Skyrim Special Edition

About this mod

Add on for JK's Whiterun/Skyrim with support for JKs Skyrim - Dawn of Skyrim Patch, Immersive Citizens and Eli's Breezehome. New Whiterun meshes available as well as new firewood meshes in seperate downloads.

Requirements
Permissions and credits
Translations
  • Italian
  • German
You may want to consider this version that can be found at EEKs Immersive Whiterun, includes new clutter, furniture/containers and EXTERIOR INTERIORS.
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This mod is a add on to JK's Whiterun & JK's Skyrim designed using EEKs Renthal Flora Collection and uses assets from High Poly Project, Winter is Coming and HD Photorealistic Ivy, as well as various resources found on the Nexus.

There is also a version that provides compatibilty between JK's Skyrim & Dawn of Skyrim in conjuction with Jk's Skyrim - Dawn of Skyrim Patch. As well as sorting all the clipping issues I have overhauled the two stores to tie them in with the rest of my interiors (see screenshots). This version is unlikely to get further updates outside off bug fixes as it's too much work maintaining so many versions.

Packed into this mod are the terrain meshes for the waterways with a texture path change made to wrstonemortar01.dds along with city walls textures. There are also some new meshes from Ambershore for the market well, wrwalltotem01, wrwalltierdivide01 and wrstairswater01.

Each profession/NPC has been fleshed out by adding extra related static and harvestable clutter to their work areas, stands and shops as well as adding related laundry to their homes. I've also added more idle markers around the city to accomodate population mods.

The whole city has also had a new lighting scheme implemented that fixes the blinking lights and smoke. The braziers running from the Main Gate to Whiterun Stables has also been tweaked.

I've also reworked the navmesh across the city to accommodate any new additions and animal pens.

Rather than mess with vanilla AI packages and cause problems with ICAIO I have chosen to add seven NPC's to make use of some of the new areas/features added. They have jobs, one being a merchant, around the city and will hang about outside The Bannered Mare during rest periods. Three of them are the guards standing above the main gate and the market overlooking the city.

There is a new mesh included for the Hall of the Dead that places windows behind the bars at the front of the building (see EEKs Whiterun Meshes below).

The aspen trees have been set to full lod so that they will appear from outside the city, They have also been placed under a different ID so Dyndolod doesn't generate lod for them, otherwise lod would appear in the city. Woodpiles etc have also had a aspen texture set applied to them to reflect the surrounding trees (see EEKs Firewood below).

There is a new empty shack behind Arcadia's that can be used by any other modders out there for their own needs. It's only a shack and I really can't be bothered with it as I'll never go in there in game. The new door into Dragonsreach will come into play when I do the interior. Dawn of Skyrim makes use of the shack as the Tundra Bakery.

This mod also includes my Gildergreen and Noble Door mods.



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USSEP and JK's Whiterun or JK's Skyrim are required masters.

EEKs Renthal Flora Collection is recommended as I have designed and planted with these meshes and texture variations but there is no reliance. Skyrim 3D Trees & Plants also looks good and adds a totally different atomsphere.



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Realistic Aspen Trees is recommended as I have placed fallen leaves to match the colour change in leaves, not a biggy though.

Embers HD is also recommended as I have come up with a work around for the blinking smoke utilising it's  FXfireWithEmbers01_Cheap mesh which emits smoke that doesn't blink.

Guard Torch Remover is recommended to help with any blinking light sources caused by torches.




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If your installing mid playthrough there will likely be things baked into your save, disable them through the console. A new game start is recommended when installing overhaul mods.

Other Whiterun overhaul mods will have serious conflicts.

Any lighting mod that places new lightbulbs in Whiterun, ELFX Exteriors for example, will cause blinking lights and have placement issues. I recommend removing Whiterun from them using SSEedit. This method can be used for other mods or parts of this one.



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If your using Skyrim 3D Trees & Plants delete the Gildergreen from this mod.




