About this mod
Modular patches between Drengin's Blue Palace Terrace, Legacy of the Dragonborn v5, Palaces and Castles Enhanced, Enhanced Solitude, Enhanced Solitude Docks, Solitude Skyway.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
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Translations
- Italian
This mod includes a set of compatibility patches I made to combine the following mods together in my game:
- Legacy of the Dragonborn v5
- Drengin's Blue Palace Terrace
- Palaces and Castles Enhanced
- Enhanced Solitude
- Enhanced Solitude Docks
- Solitude Skyway
- Imperial Mail
Motivation
So I started with the goal of patching Blue Palace Terrace with Palaces and Castles Enhanced, which is the biggest missing piece in this list that nobody else seems to be working on. I also wanted all other above-mentioned mods in my game.
After a survey of existing patches, I learned that existing patches vary wildly in both quality and flexibility. The most promising seems to be cheesetoast8's patches, which were very nice. Unfortunately, there were still downsides in that they did not play well with Imperial Mail, and every patch offered required LOTD which felt less flexible than I hoped.
I figured that, if I'm going to make a true BPT-PCE patch, and I'm going to tweak cheesetoast8's patches for my own game further anyway, then I might as well go all the way and see if I can recreate a more modular set of patches. So that's what I ended up doing.
A good amount of content in these patches were conflict resolution work found originally in cheesetoast8's patches, reused with his/her permission. I basically used cheesetoast8's patches as a starting point, refactored them to be a bit more modular, in some parts redid them to my own aesthetic tastes, added my PCE patch into the fray, and ended up with a new series of patches.
These patches had the following goals in mind:
- As modular as possible - each patch handles one problem only, multiple patches are used together to handle multiple problems
- As clean as possible - edits other than conflict resolution were kept to a minimum (though admittedly not zero - the exception being a new fancy Skyway courtyard door), and I tried really hard to remove accidental unnecessary edits and plugin record overrides
- Provide a good base system of patches to plug my BPT-PCE patch into
- Compatible with Imperial Mail and the BPT-Imperial Mail Patch
What Patches Do I Need? What Order?
For your reference, my current load order is the following (irrelevant mods I used for testing like AddItemMenu etc are omitted). Bolded are patches I offer. Patches I'm using/building on top of but come from other mods are linked to those other mods.
- LegacyoftheDragonborn.esm
- BluePalaceTerrace.esp
- Palaces Castles Enhanced.esp
- DBM_PCE_Patch.esp (official LOTD patch for PCE)
- Solitude Skyway SE.esp
- Enhanced Solitude SSE.esp
- Enhanced Solitude Docks.esp
- MLQ_EnhancedSolitude_Fixes.esp
- DBM_EnhancedSolitude_Patch.esp (official LOTD patch for ES)
- Solitude Skyway SE - Enhanced Solitude Docks Patch.esp (official Skyway patch for ESD)
- Solitude Skyway SE - Legacy of the Dragonborn Patch.esp (official Skyway patch for LOTD)
- EnhancedSolitudeDocks-Fixes.esp
- BluePalaceTerrace-EnhancedSolitude-Patch.esp
- BluePalaceTerrace-LegacyOfTheDragonborn-Patch.esp
- BluePalaceTerrace-PalacesCastlesEnhanced-Patch.esp
- BluePalaceTerrace-LOTD-PCE-Patch.esp
- BluePalaceTerrace-LOTD-ES-Patch.esp
- BluePalaceTerrace-LOTD-Skyway-Patch.esp
- BluePalaceTerrace-LOTD-Skyway-ES-Patch.esp
- SolitudeSkyway-LOTD-ESD-Patch.esp
- BluePalaceTerrace-EnhancedSolitudeDocks-Patch.esp
- BluePalaceTerrace-LOTD-Skyway-ESD-Patch.esp
If you're using all source mods (BPT, PCE, LOTD, ES, ESD), then please use all patches and follow the order above. If you're omitting some source mods, then please omit patches accordingly, but try to follow the same above order. Other sensible load orders should theoretically work too but may be untested. Please report issues if you see them.
Note that these currently don't support a non-LOTD-patched Skyway, so if you're using vanilla Skyway then unfortunate I don't have a solution for it.
