I'm one of those people who swore to myself that I would never download a mod that overhauled the interior of a walled city in Skyrim. It'll be a compatibility nightmare, I said. It'll mean I have to rearrange my whole load order, I said. The patch support will be rough, I said.

I was RIGHT about 100% of those things but it didn't matter because I really like Capital Windhelm Expansion. I tried it out and couldn't live without it. Unfortunately I noticed that it caused a CTD if patched for Better Dynamic Snow 2.11 and looked weird if it didn't. Okay... there was a fix for that, which was updating to BDS 3.0, which means no multipass shaders or something too complicated for me to understand. Okay I'll just go and disable all the parallax meshes I literally just downloaded, that's cool, I'll live, this mod is beautiful and honestly I'm glad BDS 3.0 lets us have beautiful snow without patches now. It's fine... it's fine... honestly it's more than fine, my game looks great and I don't miss parallax very much. I play happily for oh, a month.

Then I accidentally deleted my SSE installation and all my mods :) so the release of Simplicity of Snow (lol) as I'm still rebuilding my load order was well timed. I instantly clicked download the same as y'all did. I liked the results and I definitely liked the sound of being able to use those paralllax meshes again. I'm running through snowy regions and things are looking pretty good until... CTD entering Windhelm.

Through tears, I check NetScriptFramework\Crash:

Possible relevant objects (11)
{
[0] BGSMaterialObject(FormId: 0002871B, File: `Simplicity of Snow.esp <- MajesticMountains.esp <- Update.esm <- Skyrim.esm`)
[0] NiNode(Name: `Scene Root`)
[1] TESObjectSTAT(FormId: 2C120113, File: `WindhelmSSE.esp`)
[7] TESObjectREFR(FormId: 2C0FC3E5, File: `WindhelmSSE.esp`, BaseForm: TESObjectSTAT(FormId: 2C120113, File: `WindhelmSSE.esp`))
[ 17] BSFadeNode(Name: `WHprisonwallcap01`)
[ 18] BSFadeNode(Name: `Campfire01LandOff`)
[ 152] hkpRigidBody(Node: `NiNode(Name: `ArenaDoor`)`)
[ 196] hkpRigidBody(Node: `BSFadeNode(Name: `IcicleThinStrip`, Owner: `TESObjectREFR(FormId: 2C12FCFE, File: `WindhelmSSE.esp`, BaseForm: TESObjectSTAT(FormId: 000F7F4F, File: `Skysan_Icicle.esp <- Skyrim.esm`))`)`)
[ 264] BSFadeNode(Name: `Scene Root`, Owner: `TESObjectREFR(FormId: 2C12E65E, File: `WindhelmSSE.esp`, BaseForm: TESObjectSTAT(FormId: 2C129482, File: `WindhelmSSE.esp`))`)
[ 276] TESObjectSTAT(FormId: 2C129482, File: `WindhelmSSE.esp`)
[ 276] TESObjectREFR(FormId: 2C12E65E, File: `WindhelmSSE.esp`, BaseForm: TESObjectSTAT(FormId: 2C129482, File: `WindhelmSSE.esp`))
}


Okay so it's some snow shader, being applied to some static. I go in and patch the shader out, as Simplicity of Snow does for the Palace. Easy enough. And yay! I don't CTD when I get into Windhelm.

Unfortunately Capital Windhelm Expansion has a lot of custom meshes and for reasons that are above my pay grade lots of things looked like this:






And when it doesn't look like that it looks like this:



So obviously there was room for improvement. I went back into the snow shaders and changed a few of the new custom static models that Capital Windhelm adds so they use copies of non-Simplicity of Snow shaders. In my case, I wanted to use the values from Majestic Mountains. I did some fixing and things looked better:




There are 3 versions of this. 1 fixes only the CTD. 1 fixes a lot (but not all) of the shader issues around town by taking values from Majestic Mountains because that's what I use and I wanted it to match. 1 does the same fix but uses vanilla values. I didn't test that one lol.

By the way, I could not get parallax meshes working with this, but it was specific to the custom meshes added by CWE so I think I'm good to start adding them back elsewhere. So what you're getting here is basically Capital Windhelm + Simplicity of Snow + snow looking okay-ish + parallax elsewhere. If anyone has a suggestion on how to make parallax work or wants to upload their own fix, that would be really cool.



If you want Capital Windhelm Expansion + Simplicity of Snow + no CTD, download the file called "Arial Capital Windhelm and Simplicity of Snow CTD Fix". If snow in Windhelm still looks weird in your game, download either "Arial Capital Windhelm and Simplicity of Snow Patch" or "Arial Capital Windhelm and Simplicity of Snow Patch for Majestic Mountains" depending on... whether or not you have Majestic Mountains. These are ESL-flagged plugins.

and pls

go and endorse the original mods this is ESL trash, literally GO GO GO endorse


Let me know if you have a better idea how to fix this in general. I still want parallax Windhelm meshes :(