Maybe I'm just dumb but it took me a minute to figure this out having never used Creation Kit.
If it's just one person, or a few people, you can type their names in the filter. Then highlight them and press ctrl+f4. If that doesn't work, double lick their name, get their race, go to that race under actors and highlight their name in the right window then press ctrl+f4, then click yes.
If you want to do a mass edit for just a race:
You click to expand Actor
You click to expand Actor again
You click to expand a Race
Select Male or Female
In the window on the right select the top name, hold shift and press end to highlight them all, then press ctrl+f4, and click yes.
If you want to update ALL actors (god forbid your computer might blow up or crash Creation Kit)
click to expand Actors
click ON Actor (In Bold letters)
select the name in the top right window at the top
press and hold shift and press end to highlight them all
Then press ctrl+f4, click yes
Maybe update the directions? Or just leave this here if anyone else is confused.
edit: and yes this fixed all my issues, so thanks for posting!
I'm having this problem as well, about half of the npcs I encounter are affected. I am using Immersive Weapons. What is a "meta" and where should I put it in mod order to possibly fix this?
I'm having the same issue here and none of the suggested fix works. All the affected NPC id is showing 00 which was Skyrim.esm so it's not mod related.
What meta are we talking about here? The setnpcweight thing only fixed it for a short time. Even when I save the game, it returns back to the black face bug.
Any way to roll this back? The problem became worse after...LOL
Thinking maybe a reinstall.
Reinstall of game and mods seems to have done the trick. I, of course, did not reinstall Opulent Outfits and it's required Consistent Older People which is what caused the majority of my dark faces problem to begin with. Before that, the only NPC with the dark face was Carlotta from the Wizard's College. Haven't checked to see if she is still borked. The only thing now is I have naked tavern wenches and Opulent Outfits changed those also. But hey naked is still better than the dark faces. :)
buddy you are amazing! you just translated the whole thing into "find the problematic person...click them...press 2 buttons...click ok...save and quit...and everything's fixed! thank you very much!
Hello first of all this helped me figure out how to fix my previous dark face bug so you are awesome for that. I don't know if you are still helping so if you could I would appreciate it. I have the issue where its all elves that have it. Trying to follow your guide, I tried to isolate by seeing the first characters of the id but they are all 000 so that is in the skyrim.esm (i think). Seeing this pinned message would this be my only solution?
Thanks for the post. For other modders that see your post, gotta add that loading the mods that change npc facegen data should be loaded very late (after immersive armors in particular) and should overwrite all mods that conflict with it.
I just got rid of Vanilla Hair Replacer. Got rid of the dark faces right away. I'd much rather just deal with the vanilla hair, thanks. It's not like it looked *that* bad and the replacement hair wasn't great anyway.
Just getting rid of the mod was also far simpler than anything else I found as a fix.
Legend. That did it. I spent hours figuring out how to turn Recorder into a Selachii (shark race), and after I had finally figured it out, she was blackfaced. Your solution saved me hours me of trying to solve this last problem. Thank you.
Downloading the mod just so I can endorse this.
Also, both of you, DylMan62 and cptnobvius, should take some pride is this. This page is the Featured Snippet for the search "skyrim se blackface fix" in google. First thing on the results page.
This doesn't let you choose which changes you want to show in game. Say mod A changes the face and armor. mod B changes face , armor and weapons. mod C boosts health but has vanilla armor and weapons.
With a conflict resolution patch created in xEdit, you can use A's face, B's weapons and armor, and C's health boost in your game.
It is a lot of work, so it depends on how much control you want over the appearance and features of your NPC's.
Well, I had too many black/dark faces despite believing I have the correct load order, so I just did this on all actors.
I thought with my super duper 3060 ti and a ryzen 5 7600x, 32gb of memory and a super SSD, it wouldn't be a problem. However Its been I think 8 hours so far and all I see is the "app is not responding." I was going to try again with less actors but after a while, I saw a pop up come up and I clicked "yes to all" and now Its been another 4 hours or so. lol
Peeps, I don't care how strong you think your computer is, don't do this lol I'll let this run over night. Hopefully its still running and didn't freeze up.
