I'M CAPTAIN KIRK

adventures in once again spending far too much time playing skyrim

Bitsy is making good progress on building her house, and also on hating vampires, since i dragged her through not one but two vampire dens yesterday and she's thoroughly tired of the whole business. she was so annoyed about the redwater den that she smacked the heads off the doorman and the two watchpeople outside once she emerged, and they don't even attack you.
I kind of doubt i will be permitted to marry mr. snow elf, since the marry almost anyone mod seems to rely on the vast majority of skyrim's npcs sharing base programming and voice actors (for the marriage lines). but gosh darn it i am going to try, and if i don't succeed i might try and marry that wizard who lives in Morthal and will un-vampire you if you don't cure disease in time, he's cool.
(derkeethus, the argonian from darkwater crossing, did not impress bitsy at all while she was rescuing him from the falmer, so he'd be out of the question anyway)

meanwhile, in the continuing saga of me fucking up rilli's life while trying to improve it, the game will no longer give me the marriage dialogue for Rune despite me having redownloaded the polyamory mod and still having the Marry Rune mod on. it worked fine before i removed the polyamory mod to see if it fixed the house bug. there are two options: 1) an unexpected conflict that wasn't there before and 2) the game thinks that when i removed the polyamory mod the first time i divorced him since he was the one that got kicked out, and therefore has him refuse to marry me again. he still seems to like me though so it's probably the first one. potential fixes: remove the polyamory mod from Vortex and re-subscribe on Steam Workshop because that's how i had it before and it worked then; remove the marry rune mod and find another one (i hope there's another one).

Malgrave continues to have Times. she was not particularly impressed by markarth's whole... markarth, when i dragged her along there for reasons of trying to find a mod that will let me carry lanterns around (the most popular and well-used one requires you to have SkyUI, a mod that changes a LOT of skyrim's, well, UI, and i'm not there for that) because i was playing in windowed mode and that makes everything so very, very dark. we all got horribly lost in a cave full of spiders because it was so dark, and i had to rewind time to save us all.
i still haven't got my lantern (working on it!) but Malgrave has learned the Candlelight spell (and Healing and Fast Healing, taught as part of continuing efforts to Prepare to Not Die when i go back into the falmer dungeon i failed to clear last time) and is quite proud of her newfound ability to create light for sixty seconds at a time. She also enchanted some gloves! It's a shitty enchantment but she did it! Malgrave is going up in the world like she never thought she could.
She also met dwarven ruins properly, and decided she likes the orc blacksmith in markarth keep, and smelted some dwarven armour, and killed a dragon, and fully upgraded Breezehome and formerly moved in there from Uthgerd's house (i also found the stash of random shit i squirrelled away in uthgerd's house some time ago). next step is to find some children. maybe i'll see if the multiple adoptions mod actually works this time or will just vanish another child into the ether (rip blaise). maybe i should try getting it on vortex instead of steam workshop. changing it over probably won't fuck rilli over just because she only has two functioning children anyway.
i also figured out how to work the portable crafting tools mod that was one of the four or so mods my friend put on there when i allowed him to a couple years ago, which started me on mods in the first place, so that's nice. just haul a log out of your pack, plop it on the ground, crouch down and boop it, and bam it's a fucking anvil and now you're making armour right there in front of a guard who just wants to know why you arrived at a mine at 12:30 at night and are making so much noise.

 

Malgrave has one horse, who was awarded a name by the horse mod i have but i've forgotten it (it starts with V). He is an enormous dappled grey who might as well be an elephant, not that Malgrave knows what an elephant is. She needs a big horse because she is a big lady; he carries her with ease. The game declares that Uthgerd has to run behind, but most likely she rides too; he's just that big. Malgrave rides him bareback, because saddles and bridles are too much frippery if you ask her, and anyway he knows what she's asking him to do.
He is utterly unflappable and will stare down a dragon and I made sure he was immortal.

Rilli has two horses, Frost and Shadowmere. Frost was her mount for years but now he belongs more to her daughters because he has a considerably better temperament than Shadowmere the probable eldritch horror, not that Shadowmere would do anything to her beloved mistress' offspring. Not on purpose, anyway.
Rilli delights in both her animals and gives them multiple kisses on the nose daily, and she rides like the brain-damaged asshole who knows no fear that she is. Both her horses are perfectly capable of battering a wolf or a quite large bandit to death all by themselves, and happily will. Rilli is hoping they will have babies.

