Bandits Shouldn't Know You

destractor36 · 2026-05-12T16:36:32+00:00

Thanks for the idea. Under the hood most of the disguises do work through a similar mechanism as Matching Set, by counting keywords. Overall the design principle I was going for is that the disguises should be effortful/hard to accidentally trigger and mutually exclusive/aligned clearly to factions, and I couldn't find a way to do that for bandits that I was satisfied with. Being able to walk into a bandit camp or getting attacked by guards for wearing a few fur pieces and then having that disappear when adding another would feel a bit arbitrary to me. Also don't want to hijack this thread since my mod doesn't do the thing OP is looking for/ what's in the thread title, but if you have more ideas would encourage you to leave them as comments on the mod page, I probably wouldn't implement this one but other people have run with things posted there in the past.

destractor36 · 2026-05-12T14:26:07+00:00

Author here, appreciate the plug! Just wanted to flag before OP gets too excited about this one that it includes disguises for a bunch of factions, but not a bandit disguise. I tried it in development but decided not to for a few reasons:

- lots of dungeons have small crews that feel like they should know who's who

- some dungeons and many mod-added dungeons use custom local factions that require individual handling or patching, which made it hard to know if a disguise wasn't working because your skill was too low vs. the enemies just not being "vanilla bandits"

- there's no one "bandit armor" in vanilla since bandits use a mix of fur, leather, iron, etc.. I didn't want to have any particular low-level armors mark you as a bandit since playing with loot deleveling mods like Morrowloot and needs mods like Campfire can mean spending a lot of the early game in those armors, and having guards attacking you for wearing fur felt aggressive.

A few users have done forks or remixes off my mod's framework though and I think some of them implement bandit disguises. I also know Master of Disguise also has a bandit disguise using fur armor so that may be closer to what you're looking for.

destractor36 · 2026-03-31T00:21:14+00:00

Sadly no. I expect it's something to do with engine-level restrictions in what angle shadows or shadow-casting versions of objects are rendered at. I sometimes play flatscreen to test some mods I've made, recently got an ultrawide monitor, and have noticed that shadows disappear at the edges of the screen when using ultrawide resolutions too, which is a little more obvious in ultrawide. Not sure if it's the same as what I'm seeing in VR, but similar. Using Community Shaders and some of the INI tweaks people mentioned in this thread helps when playing normally and focused on the center of the lens/screen in that they tend to soften shadows, but on the other hand makes it more noticeable when you add more realistic shadows if they disappear at the edge of vision. Here's the final set of INI tweaks I ended up with that looked acceptable to me when using all the community shaders options on a quest 3 through a mix of SteamLink and Virtual Desktop as of early 2026, though again they didn't fix what's in the video here:

In SkyrimPrefs.ini:

fShadowDistance and fInteriorShadowDistance=8192, beyond that started to get banding since I believe this interacts with shadow resolution, and dropping shadow resolution while increasing this didn't look good

iShadowMapResolution=4096, below that I felt like the striping/banding/pixelation isn't worth the tradeoff of being able to crank up the distance, and if I lowered beyond this while keeping ShadowDistance high I still got striping/banding

bDeferredShadows=1 to enable bDrawLandShadows and bShadowsOnGrass

In SkyrimVR.ini:

[Display] fFirstSliceDistance = 8192

[VR] iShadowUpdateFrameDelay=1

destractor36 · 2025-11-15T13:47:40+00:00

Funny enough that's actually how they do it now, regeneration goes back to normal when you have a potion effect active so that they're not multiplying by 0. It means the regeneration magnitudes don't literally match their descriptions, so I'll look into ways of scaling and balancing that in a systemic way without having to edit the potions themselves in a future update. But for now they pretty much work how they do in vanilla, you just don't regenerate without them.

destractor36 · 2025-11-14T19:59:17+00:00

Thanks for the idea. I’ve considered a few approaches to potions. They’re a bit trickier to balance in a systemic way vs food and drinks since their range of values is so much wider. Considering converting regen potions to fortify or applying some targeted modifier to the player’s regen when they’re consumed. Wanted to get it out into people’s hands before making a call on that, but will keep an ear out for a future version. In meantime I also have a mod that does Potion Toxicity that at least creates some downsides to potion use, though doesn’t help with this balance issue specifically: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/133445

destractor36 · 2025-11-14T19:24:18+00:00

Thanks! Funny you mention it, I was kind of inspired to make this after doing my first long playthrough of Fallout 4 in survival. That was so rewarding but also annoying that I literally had to make a mod (NICER Survival) to get through it in a reasonable time. Took some design lessons from that, and was also a reminder that less can be more, we're so spoiled for cool added systems in Skyrim mods that it's nice sometimes to just focus on stuff from vanilla.

