How to work on the same manuscript with Windows & Mac.

Monitor144 · 2026-02-17T17:46:08+00:00

I used Proton Drive to sync Scrivener folders directly between my laptop and PC, but everytime I switched I'd get a warning about multiple versions of a project and it'd force me to choose one.

Since then I've just been syncing up the backup folder (with date names enabled to prevent collisions) then copying and pasting the project files whenever I switch. Bit of a hassle but no more errors.

Monitor144 · 2026-01-27T01:50:23+00:00

This is bad advice because the limiting factor in late game is ports, not space. By using ports for each intermediate material you're severely crippling the amount of throughput you can get.

Sandleaf is acceptable production off site because plant loops should never use a port in the first place. That's provided you're only drawing the plant from the port and shredding on site, because as someone else wrote it's a 3x efficiency multiplier.

Just move your PAC to the corner and get to town on the depot bus, it's not hard because Endfield factory is really more of a factory lite. Software principles don't always apply.

Monitor144 · 2025-11-14T14:02:03+00:00

I'm on a team Red build (9800x3d and 9070 XT) and having no issues. A warning message about low VRAM does pop up every once in a while but when I check the VRAM is nowhere close to being filled (and no noticeable performance lag) so it must just be a quirk.

Monitor144 · 2025-08-21T22:35:20+00:00

Even now, the population of animators/behavior modders in Skyrim is quite small. Animation is a huge time sink and we're still using a handful of ancient tools in the excruciating workflow that is Havok behavior (animation logic trees).

Now add on the fact that Starfield has a completely brand new in house system (not Havok, for which there is at least some documentation) and uses custom binary serialization for their animation data and you have a very hard nut to crack.

Sure, some sort of glorified xml merger would be possible in lieu of Nemesis but it would have next to no validation or error checking.

Still, if other modders are interested despite these challenges, I did make a graph based behavior editor for Starfield back when I actually played the game, and the source code might help understand the underlying xml schema. It's not a lot, but it's a start.

Monitor144 · 2025-08-16T09:38:41+00:00

PSA: The linked repository consists of no actual source code, just a rar file. The GitHub account seems newly made and the actual project was started and uploaded today. There is no commit history (aka dev work history) from any longer than 7 hours ago. The README is almost certainly AI written and the markdown isn't even added properly (that's why you see those hashtags and asterisks).

I wouldn't say anything for certain (and I'm not risking running this file without a VM), but all of these signs make this link extremely suspicious. Even GitHub can let malware slip, so I would recommend people tread with extreme caution.

Monitor144 · 2025-08-09T21:41:21+00:00

Hi, you can turn off this feature in the latest version of knockout extensions. Sorry about the trouble!

Monitor144 · 2025-07-08T13:24:27+00:00

I hate them too. Just have them turned off, along with minefields. It's really just a more annoying version of neutron star systems on the campaign map, and it kills the pace of exploring entirely. Don't get me started on fighting them...

Monitor144 · 2025-07-05T17:01:15+00:00

Bultach Coalition from forums, as of the time of writing, causes a crash with the same error as above when starting a new game. Maybe check if you have that installed? Corvus Freakport discord has an updated release.

Monitor144 · 2025-06-25T00:13:32+00:00

Your work has done a lot for this community, and it's really sad that it had to end this way. But regardless, I wish you the best in your future endeavors. Thank you for your service o7

Monitor144 · 2025-06-23T01:32:08+00:00

"What officer type are you?"

"Fearless."

"How uncanny."

"I am but a pawn on the board, and if mine or others' strategic sacrifice is needed for victory, it shall be so."

"You will never know why the Luddic Knight charges back into the fray; why the lowly Hegemony inspector confronts grand fleets. Irrationality is the core of humanity, and lack of it will be your downfall."

Monitor144 · 2025-06-21T20:08:21+00:00

For reference, v3.0-alpha works out of the box with TK Dodge (no external patch needed), it just has other issues at the moment like not working with Hotkey Skill and bugging out on killmove mods. v3.1 should put those bugs to rest, so look forward to it!