Bitsy has, as yet, zero horses. Bitsy does not quite see the point in horses, since when you're on a horse you can't easily stop to dig up that cool root you just found that's probably useful for something. Horses also don't really like water, and Bitsy would rather follow rivers than roads.
I'm somewhat unsure how much she'll use a horse once she gets one, but she will get one because I went to the trouble of downloading horse mods on ps4 and they will not be wasted.

 

added some child mods so i have more options for acquiring childrens

'mirrors, your mod addiction is getting out of hand', i hear you cry. no, shut up, get back to me when i'm playing an anime catgirl with enormous bazongas

 

malgrave, Disapproving of cowardly and conniving orc chieftans: your armour is my armour now

which is to say, did the Largushbur quest and stole all of Yamarz's armour after killing him, because fuck that guy. malgrave is wearing it now, after running round grinding smithing and collecting ore to improve it. Just need to see if i can get a buff carry weight enchantment on a piece of it anywhere near as good as the one i have on my dwarven boots and i'll be able to have her in the full set, looking orcish as hell because she's also weilding Volendrung at present.

he survived the fight with the giant, but only because the only way i could kill the thing was to shoot at it from a distance while he smacked it from up close; tried a few times to let him die and then kill it, but the stupid big bastard just had to twitch a toe in my direction and malgrave's corpse was t-posing its way into the skybox. got tired of that after a while.

i have a mod that lets me build an orc stronghold once i've got the npc orcs to like me sufficiently, which i have. i am looking forward to building it SO MUCH.

 

malgrave has made a start on her stronghold (it's a hut at present, but we all start somewhere), adopted an orc daughter (once i figured out i'd downloaded the wrong version of the mod and that was why the new children weren't showing up), and become a werewolf
busy busy

i also remade my breton, Caro, for the third time- probably the last time though i'm pretty happy with how he turned out this time round
god knows what his playstyle's gonna be, probably in many ways rilli 2-point-oh because he's a sneaky archer at the moment but i want to give him a more magical focus overall, even though skyrim's magic is Not Workable by itself in vanilla form and i don't really want to download a rebalancing mod because i can't be assed to learn a whole new system
he's a twink and a slut and he's going to marry balimund the smith in riften and also hopefully multiple other large buff men
i know markarth's dude orc smith is marriageable i wonder how many other of the blacksmiths are

 

conveniently there is no shortage of eligible blacksmiths, warriors and miners in skyrim
many of them are orcs
the multiple marriage mod allows for eleven spouses, caro is going to be a happy boy

 

Not a rebalance, but Apocalypse adds more spells over a nice spread, giving neglected schools some more meat.

 

i think i might have seen it or things alluding to it in some of my nexus mod walkies, i'll have to look into it properly
thanx 4 tip

 

my god where are all the husbands going to live

it's actually unlikely i'll ever get caro to the point rilli's at, where i've done almost everything i want to do on her and she's comfortably settled (even if rune still refuses to remarry me and i haven't got round to trying to fix that yet) because my attention span is simply not that long, but still

i don't think i could take balimund away from his smithy tbh so i'll probably leave him living there and since i want him to be the first spouse his house will be caro's base for at least a while but i don't think i want caro established in honeyside that would be too like rilli

he's just going to have husbands scattered all across the damn country

 

probably dawnstar or solitude will end up being caro's home base

prrrrrobably most likely solitude

 

made rilli's lockpicking skill legendary and did a tour of the major cities of skyrim unlocking every door i could find to level it back up- got from 15 to 60 in a couple hours which is pretty good going for me. the dwemer museum in markarth is a goldmine for that btw because there are a lot of decently highly levelled locked display cases and none of them are opened just by the key calcemo gives you.

since rilli is staying in honeyside, i took my life in my hands and downloaded a mod to improve it

against all odds it worked like a charm even with the arcane install instructions for if you'd already upgraded the house in vanilla

so now rilli has beds for all four of her children (she may have adopted a small orc girl who accosted her in markarth to buy flowers- apparently she has a weakness for homeless flower-sellers- and a high elf boy lurking around in understone keep, mostly to get him away from Ondolemar's influence) plus two more, and lots of room to display things like the clothes she took off ulfric stormcloak as trophies.

