About this mod

A Hearthfire-style buildable riverside lodge with all amenities located seamlessly between Riverwood and Whiterun. Originally based on Lupus78's Riverside Lodge Mod, now heavily altered and optimized. Requires Dawnguard, Hearthfire and Dragonborn.

Requirements
Permissions and credits
Translations
  • Russian
Changelogs
Donations
QUICK-START

  • SSE Version is here.
  • Begin the mini-quest to buy the house by looking for a small sign overlooking the river on the hilly road between Riverwood and Whiterun.
  • If you want the house for free or don't want to spend lots of time building, then read this article
  • If updating from 2.0 or below, you MUST start a new game.

INTRODUCTION

Nestled in the shadow of the Throat of the World, overlooking the White river thundering down to the plains of Whiterun Hold lies Riverside Hollow - a narrow but wildly beautiful patch of land. This mod uses a mix of Hearthfire and scratch-built systems to allow you to create your own picturesque yet functional home. While sharing the roots of the original and popular Riverside Lodge, the design has been almost completely overhauled, with new features and a huge amount of customization available to you, the builder. In addition to the standard equipment common in player homes, you can raise an alchemical garden in an underground cavern, read a book under the starlight in your observatory tower, or fill a display room with treasures from your adventures. Feature-packed in a lore-friendly, seamless package.

FEATURES

The Home

Riverside Lodge Redux is a fully buildable home with follower/child support, a full set of crafting equipment (including DLC systems) situated between Riverwood and Whiterun. The design of the original Riverside Lodge has been almost completely altered, with most interior and exterior architecture overhauled and fully optimized to act as a beautiful, functional home without compromising performance.

Expand the spoiler to learn more...

Spoiler:  
Show


New interior decoration and custom meshes to decorate the house, but staying completely within the base game's art style, seamlessly integrating it into the game world.

Outside, you can build an exterior planter deck to grow crops, a training deck to keep your combat skills sharp, a stable for your mounts, and seating areas in the balcony and roof tower where you can relax. Inside, is a kitchen/dining area, an anteroom to store essential gear and to plan adventures, a full smithy, a master bedroom and a large study for enchanting/alchemy.

You are a designer, not just a builder - make certain design choices:
  • Build children's beds for adoption, or convert the bedroom into a comfortable set of quarters for your followers.
  • Build a meadery or an extra follower bedroom.
  • Fill the front basement with weapon and armour displays
  • Build extra storage and bookshelves.

The choice is yours.


The Building Process

An immersive, configurable and lore-friendly system to build every part of the lodge from the ground up. Customization options are also improved from the original mod release, allowing for slightly more user choice in the internal house layout.

Expand the spoiler to learn more...

Spoiler:  
Show


Use the Timber Pile to gain wood for construction - completely separate from the Hearthfire sawn-log system for compatibility, but fulfills the same function.

Oversee construction from a central platform, and watch your house construction in stages - with immersive scaffolding and clutter.

Building takes time...if you want it to. By default, construction of most items in the mod cause a certain amount of time to pass, depending on the item complexity. You can use the options menu (see FAQ for more details) to set the building time - half-durations, standard, or for those realists, double-time. Or just turn them off entirely.

The building process is MUCH longer and more involved than the Hearthfire manors. You will need a huge amount of time, money and resources to fully realize the potential of the house - it is designed so that over the course of the game, your house develops, just like your character. But if you're not into that, I have included various debug (read: cheat) chests that give you everything you need to construct the house.

