If you're playing as a female character or even carefully observing female NPCs, you may have noticed that the currently equipped weapon will suddenly shrink in size after being drawn and then grow back to it's original size when sheathed. This is most easily spotted when using 2 handed weapons or drawing a bow, as its string will clearly not be reaching the character's hand when the bow is drawn. The same applies to shields and torches - they are noticeably smaller than their male version. Once you see it, you cannot unsee it anymore.

So, why is this happening? It appears that Bethesda wanted females to have smaller hands than males, so they downscaled the hands' nodes in the female skeleton to around 85% of the original scale. However, since the drawn weapons are using separate nodes that are derived from the hand nodes, they get downscaled as well, despite having their own independent scale and that's what's causing the bug.

This mod aims to address this by applying a slightly larger scale to the WEAPON and SHIELD nodes on the female skeleton, which are responsible for the equipment scale when drawn, to offset the downscaling from the hand nodes. This is done by using the Mu Skeleton Editor framework to dynamically apply the fix for every currently loaded female character (both the player and NPCs) without using any scripts or causing incompatibilities with most other mods. If for some reason the scale is not quite right for your character or NPCs, you can easily tweak it in the FemaleEquipmentScaleFix.json file (NOT the ini) or by tweaking the respective body scales in RaceMenu or Enhanced Character Edit, but that will only work for your own character. If you have already made a scale change on your own through RaceMenu, revert it back to 1.0 and this mod will take care of the rest.



SKSE
Address Library
Mu Skeleton Editor




Install with your favourite mod manager after installing all other requirements.

Compatible with existing saves and new characters.




Not compatible with Enhanced Character Edit. That mod's scripts will overwrite any changes to the nodes' scale on each game load. It will still work for NPCs, but you'll have to configure the weapon and hand scales yourself through the race menu for your own character. The full version of XPMSSE does this as well, but it has it's own script based fix for the bug, so it's a non issue.
Compatible with RaceMenu, custom races (as long as they use the vanilla female behaviour path) and skeleton replacers like XPMSSE and other skeletons based on it.




Arrows knocked on a bow will not be completely aligned or clipping through the character's right hand. This is because the hand node is still influencing the overall arrow position and scale to an extent. I've made multiple attempts to fix this which don't involve changing the hand node's position or scale (which will either cause other weapons' position to look off or make female characters' hands bigger which is just silly), but none of them were successful.



Acro748 for Mu Skeleton Editor