This was a post I originally submitted to the Steam Discussions area for Skyrim LE back in 2015 to address some issues that came up, and to a large extent, still do. People have a tendency to brand the USSEP as useless garbage that doesn't do anything so I whipped up a randomly selected bunch of things off the top of my head at the time.
The first section of quoted material addresses 4 issues that were being discussed but were not entirely correct.
The second section that's been broken down into 4 parts by themselves should be reason enough for people to value the USSEP.Thalmor Embassy Disguise fix that will break the main quest if appears in game.
While we do fix the disguise so it works properly, it NOT working won't break the game. In fact you aren't required to even try using the disguise at all. You'll just get attacked as usual.Shy Nirnroot fix
This is something Bethesda eventually fixed themselves in an official update. I forget which one it was, but once they did so and we verified their fix works, we backed that out. So that one isn't sensible to credit us with.Spell absorption so that you can't end up absorbing your own summons and some of the quest shouts making it hard to reliably play as a conjurer and potentially impacting the stability of some quests relying on the shouts.
Spell absorption fixes are only for conjuration, where Bethesda had MOST of them already properly set to ignore that. We fixed the remainder. No shouts were part of this because none of them are conjuration based effects.Multiple fixes to Breezehome for bugs introduced by Hearthfires including scripting issues and non-functioning navmeshs.
While true that we do have multiple fixes for Breezehome, we backed out all of the navmesh changes because the DLC deletes the one in the cell and attempting to edit it results in a CTD. That one is classified as unfixable. Ignore any claims from others who say that some other mod fixes this without crashing because it's simply not true.
A random selection of non-trivial issues the USSEP addresses
Vanilla
* The numerous ways in which Blood on the Ice will break. Too many to list. Scan our changelog for that quest by name, or as MS11.
* Missing in Action. The player could be accused of trespassing after Fralia invited you to her home, making it impossible to complete this quest if you wait too long to go there.
* Numerous issues with weapon racks that would cause some weapons to silently vanish if the player displayed them.
* Equally numerous fixes to the mannequin scripting to resolve duplicate inventory as well as vanishing inventory in some conditions.
* Major reduction in save bloating from several causes scattered around the game. Save bloating likely can't be eliminated entirely, but we've done what we can.
* Amulet of the Moon quest can't be blocked and become unsolvable due to the game picking a noreset location for it.
* Revealing the Unseen can't be blocked by Sergius Turrianus being dead, rendering the College quest line unsolvable.
* If Dampened Spirits gets started and then Battle of Whiterun completes first, Caius shows up instead of the other guy, which breaks the Thieves Guild questline.
* Word wall triggers that were incorrectly updating global variables in the script, which resulted in several of them simply not giving words when they should have.
* The infamous Brynjolf "hmm" bug where the second Thieves Guild quest wouldn't start if Drifa had been killed. A problem that's much more likely to happen with Dawnguard installed and the frequency of vampire attacks on cities. [In SE as of version 1.5 vampires no longer attack cities, but if you're using a mod that re-enables those, you'll be glad we still have this fix in place.]
Dawnguard
* Kindred Judgment can become blocked and will not start (even with the console) if Stalf, Salonia, or either of the hireable Deathhounds are dead long enough for their corpses to get culled from the game.
* Killing Agmaer in Dayspring Canyon before the Dawnguard quest starts will cause the entire questline to break.
* Touching the Sky could break Serana's follower scripts and result in her becoming permanently unavailable as a follower after that, as well as breaking any events she was needed for later.
* Auriel's Bow contained a possible infinite loop in its script which would cause the weapon to stop functioning properly. If it became stuck, Papyrus would begin to lag. This one is an example of one we fixed, but it won't help if the game is already broken because of it.
* Several issues with Dexion slipping out of his restraint area in Prophet, along with the issue of him being permanently in bleedout mode which would then break the remainder of the DLC.
* Lost to the Ages breaks if you visit Mzulft or Deepfolk Crossing prior to reading The Aetherium Wars.
* A Daedra's Best Friend was broken by Dawnguard causing the Oblivion Walker achievement to fail to be recognized.