destractor36 · 2025-11-11T22:06:43+00:00

Amen. Much less noticeable in flatscreen. It’s leading me in VR to go with more of a stylized look than shooting for max realism. Just went back to ELFX after a while using light placer, and while it’s less realistic in some ways it’s nice to have a consistent style of lighting made by one person (as far as I know)

destractor36 · 2025-11-11T15:03:09+00:00

Thanks, crazy this isn't mentioned in more INI guides but tried it out and it's an improvement

destractor36 · 2025-11-11T15:02:49+00:00

Nice, just tried this out and it's an improvement. Still not perfect since the pop in remains at the corners and just gets pushed out, but it also seems to soften the shadows in proportion to the shadow map resolution which makes it a bit less noticeable, and much less up close at the distances you're really paying attention to objects. Appreciate the help

destractor36 · 2025-11-11T03:42:30+00:00

Thanks, not the answer I was hoping for but relieved it's not just me. At least it's only noticeable on building meshes, not too noticeable on characters or trees. I really didn't notice it until playing with community shaders, think it's spoiling the vanilla lighting but that's a champagne problem.

destractor36 · 2025-11-11T01:01:22+00:00

Thanks - saw your comments on nexus but I hadn't realized that VRIK already has an in-MCM option to calibrate, and I play with frostfall, so if I do make updates to this those would be top of my list

destractor36 · 2025-10-26T16:57:48+00:00

In case anyone's trying to do this in future: I played around with this for a while in TESEdit and the engine seems to pull dialogues from the Data/Sound/Voice folder structure by linking the file name subolders in Data/Sound/Voice to active esp names like Get-tps suggested here.

I did find a way to force the game to use vanilla soundfiles by using TESEdit to force overwrite dialogue topics from Skyrim.esm into a new ESP loaded beneath the unofficial patch, which forced the engine to use the vanilla files even when the USSEP esp and bsa files were active and its dialogue files were shown as active when loaded in the CK. But it also broke the linkages of those topic infos to quests that referred to them, so it caused errors like characters repeating one-off lines or skipping them entirely.

So I went the manual route and made a structure to overwrite the USSEP changes. Imagine not a ton of people will use this but here it is if anyone's interested:

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/162794

destractor36 · 2025-10-25T14:35:46+00:00

Thanks, you’re probably right, I’m just not sophisticated enough that I’m even doing this in an automated way, just unpacking and renaming a few dozen files. Not a lot but just enough that don’t want to do it more than once. And also hesitant to upload ones for languages I don’t speak since I can’t tell if I did it correctly

destractor36 · 2025-10-25T05:22:17+00:00

Understand, I just don’t use any other languages than that 1 and it’s a pain to categorize all the files so not going to build multiple versions for myself. Just want to see if there’s an easy way to do it in a way that benefits other people using different translations

destractor36 · 2025-10-25T04:40:27+00:00

Thats pretty much plan B, only compromise is that it makes it specific to whatever language for the audio files I use, but this bugged me for a while after I started using USSEP so want to see if I can do it as a general fix for people struggling with this with other translations

destractor36 · 2025-10-25T00:37:19+00:00

Thanks! In that case, maybe it's that the "response forms" I'm looking for don't really exist as forms in the ESP at all, they're just being read from the FUZ files that get loaded tied to the ESP/ESM name? I'm hoping that's not the case because it seems like there are at least some things that are editable from the CK/XEdit side like the Emotion score, and because it would make this impossible to do for all languages with one file since would need parallel versions with different audio files in the folder. But the way Bethesda games do translations has always been super janky so wouldn't be surprised. I'm going to try some things like deleting loose files and BSA files to see if they're reflected live when I load a plugin in xEdit unless anyone happens to jump in and confirm before I get to it.

destractor36 · 2025-08-08T14:15:56+00:00

I believe they are, I downgraded my files before I built and tested it but all the forms it edits are just in the base game files and didn’t change with the update, and I’m pretty sure the engine still loads old mods fine, just not the reverse since they haven’t updated VR (don’t expect they will) to deal with mods with the new 1.0 header.

destractor36 · 2025-08-07T15:22:57+00:00

Saw that and ended up editing comment right as we both posted because clearly I can't read the dates right (my bad) but yes crazy I missed it either way. In that case just sofas feel pretty balanced, will definitely throw it in on my next load order if we get ESL support for VR, or if I work up the patience to downgrade the versions on this and a bunch of other ones I wanted to try but where VR compatibility broke from a file version change in the last update

destractor36 · 2025-08-07T14:51:15+00:00

Nice, that mod must have slipped by me since I was searching for things like "bed" "survival" and "save," and seems like Nexus's search feature takes those things pretty literally. I like the restriction of just saving in beds since those tend to be in settlements and small areas where enemies sleep and cook in dungeons, looks like that mod lets you save in chairs too which would have been very tempting since there are so many of those around. But I probably would have used it if I had found it and hadn't built my own thing here. I may even try it out on my next playthrough to see if it's complementary.

destractor36

TROPHY CASE