Below is a list of questions that have come up from users over time. Please ensure your issue or question isn't already addressed, below, before posting it or reporting what might be a bug.
Question:
I have water seams. How do I fix this?
Answer:
Most likely, a mod is installed that edits exterior cells and is overwriting RWT's changes. Use SSEEdit to fix this by:
- Load entire load order (all plugins).
- Right-click on any plugin and "Apply filter for Conflict Losers".
- Check for any overwrites (red) to RWT's plugins.
- Forward any changes that need to be made to a new plugin.
The above is the only way to ensure users find 100% of the potential issues around water seams, but also please make sure you are sorting your load order with LOOT first. It is recommended that RWT sits near the bottom of your load order.
Question:
Is Water Fix Script mod compatible?
Answer:
Water Fix Script can be used on other mods to ensure they match vanilla records; however, do not use it on Realistic Water Two's plugins. It will break them!
Question:
I have water seams of two mismatched water types next to one another (i.e., river water next to lake water). How do I fix this?
Answer:
Most likely a mod is installed that edits exterior cells and is overwriting RWT's changes. Please see the question above, "I have water seams. How do I fix this?" for more details.
Question:
I have missing water in rivers and other locations while up close to the water. How do I fix this?
Answer:
First, this isn't directly caused by RWT. We only edit river textures and occasionally edit the WaterType of cells. Therefore, 99.9% of the time the issue is caused by cached data. The options to try are either fast travel away and come back, or wait it out for the exterior cell to reset by finding an interior location and using the wait menu until 30 days have passed.
This can also be a bug caused by another mod. Sometimes, the water height in a cell can get accidentally edited to be either too low or too high. Make sure RWT's changes are getting priority over other mods. Please see the question above, "I have water seams. How do I fix this? " for more details.
Question:
I see a seam line out towards the ocean just past Solitude. Can this be fixed?
Answer:
We've edited and done everything we could to try and fix the issues with water around Solitude harbor, the marsh along the opposite shore, and harbor entrance. There are a line of cells from -14,26 to -7,26 which appear to have some sort of hard-coded settings, so this also happens in a vanilla game and thus cannot seem to be fixed.
Question:
Why do I get flickering water?
Answer:
This is not a problem with RWT. Most likely, you will need to update your Skyrim.INI file. If users are having issues with flickering water, then we recommend using BethINI.
Distant shallow water that flickers is most likely a z-fighting issue with the landscape/LOD. Users can achieve the best result by running xLODGen for terrain meshes and textures using the Optimize Unseen setting. A value of around 500 is a good value to start testing.
Question:
How do I get rid of the close horizontal reflection line on my water surface?
Answer:
This is caused by Screen Space Reflections (SSR). The only known workaround for the line on the water is to set the following in your Skyrim.INI. Values between 0.3 and 0.5 have been reported to work to remove or reduce the line:
[Display]
fWaterSSRIntensity=0.5
Question:
My water surfaces are flat. Why?
Answer:
This is most likely a mod conflict issue that you need to address yourself in SSEEdit. RWT ocean, river and lake water will fall back to vanilla textures if they are missing, so it's very unlikely you have incorrectly installed the mod. If only calmer water like ponds and marshes are flat, then check your Skyrim installation folder to see if you have CalmWater.dds in Data\Textures\Water. Of course, it could still be mod conflicts regardless.
SECTION 02: WATER SURFACE - COLOR
Question:
How do I adjust the water color?
Why is the watercolor option no longer included?
Answer:
Please check out our other article titled Customizing Realistic Water Two.
We have spent time writing the above tutorial for people so they can customize the water to their own liking. There a numerous reasons for this, but the main one is the fact we can't account for every lighting and weather setup out there. We didn't enjoy the comments about this every week. All you need is a short amount of time and SSEEdit. You can even change the water to hot pink if you like, which would be sexy and disgusting at the same time.
Question:
I am still noticing a water seam where the close water and the distant LOD water transition. Is this a problem with the mod?
Why is my distant water a different color to my close water?
Answer:
There is only one distant WaterType for the entirety of each world. For example, in Skyrim, this WaterType is DefaultWater (ocean water). It is set via the water record on the Tamriel worldspace. No matter what color the water is inside loaded cells, the distant water will always be DefaultWater. In the case of RWT, DefaultWater is blue, and so is the distant water. The blue color is due to the requirement of having to blend lakes, oceans, and rivers within loaded cells. There is no fix for this problem.
Weather mods can also affect the distant water color due to them changing cloud layer 28, which also happens to be the color reflected onto the water. Therefore, if your weather mod is changing this cloud layer to very bright colors, it can affect the distant water per weather. Users should follow the instructions in the description for disabling settings/effects that can also affect the distant water, which could lead to water seams and mismatched colors.
