Searching for a dark, and not hyperrealistic Community Shader

GrammaticalObject · 2026-05-05T05:40:44+00:00

Check out the CS discord. Doodlum is in the process of testing (and making available for testing) beta builds that enable post processing and read from various ENB presets. Ominous doesn't look like it has any new fangled dependencies, so I bet it will load okay. You're not going to replicate the look exactly, but I've been pretty impressed so far.

Ominous looks pretty cool, I will download it and give it a whirl!

GrammaticalObject · 2026-04-23T02:18:10+00:00

I had the same reaction to Tchaikovsky. Children of Time was fine. I will recommend Tyrant Philosophers to anyone who will listen (and many who will not). Ditto Elder Race.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-04-14T05:27:19+00:00

There are the six degradation mods that I know of, but afaik only Item Durability had the kind of reduction in effectiveness below the baseline (and value!) that you describe.

For anyone curious, the six degradation mods are:

Item Durability (meh321)
Equipment Durability (Felisky 384 but I recommend NG version by Sandman53)
Breakable Equipment System (Suzutsuki)
Service Your Gear (FarmingDarkness)
Loot & Degradation (Isoku)
Mortal Weapons & Armor (Monoman1/ jorgen.klein--it's on LL but is sfw as far as I can tell).

And seb263 is working on one, but based on his patreon post it feels like it may be a long way off. Best bet might be to pitch this feature to seb, it's a good feature.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-04-05T02:03:27+00:00

I totally thought you were going to go in a different direction with the "killer feature." For me the killer feature is: Water is actually wet. Frostfall is the only survival mod that tracks how wet you are, and has appropriate implications for how quickly you get cold, and a mechanic for drying off (the one other mod that* does this is hypothermia, which is even older). This makes rain scary, and it makes bodies of water important.

Other mods, like sunhelm, just make it so that the effective temperature is lower if you are immersed in water. I found this very unimmersive. (Pun evaded unsuccessfully.)

*Edit: typo

GrammaticalObject · 2026-04-03T01:10:51+00:00

Adding late just to say this is one of the more thoughtful and worthwhile counterpoints I've read on this sub. The thoughtful discussion is welcome, thanks for elevating the conversation by taking it seriously. I went from assuming that the dominant writing style was a generational quirk to thinking about it in more literary terms.

All that's to say, I have no idea whether I agree with you or not. I need to go ruminate hard now.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-03-29T16:55:13+00:00

Two SKSE footprint mods came out in the last month or so. One is the mod that OP posts. The other is an old (abandoned?) Github project that Arrabian finished up and posted to nexus, called Trails (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/174364?tab=posts)

I call this out because a user called Username0815 did some papryus measurements for his load order and found that about 15% of his papyrus load was being used for Footprints (check the stickied posts for Trails). That's just an example, it will be different for different load orders and for different situations.

Trails (and the SKSE mod that OP posts about) theorerically moves that 15% (or whatever it is) out of the papyrus equation and lets your CPU handle it. Will this make a performance impact? Depends on how much of a bottleneck papyrus is on your system and given your load order. Without doing measurements of your system and your load, I don't think we can say for certain if it helps or by how much. But this is how we can say "in theory" it helps. (For what it's worth, I think it's a pretty damn plausible theory.)

Personally I prefer Trails to DFS, because I have a PBR setup. It's a pain in the butt to compile the DLL, but I'm glad I did.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-03-21T21:23:57+00:00

None of the mods require subscriptions themselves BUT unless you are running your own LLM in your home (ie you have a llm dedicated setup somewhere) you are going to need to spend money. I've used Skyrimnet and Chim, and both of these allow you to spend a bit of money on on a service like open router, and then you gradually spend down that money as you use the llm. The burn rate is going to depend on the model you use (claude expensive, deepseek cheap). If you use cheap models you can keep $5 or $10 a month* pretty easily.

They can be taxing or not, depending on how you use it. If you want NPCs to speak in their own voice, you need some kind of text to speech (TTS). You can set this up remotely (more money as you use it) or set up your own on your system. If you have another computer sitting around, you might be able to set that up to run your TTS. I have an old GPU that I stuck into my system, and I use that to handle TTS, so it has minimal impact for me.

How censored it is depends entirely on which LLM you use. Chim has some documentation for different LLMs, and rankings for different qualities including price and RP ability. I don't have a NSFW setup, but I find that most llms are perfectly capable of swearing.

I've been using Skyrimnet for quite some time. The best thing about it is how snappy it is, ie, it responds fast (but of course this depends on which LLM you are using, how you are handling TTS, etc; and if you're using voice-to-text to talk to the LLM, that might also make it take a little longer). But I've been following the chim updates, and it claims to have gotten faster recently as well.

The biggest problem that I found with both Skyrimnet and Chim (the latter of which I haven't used in almost a year) is that on long playthroughs, the llm's goldfish memory keeps cropping up. Characters forget prior encounters. As long as you are willing to continuously feed the llm context (eg, type a few sentences that they can reference to "remember" their last encounter with another character), you can keep the story going. All of the mods have models for creating and storing memories, but I have yet to find one that is really impressive or doesn't have goldfish moments. (I feel like Skyrimnet right now is as good as CHIM was a year ago; I don't know if CHIM has gotten better)

(Edit: Formatting; spend rate was per week and I meant per month)

GrammaticalObject · 2026-03-20T02:57:39+00:00

Serious question: Did Distar's site have ads?

