PALEGORE - Grimdark Horror Series Presents: 
HARROWS OF THE NIGHT

INTRODUCTION: 
This is a pretty lightweight and immersive mod that adds more spooky ambient sounds to the game. Fair warning: While I have years of experience modding, this is my first release for SSE. Pretty sure I did everything right, but apologies if I missed a step. 

FEATURES:
- Distant screams
- Strange roars and droning sounds
- Subtle stingers and booms

AS OF 1.1:

- Music Data: 
Old version is still up in case you're not interested in this feature. But I also added new music data. This is 100% compatible with music replacers and does not alter any music files. All it does is specify which files to play. Simply put: It tells the game to play more spooky music that fit with the new ambience, and less relaxing/peaceful music. It also adds a lot more silence in between music so you can take in the atmosphere. 

- New weather specific effects such as howling wind.
- Distant magic from all those evil wizards and necromancers out there. 
- Distant creepy voices from large and terrifying monsters. 

Most sounds are intended to make the imagination run wild, meant to portray a world full of pointy objects, dangerous magic, otherwordly monsters and nightmarish things. And like all my mods that focus on immersion, the central philosophy is to remind you that you are a very small being in a very big universe. 

I'd say it's pretty lore friendly. Tamriel is full of scary stuff, and Skyrim has plenty of skeletons, living and dead. Both of which are plausible sources of the sounds in the distance.

Some might say "Oh but what about all the weird humming and droning? That's not very lore friendly!"
Wrong! I've been to 2 Baltic countries, and my Slavic friends would also confirm this: Volcanic biomes are creepy. You get weird trumpet sounds, you get humming, you get rumbling sounds and droning and all kinds of stuff. STALKER's soundscapes are actually very realistic, albeit a bit exaggerated for dramatic effect. Skyrim's geography is clearly heavily inspired by particularly Icelandic/Norwegian topology, and between the tectonic activity, the volcanoes and the long-ass nights, those are some spooky places to live. 

There is a reason why old religions in colder climates are so obsessed with protective magic and offerings and wards and the like, and it's because their Gods were a bunch of passive aggressive creeps who did weird stuff in the woods. It wasn't like Gods in warmer climates who liked to hang out at temples and drink wine all day. Norse gods are very much living in the trailer park of of the pagan universe, and a lot of that came from the ambience of these regions. 

TECHNICAL MUMBO JUMBO: 
So the comment section is full of people asking questions I had no idea anyone wanted answers about. In the Fallout 4 modding community they only do that when they're feeling competitive and want to call you an idiot. So it was cool to see some real curiosity for a change instead of just weird nerds trying to figure out how cyberbullying works. 

So here's the rundown of what I did:
First off, it uses vanilla sounds. Skyrim actually has a kind of built-in sound editor if you will, by altering pitch/frequency/gain variation you can actually make some pretty fun and interesting and not to mention spooky variations of existing sounds. So that's what I did. 

And then I took all those sounds and I created a region override. Regions are used in the base game to determine stuff like sounds, weather, they can even be used to generate grass and trees and automate level design, although that takes a lot of trial and error to figure out. But it's an amazing tool for sound data and ambient stuff. It does result in some pretty big files, hence the 5mb esp file, but it runs perfectly smooth. 

So once I hooked up the sounds to the region sound data, I defined the chances of when they go off, and added some conditions that restrict them from playing at times when it makes no sense (such as cities for instance), and that was that.

In Fallout there's no distinction between interior and exterior regions, which means you can use conditions to also add new indoor sounds. I tested this method with SSE although I haven't been able to check out how noticeable it is in game yet. But if you hear some weird stuff going on outside when you're indoors at night, then mission accomplished. 

Also some of you wondered why I only used the base game esm and not the DLCs and the Update, and reason for that was because I didn't really need them for this. The records I based my own work on looked perfectly fine, and if there was any kind of bugs then I could've solved them myself. So why clutter up my interface/load time with a bunch of data that I don't really need? I might check some of the DLCs for interesting sound records in the future though, maybe the soul cairn has some fun stuff to throw in the mix. 

All in all, should be compatible with just about everything. Some of you ran it through xEdit and saw some flagged records or whatever but I remind you that xEdit is a diagnostic tool, and it really doesn't tell you much useful info unless you're actually diagnosing something. Try loading up Bethesda's own work in the Creation Kit and you'll see it generates 100s of warnings, but so what? It's just a warning. Warnings inform of us potential problems, not guaranteed problems. Runs fine, made lots of mods like it in the past, it is what it is you know? Don't fix it if it's not broken.

UPDATE:
Some of you asked me for an ESL version, CK says it's not esl capable. You need to remember that an esl is not just a new and improved version of esp files, they don't work with certain kinds of data (in this case region data I suspect since esm files have some trouble with worldspaces too), so no luck I'm afraid. You'll just have to roll with the punches on this one.