Finally, ENB may help to alleviate some of the distant water brightness issue by toning down the effect(s), but the colors will still be that of DefaultWater and/or cloud layer 28 of the current weather.
So, the issue is only hidden by making all waters in the game generally the same, like vanilla and most other water mods. RWT goes beyond this with customized waters. We have, however, hidden it to the extent it can be hidden. Users who are still seeing the seam/mismatch can try the
following:
- ENB users: set DisableDistantReflection under the [Water] heading in your ENBSeries.INI to true.
The increased reflections will cause a change in the water's surface color. This change causes the seam to be more visible.
Question:
My water is reflecting weird and bright colors. How can I solve this?
Answer:
Users have reported that this can be caused by mods that edit cube maps. These mods are thus broken, and you should remove them.
This could also be oil puddles - yes, the game has oil that you can set of fire.
SECTION 03: UNDERWATER
Question:
Why is my underwater view so clear?
Answer:
It could be that depth of field is turned off. Set the following in SkyrimPrefs.INI to turn it back on:
[Imagespace]
bDoDepthOfField=1
Certain versions of ENBSeries have also been known to cause this issue. If there is a fixed version available, then be sure you are using it and not an old version. If your ENB preset requires a specific version with this issue present, then you'll have to request the author to update their preset to a fixed version.
Note by user Niyu: While setting bDoDepthOfField to 0 to disable depth of field removes the blurry water, you can set fDynamicDOFBlurMultiplier to a very low number (I'm using 0.00001) to virtually disable the effect but keep underwater visuals. Not sure if it may have any unpredictable consequence.
SECTION 04: WATER EFFECTS
Question:
I get lines in the water when fog (hand placed fog, not weather fog) is present. Is there a fix for this issue?
Answer:
This is most likely the vanilla effect assets submerged into the water instead of sitting on top of it, causing clipping issues. Please report this to the Unofficial Patch team, since such a fix is outside the scope of this mod. The fix is as simple of raising the height (z axis value) of the effect's placement.
It has also been reported that some mods cause a similar issue, so try disabling anything with you have installed that adds fog or mist first.
Question:
My waterfalls have bright green squares protruding from them. Is your mod causing this silliness?
Answer:
No, it's most likely another mod. Get rid of any other mod that edits and/or adds waterfalls meshes. Also, do not resave any RWT meshes in Nifskope without unchecking Auto Sanitize before Save in the File menu.
Question:
Some mist and other effects have banding/look blocky/pixelated. Are RWT textures causing this?
Answer:
No. This is caused by how the engine renders effects, which defaults to 32bit because Skyrim was originally a 32bit game. This can be corrected for users on 64bit systems (that should be the majority of users) by enabling 64-bit Rendering Target via BethINI or manually within the game INI.
SECTION 05: ENB/LIGHTING
Question:
Is the ENB Particle Patch still included in this mod?
Is ENBSeries supported?
Why are my water effects bright/glowing?
Why are my water effects dark?
Answer:
The ENB Particle Patch is not included any more because we use a gradient texture system to tweak our mesh lighting. See the Customizing Realistic Water Two article for more information.
ENBSeries is fully supported. See the recommended settings for ENB users on the mod's description.
For bright water effect during daytime to glowing water effects during the night, lower the AmbientInfluence* and LightingInfluence* settings found under the [PARTICLE] header of the ENBSeries.ini file. You could also try tweaking AmbientLightingIntensity* under the [ENVIRONMENT] header.
Dark effects are possibly to do with one or more of the AmbientLightingIntensity* settings under the [ENVIRONMENT] category of your ENBSeries.INI. If a preset has any of these settings too high, then these types of meshes will just turn black at certain times of day because they don't scale well with these settings.
Note: The above fixes are based off of information from mindflux, the creator of The ENB Particle Patch. If you are still having issues, read the Customizing Realistic Water Two article about our texture gradient system.
Question:
I have really shiny wet rocks near water. What gives?
Answer:
This could be a mod that is altering specular settings, the amount of gloss, on the wet rock meshes or, if used, an ENB with settings for speculars too high or with the ENB wet feature turned on.
SECTION 06: GENERAL MOD QUESTIONS
Question:
Where are the waves in Skyrim? I can't find them, and they are enabled in the MCM.
Answer:
They are there. A good place to check is at the Wreck of the Brinehammer. They are not placed in the very right side of the map where there is lots of sea ice.
Question:
What is the performance hit?
Answer:
That depends on your machine, but it's overall low, and there are multiple resolution options available for water in the installer.
Question:
Can I flag your plugin(s) with an ESL flag?
Answer:
Please refer to this guide here.
SECTION 07: UPDATES AND UPDATING
Question:
Is it okay to update mid-game, or should I wait until I finish my playthrough?
