Hadvar, Get Back Here! The Mod


Hi! I made a mod to prevent Hadvar from going missing for the USUAL reason(his horse getting attacked by wolves at the start). I haven't heard of another reason, so odds are really good this will fix your issue if Hadvar's missing for you at the start. The only bad news is this issue seems to be caused by other mods behaving badly(old Skyproc-based mods coupled with Hearthfire seem to come up a lot); thus, you have to ask yourself: Is this probably a minor difference close to the mod's intended behavior, like spawn alteration, that bugged a VERY fragile intro sequence? For example, I run ASIS. It alters spawn numbers and some other spawn qualities. Could that start/restart a spawn in a location Bethesda tried to protect, like the trail to Helgen? Seems like it could. Have I seen it be fairly stable? Yeah- in 12 or so years of modding, I can remember one corrupted save. Pretty good, all things considered, so I'll keep rolling the dice with ASIS.

On the other hand, there are mods like Dual Sheath Redux that may not have much to do with spawns, but which have resulted in this bug. That's not necessarily a deal breaker, but you don't have many tea leaves to go on when deciding if a mod is stable, and that's questionable so far. Do you really need two sheaths that bad? And is there a safer way to get them?

So anyway, if you've decided to keep your other mod, I recommend this patch for aesthetics/immersion. Without it, you would still get to run into Helgen dungeon anyway, but the Imperial Captain would end up talking to thin air, there'd be missing dialogue, a big mess. So read on!

I made and tested the mod with Anniversary Edition(I used Skyrim version 1.6.1170.0), which itself is an upgraded version of Special Edition. The mod seems like it could work with other versions as it's not touching anything Anniversary or Special Edition-specific, but I can only vouch for it with Anniversary Edition. It doesn't have any mod dependencies as it's just based on Skyrim's base module, Skyrim.esm. I don't see any special load order for it; Vortex puts it in the middle and if installed manually LOOT puts it at the bottom; I've tested it both ways and it's worked fine. No one's reported it not working yet, but if it doesn't work for you, switch your load order(if the mod is in the middle, move it to the bottom and vice versa) and post a comment on this page; if the mod does work for you and runs stable like it has been for me, please endorse so new folks can see it's safe.

There's nothing else for ordinary users to know except that this is my first Skyrim mod- first game mod at all, actually- though I've been a professional programmer / QA guy for 10 years. I think I did it right but you shouldn't bet your house on a first-timer being right about that. Anyone else who wants to try it out to post endorsements / evaluations, check my work or extend it, please go ahead! The dev details are below. For general users, there's nothing else for you; just plug the module into Skyrim's data folder, make sure it's enabled in your load order(it can be near the bottom), and start a fresh game. You'll know if it's fixed for you in a little more than a minute. You'll know whether it may have corrupted your save file... later. Though seriously, it's a tiny, tiny uncomplicated patch that doesn't touch anything that should be sensitive, like navmeshes. It's literally less than a kilobyte. Look at the comments evaluating my mod to figure out if it's trustworthy, and thanks to the early adopters! Enjoy!


For Enthusiasts and Devs


In the mod I'm pretty much just setting two wolves in a certain land type to only show up from level 2 on, so they don't harass your caravan at lvl 1. Please, hold your applause; I'm just a guy who couldn't believe no one else had bothered to fix an error after 12 years so he got off his backside and did it himself. By the way, I created this mod as an .esp, but it is so small it seems like it could be formatted as an .esl instead. No tutorial I read declared one be-all superior way to do things so I just used the old standard .esp.

Things seemed to go well, though. I used TESV version1.6.1170.0 and SSEdit version 4.1.5. I wasn't messing with land or NPC pathing so I don't think any navmeshes should be affected, nor was I dealing with any complicated mod conflicts(indeed, any detected conflicts at all) which means SSEdit creation and SSEdit QuickAutoClean were enough here.


For Mod Extension / Future Plans


Anyone wishing to recreate my mod but with different formatting can just go into SSEdit, unselect every mod/esp except for Skyrim itself, open that; then look for "LeveledNPCs" and LCharMountainSnowPredatorList. Right click and copy / override that into a new mod with the formatting you want. Select both EncWolf entries and change their level to 2, hitting enter each time. X out of SSEdit to save. Then open SSEditQuickAutoClean, select the mod and run it. I didn't see any issues when I ran the clean so hopefully your mod version gets created fine as well. If your version tests well, start using it; you have my blessing to either post a comment here and I'll update this page or, if I'm not responding, make your own mod page and link to this one.


For general extension


There are reportedly other cases in Skyrim of NPC's being on a guided-by-rails programming system that can easily be disrupted by outside actors like wild animals;deeper in the game where bumping the spawn levels on the animals won't fix the issue reliably. In that case, there are two options I know of; one is dirt simple but will probably hurt your immersion; and the other seems like "the right way to fix the problem" short of getting in the code and making the NPC not be "guided by rails."

The easy way: mod the aggression /confidence attributes of the animals / other NPC's most likely to interrupt things. This has the issue of being hard to set to normal in a mod before or after the encounter BUT where one could set it as a one time thing with console commands, hypothetically. I'm not a console pro but that's what I've heard. Leaving it that way throughout the whole game would probably hit immersion pretty hard way which is why I recommend the alternate approach(es) below. This approach is inspired by the "Less Aggressive Animals" mod https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/3171/ which is
the first one I got to fix the Hadvar missing issue, and which gave me hope I could make a patch with a smaller scope so animals otherwise stayed the same.

The "proper" way: create anew type of Skyrim land area; set the area the problematic NPC is in to have that area; make any NPC's in that area(predator spawn lists, etc) behave in a way where they won't interrupt things. That won't stop the Dragonborn from kiting an Ancient Vampire all the way over to get magic thrown at that NPC, or from the Dragonborn just smacking them in the face; but it should otherwise work. You could make the new area have all the other usual characteristics of forest etc. but this one wouldn't have problematic predators.

Any drawbacks? Besides possibly screwing up a navmesh when you create the new land? That'd be the main one. Other than that, any mod that modifies the land type you're copying won't recognize the new name or understand what it's supposed to do with that land type. This isn't really any mod's fault it's just that you can't perfectly predict the future of development and "generic land" probably wouldn't have good coding attached to it before you know what the land is supposed to be like. It's also possible that other mods demand to know all land types and will error out when they don't know one. But still, a new "safe land" for "guided by rails" NPC's seems like the appropriate patch if you can't get in and fix the rails OR if that seems like way more work than this solution.

Credit


Props to the authors of the Less Aggressive Animals mod https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/3171/, which was the first mod I found that fixed this issue, giving me hope I could eventually make this smaller scoped patch that doesn't affect animals throughout the game; and the authors of the Predator Animals Randomized Spawning mod  https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/50815 which clued me in to one of the ways spawning works in Skyrim- and my eventual solution- based on leveled lists; also to Google, which while recently terrible for searching actually came through with some good research recommendations. Along those lines, kudos to Phaedrathalassa for the good XEdit family tutorial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=olEbW1Eqbus .