Did you know you can ignore Steam?

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SPOILER INFO
This article doesn't contain any spoilers.
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As far as I am concerned, Steam is malware.

Firstly, it uses absurdly much hard disk space and absurdly much memory for an app that has no other function except to tell the Skyrim app that I am a legitimate user. I'm not saying Steam is putting any strain on my computer. Not at all. It's simply suspicious that it uses far more disk space and memory than its legitimate function can possibly require. For all I know, the Steam app could be sending all the files on my hard disk to Google little by little.

Secondly, it displays unsolicited commercial advertisements (misleadingly called "news") – admittedly, in its own window only, so I only see it when I happen to look at the Steam window, but still, Steam has no business spamming a paying customer with ads. Unwanted advertisements are only okay when you get something useful for free. Steam is free all right, but it is of no benefit to me and I would have never installed it if I didn't have to. I only installed it because it's a requirement to run (a legitimate copy of) Skyrim.

Thirdly, Steam makes it extremely hard for the user to keep it offline. It is desirable for Steam to be offline, so that you won't end up unable to play Skyrim just because your Internet connection is down. But you have to think about it in advance, because you can only order Steam to work offline while you are online. It's crazy! (Someone wrote in a forum discussion that it's not true. It would have been easier to believe him if he had bothered to tell us how to make Steam work offline while you're not online. I haven't been able to figure that out.) And on top of that, even if you have set Steam to work offline, it goes automatically back online every time you relaunch it. The only way to keep Steam actually offline is by 1) going online; 2) setting Steam to work offline; 3) creating a rule in Windows Firewall, forbidding the Steam executables (two if I'm not mistaken) from accessing Internet. If you fail to do step 3, then the next time you launch Steam, it goes online and sets itself to work online only, so you're back where you started. An app that so blatantly defies user's choices is undoubtedly malware.

Now to the good news.
Why do we execute Steam in the first place?
Because Mod Organizer requires it, right?
Well, not quite.
When you execute TESV via Mod Organizer, a message box pops up telling you to click "OK" once you have executed Steam. But, as I accidentally discovered, MO doesn't really mean it. You can simply click OK and never mind Steam. TESV will still run.
Sure enough, the Steam login window opens at the same time. But you can simply minimize it and forget about it. You don't have to click on anything in it. It's enough for MO that the Steam process is active. MO doesn't care if you don't reply to any of Steam's prompts.
(Don't click "quit" in the Steam window, though. Then Skyrim won't launch.)

I wish I had discovered it earlier – or that somebody had told me.






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Introduction to me and Skyrim 3/3: How?

back to Part 2


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SPOILER INFO
Apart from describing the working of one mod, this article doesn't give away anything that happens in the game.
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Proper modding

I saw it written somewhere that the game of Skyrim is supposed to last approximately 80 real-time hours. That is quite incredible. I used much more than that just for making the game even playable – that is, searching and testing mods.

You will probably see it written in the forums that Mod Organizer is supposed to have a "steep learning curve". Well, yes and no. It is not exactly install-and-play, but I assure you that learning to use MO is far less effort than trying to make things work with that piece of shit Nexus Mod Manager. (That is unless your computer is very slow. MO needs a lot of computing power.)
In order to use Mod Organizer, you have to watch the video series made by Gopher. Now, please note that I have despised all kinds of video tutorials for my entire life. So when I am recommending a video tutorial, it means it must be mind-blowingly good. Gopher's Mod Organizer series is mind-blowingly good. I can't stress enough how vital it is for everyone who is new to the Mod Organizer.
(FYI, the video number 1 is not the first in the series. The first video is titled "Introduction", the second video is number 1, the third video is number 2, etc.)
When I was setting up Mod Organizer, I actually had Gopher's video running. I watched a bit, then paused the video, did what Gopher had done, watched a little more, paused the video, did the same thing in my computer, and so on. I emphatically recommend that you do the same. It can save you very much time and frustration.


So, what about that rape mod?

The rape mod is perfectly real. It is called SexLab Defeat   (or just Defeat   for short). It enables you to mark any NPC as a target by pressing G . (For clarity, I refer to that action as G-assault .) When you approach the target from behind so that she is not noticing that you are there, pressing G  gives you complete power over her (unless someone sees or hears you doing it, in which case the assault will fail and a combat will start; you'll be in a lot of trouble). A menu will open with the choices "Inventory", "Tie Up", "Kill", "Rape" etc. If you click on "Rape", the two of you will get naked and have sex in one of the positions provided by a corresponding mod.
The same applies when the target is asleep, except that then, strangely enough, the G-assault is always successful even in plain view of other people.
In case you mark the target with G  while she is either seeing you or otherwise noticing you are there, she will be marked as a target, but before you can actually use her, she needs to be injured to the point where she will cease fighting and get on her knees (a normal occurrence in Skyrim combat). Then you can approach her and loot, rape, kill etc.
(Note: children won't ever get naked and can't be raped. They can however be looted, tied up and killed, if you have a mod that enables it.)

