February 2023 Update

Hi!

Wow, it’s been a while. Since sometime in October (?) I have been completely silent in the modding world which is the longest time that I have been “out” of the community in about six years. The reasons for that are complex and I want to get into them, but since my personal stuff is not of interest to everyone I want to start off by talking about the directly modding-related things.

Legends of the Frost

This Patreon post coincides with a preliminary release of Legends of the Frost 3.0 (call it a beta). The list has been rebuilt from scratch to address various shortcomings and to streamline it as much as possible. For one, its size has gone down from ~63GB to ~32GB, partially because I ditched the Stock Game folder system in favour of root builder.

What else has changed?

The visuals are much better. Previously, I faced the conundrum that with Wander / RAID Weathers, bright snow textures like my favourite (from Majestic Landscapes) looked incredibly overblown so that I could either have a good-looking (and stealth-optimised) weather overhaul or good-looking snow LODs, but not both. Well, it turns out enabling filmic curve pretty much fixes the issue. Of course, this changes the overall colours noticeably, but I’m quite fond of the result.

I also switched from Skyrim Realistic Overhaul to Skyland AIO. In combination with RAID Weathers this is a noticeable departure from vanilla, but I feel like it is still close enough and the overall visuals setup is as pretty as I can possibly make it while limiting the amount of mods. Please feel free to check our Discord! I will post some screenshots there.

The list has been modernised in other ways. Mods like Precision, True Directional Movement, and Better Third Person Selection should be mostly unobtrusive while adding significant quality-of-life improvements.

Creations are now mandatory. Making the AE DLC optional is just too annoying as it requires me to have two sets of LOD outputs which adds too much bloat. I removed all integration mods and only kept tweaks as LOTF is intended for experiencing the game – including the creations – mostly in its original state.

(GOG support and a performance profile are forthcoming.)

The Phoenix Flavour

Oh, dear.

Well, I’ve been working on it. The thing with current TPF is that years of limiting myself to a strictly v+ setup are coming back to haunt me and my WIP setup has exploded in scale to an obscene level. I really enjoy tinkering with it! But the project will not be “finished” anytime soon. I will give you some updates once more substantial progress has been made.

My current plans are to put checkmarks behind as many projects as I can so I have the breathing space to really focus on TPF. Both SME and WTP are already “checked” and in maintenance mode, requiring very little attention from me except for minor updates and more substantial ones when I feel like it. I intend to get LOTF 3.0 into the same state as soon as I can.

Beginner’s Guide to Modding Skyrim

… which is no longer vapourware.

Well, it is still vapourware as far as you guys are concerned, but the 315 pages in my WIP PDF are saying otherwise. After chipping away at this massive project for (checks calendar) two and a half years, I finally sat down and invested a proper amount of time (i.e. most of January) into typing up this behemoth which (at 315 pages!) is just about scratching the surface.

Conceptually, this guide is very different from TPF in that it does not explain the installation of a specific setup but seeks to impart as much general modding knowledge as possible step-by-step through detailed examples. It still consists of very specific instructions that must be followed to a T, but the resulting setup is not complete in any way and the overall goal is to equip the reader with the tools and knowledge required to build their own setup.

At this point, I need probably a few more days (read: caffeine-fueled 14+ hours sessions) to bring this WIP into a publishable state. That is what I plan to do after LOTF 3.0 has had some testing and is officially published. A guide like this has not been done before (to my knowledge) and I am very anxious to see if it will actually work in the way I intended it.

Road Map

First up: I can give no guarantees or release dates, mostly because both university and my mental health can completely mess up my plans at any point.

That being said, here is my current to-do list:

1. LOTF 3.0 Discord pre-release! Monitor feedback, fix potential oversights.

2. Maintenance update for Skyrim Modding Essentials (nearly ready).

3. Maintenance update for Welcome to Paradise.

4. Properly release LOTF 3.0 with a Nexus page and on the Wabbajack UI.

5. 1.6.640 update for Skyrim Modding Essentials.

6. Complete and publish my Beginner’s Guide draft (excited about this one!).

7. Tinker with TPF.

And, most of all, catch up with Discord, and read feedback and issues from the past months.

Personal Stuff

OK, the modding-related news are out of the way. Thank you for reading!

First up, I had a bit of an epiphany last summer. My “coming out” as non-binary consisted of trying to explain the concept to my parents and telling people I prefer they/them if they ask. After years of being fairly clear about not wanting to be addressed with he/him pronouns in the modding community (most people assumed I was a guy because, well, it’s the internet), I feel a bit silly telling people to use they/them now, but there you go. Ultimately, I am not overly fussed. If you address me with she/her or he/him, I won't be mad.