I tried the fix using the creation kit method and it still didn't work because I'm using mods, I fixed it though and I'll explain what I did. I noticed this happened after I installed the Hair Replacer mod, this mod and others that replace hair, edit the meshes and textures of the face and can cause the dark face to occur. What I did was deleted two skyrim.esm folders found in the texture and meshes folders (Data/textures/actors/character/facegendata/facetint/skyrim.esm) and (Data/meshes/actors/character/FaceGenData/FaceGeom/skyrim.esm) the ones that say skyrim.esm delete these since these loose files that are generated after the creation kit method fix will overwrite any mods you install that edit the same info. (These files you are deleting are found in the Skyrm.esm master file so they are still there but just not as loose files so they can be overwritten with other mods. So by deleting those two folders I got my hair mod to work without the dark faces on the NPC's. I haven't deleted the data for the DLC since I don't plan to play them, if I do or you do, just delete the relative DLC folders that are found in the same folder paths. Hope this helps anyone else who has this problem!
THIS WORKED for me, thank you!!! I tried regenerating all the face data in the CK to no avail, and when I checked the character in the console, it was 00, i.e. from Skyrim.esm itself, so that didn't identify the mod for me. I wonder which mod created this folder with all the loose files - but really, I'm just glad the nightmare is over, lol.
I spent over a week trying to figure this out. After a while, since it was just some of the vanilla female vampires, I figured I could just deal with it. Then it bled over onto all vanilla vampires so I needed to find a solution. Generating facegen data with CK didn't work. Rearranging/uninstalling/reinstalling mods didn't work. I was about to give up but then I stumble upon this post...and it worked...I've been facepalming ever since. Go figure my vampire dark face issue would be resolved with something as simple as this. orz
I, like some others, have no idea what mod generated these folders but I noticed that this issue cropped up after uninstalling a few mods that just weren't my cup of tea. Now I just have random naked vampires running around but, their faces are fixed so who cares right? Lol.
WARNING: Don't do this if you have Bijin mods. After doing this all the women that I had modded went blackface. Restored folders and reverted back. I'll just deal with having black face generic female vampires.
Thank you so much, I realised it was my freshly installed hair mod because of this post lol. In my case it was VHR - Vanilla Hair Replacer that did it.
I have the dark face problem to and i wanted to try this solution becaused it seems to be the best and most simple solution to the dark face problem (in my game the vanilla vampires, mostly the females but some times males too have the dark face), but there is no skyrim.esm file in the path mentioned above. What can i do?
I'm using Shiva's hair replacer and my issue was with Immersive Encounters NPCs, Beyond Skyrim: Bruma NPCs and some others like Saadia. I did *not* initially try the Creation Kit method, instead going straight to the easy deletion of the skyrim.esm folders. Sadly this didn't work, so I will try the Creation Kit method and report back.
Edit: Okay, doing the Creation Kit thing seems to have worked. The absence of the skyrim.esm folders seems to have had no effect so far. Edit2: It's worked for *some* NPCs, but not all. I'm certain I selected all the Beyond Skyrim: Bruma plugins but some of the NPCs there still have the dark face bug, while others were fixed.
Ok so for the most part this is fantastic and THANK YOU SO MUCH for an explanation that works for us non-modder people who just want a game that works! Doing this fixed it for 95% of my characters.
There are a few lingering black faces though that I just can't figure out how to get rid of. Some of them come from mods, but I can't find any more files called 'skyrim.esm' to delete using the instructions above. If I go in far enough I just end up with '_folder_managed_by_vortex' as the terminal item. One of the black faces, however, is Olfrid Battle-Born who is not a modded character, and that's really throwing me. All the rest of his family look normal, it's just him.