There is another similar mod called Death Alternative , but I am not using it as I'm happy with Defeat .

After 300+ hours of playing, I can tell you that rape in Skyrim looks as believable as can be expected in a video game, right to the victims' wailing. There is room for improvement (like, the victims could cry visible tears as well), but all things considered, it is astonishing. Skyrim rape mods are the definition of "too good to be true", except that they are very true. I still can't believe that the Lovers Lab forum is allowed to operate. I still can't believe that feminist activists aren't standing day and night in front of Bethesda's office with banners demanding that they alter Skyrim so that rape mods would become non-functional. But it is so.

By a funny coincidence, the Skyrim icon looks a little bit like a vulva.  ;-)


Let's get to it

Of course, modding of Skyrim is not limited to sex. The large majority of mods aren't in any way sexual. During my two months of mod research, I ended up testing hundreds of them. There are, for instance, mods for making your character need food, water and sleep. (In the vanilla game, food and drink exist but can safely be ignored.) Or adding buildings and NPC's to a number of locations. Or correcting prices of goods to make them more realistic.

Someone wrote: "I like Skyrim. I just hate the fact that it sucks without mods! Players doing Bethesda's fucking job." I disagree. Yes, unmodded Skyrim sucks. But modding is actually a good thing. Each one of us can practically create his own Skyrim game. Skyrim is like video gaming 2.0. Modded video games compared to unmodded video games – that is like unmodded video games compared to board games.

Take sex, for instance. If it existed in the vanilla game, it would surely have been made absurdly complicated and unpleasant. For instance, all kinds of NPC's would pester you with unsolicited remarks about how important it is to always use a condom, and surely the game would have a rule that if you had sex without a condom, you would catch a VD 50% of the time, and so on. Years ago, I saw a prostitution sim which was all about condoms and gang wars, the actual sex trade being little more than an excuse to shoot your competitors dead.

Anyway, after two months of intensive mod testing I finally managed to create a mod configuration that worked satisfactorily. It was clear that there were things that could have been made better still, but I was fed up with mod testing and was dying to do some actual playing for a change.

So I started a game which I played for 382 real-time hours. (How do I know? Because the real time spent playing is stored in the name of each savegame.) I did not complete the game. I decided to abandon it and start a new one, but I will come back to the reasons later. For now, it is sufficient to say that Skyrim opened up a whole new world to me.

In the other articles in this blog, I am going to cover a variety of topics that I feel deserve to be written about. I also intend to describe the new game I will start after I have tested a number of mods I have found in the meantime. I don't really care if it will interest anyone. I just want to put it all in writing and release it into the world.



[originally published 2016-10-17]






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Introduction to me and Skyrim 2/3: Let's!

back to Part 1


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SPOILER INFO
This article describes some things that happen during the first minutes of the game. It also describes a bug which occurs very early in the game.
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The beginning

I decided to play the game unmodded first, because understandably I wanted to get a feel of the game before starting to mess around with it. Otherwise, when something was to my disliking, how would I know if it was the fault of a mod or a feature of the game itself?

By the way, the official version of Skyrim, that is without any mods added, is commonly referred to as vanilla Skyrim.

So, I decided I'd play the vanilla game through once, or at least play it long enough to become familiar enough with the game to start fumbling with it.

I had read that the Skyrim game would allow the player to choose from different kinds of characters, so I was rather confused when I didn't see any character creation in the options menu. Neither was there a tutorial anywhere. All I could do was to click New Game  and I found myself in the middle of events.
Well, nothing to worry about. In a few minutes, one of the NPCs asks you "Who are you?" and then you will get to choose your race (not really a race, but the kind of creature you are, they have just chosen to call it "race"), name and physical features.
Neither does it matter that there is no tutorial. The beginning of the game itself is a tutorial. That is, you are given instructions on the screen, and the game just holds until you have done what you are supposed to do. That way it is very easy to learn the gameplay. The downside is that you have to go through that kindergarten every time you start a new game, but that's no big deal.

Even though the controls were very logical for a jump-duck-fence type of game, it was still a jump-duck-fence game. Meaning, the mere act of walking from one place to another could become a pain in the ass. I simply hate the helpless-child-like feeling of running against walls and turning in various directions in search of a way to get through. For most of that quasi-tutorial, the screen of my computer was filled with various shades of gray – some of it floor, some of it wall, some of it a hole in the wall, some of it the castle outside as seen through a window, some of it sky, some of it stairway, some of it furniture, some of it dragon... Almost everything was gray. And when I eventually got out of the interior into the wilderness, it didn't get better. It was all gray, monotonous and profoundly joyless.
When I read someone say about Skyrim: "and there you are beneath a beautiful sky, surrounded by the beautifulest nature game developers can make," I thought: she must have been high, or not from this planet.