If you feel the need to tell me that gender is binary and I am being silly, please don’t. If you have questions about what the whole non-binary thing is about, feel free to reach out to me. I am neither representative nor the most knowledgeable on gender issues, but I will do my best to give you my perspective if you are interested in the matter.

With that being out of the way, I want to take some time to talk about my long absence. Not because I think I owe everyone an explanation, but because I want to share a little more about me. (This kind of blew up as I was typing it out, so I guess you are now getting my life story.)

I turned 24 ten days ago and suddenly realised that I have been modding for ten years now! Wow, it’s been a long time (and I still don’t know how to fix navmeshes, oof).

It has also been eleven years since my life got completely derailed. Things started getting really bad when I was thirteen; I had switched to a different school where I was the youngest in my class. Unlike the other girls, I had zero interest in shopping or makeup. Most of the time I had my nose stuck in a Star Wars book (I was hugely into the pre-Disney EU) or in some piece of historical fiction, I also started to get into PC gaming, and I was usually listening to 70s-90s hard rock that absolutely none of them had ever heard of – you can imagine how that went down with my new classmates.

Unfortunately for me, I utterly lacked the social skills to prevent the inevitable. I had no intentions to assimilate; I tried the shopping thing and found it very boring – I was still a child, and the other girls were teens. I had far more in common with the boys and I often wonder how things would have developed had I been born with different dangly body parts. Of course, being one of “the girls”, there was no way I could do things with “the boys”.

I quit school after two years of bullying. I was fifteen. I had wanted to become an historian since I was ten and that dream was the worst casualty of those years. But I left deeply affected by the experience in other ways, too. You see, they never touched me – they didn’t need to. They just needed to look at me to let me know how utterly pathetic I was. They told me, too, in case I hadn’t caught up on it yet. It’s been nine years since I quit that place and I still can’t have people looking at me. If they make no comment, it must be because they pity me, because clearly there has to be something wrong with me. (Years of therapy did not eliminate this feeling.)

At the time, I was reading a lot, but I was writing, too. I have been making up stories since I learned how to speak and I have wanted to write novels since I was nine years old. I kept notes in a green notebook that I carried around with me. A few months before I quit, my lovely classmates rifled through my bag while I was away and found the notebook, ripping out several pages. For reasons that I still puzzle over after all these years, they returned some of the pages to me, half burnt. They spent the next few weeks mocking my story ideas.

So, I quit. My parents brought me to a therapist. I was a mess. I had gained a lot of weight because eating was the only thing that could make me feel better and I was spending all my time in front of my computer. It will come as no surprise that I was diagnosed with depression and social anxiety as well as PTSD. I am not sure how I feel about the PTSD diagnosis, given that most people with PTSD have survived trauma far, far worse than everything I’ve gone through, but I do experience flashback-like episodes, so I suppose it cannot be too far off.

Therapist #1 told me I should have dressed differently and made an effort to assimilate, and yes, that might have prevented the whole thing. There was also never a chance of that happening. I am stubborn and I am weird and I was not interested in pretending to be somebody else. I don’t think I could have done so convincingly, had I even wanted to (though this is pure conjecture). In any case, I certainly “provoked” a lot of the vitriol I drew by being strange and sometimes arrogant, and by refusing to conform. At first, I did try to find my place in the new class, but there was too much separating me from everyone else and I did not know how to bridge the gap. I was, in many ways, still a child.

Therapist #2 talked to me about cats for an hour, even though she really doesn’t care for pets. She saved my life – not in the sense that I would not be alive without her, but I certainly would not have the life I have now. She was always brutally honest and reliably called me out on my bullshit. She made me laugh a lot, too. (I miss her dearly.)

About four months after meeting my (second) therapist and a year after quitting school, I did what I had previously thought impossible – I went back to school. It was one for adults this time, people who had quit like I had and wanted another chance. I was, again, the youngest, but in a very different place. In my first semester I was in a class with two women in their thirties who took me under their wings and they were a big part of why I managed to keep going.

Being in a classroom again was horrible. I broke down crying every other day, though always in some secluded spot. I started self-harming in earnest. At a school party I was introduced to alcohol, so I started drinking too, heavily, for a time. Ultimately, I eased off the booze again because it stopped working for me. That was lucky, really. My mother was absolutely livid about my drinking, but what scared me most was that my therapist was getting seriously concerned, too.