I'm reluctant to reset all the facegendata, as doing that with the Skyrim characters resulted in 90% of them going black (whereas before it was the odd one) but I can't figure out how else to sort it. PLEASE HELP. I'm so close to everything looking good!
For those having problems figuring out which mod(s) are causing the bug, there is a simple solution.
First, note the names of a few named (if possible) npcs that have the bug.
Next, fire up xEdit and load your entire load order in it, just as if you were firing up the game normally.
Now, scroll down the NPC names list until you find the character with the bug. Select them in the left-hand pane and look in the right-hand pane. xEdit will show you, at the top of the screen, which mod(s) make edits to this character.
Do the process from this page with those mod(s) individually.
An easier way to find out which mods are causing the issue is to find a character with the black face bug open up the console by clicking the tilde key ( the squiggly line key to the immediate left of the numeral 1 key), then click on the npc with the bug and look for the first two letters/numbers in the editor id that is displayed when you click on them. open up your mod manager and look for the corresponding letter/number combination in the load order, and bang presto you now have found the offending mod.
@gumby334us Check the description of the main mod, there's a process outlined there. The player's ID is usually "00000014" or around that many zeroes, I can't remember lol.
"open up your mod manager and look for the corresponding letter/number combination in the load order, and bang presto you now have found the offending mod. "
I can't understand this passage here... where and how do i look for it?
reloading game after setnpcweight 35 black face returns...not a solution...just temporary fix. my npc with black face got it removed with setnpcweight 35 and that worked but the hair is purpleish-silver like other npc's that have blackface and discolored hair and eye make-up. The consistent problem is blackface and purple-silver hair...some have eye makeup problems like Delphine has all three problems. Vampirella id is 22002f9d so the mod causing this is id 22 And how to find that in vortex?
a couple years later lol...but i was about to try your method when i saw that it said it was last changed by 'players drop skulls' mod..so i deleted that and it worked......
As an alternative, I found a comment on the other dark face fix mod (https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/11211?tab=posts) saying targeting NPCs in the console and using 'setnpcweight 50' will fix it.
It works for me, though obviously it's not as neat as fixing the problem at the root (and of course NPC body weights will change a bit).
Same here, works beautifully (tested with changing npcweight to 35 like in description), but resets once game loads a new cell. Not that I mind that much, having to do it a couple dozen times still beats seeing that terribly annoying black face.
It worked for me! thank you, after changing the value of the weight to 50 I went back to 100 and the black face bug disappeared. Sorry, English is not my native language
setnpcweight xx worked, but did not stick. I use Vokul4's NPC Body Scale Randomizer and the dark faces come back, even after save/reload, when the next randomizing interval comes along. Control-F4 in the CK works and sticks through the randomizing process. I did not need to install this mod/ESP to get rid of the dark faces either. Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions in these posts too!
If you're struggling to make over your NPC's without getting the dark face bug, you must check out Diversity NPC. Wish I'd found it sooner! I finally get great looking NPC's (700+) with realistic hair that's better than other mods I tried like WICO and Total Character Makeover (which are good, but good luck on trying to improve the hair without getting the Dark face bug). With Diversity, I finally figured out how to get everything to play nice and the hair in general is not too shiny. If you're struggling with this, here's my mod order for the most relevant mods:
MOD INSTALL ORDER: Interesting NPCs, Apachii Hair for Interesting NPCs, Apachii Hair Female/Male & Full, Diversity NPC Overhaul, Bijiin mods, Dark Face Fix, Diverse Guards, RSSE Children, Men of Winter, other follower mods here.