Before I forget – there is one part where the quasi-tutorial misleads you. (This is not a spoiler, it's something you need to know.) After you have left the kindergarten village with an NPC, he tells you "It's probably best if we split up. Good luck." I didn't want to get in any trouble so early in the game, so I duly walked the other way. That was completely unnecessary. You don't have to split up. Follow that man. He will not attack you, he will not get in any way unfriendly. I cannot imagine why they made him suggest to split up, because he definitely doesn't want that. In fact, if you do follow him but walk too slowly, he will occasionally stop and wait for you to catch up. This is the one place in the quasi-tutorial which actually lies to you about what you need to do.
Anyway, just as in numerous other games of that type, I got disinterested in (vanilla) Skyrim on my way through that grey wilderness before I had even reached the first destination. The game's entertainment value had no chance to outweigh the clumsiness of movement and the general pointlessness of what was going on. If I hadn't known about the existence of mods, I would have probably quit playing and never spent another thought on Skyrim. (And I would have never known that it will actually get more cheerful. It just happened to be night at the moment I got out of the dungeon. During the day, that gray and dull world will indeed become "the beautifulest nature game developers can make".)

To sum up – under normal circumstances I would have quit playing. But I had heard about that amazing thing called "mods". Now, I wouldn't care for running around naked in a game that was otherwise pointless, but that rape mod... Maybe it would be very crude and clumsy, maybe it would be silly, maybe it would need very much effort to install, and maybe it wouldn't even exist – but I had to find out.


My care- and cluefree first steps at modding

As I was saying, the beginning of Skyrim left me wondering which part of it did the game developers believe to be interesting. And that absurd feminism.... Even though I had planned on playing the vanilla game for some time, I couldn't. As early as on my way to the first... um, village?... I decided to get the sex mods, because that was the only chance to make the game even playable.

To start with a clearly definable goal, I decided to find a mod that would make the completely looted corpses naked, find out how to install it, and actually do it. In the vanilla game, when you take everything from corpses, they remain in their underwear. That is beyond ridiculous. Bra and panties? In a medieval world like that? Get real. Besides, even when people are wearing underwear, it is not supposed to be exempted from looting. It's a matter of principle. When I take everything off from a corpse, it means everything.

So, I began looking for a mod that would correct that ludicrous design flaw.

It turned out to be a real science. You can't just get the mods, you need separate software for installing and managing the mods, and some of the mods need some external software in order to work. I soon gave up trying to understand, and just followed the instructions as well as I could.

Now, one thing you inevitably need to do is to register on a website called Nexus. When you google for Skyrim mods, you will be directed there frequently. And there is something very important you need to know about Nexus. You see, when you follow a link in your search results, the Nexus website won't let you see any mods unless you have registered. But when you enter your data in order to create an account, you are asked to pay. It's so mean. I even blocked the Nexus site in my browser, because I have absolutely no tolerance for sites that lure you into wasting your time on registering without telling you first that you will have to pay.

Soon, however, I learned that I just couldn't do without Nexus mods. I mean, I was discovering one appealing mod after another, and Google just kept sending me to the Nexus site. I began searching for means to somehow get my hands on Nexus mods without having to pay. Turned out I wasn't the only one with that desire, and in one of the forum posts was the solution: the Nexus site itself is actually free! Meaning, on the page with all those payment options, you can simply click "register" without choosing anything!!!

Infuckingcredible.

The other website you will have to register to is LoversLab . It's the other site you will inevitably come across when googling for Skyrim mods. Registration isn't required, but you're going to have to do it sooner or later, because you will need the forum. The Nexus forum is rather pointless. The LoversLab forum is a striking contrast. It's possibly the best forum I've ever seen in my life. The speedy and friendly manner of answering questions is unbelievable, and trolling is rare and mild. I have no idea how they have achieved it, but LoversLab forum is THE place for asking questions about Skyrim (not just sex mods, mind you).
Added in 2019: Unfortunately, LoversLab forum is now but a shadow of its former self. The number of active users has decreased dramatically and I've seen a number of people mention being disturbed by attacks from leftist fanatics. It's still a good site for getting mods, though, and when I searched for a better Skyrim forum in November 2019, I couldn't find any, so I'm still visiting LoversLab forum from time to time.

These are the only sites you'll need to bother with at first. Less than 1 mod out of 20 is hosted anywhere outside of Nexus and LoversLab. And when you eventually are going to need to ask some very specific questions, there are niche forums, but by the time you'll need them, you'll learn how to find them.

There's a program which you need for modding Skyrim. It's called Mod Organizer. Unfortunately I knew nothing of it when I first began modding Skyrim. I installed an obsolete but still widely used program called Nexus Mod Manager  instead. And then I began modding. That nakedness thing taken care of, I would think of the next thing I wanted to achieve, then I would search for a suitable mod, download and install it, see what happened, and so on. For a while, things went well, but then I just ran up against the wall. The game wouldn't run properly, mods wouldn't do what they were supposed to do. And that's the thing with Nexus Mod Manager. The beginning is very simple. You can just install NMM and begin to use it. You won't need any tutorials. But when things go wrong, you're screwed.

To cut the long story short, I ended up doing a clean reinstall of Skyrim. I only kept my savegames which, by the way, came really handy later for experimenting.


continue to Part 3



[originally published 2016-10-13]






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