* A New Order can break if the bear Gunmar wants you to kill is purged by the game's cleanup code. This will then break the DLC questline.
* Dirty edits in the DLC cause purchasing the alchemy lab in Breezehome to break - taking money from the player but doing nothing in return for it.
Hearthfire
* Hirelings unable to be made stewards despite being intended for the role, along with them losing the steward dialogue if they had become steward somehow despite the first bug.
* Children saying they'll give gifts but no gift is given.
* Children with bloated inventories due to the scripts not properly removing objects their packages were giving them prior to being adopted.
* Stack dumps in the scripting for handling the inventory filtering that governed buying logs for your houses.
* Being unable to move your family to a new home if the scripts governing this didn't run until you entered cells with no assigned location.
* Restraints not being removed from your spouse in one of the dialogue options for Rescue, which would result in them trying to walk backward and becoming stuck.
* Round table and chairs construction taking resources from you but building nothing because it used the wrong keyword assignments.
* Being unable to hire the bard if you had already purchased all of the other house exterior upgrades first.
* The DLC letting you hire the same steward for more than one house, which resulted in both of them breaking permanently.
* Valdimar trying to sandbox in Helgen because his AI packs were pointing him to the wrong house.
* Swapping the enchanting room in Honeyside to a child's bedroom would eat equipment displayed on the mannequins.
Dragonborn
* The battle with Miraak in Apocrypha could break easily, resulting in him being stuck while ethereal and never resetting. This then breaks the end of the DLC.
* A New Source of Stalhrim breaks if Fanari or Deor are dead prior to when it should begin.
* Deathbrand breaks if you use the wax key perk to break into Gyldenhul Barrow. This one can't be undone if you broke it before installing the patch.
* The DLC makes it impossible to dismiss Onmund if he's your follower.
Taken by itself, this selection of fixes alone is more than enough to objectively prove the USSEP is not useless. When combined with the hundreds of other fixes the USSEP offers, it's nothing short of fat lies when people say it's useless garbage.
As a follow-up just recently, I posted in another USSEP topic on the Steam Discussions area to address some other common issues people keep harping on:
The "Resto Loop" was not one specific thing. We got a submission from a dedicated user who went through all of the various spell and magic effects and corrected their spell school assignments. All of which we vetted as legitimate bugs before including his work. As it turns out, this apparently also stopped the exploit that was present along the way. So said exploit only existed due to numerous bugs that were present in the system. It was not something he set out to fix, or something we set out to fix, and we would not have focused an effort to do so directly. It just happened that way. IMO, I see it as proof that exploits are generally not intentional and when left behind are simply because nobody on the studio's QA team ran into it, and even if they did, there wasn't time enough to invest the money into fixing it themselves.
Necromage. It is pretty clear when one examines the effects and the comments in supporting scripts that it was not intended to benefit a player who became a vampire. I don't know why the rumor mill insists that the targeted fix we did for that specific issue has somehow become "restoration doesn't work on anything undead" because it's not true and never has been. Restoration spells designed to do things to damage or heal undead creatures all still work as designed. Maybe there's some argument to be made that player vampires should also benefit, but in the 7 years this fix has been in place (from before our team took over btw) nobody has been forthcoming with an evidence based argument for why we should remove the fix. Provide one and we'll listen - as we did with Ebony Blade. Don't just continue to spout off about it.
Translation issues. We'd love to be able to provide fully working included string translations for all of the languages that SSE currently supports. This even happened for a brief time back in the earlier LE days. The problem is nobody on our team knows these languages and Skyrim also has the unfortunate issue that it will CTD if a localized file is missing the string files to make it work. So we can't even just provide those languages for the ones who still do this sort of work. This is a technical limitation of the engine itself which cannot be addressed, so we're stuck with using the old ways. Someone who knows the language to be translated into makes a .esp file to accompany ours (or replace it, it depends) and Nexus has links back to the ones that get uploaded there. How those are put together and supported is out of our hands. We don't involve ourselves with it. Sometimes they work fine. Other times they don't, and it's often because the translation team in charge of a particular language is trying to quietly revert fixes we've done but doing it improperly or not completely.