(I use the latest Vortex for my mod manager)
MOD PLUG-IN ESP ORDER: Apachi Hair (all 3), RS Children, Diversity NPC Overhaul, Interesting NPC Apachii Hair, Men of Winter, Bijiin, Dark Face Bug fix, RS Children Interesting NPC patch, RS Children, UNP Female Body Renewal, Diverse Guards
You'll want to disable WICO and Total character (and *maybe* other NPC makeovers) in favor of Diversity. At first I disabled Men of Winter that touches a dozen NPCs, but had dark face with those characters. I tried the Dark face mod, but that didn't help. I then reinstalled Men of Winter and all was well. I think if you have mods that touch upon NPC's and you save your game, those attributes get baked into the NPC's DNA forever, then you'll need to keep them active but install after Diversity. Once this all worked, I left the Dark Face mod installed, but I'm not sure it's necessary (though it's mod page has a lot of useful advice on the topic). Be careful about layering on other NPC overhaul or appearance mods that target individual features or you may get the Dark Face. All I can say is the above list is compatible (along with another 200+ mods I have running in VR).
The great thing is this all works with the hundreds of "Interesting NPCs", a mod that adds so much to the game (you must go to 3dnpc.com for the SE version as it's not listed on Nexus). However, install the Interesting NPC Apachii hair patch from Nexus. Most of the hair in the game has been pretty lore friendly. I think these mods filter much of the most lore unfriendly hair. Bijiin's hair is a bit too shiny for my tastes, but it's still a great mod.
To make over the NPC clothes/armor: The amazing oldrim aMidian Book of Silence works great on SE if you disable the ESP's and install the aMidian Blades patch. Rustic Clothing SE improves much of the rest, along with some cloak mods.
Just a quick comment, the GECK ctrl-f4 method works for me every time, but only after I hit the save button in GECK. Maybe this should be added as an additional step?
Thank you, the "setnpcweight 35" command is what worked. Bonus points for teaching me how to do the facegen thing, since that fixed my vampire yellow eyes bug.
This was such a helpful page. <3 Edit: sadly it didn't permanently help, but learning a bit about Creation Kit for the first time was really helpful.
My gash.... I found the issue. It was the stupid Plugin order, not the mod order in mod organizer. On the left side, My high poly was overwriting everything (which I wanted). But the plugin was at the top. I moved it to the very bottom and the issue was resolved.
Now I'm worried about my plugin order because I let loot handle everything there.
Found a solution how to get rid of the black face problem. (I used vortex)
STEP 1 Download creation kit and start it from vortex. (tuturial from gamerpoets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3FuJA1UGvQ)
STEP 2 Go to File, then Data, double click on VHR vanilla hair replacer, then press Ok. See at the bottom it will tell you the loading progress. If any warnings come up just click yes to all.
STEP 3 Go to actors, and click on the top actor. For me this is AADeleteWhenDoneTestJeremyBig. If you know exactly which NPCs are affected by the bug, then select only those NPCs, it will save you a lot of time. Skip to step 6 if this applies to you.
STEP 4 Scroll to the bottom of the list, hold Shift and click on the bottom actor. For me this is Zaynabi.
STEP 5 Press Ctrl+F4 and press yes. Be prepared, this is going to refresh every NPC in Skyrim's face data. It's might take a while. (took me around 5 minutes) See at the bottom it will tell you the loading progress. If any warnings come up just click yes to all.
You will receive a notification when its done, just press oke.
STEP 6 Go to file and press save. Now go to your skyrim special edition folder and open the backup save from CK. (creation kit) There you will see a new file called: Vanilla Hair Replacer - VHR - BIB.esp.1.bak Hold that window open. Go to vortex and right click on VHR ---> open in file manager Now replace Vanilla Hair Replacer - VHR - BIB.esp with the new: Vanilla Hair Replacer - VHR - BIB.esp
When thats done just Deploy Mods!
This worked out for me. Im not a modder and know pretty much nothing about coding. Just wanted to help :)
(Maybe this vid can help a little: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5r9fzo3JTo )
Black is the "easiest to fix" wich is done by simply qutting the game to the main menu and then restart as its a memory issue.
The same thing can happen with the body too if you use a body mod like UUNP or CBBE and the solution is just a simple restart.
Grey and brown however are more tricky.
