Introduction:

This mod allows the player to fully customize Roach.

The main features are:
- 240 items to customize your horse, including bodies, manes, tails, eyes and feathers.
- New merchants with daily schedule allowing the player to access the stable in every main hub of the game (White Orchard, Novigrad/Velen, Skellige, Toussaint).
- An unlocking system allowing the player to buy items only once and to keep them forever. 
- A previewing system allowing the player to preview the items before spending money on them.
- Dynamic eyes, saddles, saddle bags, blinders and trophies adjusting to the used horse's body type.
- Dynamic manes and tails adjusting to both the horse's body type and the saddle equipped.
- A dynamic dirtiness system.

Hairworks is required to enjoy the mod to its fullest. Thus, it is highly recommended to enable it in your game parameters.
Once hairworks enabled, If you want hairworks on animals and monsters only, you can install this mod: Fake Hairworks

I simply cannot  afford spending another thousand hours making hundreds of haircard models and desperately trying to get their color to match with hairworks. 

The mod is currently in beta version. To fully complete it, I need to first develop my own tools to mod .redcloth directly in Blender. Since it will take time, I preferred not to postpone the release again.
Feel free to share your feedback and to report bugs. It will only help me improve the mod for its full release. 

Access the Stable:



The mod brings four new merchant to the game, each having a unique appearance and a daily schedule. They display a new unique horseshoe icon on both the map and the minimap.
You can find them as follows:
- In White Orchard, at the Westside of the village.
- In Novigrad, in the suburbs South to the Southern Gate.
- In Skellige, in Kear Trolde, in front of the inn. (Unlocked once you completed the fist fight also taking place in front of the inn.)
- In Toussaint, in Corvo Bianco. (Unlocked once you asked your majordomo to restore Corvo Bianco's stables.)

The mod introduces an innovative scene-based merchant system based on the way barbers were developed by cdpr, improved with dynamic cameras revolving around the body part of interest, and a previewing system enabled by simply hovering over the choices available. The mod also comes with an unlocking mechanism allowing the player to keep the purchased items permanently available as free choices.

All merchants have all the items contained in the mod for you to buy. You can buy items at a stable, and retrieve what you bought in the others stables without paying again.

Available items:

In this mod you will find 240 items to customize your horse:
- Eyes are improved with caruncula lacrimalis and eyelashes and are available in 12 colors. They dynamically adjust to the horse body.
- Bodies were improved by fixing some minor weighting inconsistency and by making them two sided allowing for asymmetric horses. There are 34 textures available for 4 different body types.
- Manes are available in 4 different styles, each available in 9 colors. They dynamically adjust to the horse body and the equipped saddle.
- Tails are available in 4 different styles, each available in 9 colors. They dynamically adjust to the horse body and the equipped saddle. (Dynamic adjustments are for hairworks tails only.)
- Feathers are available in 2 different style, each available in 9 colors. (Feathers are exclusive to the draft horse body type.)

To offer the best experience possible, each vanilla saddle, saddlebags, blinders and trophies were remodeled for each horse body type and some vanilla weightpainting issues were fixed. Manes and tails styles were also designed to fit each saddle x body type combinations.

Dirtiness system:

In this mod, you will experience an immersive dirtiness feature inspired by RDR2. Dirt will accumulate on Roach's coat as you journey through the Continent together. 

The feature is entirely dynamic. Dirt will accumulate quicker the faster you ride Roach and the muddier the soil roach is stepping on.
There are multiple ways to decrease the dirtiness level:
- Make roach walk in deep water.
- Pay the groom at the stable to brush your horse.
- Buy a new horse at the stable or change it for one of the horses you already possess. The grooms take good care of your horses.
- Brush your horse yourself.

To brush your horse you will first need to find a brush. You can loot this new item at the Stable located in Novigrad, in the suburbs South to the Southern Gate.

Now, that you have this brush in your inventory, next time you will pet Roach (hold jump), Geralt will equip the brush and clean Roach's coat.

The system is fully implemented and functional, however, depending on feedback, the intervals between the stages, the number of stages, or the visual effect itself are subject to change.

Installation:

The installation is done as follows:
- Paste modArdDhuStable into your Mods folder.
- Paste dlcArdDhuStable into your dlc folder.
- Merge your script using script merger if necessary.

Updating:

If your save didn't have the mod installed, you can update the mod like any other mod.

However, because the mod is made using radish, it works with a quest file, like vanilla stuff, and updating the dlc part when it was on a save is a bit specific. As such, to make sure everything is working, you should:
- Delete dlcArdDhuStable
- Go in game and save without the dlc installed
- Install the last version of dlcArdDhuStable
- Then you can enjoy the update without issues

You can update the mod part like any other mod.

Conflicts:

This mod is basically incompatible with any horse mod editing models, textures and appearances because of how much I had to refactor the player's horse entity (player_horse.w2ent). Script mods should be fine.

Incompatible with Mane and Tail Fixes, but anyway, it's not necessary anymore. Unfortunately, by extension, it is incompatible with Thoughtful Roach as well, until a version without mane and tails fixes comes out. 

The conflict with DLC Armor Quests can be easily resolved. You have to merge the conflicting .xml's by choosing DLC Armor Quests everywhere except the last one where my mod should be chosen, like in the following screenshots.
Any xml conflict can essentially be resolved the same way. 

Disclaimer:

The vast majority of the hair assets are hairworks, hairworks only. Hence, "hairworks on" is very strongly recommended. Some would even call it required.

Some saddles are not yet supported by the mod because they used redcloth. Consequently, the following saddles are not supported yet:
- DLC1 Temerian HorseSaddle
- DLC14 Skellige HorseSaddle
- Toussaint saddle 1
- Toussaint saddle 2
- Toussaint saddle 3
- Tourney Geralt Saddle
- Tourney Ravix Saddle

Support for them will come later when I will be done developing a decent .redcloth workflow using Blender. 

Credits:

A huge thank you to Dhu Blaidd for sharing her textures with me. She authored all the body and eye textures. Such diversity wouldn't have been possible without her, thank you my friend, for that and for the support.
Thank you to rmemr for developing radish modding tools, the bedrock of this mod, for always being there when I needed help during development and for updating radish tools with my crazy needs.
Thank you to Menschfeind for giving me the keys to making in-scene previewing possible.
Thank you to Nikich for allowing me to re-use his script to hide npc's when a scene is running, and for bulk editing of mane entities.
Thank you to Aeltoth for answering my scripting questions.
Thank you to erxv for helping and for allowing me to take inspiration from his own mod adding footstep fx to horses.
Thanks to Wolven Workshop for the support, the feedbacks and the love.