General rehearsal game, hours 25..28

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SPOILER INFO
This story follows closely my actions in an actual game, so it's inevitably a spoiler.
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I wanted to sell as much as I could before going into (near-)wilderness. In order to pass the time until the shops would open, I broke into a house and stole some cash and food and ingredients. After selling all I could, I noticed I was sleepy. In order not to waste a whole day, I slept only 4 hours. Then I had a bath and we headed southwest.

I feel kind of safer in Stenvar and Vorstag's company, you know. They are sometimes a nuisance in combat,
getting ahead of me and blocking my shots. Most of the time, they are very helpful, though.
They are efficient and strong enough not to get killed easily, so I don't have to take care of them.

We discovered a house which was apparently a part of the mod Beggar Prince . Its author is one of those who just gives you all the lines available, without bothering to check if you are actually supposed to know anything about all those things you say. Apart from which, I was able to pick up a lot of free stuff in the house which is just not right. But it doesn't matter as I had already decided that I would switch off Beggar Prince  for my main game anyway.

We discovered the village of Pinewood and spent the night there. Then we went further southwest along the road and reached the edge of the explorable world. Going clockwise along the edge, we found a couple of buggy caves created by Falkreath Hold Extended . In one of them, the cave entrance would take you into a completely dark space where you couldn't go anywhere. By turning in various directions and pressing W , you would eventually end up outside again.

Here is some scenery from southwestern Falkreath:

I decided to use the remaining time to find out if me and my boys can take on a bandit camp which I knew would be there somewhere. We found it and approached it very conveniently from above. Now, I guess I forgot to tell you, but recently I altered the parameters of the Sense of Smell  special power. In order to make it less cheaty, I decreased its range from 250 to 100. I also decreased the duration from 120 to 20, because it's really very annoying to have to wait for the glow to disappear in order to take screenshots, and no one would ever need it to last for 120 seconds anyway. As for the distance, 100 is just about perfect. It spares you the utter confusion in dungeons, but in the open there's a good chance that the enemies will discover you before you discover them, so you no longer have this huge unfair advantage you used to have. (Mind you, distance 100 doesn't mean 100 Skyrim distance units. I don't know which units that parameter uses. Maybe it's 100x10 or something.)

Back to the current assault. I had a perfect shooting spot overlooking the camp, but unfortunately it was too far for the Sense of Smell  to detect the enemies. A delightful challenge, an opportunity to exercise my tactical thinking! I sneaked slowly closer (as well as lower) until one of the enemies detected me, and when he began to move, I was able to see him with my physical eyes and kill him with a number of shots, and then I killed another one. We had to descend all the way to the ground in order to get the remaining two. They kept looking for us, but we stood there in stealth mode and eventually they gave up. Then we sneaked in and my boys killed them while I was watching their backs. It was awesome.

There were a couple of doors. I was about to go in, but then I noticed I was past 28 hours of the real-world playtime which I had planned for this rehearsal game. So that particular challenge will remain unsolved in this life.

This is it. The general rehearsal is over. I have gained very valuable experience and after a few final adjustments I will start the real game – starting in Helgen, the vanilla opening. I can't stress enough how excited I am.

Thank you for being with me so far. My report of the real game shall be written in a different style and I hope it will be much better than this one.



next part: my final mod configuration