Realistic Water Two

Overview

One of the many upgrades to Skyrim Special Edition is the new water flow system that allows water to bend around turns and change speed depending on the environment. While the water is much improved over the original edition of Skyrim, water flow was applied to most bodies of water, indiscriminately, resulting in odd looking water in certain situations. With RWT installed, marsh, pond,  and river water are once again visually and aurally distinct from one another. To fix some major LOD issues both the lake and ocean water are now the same.


Features 

• Lakes and ocean water now share the same texture. This fixes most distant LOD issues.
• Lakes, ponds/marsh water, and ocean water no longer flow in any particular direction.
• Lakes, rivers, and oceans have new, ambient sound effects. Ponds are silent.
• New animated water for blacksmith troughs.
• Icebergs and ice chunks will sometimes crack and gurgle.
• Smaller icebergs floating in the water will now animate and gently bob around.

Assets

• Large waterfalls now have improved textures, smoothed 3D geometry, faster animation, added particle splashes, expanded steam cloud particles, color edits, and increased effect distances.
• Waves were slowed down, retextured, and now have a crashing water sound effect. The splash/foam effects were made more visible.
• Foam effects have been retextured and were generated from a high resolution 3D water simulation.
• Splash effects have been retextured and captured directly from high quality 3D particles.
• Fog and steam cloud textures have been retextured.
• Rapids have been changed to remove ugly lines and seams. Particle splashes have also been added to rapids near rocks.
• Churning water and fountains have been edited to improve visible seams. They have also been retextured.
• Character splashes have been retextured and reworked. Their 3D model has also been tweaked to provide further realism.
• Rain ripples will no longer slide across the surface of the water. They've also been retextured and transparency has been increased.
• The green reflections emitted by some meshes when viewed at a certain angle is a bug that was introduced with Skyrim Special Edition. This bug is now fixed.
• New sound files for water, waterfalls, waves, and ice.
• New mesh for animated, small icebergs.

Optional Options (available in the main archive)

• Waves: New hand-placed waves added along the coast of Skyrim at locations that make sense. Additional waves have also been added to Solstheim.
• Extended Ambiance: Extends the lake and ocean ambient looping sound effects from 30 seconds to 50 seconds long.
• Flowing Lakes: Reverts lake water back to vanilla river water visually and aurally. Lake water will flow strongly in one direction again instead of being made up of slow, lapping waves. (not recommended)
• Original Foam: Reverts the rapids foam back to the original RWT textures. The new default foam textures are from the mod, WATER. Credits to SparrowPrince for those textures.
• Original Rain Ripples: The default rain ripples are SparrowPrince's new textures and meshes. The original are available as an option. They are more chaotic in nature.
• Smoother Rivers: The default river flow texture is a more choppy texture. This option is very similar, but will make the "waves" on the water smoother. Credits to SparrowPrince for this texture.
• Watercolor: Turns the water into a more vibrant, fantasy-like, teal color.

Version Scheme
Since I (TechAngel85) started managing several mods for various authors, I adopted a standardized managing style to keep myself organized while doing so. One of the changes I typically make is to regulate the version scheme with something that is structured and makes sense. The new scheme will be as follows:

Major.Minor.Hotfix

• Major = major changes to assets which alter the look and feel of the mod, new scripts (if applicable), new meshes or textures, etc.
• Minor = compatibility updates, new patches, larger bug fix roll-outs, existing mesh or texture edits, etc.
• Hotfix = hot-fixes, single bug fixes, update to installer code, etc.

Installation / Updating / Uninstall


Manual Install:
Manual installation is not supported. Use a mod manager. No support will be provided for these users.

Mod Managers:
Download the file and add it to your respective manager. Install using the provided installers (FOMOD or Wizard).

Notice!
We are no longer supporting retired mod managers! This means no support for NMM or MO. Your issues with these managers will be ignored.
MO2, Vortex, and WB are still supported.

Bethesda.net:
Add to your library and enjoy.

Updating
Simply uninstall the previous version and install the updated version. Wrye Bash users may need to Anneal some mods.

Uninstall
User your mod manager to remove the mod.


Plugin Load Order

• RealisticWaterTwo.esp
• RealisticWaterTwo -ModPatches.esp (any patches installed)
• RealisticWaterTwo - Watercolor.esp

Compatibility


General Mod Compatibility
This mod must be placed AFTER any mod that modifies a cell near a body of water!
This must be done to avoid seeing "seams" in the water. It is recommend placing this mod VERY low in the load order (towards the bottom) and use xEdit to make any necessary patches with other mods.



Not Compatible
The following mods are not compatible with Realistic Water Two:

SSEEdit Script - Fix Oldrim Mods Waterflow - (link)
This mod checks for the existence of "RiverWaterFlow" on cell records. RWT intentionally changes some of these records to provide the various water types. This script can not be ran on any of the plugins provided by Realistic Water Two; doing so will break intended edits.