Ive had this issue for a week now with JH skyrim people wich in itself is a very delicate mod so before i found my solution i sadly got so pissed i deleted it and changed it to babes of skyrim.
But it wasnt an issue with the mods.
To fix the issue of brown faces exporting ctrl+f4 doesnt always work since its a mod issue and skyrim will rebuild the face into vanilla and youll still end up with brown faces.
Now here is the solution that worked for me.
I will asume in this that you use Asis, mator smash and bash since thats what i use.
1. i go into wrye bash rebuild my patch but deselecteng everything other than "level list" and "merge patches" but in the merge patches column i deselect any npc overhaul so bash doesnt merge them together(with babes of skyrim bash wanted to merge all of them) leaving them enabled in the load order wich is important.
I move all the npc overhauls to the very bottom but above RDO and Skyrim unbound. Then i go into mator smash and builds my patch like normal.
2. After building my smashed patch i then move onto asis and builds that one aswell.
3. then i go into TES5EDIT/SSEDIT and apllying filter to show conflicts.
4. When its done i then find the npc overhaul mod(for me it was easy since i only had one but i have alot of mods that edit the records but i didnt have to pick what overhaul i wanted for the specific chara since babes touches everyone) Then i manually resolve each and every single appearence conflict by drag&droping making sure that no other mod overwrites the changes(if its on the bottom of your load order its really only asis and smash that does this usually)
I also drag and drop the changes from babes into every mod that loads earlier. meaning that some changes from mods like disparity will be using some things from babes even though it has nothing to do with appearance. This is especially annoying if you use something like racemenu or ECE as it will change the default appearance of every race but i didnt care since i didnt have any presets i cared about.
I did loose some things from USLEEP aswell but i was ready to make that sacrifice.
5. All done, it took a while but opened up skyrim and now every single npc looks perfect, i have alot of mods that changes npc but forwarding the changes from babes into all the conflicting mods did wonders.
Now this is not foolproof is youre an advanced user or modder you have probably spotted alot of issues with this. If someone who wants to try this doesnt know what everything in the rows in tes5edit does or changes then this can screw some things up but with a little common sense and research you should atleast be able to spot the columns that deals with appearance.
If you do this then you will no longer suffer from the grey/black/brown face bug. You wont need an esp, you wont need the CK, all you would need is SSedit and MO2(since it is more forgiving than vortex)
So.... Method 2 worked for me. I tried it before anything else. Can someone please tell me why it worked? All NPC's affected are 000 (I'm guessing that means base-game?) Does that mean I borked my tints or what is the vibe? Please help
This isn't bad, but it isn't very precise. Making a conflict resolution patch in xEdit gives you full control of which mods changes appear in your game. Yes, it's expert level modding, but it let's you control just about everything, not just a character's face.
431 comments
If it's just one person, or a few people, you can type their names in the filter. Then highlight them and press ctrl+f4. If that doesn't work, double lick their name, get their race, go to that race under actors and highlight their name in the right window then press ctrl+f4, then click yes.
If you want to do a mass edit for just a race:
You click to expand Actor
You click to expand Actor again
You click to expand a Race
Select Male or Female
In the window on the right select the top name, hold shift and press end to highlight them all, then press ctrl+f4, and click yes.
If you want to update ALL actors (god forbid your computer might blow up or crash Creation Kit)
click to expand Actors
click ON Actor (In Bold letters)
select the name in the top right window at the top
press and hold shift and press end to highlight them all
Then press ctrl+f4, click yes
Maybe update the directions? Or just leave this here if anyone else is confused.
edit: and yes this fixed all my issues, so thanks for posting!
What meta are we talking about here? The setnpcweight thing only fixed it for a short time. Even when I save the game, it returns back to the black face bug.
Thinking maybe a reinstall.