speaking of her children, blaise is back to running around solitude, but cannot be conversed with. guess he likes the horses too much to leave. this may actually be a vanilla bug and not a mod bug. rip blaise, you were rilli's son for such a short time

i removed the rune marriage mod i had and put in another one that's supposed to make multiple more male npcs, including rune, marriageable. however the only noticeable effect it has had thus far is to make him vanish entirely. starting to suspect my campaign to reclaim my husband is doomed to failure. also have the sneaking suspicion my problem with the house mod previously was due to me skipping one very simple step, and all these knockon problems could have been avoided, but oh well we live and learn do we not

malgrave adopted lucia, the homeless girl from whiterun, because the kid was like 'you're great, can you be my mother?' and her heart broke in half. gonna have to get cracking on that longhouse, malgrave

i also unplugged my headphones to use them on my laptop because i was being lazy and now they're playing silly buggers on my desktop, which is grand. i'll fix em at some point (i hope)

 

What adoptable kid mod are you using?

 

for the mer kids?

bearing in mind that i've got skyrim legendary edition and not special edition:
Aymar and Friends Adoptable Elven Children, which requires RS Children Overhaul to work and also the textures from Vanilla Hair Variety Plus

probably also going to add, when I get back from the trip to my parents' i'm heading off to tomorrow, RS Elven and Beast Children which also requires RS children overhaul, and on an entirely different note Falmer Brothers Adoptable Falmer

 

i'm adding the elven & beast children mod because a) more children give me more children and b) adds two more orc children which with the two from aymar and friends and the one from the orc stronghold mod gives me five orc children, plus lucia, for malgrave

 

played skyrim for... probably an excessively long time today but guess who has a whole stronghold, six kids and two dogs?

THAT'S RIGHT IT'S MALGRAVE

Spoiler: screenies

Pictured: the longhouse, the wife, the puppy and the horse's butt. The horse's name is Vefridr, btw, or something very similar.
I made a careful list of everything i needed to complete the interior and i was only off by one hinge and one lock, which was nice. The puppy comes from the Dogs of Skyrim mod; I don't think there's a way to change his name from 'puppy' but honestly calling him 'puppy' is pretty ic for Malgrave. He is, officially, a snowy alsatian.
I was sort of concerned that there didn't seem to be an option to change Uthgerd's home base to the new house but it seems to have done it automatically, which is reassuring.
I also downloaded a follower tweaks mod to make sure everyone following me was properly immortal, because it's REALLY hard to be careful where you're swinging Wuuthrad or Volendrung tbqh. And also nobody wants to get a puppy killed. And also this way I can work up to having FOUR dogs and Uthegerd following Malgrave alround....


He's stuck in there.

Post completing the longhouse and moving the three already adopted children in there, I set off on a quest to go get the other three children, while of course getting hideously distracted along the way.

'Don't go where we can't follow' cry my followers sadly from the bottom of the mountain, to which I reply, come the fuck on it's only a 45 degree angle if the horse can make it so can you


Dog in a boat


The longhouse is not what you might call 'well-lit', so I lightened the shit out of this screenshot so y'all could see the Fambly Together, except for one kid whom I can't see anywhere. Uthgerd is standing in front of her mayhaps? who knows. Anyway, thanks to the wonders of modding Malgrave now has five orc children and Lucia, who is an orc-by-association now. Lucia also brought home a rabbit, whom she's allowed to keep provided she prevents the dogs from eating it.
The orc kids are: Uzgash, who came along with the longhouse mod and refuses to change her clothes at all ever; Batul whom Malgrave pulled out of Warmaidens, no word on how she wound up with Adrienne; Uzul, who grew up in Dushnik Yal but must not be the son of the chief or I can't imagine they'd let Malgrave steal him (those two are from the Adoptable Elven Children mod, which doesn't give the kids very detailed backstories in the mod description); Yagak, whose mother abandoned him at Gloombound Mine and who is noticably taller, more teenager-ey, than the other kids; and Atarga, whose dad got caught stealing orichalcum from the Mor Khazgur mine and got executed for it (the RS Elven & Beast Children mod (source of the last two) however, likes to give the kids pretty detailed backgrounds in the mod description).
There's only two kid beds on the main floor of the longhouse and the kids' AI refuse to let them go down into the cellar where there are more beds so four of the kids just stand around blankly all night. This is fine; that's what rping is for. We do a lot of that in this household.
It should also be noted that you can't hire any staff for the longhouse and Uthgerd is Malgrave's permanent follower, basically never permitted to stay home. SO. The kids have free reign most of the time. I'm starting to wonder if I shouldn't marry someone else to stay home with the kids...