Compatibility Patches
The following patches are provided for compatibility during installation:

• iNeed (works for Realistic Needs and Diseases too!) - (link) (RND)
• Paper World Map for SSE - (link)
• The People of Skyrim Complete SSE - (link)
• Wyrmstooth - (link)

Mod Install Order Recommendations

Majestic Mountains - (link)
Install Majestic Mountains after RWT.
Majestic Mountains includes three meshes that conflict with RWT. Users should overwrite RWT with these meshes when using both mods or delete/hide the files from the RWT installation. They are two creek meshes and one river rapids mesh. The changes to the meshes are only to the rocks included within them, from what I can tell. Users will still get the RWT foams with the river mesh. The creek meshes will likely be reverted back to vanilla. RWT speeds these two meshes up so the water doesn't look like it's in slow motion, but it's not that noticeable.

SMIM - (link)
Install SMIM before RWT.
SMIM has one mesh that conflicts with RWT. Users should allow RWT to overwrite this mesh when using both mods or delete/hide the file from the SMIM installation. RWT fixes a green glow on this mesh caused by certain lighting conditions. The SMIM mesh was used as the base for the included, fixed file so users are still getting the SMIM fixes/updates.

ENB Particle Patch - (link)
Install ENB Particle Patch before RWT.
RWT needs to overwrite a lot of effect files in ENB PP. If you don't overwrite ENB PP, you will be missing a lot of visual upgrades and features in RWT. The ENB PP fixes for glowing assets are also contained within RWT's assets, so you will be getting the best of both worlds by overwriting ENB PP with RWT.




Recommended Mods

The following mods are recommended to help support a stable game:

Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch - (link)
An essential mod for everyone.

SSE Engine Fixes (skse64 plugin) - (link)
This mod will fix several issues within the game engine, including some FPS issues with tree LOD, but it's recommended here because it also includes a fix for the new water flow system being tied to the game's timescale. Without this mod, lowering the timescale will slow down the movement of river water. This mod fixes this so that the water flow speed will remain consistent across all timescale settings.




Bug Reports


A quick statistic: I pruned over 70 bug reports and 90% of the reports were user error!

Before reporting any bugs please ensure the issue has been narrowed down to Realistic Water Two and is not a conflict between mods. To do this:
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1. Remove all the mods except the game's content, the unofficial patches, and Realistic Water Two.
2. Ensure RealisticWaterTwo.esp is loaded last. If you have other plugins from RWT, follow the load order above.
3. Run the game.
4. At the menu screen, open the console (~)
5. type in: coc riverwood
6. Once in game, open the console again and type in: tmm 1
7. Open your map and travel to the location where the issue was presenting itself. If combat is an issue, you can turn it off with the console command: [i]tcai

If the issue is no longer present, it is either your mod list or your save file that is the issue. If the issue is still there, you've likely found an issue with the mod. Please report the issue using the "BUGS" tab above. If you're able to narrow the issue down between RWT and another mod, please report it so that I can look into making a patch.

Else, if you're not sure whether or not it's a RWT issue, you should simply post in the POSTS section. If it's a bug, we can move it to the bug reports later.

Due to the statistic above, users who do not follow these procedures to narrow down the issue before posting a bug report, will simply have their bug reported deleted. This is because these users didn't take the time to follow these procedures, and wasted ours by having to do it for them. We don't have time to sort through bug reports who's source cause is user error. We will help any users who have diligently attempted to narrow down the issue to RWT.


Common Issues
Below is a list of common issues found with updating Realistic Water Two mid-game.

Frequently Asked Questions
We have put together a FAQ for users. This should be the first item users check when investigating issues. It's currently found in the BUGS section above.

Water Seams
If you have water seams, first ensure none of RealisticWaterTwo.esp's records are being overwritten by anything other than the provided patches. Use xEdit to do this by loading your entire load order, Apply filter for Conflict Losers, and checking for any overwrites in the RealisticWaterTwo.esp. Forward any changes that need to be made. Alternatively, for a more thorough check users can manually check all the records in RealisticWaterTwo.esp.

The above is the only way to ensure users find 100% of the potential issues around water seams, however, we understand this can be too advanced for some users. In this case, other users have reported success from the mod, Water seams fix.

Missing Water / Mismatched Water
The majority of these cases fall under one of two issues:

1. Users have mods installed that edit exterior cells and are overwriting RWT's changes. Thus, reverting RWT's changes back to a vanilla state or worse.
2. Users have exterior cell data cached causing some visual issues.

In the first case, this is displayed in the game as two mismatched water types next to one another (ie. marsh water next to lake water) or missing water. Following the same process to fix the water seams, in xEdit, will fix these issues as well.

If the above doesn't work, it could be the data is simply cached. Users do have a couple options. Exterior cells normally reset every 30 in-game days. Users could simply wait it out; especially for areas that aren't visited much. Else, users could go to an interior location and use the wait menu until 30 days have past.