Reinstall of game and mods seems to have done the trick. I, of course, did not reinstall Opulent Outfits and it's required Consistent Older People which is what caused the majority of my dark faces problem to begin with. Before that, the only NPC with the dark face was Carlotta from the Wizard's College. Haven't checked to see if she is still borked. The only thing now is I have naked tavern wenches and Opulent Outfits changed those also. But hey naked is still better than the dark faces. :)
I love you, like really
i was had coutless video tutorials but nothing worked.... but these simple instruction i really love you ^^ #nohomo
Then I found this by chance. Wish I found it sooner and didn't mess with anything this page suggested!
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/42441
Hope this saves someone else some time!
Just getting rid of the mod was also far simpler than anything else I found as a fix.
Downloading the mod just so I can endorse this.
Also, both of you, DylMan62 and cptnobvius, should take some pride is this. This page is the Featured Snippet for the search "skyrim se blackface fix" in google. First thing on the results page.
Don't waste time with these other methods.
wildlands
With a conflict resolution patch created in xEdit, you can use A's face, B's weapons and armor, and C's health boost in your game.
It is a lot of work, so it depends on how much control you want over the appearance and features of your NPC's.
I thought with my super duper 3060 ti and a ryzen 5 7600x, 32gb of memory and a super SSD, it wouldn't be a problem. However Its been I think 8 hours so far and all I see is the "app is not responding." I was going to try again with less actors but after a while, I saw a pop up come up and I clicked "yes to all" and now Its been another 4 hours or so. lol
Peeps, I don't care how strong you think your computer is, don't do this lol I'll let this run over night. Hopefully its still running and didn't freeze up.
I tried the fix using the creation kit method and it still didn't work because I'm using mods, I fixed it though and I'll explain what I did. I noticed this happened after I installed the Hair Replacer mod, this mod and others that replace hair, edit the meshes and textures of the face and can cause the dark face to occur. What I did was deleted two skyrim.esm folders found in the texture and meshes folders (Data/textures/actors/character/facegendata/facetint/skyrim.esm) and (Data/meshes/actors/character/FaceGenData/FaceGeom/skyrim.esm) the ones that say skyrim.esm delete these since these loose files that are generated after the creation kit method fix will overwrite any mods you install that edit the same info. (These files you are deleting are found in the Skyrm.esm master file so they are still there but just not as loose files so they can be overwritten with other mods. So by deleting those two folders I got my hair mod to work without the dark faces on the NPC's. I haven't deleted the data for the DLC since I don't plan to play them, if I do or you do, just delete the relative DLC folders that are found in the same folder paths. Hope this helps anyone else who has this problem!
I, like some others, have no idea what mod generated these folders but I noticed that this issue cropped up after uninstalling a few mods that just weren't my cup of tea. Now I just have random naked vampires running around but, their faces are fixed so who cares right? Lol.
Edit: Okay, doing the Creation Kit thing seems to have worked. The absence of the skyrim.esm folders seems to have had no effect so far.
Edit2: It's worked for *some* NPCs, but not all. I'm certain I selected all the Beyond Skyrim: Bruma plugins but some of the NPCs there still have the dark face bug, while others were fixed.
There are a few lingering black faces though that I just can't figure out how to get rid of. Some of them come from mods, but I can't find any more files called 'skyrim.esm' to delete using the instructions above. If I go in far enough I just end up with '_folder_managed_by_vortex' as the terminal item. One of the black faces, however, is Olfrid Battle-Born who is not a modded character, and that's really throwing me. All the rest of his family look normal, it's just him.
I'm reluctant to reset all the facegendata, as doing that with the Skyrim characters resulted in 90% of them going black (whereas before it was the odd one) but I can't figure out how else to sort it. PLEASE HELP. I'm so close to everything looking good!
First, note the names of a few named (if possible) npcs that have the bug.
Next, fire up xEdit and load your entire load order in it, just as if you were firing up the game normally.
Now, scroll down the NPC names list until you find the character with the bug. Select them in the left-hand pane and look in the right-hand pane. xEdit will show you, at the top of the screen, which mod(s) make edits to this character.
Do the process from this page with those mod(s) individually.