And finally! A lovely shot of the animal followers (and Uthgerd) (and the goat)
The brown doggie in front is in fact Meeko! The dog mod gave him a makeover. He is a very good dog and is better at following than either Puppy or Uthgerd. Speaking of, Uthgerd now has the capacity to ride a horse, so I might have to get another one for her so she doesn't have to run behind like a weirdo- I mean, so Vefridr's back can have a break from being ridden by two people at once.
The goat spawned when I built the longhouse stockade. I love the goat. Sometimes the goat sleeps in the doorway of the wise woman's hut for no reason. Did you know there is a mod that gives you a pointless, immortal, goat follower? I might have to download it.

 

things i have learned: temporary companions join my stupid gang just fine; there may be a Problem with horses

the horse problem was brought to my attention when (...after i reloaded after a small ctd, it's fine, only a little one) i was riding along and there was a random horse in the road.

i decided to see if i could claim the horse as mine, so i got off Vefridr and got on the new horse. new horse was promptly herded and claimed and given a name with due process. Uthgerd then hopped up on Vefridr. Now, i want to keep him as Malgrave's horse, so I dismounted new horse to see if she'd dismount as well. She did not. I then found I could not re-mount new horse. Annoyed, i retreated up the road a bit and Uthgerd then dismounted and followed on foot, so i went back to try and get on Vefridr again... and couldn't. There were no mounting prompts for either horse and just mashing the A button next to them didn't do shit.

i reloaded a previous save because I couldn't be assed to deal with it just then, but this is going to merit some investigation. I reckon it's because both Convenient Horses and the follower tweaks mod contain the functionality to let companions ride, and something is probably clashing. maybe. not sure how to fix it. Will have to poke more. probably shouldn't tempt fate by adding a mod that lets you brand horses for certain purposes....

 

I think either Convenient Horses or follower tweaks has an option to turn off companion riding, for compatibility.

 

oh shit yeah it might well
think i need to prod the CH settings anyway
thanx

 

belated update on the horse situation!

i turned off follower riding from the tweaks mod and turned it on for convenient horses, which caused uthgerd to summon a horse out of thin air and ride around on it. problem solved (minus the one time she glitched getting off the thing and spent some time hovering around in the air behind me with her feet rotating 360 degrees)! except i still didn't know if herding another horse by mounting it would cause the same problem.

so when i found another free horse by an abandoned hunting camp, i tried it out. got on, horse herded, immediately became my primary horse and Vefridr started wandering off back to where i'd planted the horse herding flag. chased after, tried to mount him, couldn't. went back to new horse, tried to mount it, couldn't. okay, problem replicated. but i wanted to know if vefridr reaching the horse camp would make a difference, and things like fast travel. so after dicking around briefly in winterhold, i went back to the longhouse. vefridr not there yet, okay, it was a bit of a long walk from winterhold to near whiterun. still couldn't mount new horse. went inside, slept, came out, there's vefridr, still couldn't mount him or new horse. tried dismissing new horse and then reclaiming her, and THAT did something, in that after dismounting i actually got the prompt to mount her again without using the auto-mount horse horn. still couldn't remount vefridr.

that's where it stands at the moment. i feel like part of it is me somehow fundamentally misunderstanding how something about convenient horses/convenient horse herding works, but i've gone through like 99% of the settings menu and can't find a damn thing that might explain it. i thought the mod description had something about being able to summon each horse by name, but i haven't been able to actually do that.

if all else fails, well, new horse and vefridr are the same model, so i could just swap the names....

 

'Horse Dismissal
Also available via Flag menu. Select a horse to be removed from herd. If you dismiss your last ridden horse game will think that you do not currently own a horse, until you mount one again.'

aha, i think at least we have an explanation for one thing. can't remember if i tried mounting vefridr while other horse was dismissed.

you know, frustrating as it is, something about trying a bunch of different things to try and fix shit is oddly satisfying. if one of them works. if they don't work, all previous satisfaction immediately dissipates.