In December 2021, I finally graduated with the German equivalent of a high school diploma after a long, long struggle. Half-way through I had quit a second time. I spent 2019 at home, in my room, fighting with my parents every other day. You could say I got a bit of a head start on the COVID isolation, because it was pretty much like during the lockdown. That I did finish school in the end still strikes me as a miracle.

I am going to university now, studying at one of the Liberal Arts & Sciences colleges in the Netherlands. Of course, I am majoring in history and I am already looking for master’s programmes in the field for when I graduate with my Bachelor’s in January 2025. My life is better than ever – not only have I reclaimed my dream, but I am also living in a beautiful city, and my future is looking bright. (Until I am done with university at which point I will join the masses of unemployed historians.)

My last flashback happened in September when we were given an assignment in an introductory rhetoric class that would have put me on the spot. I just about managed to flee into the bathrooms before absolutely losing my shit. It was probably not the last time. But those breakdowns are rare now, they happen about once a year. While many classroom situations still make me uncomfortable and I hate doing presentations with a passion, I am definitely coping and it seems to be slowly getting better.

Worse than any of that is the loneliness. I improved in so many ways over the past ten years and my life has really turned around, yet the loneliness has only got worse. I used to have friends, back when things were really bad. After changing schools, I lost touch with my previous friends (there were never many) because I was no longer interested in them (this would become a pattern). I had a close group of friends with whom I played games around the time that I quit school; I lost them over a stupid argument that I started.

There were other groups, people I met online, that were important to me after that. I have always maintained (and still do) that it is possible to have close friendships without ever meeting face to face, and considering how difficult it was (and is) for me to be around people if they can look at me, having friends who only knew me by my name and my voice was liberating.

I lost all of them. As the years went on, their company was less and less able to fill the void because having friends to play games and watch movies with is great, but nothing can replace the physical aspects – casual touches, being hugged. The worse it got, the more I felt like I needed to be entirely alone. A fun evening in some coop game became stressful rather than enjoyable. I learned that the more lonely you are, the more you want to bealone because being around people makes it all so much worse. I withdrew and those friendships fizzled out. I miss them all, but at the same time there is no sense in reaching out again.

In 2020/2021 I had some reprieve when I met someone with whom I would be in a relationship for several months. Finally, finally there was a person who spoke my language, who understood what I was saying, and whose opinions I was genuinely interested in. He made me laugh a lot. This was, once again, all online, and it ended, inevitably, when the loneliness got worse, and I withdrew. I still dream of him sometimes, though I have not heard his voice in well over a year.

Since that relationship ended, I can no longer be around people at all. It has always been difficult for me to find people who are the right kind of weird, my kind of weird. There are lovely folks at my university, but I have yet to meet someone that I can genuinely talk to.

Yet throughout the loneliness, I always had the modding community and my own little corner of it that kept me company and I cannot overstate how much it helped me over the years. Every kind word, every bit of positive feedback, every respectful encounter has dispelled a little more of the crippling insecurity that I carry around with me. Especially in recent years, this community – you guys – have been the entirety of my social life, outside of my family, and I value the friendships I have made with you greatly.

Incidentally, that is also why I disappeared for several months. I have felt those friendships slipping lately, felt myself slipping away from this community since I started university. I have less time and often I feel like I am choosing between two worlds – one is always tugging at my sleeves and yelling at me that if I do not pay attention, I will lose it entirely. While I think it is perfectly possible for me to succeed in my studies while continuing my modding projects, I am having a hard time of it in practice. I hope that this will get better in the coming years as I have no intention of giving up modding.

I’ve been rambling on for some time now. How to conclude? For one, I hope that my little story encourages those among you who are also struggling. Yes, it’s been said – “there’s always hope”, “you can do it”, etc. My usual response was (and is) that plenty of people also don’t make it and end up hopping out of their fifth-storey window instead, and I’ve contemplated that option plenty of times. There is no guarantee that things get better. Sometimes, they get worse, no matter how hard you try. The only thing you can do is keep setting one foot in front of the other. If that is all you are doing, you are doing enough. If you can’t keep going, allow yourself to take a break.

Finally, I would like to encourage you to go to someone dear to you and give them a spontaneous, completely out-of-the-blue hug. Do it right now! Stop reading! I won’t be mad. If you have no one – welcome to the club, I hope things get better for both of us someday. Here’s a song that really helped me, maybe it’ll help you, too.

Oh, hey, LOTF compiled successfully. I think that means it’s time to wrap things up. See you on the other side.