Knights of the Cardboard Castle

It’s been a while since I last updated this blog. This isn’t because I’m not around or because I’m not playing games. It’s because I’ve finally gotten around to playing Skyrim. And it’s taking a long time. I’ve always known I would be playing this game of course, but I decided early on that I would wait until Bethesda had released the Legendary Edition of the game to get the complete experience. Since I knew that there would be tons of mods for this game and I would only play through it once, I also wanted to wait until such time as the mods were fully mature.

I even planned around buying a new video card for this game. I’m currently running a GTX 770. The upgrade process itself was far from painless. First, I discovered that I had somehow messed up one of my RAM chips while installing the GPU and had to buy a new one. Then I found that the GPU had a faulty temperature sensor that caused it to run at 100% all the time, making it sound like a vacuum cleaner. That took a few days to deal with. And of course, the process of correctly installing and configuring Skyrim and set it up with the ideal set of mods is itself a lot of work.

After a great deal of research and experimentation, I’ve found that the best way to get the ideal Skyrim experience with minimal pain would be to follow the STEP guide. In addition to the basic STEP installation, I’m also running the Weather and Lightning pack and the Immersive Survival pack which notably includes the Frostfall mod. In addition, I also have the two huge content mods Falskaar and Wyrmstooth installed. The last two is really overkill however. There is so much content in the base game and the DLCs already that it’s unlikely that I’ll ever get around to exploring whole new areas.

With this many mods loaded, the experience is far from smooth. I’ve had to learn to deal with a wide variety of problems, some of which are really insidious. Most frequent are the sudden freezes. I believe this may be related to running out of video memory or the game attempting to load some data and failing to get it within the required time. There’s nothing I can do about this except save frequently. It’s most annoying in the middle of a battle. I think the game may be trying to load some special effect related to a power or a spell and failing at it.

Another problem that I encounter about once every two or three hours of play is the frame rate dropping drastically when I zone from an indoor area to an outdoor area. My normal frame rate is around 35 to 45 frames per second, which I find acceptable. When this error occurs, the frame rate drops to between 10 and 15 fps, which is unplayable. After that, if I re-enter any indoor area, the frame rate goes back up to normal but always drops back down in outdoor areas. After some Googling, I found that whenever this effect happens, I can pull up the menu to pause the game, alt-tab out and then switch back in again. This makes the effect go away. I have no idea what causes this.

One bug that I have is 100% reproducible. It falls into a category of errors that are so common that there is a huge thread for dealing with the issue on the Nexus forums. In my case what happens is that whenever I fight Death Hounds, shortly after that a black mist appears around my character’s groin and just won’t go away. Since with the Dawnguard DLC installed, vampires always attack in cities at night and Death Hounds always appear with the vampires, this is very irritating. The only way to make the effect go away is to temporarily disable the Unofficial Skyrim Patch and use the console to enable and then disable all of the Death Hound FX effects. Since the Unofficial Patch runs special scripts that are never meant to be disabled, this makes me nervous so I mostly just avoid having to fight Death Hounds at all.

But by far the worst of the errors is when my game somehow enters a state where moving to a specific area always causes the game to crash. The only recourse seems to be to go back to a savegame from before this change occurred. I’ve even tried to read through the Papyrus error logs to determine what is causing the error but couldn’t come up with anything helpful. Thankfully this errors seems to be extremely rare. I’ve only encountered it twice and I now have 150 hours of playing time according to Steam. But it always feels terrible when I realized this has happened.

So you must be wondering why I put up with all these problems. The thing is, despite everything, running Skyrim fully modded is still worth it. It looks miles  better than the vanilla version. The  shadows and lighting effects are amazing and so immersive. The landscape is genuinely breathtaking. All of this contributes to making this easily the best of the “live another life” type games. I even like the gameplay effects added by Frostfall, which forces me to seek out inns or erect a tent to take shelter in when the weather is bad. I like that food and drink matters and I have to make sure to bring along an adequate supply. I don’t think it’s possible for me to go back to vanilla at this point.

Anyway, this post is getting a bit long and getting into what works in the mods I have and what doesn’t is another topic. Actual thoughts on the game itself would be yet another post. But mainly, yeah, I’m not gone and this blog is still getting updated. Eventually.