And that's it.
This is without a doubt my favourite suggestion of how to find the offending mod, thanks a lot, I'll be adding it to my description.
Check the description of the main mod, there's a process outlined there. The player's ID is usually "00000014" or around that many zeroes, I can't remember lol.
So, no solution!
I can't understand this passage here... where and how do i look for it?
where is the editor id ?
my npc with black face got it removed with setnpcweight 35 and that worked but the hair is purpleish-silver like other npc's that have blackface and discolored hair and eye make-up. The consistent problem is blackface and purple-silver hair...some have eye makeup problems like Delphine has all three problems.
Vampirella id is 22002f9d so the mod causing this is id 22
And how to find that in vortex?
It works for me, though obviously it's not as neat as fixing the problem at the root (and of course NPC body weights will change a bit).
also just changing the value to something worked fine.
MOD INSTALL ORDER: Interesting NPCs, Apachii Hair for Interesting NPCs, Apachii Hair Female/Male & Full, Diversity NPC Overhaul, Bijiin mods, Dark Face Fix, Diverse Guards, RSSE Children, Men of Winter, other follower mods here.
(I use the latest Vortex for my mod manager)
MOD PLUG-IN ESP ORDER: Apachi Hair (all 3), RS Children, Diversity NPC Overhaul, Interesting NPC Apachii Hair, Men of Winter, Bijiin, Dark Face Bug fix, RS Children Interesting NPC patch, RS Children, UNP Female Body Renewal, Diverse Guards
You'll want to disable WICO and Total character (and *maybe* other NPC makeovers) in favor of Diversity. At first I disabled Men of Winter that touches a dozen NPCs, but had dark face with those characters. I tried the Dark face mod, but that didn't help. I then reinstalled Men of Winter and all was well. I think if you have mods that touch upon NPC's and you save your game, those attributes get baked into the NPC's DNA forever, then you'll need to keep them active but install after Diversity. Once this all worked, I left the Dark Face mod installed, but I'm not sure it's necessary (though it's mod page has a lot of useful advice on the topic). Be careful about layering on other NPC overhaul or appearance mods that target individual features or you may get the Dark Face. All I can say is the above list is compatible (along with another 200+ mods I have running in VR).
The great thing is this all works with the hundreds of "Interesting NPCs", a mod that adds so much to the game (you must go to 3dnpc.com for the SE version as it's not listed on Nexus). However, install the Interesting NPC Apachii hair patch from Nexus. Most of the hair in the game has been pretty lore friendly. I think these mods filter much of the most lore unfriendly hair. Bijiin's hair is a bit too shiny for my tastes, but it's still a great mod.
To make over the NPC clothes/armor: The amazing oldrim aMidian Book of Silence works great on SE if you disable the ESP's and install the aMidian Blades patch. Rustic Clothing SE improves much of the rest, along with some cloak mods.
Hope this helps!
Thank you, the "setnpcweight 35" command is what worked.Bonus points for teaching me how to do the facegen thing, since that fixed my vampire yellow eyes bug.This was such a helpful page. <3
Edit: sadly it didn't permanently help, but learning a bit about Creation Kit for the first time was really helpful.
Now I'm worried about my plugin order because I let loot handle everything there.
STEP 1
Download creation kit and start it from vortex. (tuturial from gamerpoets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3FuJA1UGvQ)
STEP 2
Go to File, then Data, double click on VHR vanilla hair replacer, then press Ok.
See at the bottom it will tell you the loading progress. If any warnings come up just click yes to all.
STEP 3
Go to actors, and click on the top actor. For me this is AADeleteWhenDoneTestJeremyBig.
If you know exactly which NPCs are affected by the bug, then select only those NPCs, it will save you a lot of time. Skip to step 6 if this applies to you.
STEP 4
Scroll to the bottom of the list, hold Shift and click on the bottom actor. For me this is Zaynabi.
