Overview

This mod is a simple patch I made that lets me use vanilla textures with Enhanced Solitude, plus some miscellaneous fixes.

This mod is not compatible with Open Cities Skyrim.

Motivation

When I first saw Enhanced Solitude, I knew it was going to be a must-have mod in my load order. Turned out, I liked just about every aspect about it except the textures. ES's visual aesthetic is colorful and varied where each building has its own uniqueness, which is probably great for many other people. For me though, this just makes the place feel chaotic and messy, and I would prefer the capital of Skyrim to have a more "proper" and "coherent" set of architecture.

So this patch tries to "undo" ES's opinionated textures so that we can pick and choose our own texture packs to go with ES.

What The Patch Does

• Within the Solitude City, the patch reverts every instance I can find where Enhanced Solitude SSE.esp disabled a vanilla building static and added a new static with custom textures in its place, by disabling the ES-added static, and bringing forward Skyrim.esm record thus reverting ES's disables.
• Within the Solitude City, the patch modifies every new ES-added building I can find that referenced one of its retextured statics, and updates it to reference an equivalent vanilla static record instead. This means all the new houses added with custom textures now uses the vanilla game models instead.
  

The end result of the above is a ES that basically uses vanilla buildings just about everywhere.

Note that I left SolitudeBase and the Blue Palace untouched, because my other patches for Solitude touches those things and I didn't want to add yet another load order concern when used in conjunction.

Additionally this patch contains 2 small tweaks I made for my own liking.

• I disabled 4 "PatioWallEntrance" objects ES placed at the two archways going into the Castle Dour courtyard. These objects had jarring texture compared to the wall behind it, and felt a bit too much to me. Without them, the normal arches looked good enough and a bit more open and free, which I believe to be superior.
• Outside the Solitude gate in the Tamriel worldspace, ES added a whole bunch of buildings. Specifically there's a gatehouse building that had a door platform that was both weird and kind of "ate into" the grandeur of the Solitude gate. I fixed this by lowering the building slightly so that the platform sinks below the ground. Also tweaked the floor and door position there slightly to get the final, much cleaner, look.
  

Another Thing You Might Want To Know

In addition to this patch, any texture pack you want to use should override ES's asset files, since in ES's loose files there are some vanilla texture overrides.

For example, if I want to have my Solitude look like Noble Skyrim, in MO2 I need to place noble skyrim after ES on the left pane.

I guess this means if you for some reason want VANILLA "vanilla textures", then this patch isn't sufficient (since ES's vanilla texture overrides need to be deleted in that case).