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For reference my PC specs are i7 6700K, GTX 970, 16gb RAM, SSD, Win 10. I tested on a mod light build of USSEP, textures for everything, JK's Whiterun, Waterplants, Real Wildlife, Birds of Skyrim, Birds & Flocks SSE, Populated Cities, Towns & Villages, Immersive Citizens, Vivid WeathersRudy ENB.

Without this mod I have a near constant 60fps everywhere with a slight fluctuation of 1-2fps in places.

With this mod enabled you'll definately hear your fans rev up! There is a big drop (10fps) whilst stood at the entrance looking up the main street as well as on the top steps of Dragonsreach and looking back across the city. It soon sorts itself out though when you turn away. With Rudy ENB on I lost a couple more frames here and there but nothing to write home about.

These are the longest draw distances in the city and the only thing I can do is to delete some stuff or get a better PC, I'm happy to live with it! I have added more occlusion boxes where I can in order to help keep performance up.

The Jk's Skyrim - Dawn of Skyrim Patch version will cause further framerate drops and is only recommended for those users with a beefy machine. Though it's definately still playable on my set up.

As I turned on the population and creature mods performance did decrease further by a few frames here and there but the game was still very playable. There will also be increased loading times simply because it's loading more assets.




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This mod comes with the meshes for the waterways and the surrounding architecture and I have changed the texture path to wrstonemortar01 on them. This texture is the city wall texture but with moss on the mortar.


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EEKs Whitetun Meshes - retextured makes this texture change to all Whiterun meshes that use the wrcitywall01 texture, this includes the all the city walls and buildings. This version is compatible with all texture mods and has zero peroformance impact as it's now just a texture path change instead of using a moss alpha mesh.

EEKS Whiterun Meshes - rescaled & retextured have the internal banked walls and grass rescaled and alligned and the texture path changed where necessary to wrstonemortar01. Some texture mods, such as Whiterun HD, overcame the scaling problem with their textures but others haven't so these meshes are for those users. There may be a slight performance impact as the textures are repeated more often.

If using both the loadorder is:

  • EEKs Beautiful Whiterun - any version
  • EEKs Whitetun Meshes - retextured
  • EEKS Whiterun Meshes - rescaled & retextured

I recommend installing them into EEKs Beautiful Whiterun in this order.

I have used the terrain meshes from USSEP, SMIM (to carry forward any fixes) and new meshes from Ambershore for the market well, wrwalltotem01, wrwalltierdivide01 and wrstairswater01.

I use Noble and I'm not a fan of the wrcitywall01 texture (and it's derivatives) plus it doesn't come with a mossalpha texture. So I downloaded quite a few other texture packs looking for a wrcitywall01 with a matching mossalpha that looked good with Noble and found that the best one came from Langleys Texture Workshop. I have included these textures too with the meshes so be aware when installing and overwriting.

If using ELFX allow the building meshes to overwrite this mods if you want the window glow meshes from ELFX. Bare in mind that the stone texture on the building meshes will revert back to wrcitywall01 and there will no longer be a window in The Hall of Dead.

If you know how to use nifscope to change texture paths it may well be worth combining all the meshes into one mod and changing the necessary texture paths yourself, also copy and paste the windows from my Hall of the Dead mesh onto the ELFX's. It only takes a minute and will help solve potential load order issues.

I would also let ELFX's wrskyforge01.nif and wrcompanionbase01.nif win overmine.




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In order to tie the firewood piles and chopping blocks into the aspen trees I have duplicated, renamed and applied a aspen bark texture set to them in the CK. But due to the vanilla uvmaps on these meshes every log looks exactly the same, so I have remapped them enough to stop this appearing obvious.



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Set up like this the changes only apply to Whiterun but I can't apply these methods to the animation logs without changing them throughout Skyrim, as I don't know how to make Sigurd only use a new set of meshes for the animations.

So you have four choices:

  • The pine textured versionMy choice
  • The aspen textured version - affects all of Skyrim.
  • Mix them as you see fit.
  • Not bother and the log piles won't match the surrounding trees and every log will look identical.

Both versions are compatible with other texture mods as long as they have a vanilla texture name/path.




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Just make sure that your using the right version of this mod for your mod list and this mods esp and patches are loaded after any mod that makes changes to the navmesh.