So I cannot be the only person who installed Saints & Seducers, found my first Elytra in [SPOILER], happily accepted its company because I'm chronically overencumbered and they can apparently carry your stuff, and then immediately regretted my actions. These little buggers are loud. They're chomping along like creatures multiple times their size, thereby totally disrupting my style, and completely shredding any sense of immersion when I'm wandering the world or, god forbid, try to sneak.

However, I do like me a mobile carry chest. I figured there had to be a way to put socks on them little feet.

My first discovery in xEdit was that the Elytras do not, in fact, have their own footstep sounds; they are using the vanilla Frostbite Spider ones. And not just the regular ones, oh no, precious. They are set to use the Giant Frostbite Spider footsteps. Which are like ten times their size. That's why their footstep sfx sounded so over the top.

Since I'm clueless about editing anything sfx related, I searched the Nexus for an appropriate replacer. Sure enough, I came across Better Animal Footsteps which turned out to be pretty much perfect. Now honestly I'm not bothered by loud animal footsteps as much as some people are, but for a companion/pet that's a different story.

What I did was create a whole new set of records for unique Elytra footsteps, then point them at the sound files from Better Animal Footsteps which were of course renamed and moved to a different directory. Regular Giant Frostbite Spiders are thus completely unaffected, only now you can travel with your Elytra(s) and take in the scenery without them stomping around like crazy.

Big thanks to Volnaiskra for letting me include their assets from Better Animal Footsteps as per the mod's permission section! I also converted the original .wav files to .xwm using MultiXwm because the .wav format can be problematic.