STEP 5
Press Ctrl+F4 and press yes. Be prepared, this is going to refresh every NPC in Skyrim's face data. It's might take a while. (took me around 5 minutes)
See at the bottom it will tell you the loading progress. If any warnings come up just click yes to all.
You will receive a notification when its done, just press oke.
STEP 6
Go to file and press save.
Now go to your skyrim special edition folder and open the backup save from CK. (creation kit)
There you will see a new file called: Vanilla Hair Replacer - VHR - BIB.esp.1.bak
Hold that window open.
Go to vortex and right click on VHR ---> open in file manager
Now replace Vanilla Hair Replacer - VHR - BIB.esp with the new: Vanilla Hair Replacer - VHR - BIB.esp
When thats done just Deploy Mods!
This worked out for me. Im not a modder and know pretty much nothing about coding. Just wanted to help :)
(Maybe this vid can help a little: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5r9fzo3JTo )
THANKS cptnobvius for the face gen tip.
https://forums.nexusmods.com/index.php?showtopic=9165513
Black/Brown/ grey.
Black is the "easiest to fix" wich is done by simply qutting the game to the main menu and then restart as its a memory issue.
The same thing can happen with the body too if you use a body mod like UUNP or CBBE and the solution is just a simple restart.
Grey and brown however are more tricky.
Ive had this issue for a week now with JH skyrim people wich in itself is a very delicate mod so before i found my solution i sadly got so pissed i deleted it and changed it to babes of skyrim.
But it wasnt an issue with the mods.
To fix the issue of brown faces exporting ctrl+f4 doesnt always work since its a mod issue and skyrim will rebuild the face into vanilla and youll still end up with brown faces.
Now here is the solution that worked for me.
I will asume in this that you use Asis, mator smash and bash since thats what i use.
1. i go into wrye bash rebuild my patch but deselecteng everything other than "level list" and "merge patches" but in the merge patches column i deselect any npc overhaul so bash doesnt merge them together(with babes of skyrim bash wanted to merge all of them) leaving them enabled in the load order wich is important.
I move all the npc overhauls to the very bottom but above RDO and Skyrim unbound. Then i go into mator smash and builds my patch like normal.
2. After building my smashed patch i then move onto asis and builds that one aswell.
3. then i go into TES5EDIT/SSEDIT and apllying filter to show conflicts.
4. When its done i then find the npc overhaul mod(for me it was easy since i only had one but i have alot of mods that edit the records but i didnt have to pick what overhaul i wanted for the specific chara since babes touches everyone) Then i manually resolve each and every single appearence conflict by drag&droping making sure that no other mod overwrites the changes(if its on the bottom of your load order its really only asis and smash that does this usually)
I also drag and drop the changes from babes into every mod that loads earlier. meaning that some changes from mods like disparity will be using some things from babes even though it has nothing to do with appearance. This is especially annoying if you use something like racemenu or ECE as it will change the default appearance of every race but i didnt care since i didnt have any presets i cared about.
I did loose some things from USLEEP aswell but i was ready to make that sacrifice.
5. All done, it took a while but opened up skyrim and now every single npc looks perfect, i have alot of mods that changes npc but forwarding the changes from babes into all the conflicting mods did wonders.
Now this is not foolproof is youre an advanced user or modder you have probably spotted alot of issues with this. If someone who wants to try this doesnt know what everything in the rows in tes5edit does or changes then this can screw some things up but with a little common sense and research you should atleast be able to spot the columns that deals with appearance.
If you do this then you will no longer suffer from the grey/black/brown face bug. You wont need an esp, you wont need the CK, all you would need is SSedit and MO2(since it is more forgiving than vortex)
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/42441
If you have this bug the above link ^^^^^^^^^^^^
-High Poly NPC Overhaul - Skyrim Special Edition 2.0 (All Vanilla NPCs)
-High Poly NPC Overhaul - Resources
And I don't even miss them. I think more than one of my other mods makes NPCs look better and varied anyway, so this was redundant as it was.