Gaming

(continued) (and this was good fun)

...so away I go with Aela, off to find some special totem or something. A longish walk ensues, a few random battles along the way, she doesn't help much and eventually we find the thing.
She then tells me we have to go all the way back to the Underforge in Whiterun and what am I waiting for?!
OK, OK. Don't be so impatient let's return from whence we came.

The longish walk ensues again in reverse. Not so many fights this time so before long here I am approaching Whiterun and who do I see walking the other way as I go past the stables?
It's Borgakh slowly making her way back to the Orc Stronghold.
And remember how I said she looked a little sad in her own outfit? Well this time... she's completely naked apart from boots and gauntlets.
You have a grim look, I said to her.
And as she strolls past she says, "May your weapons be sharp and your prey fresh."
Indeed. And may your breasts be covered up a bit later.

Anyway I continue with Aela into Whiterun. Into the Underforge. I place the thingie where it needs to go and she does the praying thing and leaves my service. Good Riddance to all her shoddy fighting.
Now, I wonder.
Do you think I'll be able to catch up to Borgakh and get her back?
Probably not. Four loading screens have happened since then, the game won't track her for that long, will it?
No harm in having a look.

And she's still there walking up the road!
I chase after her and catch up before she gets to the western watchtower.
"Borgakh," I call out to her, "Put on these clothes again and follow me!"
"You have a grim look."

I decided to make use of the alternate start mod for a bit of fun and variety (seeing as several of my characters are around level 6 or 7 and all asked to do the same things).

I thought it could be fun to play someone who already owned land somewhere - I pictured a rich person, noble probably, who maybe was foiled out of their lands or inheritance by bandits or relatives or whatever.... Instead I had apparently used every last penny to buy a farm outside of Rorikstead, with two farmhands that are barely able to talk (one says "want something?" and the other has a text option about farm profits, but nothing else). The game said to "start my new life" so I went around the farm for a bit. It was pouring so I waited until the next day when the weather cleared and visited Rorikstead. Passed by Lund's cottage and talked to the new guy in there (probably from the INPC mod), got Ataxia, and got home to find three out of four cows dead. Farmhands have nothing to say on he subject. They seem to not even have noticed. I'm guessing it was wolves, though I only saw them in a distance. Anyway, I think I'll scrap this character and her saves....

Completely naked huh? You have some of those mods do you...?

I've seen a lot of hideously distorted characters that can apparently only be done with certain mods. But then, those mods are also needed for anything that's not quite Vanilla, I know... I think the worst part is when someone takes screenshots for their mod, or of how they're enjoying other peoples' mods and they have those weird anime characters with strangely small heads (and usually huge boobs and modern clothing, mostly undies....) and they seem entirely unaware of how ugly and out of place their character actually looks. 

I don't really get the desire to play these entirely modern looking characters. Are they RPing that they themselves somehow ended up in Skyrim? I just think it ruins immersion. But speaking of clothes I do rather enjoy finding all sorts of slightly different outfits now, with that clothing mod I got. My character had, besides ataxia, something looking like a scottish clan thingy (well, like a mix between a lumberjack outfit and a kilt outfit, maybe). And I've spent a good portion of today working on a possible re-color of the padded fine clothing (I always found them rather dull).

NOW

I do have some of the Bijin NPC mods, and Borgakh is one of those, but that doesn't explain why she was naked.
She had her normal clothes when I left her (that's what she was wearing when she looked a little sad) but apparently her Orc armour, which I'd swapped for the Ancient Nord stuff, didn't respawn. Perhaps I should have left her with some more Orc items.

Anyway we then all went north to Windstad and after hacking out 150 Quarried Stone from Katla's farm (yeah, you can carry that, Borgakh) I added some things to the manor, including the nice side bedrooms with that lovely balcony area from where I can view my equally new fish hatchery....
 

I don't really know what you're supposed to do with that.
There seems to be a little thing that you "activate" but I don't know what goes in there. I'll have to look it up.
I also put in the cellar but I didn't have enough goat horns for the wall sconces so it remains pretty dark down there.
At least I have my torches.

Another edit: Apparently you just add fish.

Yeah, but I think you just add like one fish. Kind of like the soil plots. I've tried adding two kinds a couple of time and the first type just disappears. So I think add one, wait for it to "grow" and then you can splash around and catch 2 or 3 with your bare hands.... Rinse, clean and repeat.

I have seen mention of mod conflicts that lead to naked NPCs but if Borgakh was the only one affected it might just be her armour, yeah.

Note to self:
If you have planters in the basement, and a mod to let you plant a wider selection of things.... don't plant apple trees in the highest pots. Or maybe any indoor pots.  

 

Leafy carpets.

With ceramics still running low at the northern Distribution Centre I got a bit frustrated when I couldn't find a random truck now that I actually need one, there were loads here before but not now  and there aren't enough materials to fabricate one.
And then I remembered the online garage.
I forgot about that.
So I now have a truck to do the timed delivery and... GET OUT OF THE WAY!!!
 

I have to get these things to the Lake Knot place in just FIVE minutes and these guys are just casually strolling down the only narrow path out of here. Hurry up! Faster!

And no likes for whoever left that here in the rain...

 

*swerves*
*on two wheels* 


But it was nice to see that someone has used my zipline as a starting point to build an entire network to the Craftsman. 500 likes!
 

Oh, the horror!

I launched Oblivion tonight to make my journey back to Imperial City and... and... the ENB wasn't working!
I'd forgotten how bad the vanilla shaders are.
Thankfully it wasn't a big problem. For some reason the HDR option and been switched off in the settings, might have been me by accident or maybe Steam/NVidia did something annoying. Either way it messes up the fancy stuff so I've switched it all back and now it looks nicer again.

Well, I say nicer. Remember that bug I talked about where the cell doesn't load in properly?
Went for a stroll to find that half of Chorrol had disappeared leaving a load of floating doors and a big wall with a gap in it.

 

Also in the distance a lot of the ground had gone but the grass was still levitating there.
Another quit/reload happened and things were working again and I managed to complete my journey along one of those glorious near-vertical footpaths without incident.
Next time I shall investigate that vampire fellow that I put off from ages ago. Oh, and I need to meet up with the Thieves' Guild chap again.

"If the bomb goes off you're doing something wrong."
Oh, really? Specialist subject: The bleeding obvious.

And not more terrorists!
I'm not risking going through those trees.
They're strangely inviting and yet clearly ominous. There's bound to be nasty people in there with guns.
Gonna have to be the steepy steep route then. Wish I'd brought more ladders. I needed two to get past the deepy, deep river and I only brought... two. I tried to collapse one of them after using it so I could grab it again but the current took it into the super dangerous part of the water. Wish I'd brought the grabby, grab gloves too.
That's two wishes. May as well make a third. Wish I'd hit the music trigger first time.
Managed to hit it second time after reloading a useful autosave from a couple of minutes back...

 

But that was a tough journey. Tough but satisfying.
And now...



And in Oblivion...

Valence wrote:

Oh, and I need to meet up with the Thieves' Guild chap again.

It seems like I shouldn't have been greedy and fenced so much loot to that occasionally unconscious chap.
But I had to get rid of all that wine! 
I have been given the next stealy job so I don't think the quest has bugged out but the journal isn't communicating things very clearly. I'll have to learn to store my stolen loot until I really need to sell it.