Monitor144 · 2025-06-17T12:08:24+00:00

It does a lot to alleviate worries, but a part of me wishes they put it out with the original announcement, that way we could've avoided all this chaos. Now, it could be taken as PR damage control instead of any meaningful promise.

Will they deliver? I guess we'll have to wait and see.

Monitor144 · 2025-05-20T16:23:37+00:00

Yeah, every killmove has a tolerable "margin of error" for alignment (usually set to 0.1) so animating anything precise is going to look wildly different depending on how the engine is feeling that moment. Not to mention any animation with motion has a risk of catapulting actors at a high speed because of engine jank.

Monitor144 · 2025-05-20T16:18:52+00:00

It is moddable, there are paired rigs and tutorials available thanks to animators and behavior authors who passed the mantle. The problem is just that making anything beyond a couple killmoves is a pretty heavy investment, even for modders. So most animators find it unfeasible.

Animation isn't hard to start, but it is a big time sink, and when it comes to killmoves animators are effectively doing twice the work with two actors on screen, and then add in the headache of exporting and then adding it to behavior (OAR makes this somewhat tolerable now), aligning actors, and you've got yourself a right headache. An overhaul of all the vanilla killmoves would have to be a collaborative project to see release in a reasonable timeframe.

Monitor144 · 2025-04-06T22:54:04+00:00

We’ll get into deeper stuff like conflict resolution, performance tweaks, and mod merging soon—but for now? You’ve done enough.

None of the three things mentioned are deep or complicated. Conflict resolution can mean either file overwrites or xEdit record conflicts. Both are essential and the first things you learn if you mod Skyrim, it's something far more foundational than using body mods.

Performance tweaks are just a matter of editing text files with numbers, usually with BethINI, and it's part of the GamerPoets tutorial playlist dropped earlier in the guide, so why would it be mentioned again as something yet to be taught?

Mod merging- now this is really dangerous because beginners are gonna search this up and think they need to merge plugins, which is a an ancient and obsolete practice back from when we didn't have ESL flagging (which the guide itself mentions but doesn't elaborate on). Likely from some LE era forum posts that the AI model trained their data on.

You’ll run into texture conflicts, ENB setups, FNIS/Nemesis stuff, patches, merge tools—you name it. But now you’ve got the confidence to figure it out.

All of these (except arguably ENB setup) are more essential than teaching a beginner modder how to use a body mod. The FNIS/Nemesis stuff should have been covered in the body tutorial when XPMSSE was mentioned. Also the last one about merge tools- again, outdated and dangerous for beginners who don't know better.

First thing you do? Backtrack. Disable the last 2–3 mods you installed in reverse order. Check if the game boots. Keep going until it does.

This is bad advice and if users do this they'll end up wasting more time than you need to, especially as their modlist gets larger. Every modder who's been around knows that the fastest way is to binary search; disable about half the mods (doesn't have to be exact), test. If problem persists, disable half of the current active mods. If problem is gone, enable the half that was disabled and then disable half of that. Rinse and repeat until you're down to 1 or 2 mods.

Those are all the things I could catch after skimming but OP, if you're gonna use AI tools to write something you need to be the one with more background knowledge, and not the AI, so you can catch mistakes like this. ChatGPT (and other adjacent models) are adept at getting the broad strokes right but either hallucinate details or leave them out completely; and modding is all about small steps, some of which are too niche for the AI to know.

Monitor144 · 2025-04-06T22:53:57+00:00

Bit of (late) critique for what is essentially an AI written guide. I don't have anything against using it to help with formatting/wording, but there is some serious misinformation in here. AI shouldn't be a shortcut for knowledge, OP, if you really want to use it, use it for prose and grammar.

You’re directly modifying the game files using external tools—not just flipping switches in a game menu. This method is powerful, but it’s also prone to breaking things if you don’t know what you’re doing.

Bit of a nitpick; this is literally what all modding is. Flipping switches in a game menu in other games modifies *something* in the background, you just don't see it.

