Skyrim Special Edition

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Real Pharaoh

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RealPharaoh

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About this mod

Comprehensive fixing of the landscape seams that result in ugly visuals.

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Disclaimer: This is a WIP mod, that will not be finished for some time. I have started by fixing the road areas.



Vanilla Skyrim shipped with an enormous number of landscape seams (a stark transition from one landscape texture to another). In the base game, most of these aren't immediately noticeable for two reasons:

  • The textures are very low-resolution, so the pixels kind of blend together. If you look closely though, you can see the seam where they meet.
  • Most of the textures share a very similar color palate and brightness, further reducing how obvious it is when there's a seam. 

However, as soon as you use one of the many high-res landscape retextures available, these seams immediately become very noticeable. Normally, this is offset by using a dense grass mod (Verdant, Folkvangr, etc...), so that grass grows everywhere and you can't see the landscape textures anyways. Unfortunately, this results in grass growing in areas where it shouldn't, and so Landscape Fixes for Grass Mods was released, to fix this issue. The one drawback of this mod is that by scaling back where grass is allowed to grow, some of these ugly seams become visible again. This issue is particularly bad in and around Skyrim's roads, which is why I've started there. The primary goal of this mod is to fix these visible seams by blending the two textures that meet, which Bethesda decided not to do for some reason. 

Along the way, I'm also fixing all sorts of other issues that result in ugly visuals, like rocks that clip through mountains, bushes that clip through rocks, and other such visual annoyances. In some rare cases, I have added some bushes or rocks in order to cover up seams that could not be fixed any other way.

Are there any drawbacks? There's only one I can think of:

  • Slightly more uniformity in landscape textures. To fix many of these issues, I've had to extend the range of one texture slightly, and decrease the range of another. Most frequently this is the Dirt02 texture. Long story short, there's slightly more dirt in the world. In my eyes, its not nearly enough to be noticeable, but who knows, it might bother you.


As you can imagine (or perhaps you can't?), this is an incredibly time consuming process, so I will be releasing this mod bit by bit. If you want to know how much I've covered, check the progress map in the images section. Every time I update the mod, I will also update the map. As of version 0.1, I have finished the road from Riverwood to Falkreath, which is what inspired me to begin this project. The seams are...well they're quite horrific.






Requirements:

- The only requirement is Landscape Fixes for Grass Mods. At this point in Skyrim's modding scene, almost everyone is using a dense grass mod, as there are options available that range from performing better than vanilla (Cathedral Landscapes) to ultra heavy (Folkvangr). And if you're using a dense grass mod, you should be using the aforementioned mod. While many of the seams I'm fixing are from the base game, some are LFfGM, and maintaining two versions of this mod is not possible.  

Any mod that makes changes to the areas that I have changed is going to conflict with this mod. As far as I know, this shouldn't really be a problem in most cases. I made this mod alongside Skyrim Landscape and Water Fixes, so it will not conflict. I would highly recommend you add it to your load order, there's really no reason not to be using it. 






As far as I understand, this mod should be safe to update on an existing save, as no scripts are involved. To be safe, make a save in an interior cell before updating.

If you notice a seam that I've missed within the areas that I have covered, feel free to let me know!

v0.1 : Road from Riverwood to Falkreath





Darkfox127 for the layout for this Nexus page, for his great creation kit tutorials, and for convincing me during a livestream that I could be a Modder.
Code1k for Landscape Fixes for Grass Mods
Wizkid34 for Skyrim Landscape and Water Fixes