Chantry College of Winterhold, using the textures of the Snow Elves chantry in the Dawnguard DLC. Gave it a very interesting flavor. Plus Magic College Music and now it is getting a bit of Dark Academia, a bit of Magic School. Unfortunately. the make-over of the existing students was, again, a stack of off-site resources and those resources threatened to break things. So it won't quite be the perfect cast...
Except there is a face remake mod that I think I can run without all that craziness that makes them prettier and more memorable (aka, good cast members for the Dark Academia fantasy story). Plus a couple mods that expands on the various College quests and adds some proper magic teaching.
Not my picture, but that is the mesh-and-texture combination I am using. A well-tested and popular one, it seems.
I did finally find some skin texture packs that didn't require going the whole CBBE route (which I did with Fallout 4, pretty much of necessity). And some small upgrades to clothing textures and jewelry meshes and some high-poly hair with better maps, too. So the people don't look quite so bad. Skyrim may be using the same engine as Fallout 4, but it is earlier and more primitive. It takes a whole bunch of third-party stuff to try to hack decent expressions and otherwise make faces look human.
Look at it this way; the engine only supports six shadow-casting lights at the same time. Six! That means if you have lanterns in a city, the guards can't carry torches without everything flickering on and off.
So you may wonder: is this the Skyrim Walking Simulator now, or is there actually gameplay involved? Well, yes. There are a few play-oriented mods in the stack. Top of the Companions list is Serana Extended Dialogue. Although Sophia, Recorder, and Inigo are waiting in the wings (all of them fully-voiced with their own AIs).
I've a mine, a farm, and a foundry plus a buildable player home to play with. Which does mean I could and have spent hours without going into a single dungeon or pulling a sword (except for the frequent wolves). Archery Tweaks to make it possible to aim bows properly, and Ars Mettalica to let me forge my own arrows (and stop running out of the good ones). Sun Magic, which is frankly slightly overbalanced when it comes to Undead, but for a Champion of Meridia. Member of the Dawnguard, and Wielder of Dawnbreaker, it seemed appropriate.
Cutting Room Floor and the Unofficial Skyrim Patch, but that's a given. HD music and some additional tracks but we are straying into quality experience again. Also Immersive Citizens, Immersive Conversations, Improved Relationship Conversations which all make NPCs sound, and act, a little more human. They talk to each other instead of just waiting for the Dragonborn to come by so they can recite their canned speech, and they even go indoors when it rains! (Or when dragons.)
But, really, I don't need mods to make play easier. That's what console mode is for. Or to add quests since there is a million of them, especially in Anniversary which piles in half the Creation Club material (Bethesda's failed attempt to run a paid mods service).
Or just wander around exploring the landscape.
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