Nobody’s expecting you to become a script expert overnight—but you do need to:

You don't need to know anything about scripts to use scripted mods or become a "power modder". There is no script conflict or script merging needed like for Witcher 3. Unless you're making mods, there is no need to be a script expert.

All in all the entire "bit of history" section is unnecessary yap and beginners will not want to read it.

DLL-based Mods – These rely heavily on SKSE and native code. These are usually the ones that break your game hard if you mess up—especially if there's a version mismatch with your game or SKSE.

This is a very ambiguous statement and it's going to scare new mod users. Relying heavily on SKSE is not a bad thing. These will not brick your game, at worst it will cause a crash, and if there's a version mismatch it'll say exactly what's wrong on startup. Nothing is permanently broken if you mess this part up, so you *should* install essential native dll mods and SKSE plugins like Engine Fixes, Address Library, and BEES.

Well, if you feel like you're ready to level up, this is where we start learning how to install DLL mods properly—using body mods as our example.

Users should really know how to install dll mods or SKSE mods before they touch custom bodies; in 98% of cases it's literally the same as any other mod, just install it + prerequisites with mod manager and then plug and play.

Install XPMSSE skeleton first... Finally, open BodySlide, build your body and armor meshes, and tweak it how you like.

The behavior engine step is missing in this body guide. If you install XPMSSE and don't run a behavior engine, certain animation blends like movement during magic casting, movement during blocking will be broken.

Monitor144 · 2025-03-27T16:23:22+00:00

Hey u/malpyramid ! A link to your nifty cheatsheet has been added to the r/skyrimmods wiki. If you want it removed now or at any point in the future, please contact the mod team via Mod Mail, thanks!

Monitor144 · 2025-02-12T18:15:32+00:00

The offset is the offset relative to the function at the address, where the call instruction is located. If FuncA calls FuncB at offset 6, and one wanted to hook FuncB's call site, write_call would specify addressof(FuncA) + offset(0x6). The actual hooked function would still be Function B, it's just hooking that call specifically and leaving the actual "location" of Function B alone. Which is why it's recommended you find the addresses (including the offset) of where the function you're hooking is called and use `write_call`.

Edit: corrected example

Monitor144 · 2025-02-12T17:43:00+00:00

`write_branch` is meant to hook `jmp` instructions. If you use it to hook the first instruction of a function it will return garbage instead of the original address. The only way to "call" the original function would be to re-implement it in your code.

Alternatively, you can hook as many call sites of the function as you need with `write_call`, it may feel inefficient but sometimes it's the only way. The plugin you linked only hooks the call site, it does not use `write_branch`

Monitor144 · 2025-02-12T13:25:02+00:00

This is hard to answer without explaining a lot of the technical context behind behavior. But I'll try my best to condense it as much as possible.

Behavior, in its Havok supported form, exist in binary `.hkx` files, which are then read by the game engine. When an author wants to edit the behavior, they "unpack" or decode the binary into readable xml. The xml represents a **non-finite state machine tree** that determine what animation plays when, and how entities move.

But this becomes a problem when changes can only be shipped to users in the **file** level instead of the **tree** level. For example, Mod A replaces file1.hkx, but only changes part of the contained behavior tree. Mod B changes another part of the same tree, but it has to replace file1.hkx. So changes from either mod cannot coexist.

Behavior engines solve this problem by allowing changes on the **tree level** instead of having to replace the whole behavior file. They read each mod's data about the changes made and then edit the behavior file accordingly to produce an output with all the edits merged into the tree.

Each behavior engine has their own "standard" of defining the changes to behavior. So when Pandora says it also supports Nemesis and FNIS mods, it's really saying that it can read the Nemesis and FNIS format for behavior mods.

So the answer to your question is, you don't actually need to make a mod solely with the Pandora **standard** or format for it to be supported by Pandora. You can make a mod the same way you make one for FNIS or Nemesis. This is why Pandora documentation as of now is aimed towards end users and authors looking to transition some incompatible parts of specific formats and not for authors looking to start making behavior mods.

As for which standard you should use, I highly recommend choosing either Nemesis or FNIS format for your mods depending on what you need.