I've also tried to make it a bit easier to get some items that are required for construction. While Riverside Lodge Redux is NOT intended to be built all at once (it grows as you adventure), certain ingredients like linen, straw, amulets of the divines, and even a humble quill and inkwell to buy the house are sometimes hard to track down. I have added some crafting recipes to the game to make it a bit easier to find this stuff. By default, you can craft inkwells at a forge from an iron ingot, or a quill from Hawk, Hagraven or Felsaad Tern feathers at a tanning rack. Additionally, you will find a book in your starting gear called "Common Crafting Notes". When this book is in your inventory, you can also tear up straw baskets at a tanning rack to make straw, weave linen wraps from tundra cotton, and even craft amulets of the nine divines at a forge IF you also have the "Arcane Blacksmith" perk,


The Cave

A lovingly crafted mini-worldspace housing a small subterranean area with hot springs and an underground stream - build a sauna and relax after a long day's adventuring, bathe in the waterfall, or grow plants from all over the game.

Expand the spoiler to learn more...
Spoiler:  
Show


Accessible through a secret passageway in the house study, the cave can be fully outfitted with a sauna where you can use a washbasin to change your face (and is a much prettier environment than The Ragged Flagon). The cave also includes a small patio area overlooking the brook - who said caves weren't pretty?

If you're more alchemically inclined, the cave contains space for 24 hearthfire soil plots to grow your own crops (in addition to the planter deck) in a lore friendly and immersive manner.

You can also build Plants and flora from all over Skyrim, Solstheim and the Forgotten Vale too (if you have visited it!) which aren't normally supported by Hearthfire.


The Display Room

You can build a display room to track your progress throughout the game. Unlike display rooms in other mods, you don't need ANY items to build the displays themselves - everything is down to player choice.

Expand the spoiler to learn more...

Spoiler:  
Show


Since a lot of quests involve handing items back (like the Golden Claw, or the Skeleton Key), I opted for a simple system whereby the displays don't consume any items to build. It is left entirely to the player to build whatever they like. This ensures flexibility of play-style (so you can show off the treasures you have accumulated in another save), or just fill in the gaps in your collection.

Personally, I choose to use this room to track my progress through the game - crafting a display for the items I have collected.

There are two exceptions to this: Black Books, and Elder Scrolls. Normally, Black Books remain permanently in your inventory, and so do Elder Scrolls, unless you choose to sell them to the College of Winterhold or the Dawnguard.

When activated, the Black Books display actually removes and displays your Black Books, and will return them to you upon reactivation. The Elder Scrolls displays work similarly to the Black Books stands, but in case you wish to sell the Elder Scrolls to another faction, you can build "fake" Elder Scrolls so that you don't lose the display when turning the item in.


INSTALLATION

Install as usual with MO2 or Vortex.
Manual installation is...c'mon people, it's 2021. Just get a damn mod manager.
Uninstallation midway through your game is NOT supported, this mod contains (very lightweight) scripts. While removing the mod mid game is probably OK, it is NOT recommended, and if you complain about it breaking your save, I will perform for you my famous "I-Told-You-So" dance.


NOTES

  • If you have just built mannequins, display racks or Hearthfire fertile soil, leave the area IMMEDIATELY and return. Either EXIT the house if you built something inside, and then go back in, or ENTER the house if you built soil outside.
  • Because the landscape and pathways are altered around the area so dramatically, the navmesh matches what the END state of the house should be. It's therefore recommended not to bring followers until you've built the MAIN exterior areas of the house. Nothing bad should happen, they might just get stuck until you go indoors or fast travel.

FAQ

See the FAQ Article

CREDITS

Lupus78 - Original Mod
Scripting help - Chesko, IsharaMeradin, FrankFamily, M3rvin, Cipscis, Darkfox127
and /u/ceruulean from the /r/skyrimmods subreddit.
Custom Meshes/Textures:

Jet4571 - Building Kits and Other Items
Oarystis - General Clutter
Stroti - Outdoor Toilet
Elianora - General Clutter
Blary - General Clutter
ArtisanX - Paintings
TESA - Resource Kit
JetSteele - Magnus Enchanter

Also further thanks to Elianora and ZugulZone - your mods have been an inspiration, and I love what you guys have done in terms of Design.
Also to Darkfox127 for his EXCELLENT tutorials.