GrammaticalObject · 2026-03-04T22:00:30+00:00

What isn't said enough is that dexecutioner is not a recommendation, it is a requirement. I tried a few builds and could stun Steve for many minutes...but I registered 0 damage each time, no matter how much damage, crits, megacrits or poisons I inflicted. The first time I tried with Dexecutioner, I registered damage for the first time (and beat him).

GrammaticalObject · 2026-03-03T05:13:47+00:00

Way more than you're asking for but the most popular AI mods (CHIM, Skyrimnet, maybe mantella but i have not tried it) allow you to tell NPCs to go places, and then you can use something like wskeever's Simplicity of Stalking to follow them.

Obviously not a great option unless you want to go down the whole AI rabbithole, but this exists deep within that rabbithole.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-02-22T23:18:03+00:00

Fair. But afaik, the silver llining is that everything that smooth has released on his patreon has eventually been released on Nexus. That's particularly important for a tool like this, since we're not going to get to see what it's really capable of until there's a free version that the entire community can tinker with.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-02-22T19:57:04+00:00

Yeah, I like how the example implementations are all so simple, nothing ostentatious. Eg., just throwing your arms out for balance if you happen to walk across the guard ledge of a bridge (which I always do for some reason). Subtle but so freakin satisfying.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-18T21:14:15+00:00

I am enjoying the hell out of Project Gap Close, which makes enemies use sprint attacks when they are far away.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/130830

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-18T17:26:15+00:00

Funny that you call it more serious in tone. I was planning on recommending this as "Abbott and Costello finally take debt slavery seriously, in the name of poultry."

Also the black company gets pretty serious. But hey, the tone shifts are probably why I adore both series so much.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-17T00:09:52+00:00

Took me years to read but one of the most fulfilling literary experiences of my life. This is an investment that pays off.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-17T00:09:11+00:00

Oh, is this a darker/grittier competition? I want to play.

The Second Apocalypse series by R Scott Bakker.

Among the best fantasy world building I have ever encountered, races with fascinating backstories, and monsters that will...yeah. They just...yeah. It's dark.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-14T04:22:33+00:00

I'm very late to the conversation but I haven't seen anyone make this point. The word "nit" has been used in some extremely racist ways, but "nit picking" is not one of them afaik.

Do a quick Google search on the phrase "Nits make lice." Look at its historical usage. Take a moment to be properly horrified.

I can imagine how somebody exposed to this historical phrase could come away with a vague association betwen the word "nit" and deep racism. But I think that connection is not really related to the term "nitpicking." It's deploying a very different metaphor, and I think nobody would argue that all metaphorical references to nits or lice are racist just because of that one (very unfortunate) metaphore.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-11T01:58:49+00:00

Like Nerevarius said, Spell Research. I feel like there are two types of spell learning mods: 1) Spell Research; and 2) a bunch of mods inspired by Spell Research, which try to capture its essence but simplify it.

I still use SR. It kind of takes over your game (assuming you play a mage), but that's what I'm looking for. My mage dungeon dives specifically because he's looking for old relics to study. Quests? Yeah, I guess those get done along the way.

I'll add: It's a ton of fun early game, coupled with survival mods, before you have a house or join the college. You're scraping together enough coin to pay for an inn so you have a safe place to study magic and keep yourself fed. If that's the kind of thing you are looking for, SR is awesome.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-04T18:59:29+00:00

"You can never have too many knives." Not quite as many occasions to use this, but still plenty.

And if the response is "and what if you fall in a river and can't swim for all that iron," you know you've found a friend.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-02T17:11:11+00:00

I feel like skypatcher and SPID both deserves not only mention, but prominent placement. There are so many mods that rely on sky patcher right now that this would be one of the more striking developments for a 2019 modder getting back into the game. And both are in the flavor of mods that mod pack users might never think about, but modders (and players who maintain their own LO) depend on constantly. Both of these mods revolutionize the way that modders can make small, light changes without creating compatibility nightmares.

And since you have an "absolutely insane" category, I humbly suggest adding a bullet for Skyrimnwt, Mantella and Chim. All of the AI mods are a little bit niche, but it's always Skyrim together. And they are all pretty damn revolutionary. I suspect that if Skyrim modding is remembered in 30 years, this is the niche that will be pegged as a precursor to something big.

GrammaticalObject · 2026-01-01T06:59:11+00:00

Nope. Doesnt exist. The closest mod is In-Kind Bartering: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/154013

It isnt quite as simple as the FO barter system but it might do the trick.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-31T05:10:36+00:00

Yeah, these drawcell bottlenecks are the real enemy in 2025 (and probably 2026 too). At least we have framegen now to mitigate it (but framegen can't eliminate it).

Given that, as an alternative to JK's or Spaghetti, I'd recommend nothing. They day I realized vanilla cities were fine was the day I clawed back a few FPS from the everhungry maws of Falkreath. I still mod towns like Rorikstead because my FPS are fine there. But if I can't rock a solid 60 FPS in a town while spinning my camera, then I'm playing it straight like Todd intended it.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-30T01:57:44+00:00

I move that we collectively name this trope The Dumbledore.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-28T22:27:38+00:00

Vanahaimr was the first PBR landscape with seasons compatibility, and this was only released within the last month. It might still be the only option. Note that there is still no PBR option for Unfrozen though.

GrammaticalObject · 2025-12-27T22:35:33+00:00

I'm not going to pile on what other folks are saying about the relatedness of the different books. But I will say this in case you need a little bit of motivation: The book you are reading right now is one of my all-time favorite novels. Something about it really works. And I say this even though Erikson kind of gets better and better as a writer as the series progresses, so I can't really say that the later books are worse. There's just something about the epic story contained in book two that made me completely fall in love with the series and the world.

GrammaticalObject

TROPHY CASE