About this mod
These are a few simple patches to help ELE and ELFX work nicely together. It carries ELFX light (LIGH) parameters over ELE's, assuming that most users will load ELE towards the bottom of their load order. A few lights were added in places that were too dark with these two great mods combined. Some cavern lighting templates changed. WIP.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
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For many of us who have been using Neovalen's Skyrim Revisited: Legendary Edition, as well as any of its "spiritual successors" like DarkLadyLexy's Legacy of The Dragonborn Special Edition guide, no lighting mod by itself can beat the combination of three of the most popular lighting mods for Skyrim and Skyrim SE, ELE - Enhanced Lighting for ENB, ELFX - Enhanced Lighs and FX and Relighting Skyrim (the latter thanks to Neo's own tweaked plugin), each addressing some particular aspect of interior lighting and resulting in a very dramatic, yet completely playable experience.
Still, the mileage would vary between users, as different set-ups, different sensitivity and different personal preferences always led to some remarking that certain interiors were too dark to be fun, while others would swear by how fun and rewarding it was to sneak around in complete darkness and having to use lights to find their way or stuff they were looking for, while taking the risk of being seen. This mod started as (and is still not much more than) an attempt, perhaps doomed, to cater for both.
Both ELE and ELFX darken the game a bit - ELE by changing interior cell imagespaces and lighting templates, ELFX by removing many vanilla light "bulbs" while adding others, aiming at a more realistic experience where all light should come from visible light sources like fire, candles, lanterns, torches, windows, rock crevices, etc... Combining both often results in a beautiful contrast between mainly dark places and locally lit scenes, other times in better lit areas with shady corners, but the contrast is always there because of what both mods do. ELFX does a great job adding more light sources to compensate the absence of the ambient light (that one may rightfully deem "artificial"). But with ELE also in the picture, some places were still too dark, at least for some users.
An example, and what started this mod, is the Winking Skeever in Solitude. Using both ELE and ELFX, the whole pub is immersed in darkness, with only a few candles barely lighting the faces of patrons sitting at the tables. There is a bard, Lisette, who sings mostly in the dark (poor thing!) and a few markers are in places with no light at all. Often I'd find Gollum-Ei leaning against the wall beside the entrance door, only "seeing" him because of the GUI and would make the entire dialogue without even been able to look at whom I was talking to. While carrying a lit torch or lantern makes sense in a dungeon, should we need to carry our own light source in a tavern?
In parallel, when using these two mods and loading ELE last (as you should) many light (LIGH) records from ELFX are overridden by ELE, with very different results. It's probably another matter of taste but I found ELFX to be less saturated and more neutral, so I carried those records from ELFX. It probably helps with general lighting because ELFX lights were placed taking those records in consideration.
Features
This patch does only the following:
1) Forwards ELFX LIGH records where they conflict with ELE;
2) Tweaks some lights and adds a few to better balance light and shade, especially in busy, public interior areas; this is Work In Progress. So far, only the Winking Skeever and the Bannered Mare were tweaked. As this could be a never-ending endeavour, I'll only ever tweak those places that really seem too dark, in a less than realistic manner.
3) Since placing stuff requires you to nest it in a cell override, for those cells that I used the records, imagespace and lighting template references, from ELE were carried.
4) Changed some base game and DLC cavern worldspaces to use a brighter ELE lighting template, where it made sense, either because it's a vegetated cavern (like Shadowgreen Cavern, or the Ancestors' Glade) or because it helped navigate around very large caverns and give back some sense of monumentality, as well as bring out more of ELFX's aesthetics, while still keeping unlit areas in complete darkness (example: Labyrinthian Tribune).
5) Made a small edit to 1ELE_Interior_IS and 1ELE_Bright_LT records from ELE. It will give all "civilized" interiors a tiny bit of ambient light, enough to see the contours of people and objects even in the dark spots of the Winking Skeever and the Bee and Barb, but without losing the overall realistic feel of the ELE+ELFX combo.