Answer:
It should be okay to update. Just save in an interior before you do.
Question:
If updating, is it required to rerun xLODGen w/ TVDT Occlusion data, DynDOLOD, and TexGen?
Answer:
You don't need to rerun anything if you don't want to. If you are the type of person that likes keeping everything updated, always check the RWT changelog. We may recommend you to rerun some of these utilities in the changelog, but again, it's entirely up to you and if you feel like it's worth the effort.
Question:
Why does my game now crash after I updated RWT?
Answer:
This could be a number of things. Most likely it's unrelated to RWT, but it's possibly due to you missing a master file for one of your plugins, or sometimes an outdated third party plugin. We do ask that you only have official RWT plugins active at first and then follow the red sticky post information in the POSTS section of the mod if you are still experiencing issues. If you can confirm that it's RWT causing the issue(s), go ahead and make a bug report. Please do not create a bug report if you haven't actually followed our steps and troubleshooting advice though. We have had this happen a few times before, and it's a huge waste of time for everyone involved.
SECTION 08: PATCHES, PATCHING AND FIXES
Question:
Do I need X mod patch?
Is there a patch for X mod?
Does X patch need updating?
Answer:
We only manage the patches that are in the main RWT installer and have no idea about third party patches or what they do. You need to ask on their respective mod pages. If the author of these patches seems no longer active, then I'm afraid we can't help with that. It's just how it is.
Question:
I have come across a fix mod for RWT; is it still required with the latest version?
Answer:
You will need to test this out yourself because we don't use third party files for our assets. We don't deem any of our work in need of fixing. If we did we'd make it ourselves and include it in the mod anyway. "Fix" is thus the wrong word for these mods and they should be noted as being alternatives for specific assets instead.
Question:
When I use a needs mod patch, character splash effects disappear. Why is this?
Answer:
Needs mods' use a water property flag to detect if you are in water. Sadly, the only way they can seemingly do this in Skyrim is to detect if the player is in a dangerous water type. This usually means lava, but they flag most normal water types with this flag. This in turn disables the water splash effect because lava shouldn't be emitting water splashes.
Update: Please check this mod out.
Question:
When I use a needs mod patch, I sometimes can't collect water. Why?
Answer:
Make sure you are using an updated patch. Over time, some patches will stop be being developed and become abandoned. We do not keep tabs on these patches because they are managed by third parties. Please do a search, read the comments on the mod(s), and also check when they were last updated.
Question:
I found RealisticWaterTwo.esp changes XCWT - Water in many worldspace sub-blocks back to DefaultMarshWater [WATR:00105CC3], which were updated to RiverWaterFlow [WATR:01001232] by the official Update.esm. Are these missed forwards?
Answer:
This is intentional. This changes the marsh water from flowing river water, which makes no sense for a marsh, to water that is without flow and has a calmer appearance. Additionally, RWT's marsh water is a unique color.
SECTION 09: REQUESTS
Question:
I can't use or do not want the ESL-flagged plugins. Can you provide regular plugins?
Answer:
No. RWT strives to use the latest standards in modding. ESL-flagged plugins work on all modern mod managers with the added benefit of not using up one of the user's limited plugin slots. Users wanting regular plugins will have to remove the flags from the plugins themselves using SSEEdit. To do this:
- Load only the plugin(s) that the ESL flag will be removed from in SSEEdit.
- Expand the plugin's tree in the left pane and click on the plugin's file header.
- Right-click on the Records Flag line and choose Edit.
- Untick the ESL box and close the window that popped up for the flags.
- Repeat the above for any other plugins currently loaded for editing.
- Once complete, close SSEEdit saving the edited plugins
- Let LOOT sort and enjoy your game!
Question:
NifScan reports issues on a few of the meshes in this mod about a name being used in more than one child node. NifScan claims this will result in random crashes. Can you fix this issue?
Answer:
Specifically, NifScan says: "Duplicate children names. Causes random elusive crashes in game, but not on all meshes. Vanilla meshes have dups in skeletons and some armours, so maybe it affects statics and clutter only."
The meshes included in this mod are not static meshes. Therefore, these errors can be ignored. Specifically, if the nodes are water currents then you shouldn't rename them, as doing so will break them. Else, please report any other issues.
Question:
Can you update for original Skyrim?
Can you update this on Bethesda.net?
Answer:
Sorry, but since changes were made with Form 44 in play, the mod's changes since its Skyrim SE release would have to be completely rebuilt from scratch within the LE CK. Therefore, the Skyrim LE version of RWT is likely retired.
Bethesda.net (Xbox) version will only be updated for significant changes and only when those changes have been well tested by PC users. This means the Xbox version will lag behind the PC version; however, it will eventually be updated when we feel the time is right.