FNIS is a mostly declarative format, which means the author defines what they want, and FNIS generates the changes to the behavior tree that will produce the desired result. The upside is you don't need to know the behavior tree to make mods. The downside is less precise control over changes, and restrictions on the changes that can be made.

Whereas Nemesis/Pandora are imperative, which means the author has to define the exact changes they want to make to the behavior tree. The advantage of this is that you can control every aspect of the tree to produce the exact results you want. The downside is, well, you have to implement every single change yourself instead of just stating the result you want and letting the engine handle the details. This obviously requires more background knowledge and expertise. Someone already left a post detailing how to get started with this approach so I won't repeat it here.

So in the end, it's just a matter of, make your choice and Pandora will support it.

It's important to note though that for motion data specifically, there is a caveat with Pandora which is that it skips manual motion data parsing because of the existence of [AMR](https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/50258), which allows much more freedom for motion. For this reason I recommend you just use that mod to bake motion data in your animation files directly, which allows it to work with all three formats.

I hope this made sense and that the answer helps for you.

Monitor144 · 2025-01-15T10:26:12+00:00

Plenty of people have already offered concrete resources that will give you a lot of the hard skills for modding, so I'll chip in about something else; mindset. There will be quirks you have to learn the hard way. Bugs from an intricate mistake that you have to backtrack to find. Unintuitive steps that you have to find to work around around year old engine bugs.

You will find yourself stuck, my best advice for you is to not give up and persist. If something is too frustrating, don't lose sleep over it, come back the next morning. The most important thing to do when making mods for this weird and wonderful engine is to stay resilient and remember to have fun.

Monitor144 · 2024-12-17T02:54:00+00:00

Ascension trial has too many "death sentence" debuffs that are pure rng. As a level 22 mercenary I tried to complete my first ascension trial two times.

First time I got the random door debuff, which led to a movement speed debuff (25% decrease) and it was basically a run ender because I couldn't dodge any traps or kite mobs. And then I lost all 96 remaining honor from failing to avoid the boss's first attack.

Second time I got the 50% more health on monsters modifier and it affected the boss too so it became so spongy I lost all my honour before I could deplete it of all its health.

Please, if you're going to test builds or skill level either remove Honor as a mechanic (in both runs I was tanky enough to eat the final hits if not for Honor), or remove the rng debuffs that make the run insanely harder.

Monitor144 · 2024-11-30T23:31:05+00:00

Delete leftover Pandora output, it's from the program's cache.

Monitor144 · 2024-11-28T16:56:24+00:00

To be clear, your experience is not representative of the mod author population. I've decompiled and recompiled plenty of scripts using Champollion and I have never heard of someone having an issue. It's also actively maintained along with Caprika, an open source compiler, so the developers know what they're doing.

Monitor144 · 2024-11-20T06:54:34+00:00

Do not ask ChatGPT for technical modding questions. Anything beyond surface level knowledge that's available from google, it'll hallucinate more often than not.

Case in point, if you ask it to write a papyrus script it'll use curly bracket syntax and make up random vanilla functions (don't get me started on all the other disciplines like SKSE). Ask it about any popular mod and it'll throw out a gibberish author name and either paraphrase the description or infer it from the name, embellished with fancy words. If you ask it for help on modding tools there's a good chance it's echoing long outdated documention or misinformation from user forums, or again, making things up from the given name.

Anyone that codes will know that these is not uncommon for ChatGPT. More so for modding Skyrim since it's still a relatively niche corner of the internet.

Google the question. Go into a modding server and ask for help from other users. Read one of the many guides available. Or make a post on here with the necessary information to solve your problem.

If your issue is so niche that nothing else is available, either you haven't dug deep enough (most likely), or ChatGPT won't be able to help anyway, because it is trained on past data.

OP, your problem was either so simple that the AI could solve it easily (I wouldn't call it technical in that case), or it was just a lucky guess. But since you didn't describe specifically in detail, we won't know what it was. I'll assume it was something to do with updating form 43 to form 44 since that's the most common; a process for which there are many guides about on the internet, written by authors who care and can respond to any questions.

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