The Creation Club. Put simply, it's not realistic to expect everyone on our team to buy up all of this stuff so we can support it. Due to how the engine works, they will all load before the USSEP. This cannot be changed. It's a hardcoded process during initialization. You'll want to go get this: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/18975 Garthand keeps it regularly updated and ONLY fixes the bugs, like the USSEP itself. Load the ones you need after USSEP and you're good to go. Any issues with CC patches need to be addressed to him and he'll take care of it when he has time.
Our general approach to exploits is exactly the same as Bethesda's. If we find one, or if it's reported to us, we will fix it. They have demonstrated clearly that upon finding them they will be dealt with as they have time to do so. They've even done so without saying they did. The only thing I find curious is how nobody ever complains when they do it, but we follow their lead, and we're the devil for it. I don't recommend anyone use any of those mods out there that revert the fixes we've made. I've checked all the ones I know about and every single one is badly made because the person does not understand what they're doing. You're more likely to have issues using those than if you just left it alone or cheated outright by using the console to do that stuff.
I used to have a saved post where I rattled off something like 30 major issues the game has that USSEP fixed, sometimes years ago while Bethesda was still actively patching LE. Apparently I lost that post during my last Windows reinstallation. So I'll just say this: The changelog is all you need. It has every major category of thing that could be broken and without fail, everyone who attacks our work counts on you ignoring our documentation entirely. Yes, it's a lot, but it's documented precisely because of people like that who enjoy bringing others down with lies and half-truths. We also have a bug tracker ( https://afktrack.afkmods.com/ ) where all of the initial reports and follow-up are done before the summary is included in the changelog. So I think we've done our due diligence in documenting our work. Don't let people who cherry pick selective quotes of unknown providence fool you. Our work is solid. This game really does have this many bugs.
Someone on another forum somewhere also said something to the effect that we should not be "tinkering with RPGs because we clearly don't play them or have experience with them or D&D blah blah blah". We've played numerous other RPGs, we've played MUDs, some of us ran one of our own for over a decade, and nearly all of us have played D&D at some point in our lives whether it be the old gold box C-64 games, or God forbid, with actual pen and paper.
On a final note: If you don't like the patch. Fine. Move on. You need not tell the world why you hate it and our team so much.
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I'm an Elder Scrolls fanboy, I started with Oblivion (console) as a pre-teen, found Morrowind (PC) after I completed that, and eagerly awaited Skyrim after I completed that. On release day I bought Skyrim on console and have completed it a couple of times now - but by completed, I mean, I did as much as I could without encountering bugs. Which actually, will sometimes just cut off whole factions from being played through. I feel like I've encountered every single goddamn bug in this game. Some the size of a fly, some the size of the massive Jurassic bastards you see on TV which will cut your 'playthrough' short. A really common experience for me was to find the UESP page for the quest I was on, scrolling to the Bugs heading, finding the exact bug I was encountering and the famous words "This bug is fixed by version x.x.x of the Unofficial Skyrim Patch". This mod is the reason I decided to upgrade my ancient PC to run this game, and I can't wait to properly complete this game for the first time lol.
I don't think some people appreciate how difficult it can be to 'fix' a game in the original intention of the game's authors for an inactive game, and especially while being constrained to, presumably, the creation kit. And ESPECIALLY trying to keep the game balanced. Even the definition of what a bug is and isn't is not always clear cut. I don't envy the task.
I also question the ''fixes'' to certain trader inventories. Some are certainly accessible due to glitching (whiterun terrain clipping), but for khajit caravans, its more like a dev oversight, and not a bug. The chests are simply placed too close to the surface. So that is only an exploit. Again, will be reverting that, as well. There are sure to be many more things that people would rather revert back. Not all ''fixes'' are desired, or even needed.
Disregarding those unwanted changes, I do still believe that this mod is pretty much integral to any gameplay at this point. I would be missing out on a ton of s#*! if I did not use it. By no means am I attempting to devalue what you have done. Just giving my opinions (which are often unwanted and disliked). It is a good mod. Alas, I refuse some parts of it.