6) IMPORTANT COMPATIBILITY FIX new in 1.2! Forwarded ELFX room markers in the Thalmor Embassy cell over ELE and tweak room bounds, which caused crashing when using both mods. Feature is included in both the AIO and all of the modules because it addresses an incompatibility issue between ELE and ELFX. Thanks to Andaone and the Lexy guide folks for this feature.
Patching was done entirely in xEdit, all records were manually carried or edited and verified clean so it shouldn't contain errors, wild or dirty edits.
Compatibility with ELFX Enhancer
ELE and ELFX Enhancer are simply incompatible. They do the same things - only differently. There is no point having both in your load order, you're likely to only get the benefits of one of them (whichever loads last), possibly you'll get inconsistent results if you run Wrye Bash or any automated patchers on your build. And, of course, your computer will explode. Don't install ELFX Enhancer (nor the hardcore version) if you use ELE and this patch. There will never be a patch for using ELE and ELFX Enhancer as there is no logic to it.
Requirements
The plugin file requires both EnhancedLightsandFX.esp (for the LIGH records) and ELE_SSE.esp (for the LGTM and IMGS references) as masters.
Installation
Install ELE and ELFX. When installing ELFX, DO NOT install ELFX Enhancer or Hardcore. You can use ELFX Enhanced Ice and also, if you like, exteriors - but please read what is said about it in the mod's page and installer, that it's a weather mod proper and will conflict with other weather mods if you happen to use one. Both Ice and Exteriors are not required for these patches and these patches will do nothing to those modules, install them if you want, or not.
Let me state this for the third time in this description, DO NOT USE ELFX ENHANCER OR HARDCORE WITH ELE. The result of doing so will be so hideous not even this patch can do anything about it. You've been warned.
Either download and install the All-in-One version of this patch, or any combination of the optional plugins. Do NOT install the AIO at the same time as any of the optionals. Install with your mod manager of choice or copy the plugins to your data folder. All are light plugins (.esl) so they don't count towards your maximum number of plugins, but they all can be merged with ELE_SSE.esp.
Load Order
Sort your load order with LOOT unless you know really well what you're doing. That should place EnhancedLightsandFX.esp pretty high, towards the beginning of your load order, in a low priority position and that's where it should stay. If you need to fix conflicts between that plugin and others in your build, instead of changing its position the load order, use or make a patch instead (just giving some free advice, as this is beyond the scope of this mod and description).
Loot should also place ELE_SSE.esp towards the bottom of your LO, in a high priority position and it better stay there. The result of ELE_SSE.esp not overriding interior cell records is that those cells will have a different lighting setup and feel inconsistent with the rest of your interiors. If you need to sort conflicts between ELE and other mods regarding cell records, you need specific patches.
All patches on this page can also be sorted with loot, or placed directly after ELE_SSE.esp. All are ESPFE plugins and won't take up any full slot from your ESP count.
Disclaimer and Credits
I do not claim to be "improving upon" either mod. The purpose of this patch is to, hopefully, make the use of both in the same build more enjoyable to a greater number of people.
All credit for the resulting visuals should be given to the authors of ELE (JawZ) and ELFX (anamorfus). Even when I added new lights, I tried to follow ELFX's principles and aesthetics, and lighting template edits to interior worldspaces all used other ELE lighting templates. This is mostly about details.
Credit to the Lexy guide users who caught the room markers issue that caused crashing in the Thalmor Embassy when using ELE and ELFX, in particular to Andaone who developed the fix now included in this patch.
Thanks
To Bethesda for a great game,
To the TES modding community for being great,
To Darkladylexy and her team for a great guide, and pushing me to do this, to DarthMathias for the LE guide that kept me busy and learning stuff for over a year, to Neovalen (who started it all ;) ) and all the SRLE community for being great as well;
I can't stress this enough, I consider Skyrim modding folks a learning community that pushes you to learn real new skills, even if it's all about a simple game.
To Wellden for the first casual challenge to try SRLE and constant encouragement afterwards.