Also for your reference, the following are a list of special load order requirements that I've either intended or discovered good or necessary reasons for:
- PCE must load after BPT
- Solitude Skyway SE - Legacy of the Dragonborn Patch.esp (official Skyway patch for LOTD) must load AFTER Solitude Skyway SE - Enhanced Solitude Docks Patch.esp (official Skyway for LOTD)
- my EnhancedSolitudeDocks-Fixes.esp should load BEFORE all my other patches
- my BluePalaceTerrace-EnhancedSolitude-Patch.esp must load AFTER DBM_EnhancedSolitude_Patch.esp (official LOTD patch for ES)
- my BluePalaceTerrace-LOTD-Skyway-ES-Patch.esp must load BEFORE my SolitudeSkyway-LOTD-ESD-Patch.esp
Full description below. Extremely detailed description and changelog available in the readme (see "Docs" tab)
Description of Patches
To give cheesetoast8 full credit for his work that I reused, all below bolded and yellow parts of the description are his work that I knowingly and intentionally reused with his/her permission, which basically meant I copied the records/values straight over in xEdit into my patches. The rest were my own work that I discovered and did myself in the CK, though some may have also overlapped with other parts of cheesetoast8's patches. Overall, I also want to thank cheesetoast8 for giving me advice and hints, and help me test the BPT-PCE patch a bit which resulted in discovering an issue that I later addressed.
Without further ado, here are a listing of the patches and what they do:
Each of the above patches (maybe with the exception of the ESD-Fixes patch) should solve to the best of my ability all current conflicts (at least, the ones that I know of) between the respective mods, and when used together they should solve all conflicts between all mods involved. Any sensible sub-combinations of my patches should theoretically work, and many such combinations have been tested, so feel free to leave out LOTD or leave out Skyway, etc... and simply don't install the associated patches.
Overall, these series of patches depend on vanilla Skyrim masters, USSEP, the original mods. As noted above in the description, some of my patches will also require/expect to be used together with, some of the following official patches:
- Solitude Skyway SE - Enhanced Solitude Docks Patch.esp (must load before Skyway-LOTD patch if used together)
- Solitude Skyway SE - Legacy of the Dragonborn Patch.esp (must load after Skyway-ESD patch if used together)
- DBM_EnhancedSolitude_Patch.esp (the official LOTD patch for ES, all skyway-related patches must load AFTER this one if used together)
The patches do not require, but are intended to work together with the following mods and patches for a complete experience:
- MLQ_EnhancedSolitude_Fixes.esp (this fixes the ES issue where courtyard clutter keeps on spilling all over the floor, among other things)
- ImperialMail.esp (my patches are fully compatible with Imperial Mail)
- BluePalaceTerrace-ImperialMail-Patch.esp (official BPT patch for Imperial Mail)
Quality
All patches are provided as ESL-ified ESPs, of which you can have more than 4000 of so you should never need to worry about plugin count.
All patches should have no ITMs, UDRs, or errors according to xEdit.
I tested many combinations of the patches in the following fashion:
- Created a new character
- Got a follower (Belrand from Solitude)
- Traveled all main, obvious paths affected by the mods involved, such as throughout Solitude, the Blue Palace Courtyard, path "Around" the Blue Palace Terrace from corridors to terrace to drawbridge door, the Skyway end to end plus Fort Area, and the dockside road and surrounding areas added by ESD.
- Tested as many crucial doors I can see and I know my mod touched. For example, all BPT/PCE/Skyway-related doors across many patch combinations should have been tested. Many ESD doors have also been tested (though not all due to the sheer amount of them - and ESD doors frequently have problems of their own).
- Ensured all navmesh and door links (for both directions) were working and Belrand had no trouble following anywhere I go.
- Scrutinized details of everything I saw, until no clipping due to conflict were unresolved
All issues I saw should have either been addressed, or cannot be reliably reproduced (i.e. it happened once but never saw it again).
Note that I have not tested all the nook and crannies of out-of-the-way area navmesh. Also note that I have not tested any content that only becomes available later in the game, and I have not tested any quests, though I tried to make changes that theoretically should not affect quests or future content.
Please note that other than what I included in the ESD-Fixes file, I did not attempt to address any bugs that may exist in the original mods.
Some of the newly added doors in my patch are not as perfect as I'd like (for example, it can be painfully obvious that there's really nothing behind the newly added Jarl Chamber's doors to the terrace if you look from above, which is doable with the third person camera). I will try to finetune it with a future iteration.
Compatibility
These patches are known to be incompatible with cheesetoast8's patches. If used together, there will be definitely be duplicate objects (since I reused some of his work), and will likely be other shenanigans. Please choose to use either his set of patches or mine, but not both. Consider the two set of patches to exist in separate universes from a technical standpoint.
These patches are also incompatible with Enhanced Solitude's series of BPT-related patches. I recommend to stay away from those patches because they predate today's version of BPT, and possibly also predate today's version of LOTD (either that or there's just quality issues, as I saw a lot of remaining clipping). Those patches try to fix the problem by giving you a replacement esp for BPT that's a super old version of BPT that is nowhere near as beautiful as Drengin's BPT in its modern form, which is most likely not what you want.
These patches are incompatible with Open Cities. I do not plan to support Open Cities.
There are no guarantees that these patches will be compatible with any other mod or patch (since I have not tested them). Use your best judgment.