Oh, and if you want some reasoning for Necromage, well... the player IS undead if hes a vampire. The perk only mentions undead, with no differentiation between player or NPC. Technically, the restoration tree should either:
1. Not work (be locked out) for vampire players, at least partially, as restoration is a direct opposite to their undead nature (at least the parts used by most mages - example: Heal Undead). So some select perks would not function, and you would be unable to cast certain spells (doesnt make sense for a vampire to cast holy sunblazer spells, or some s#*!, and normal healing would be ineffective). Healing would have to be done purely by absorb spells, absorb enchant, feeding, something equivalent to Heal Undead spell, and regen modifiers. That wouldn't work for many players, so outrage would probably follow.
2. Change in the way it works (has a hidden secondary set of effects for some perks/spells that gets revealed/switched to when one become a vampire). Along with changed effects, could gain some negatives to symbolize the conflict in natures. Not sure how that would be implemented though. Just a vague concept. It could just open up/enable a new tree based on death and decay. Again, just a vague concept.
OR
3. Work as normal, but with the added benefit of affecting oneself once theyre undead, when certain conditions are met (getting Necromage). The description only mentions spells, but spells are simply effects brought to existence by magic and intent. Necromage essentially makes magic more effective against undead. How that is a achieved is one of the great mysteries of magic logic. Lol. And enchantments effects are essentially magic imbued into an object. A regeneration enchantment could, fundamentally, be similar to the basic Healing spell in nature, only becoming different due to the imbuement process (artifact making). Its still magic. Same with other status effects. Sure, you could differentiate between magic originating from you, and magic originating from outside sources, and only make your magic more effective for yourself (self targeted spells, purely only player made enchantments, etc). Would make sense why your magic is more effective against undead creatures, and no other. But then, what are perks? Are they not, in some sense, magical improvements and/or alterations to ones condition and abilities? Would that not mean that, as something originating from within you, the Necromage perk practically amplifies your own magic potency due to your undead nature, by some means of a minor feedback loop? Then what of outside sources of magic? Would they have the same potency as normal? But how do they work? How does magic work? how does magic work on a creature? Would it not have to be accepted and integrated into the existing energy systems of a creatures body/being to take intended effect, be it from enchantment, or someone's else's spell? Would outside magic sources not enter the domain of the Necromage status when affecting the undead player character? Why couldnt that be? That would leave the question, of course, of how they would get amplified, as they do not belong to the players own magic pool. Could be just extra magic absorbed from the surrounding world.
You could say that Necromage may be governed by some sets of rules within the laws of magic that exist in Skyrim world, essentially changing your own nature of magic to interact more/differently with the nature of all kinds of undeath, but also make all magic affect you differently (more potent) because of your own undeath and the presence of the Necromage magical status, when outside magic enters your energy systems within the body, becoming altered/affected - all because of some Vampire Diaries level of loophole in the natural laws (if you have seen the show, youd know the reference).
I am sure there are plenty of logic holes and lapses in what I just said, and a lot of it may not make any sense at all, but in reality, there is not a single reason of why Necromage shouldnt affect undead players, other than simply being part of a game and affecting balance in some way. Give me a reason why undead players should not be affected beyond just gameplay?
As for restoration loop - meh. Im sure I could try finding some reasoning for it, but in reality, its just a fun thing to achieve. Its powerful enough to make you a god (dragonborn is potentially an incanation of one), but its not cheaty enough to be comparable to a console command - it still requires some work and preparation. You need money, you need resources, and you do still need some level of acquired skill. The loop should have just been left alone. End of story.
Anyway, sorry about... this. Sometimes when my mind 'switches on', I just gotta let it out.
USSEP would be fine if it focused on fixes, but it goes beyond and people don't like that for obvious reasons.
I tested it for two days with a very clean save file that didn't even use SKSE to see why the weapon rack didn't work, but the root cause of the bug causing the weapon rack to not work was this mod.
And yes, we really do need to include this information in the FAQ.