Corinthe is getting a bath house!

Outside - Market District, by the well

Inside - oh who's this? Bring your own soap

The privvies

Made with beautiful resources by Stroti with Wolf scripting (no clothes in the bath!). This does not require you to wash, it's just for fun. For reading newspapers and such.

Looks very nice indeed!

Postcards from Corinthe.

Who needs a caravanserai?

Another day starting.

Wish you were here...

Some nice travelogue pics from an exotic, faraway land.

Nice pictures! Makes one want to go back to the land of warm sands.

Thanks! Next time you are in Corinthe, make sure to explore the rooftops. The views are brilliant.

Quest debugging is going well! Some experimental effects included. It won't be long now!

Elsweyr Mysteries v3 is released! It includes the Corinthe chapter and a certain book we've been having fun writing... At Jobasha's in Corinthe and at the First Edition, of course.

I am taking a break from Elsweyr Mysteries, I think I overheated under the desert sun... Lena and Hauk are ready to go further South from Corinthe, where we expect massive land tears due to having Pelletine and Valenwood Improved loaded together. Yes, I know, it cannot be done! The Cartographers Guild told us so! It's either one or the other, not both! Umm... but it's one Tamriel, is it not? So how can you have either this or that land layout, dear cartographers? There can only be one land layout, even after a massive earthquake or whatever it was that ripped the very fabric of the land to pieces.

So we are going South. There is a rumour that a new city has risen from the Topal Sea just South of Elsweyr, and it calls itself Senchal the Seaside City! But it is not the Senchal at the Southern point of the Pelletine peninsular. Rumour has it that this new Senchal is encrouching on some of the beaches of Anequina... Or has someone had too much skooma when they were writing that report? We aim to find out.

It is my aim to build a rough patch that would allow to reconsile these warrying mods. Note that I said rough. If some villages get in the way, they may just get removed. Other people are working on a far better patch, so mine will eventually be superceded. I just want to be able to explore those lands without falling into the Void prematurely.

Today was the most annoying day in modern history! Well, all right, the most annoying day of this week. I was working on this new mod - Senchal the Seaside City - trying to make it compatible with Elsweyr Anequina. I was hoping for a patch, but unfortunately that mod had a number of edits that had to be removed - I couldn't get rid of them with a patch. So then I just continued. I did make a nice compatible version, there's a crossing from a beach in Anequina, and the city looks very nice, it's almost on an island, except for that crossing. All good. Except for LOD. I regenerated it five times! And it takes about half an hour on my PC to do Tamriel... And still I was having floating forests and distant land while all of that had been removed! WTF!!!

SkyBSA. No, it does NOT work for me. Freshly generated LOD files should have overwritten LOD found in BSA archives, but in fact they didn't. That wrong LOD was coming from the archives of several mods, and even Akatosh couldn't sort it out. Floating trees and false islands galore. And the stupid thing is - SkyBSA should not have been loaded... I tested it before, found it not working, so why was it still sitting in my OBSE plugin folder? Huh?

So now I am regenerating LOD for the sixth time. I have also removed LOD data from those BSA archives, but there may be more of it around, I didn't check them all. After that it's going West towards that enormous land tear I spotted earlier... unless of course it was only due to spurious LOD! We'll see. Tomorrow has a great potential of becoming the second most annoying day in modern history.

Today is the day. THE day. I've reconciled the warring mods of Valenwood and Elsweyr under a new TWMP Southern Alliance! Yeah!!!

This is my rough patch. It is meant to close land tears, not reposition every rock. In fact, it distinctly doesn't do that. Plenty of floating rocks for you to find in the enchanted forests!

But you can load together TWMP Valenwood Improved, Elsweyr Anequina and Elsweyr Pelletine, and it was Valenwood and Pelletine that weren't getting along. Plus, I also made a version of Senchal the Seaside City that is compatible with Anequina, and I named it New Senchal because obviously we already got one from Pelletine. And if that wasn't enough... I also updated the map! Phew!! Now it's time to go exploring.

Like I said, not every rock got grounded. There are also areas where land texture didn't take - I am not sure what I'm doing wrong, but the CS stubbornly refuses to paint the land. So you see straight lines there, if you ever get to those areas - there's nothing going in those remote regions. I tried my best to make inhabited areas presentable, focusing on the border between Valenwood and Elsweyr and areas that conflicted with Pelletine. I had to sacrifice a group of hostile skooma addicts, but otherwise I tried to reposition things rather than throw them away. I may well have missed something - the place is huge! But you can take the road from Senchal in Pelletine all the way to Skingrad in Cyrodiil, passing by Torval (Pelletine), Haven (Valenwood), Dune (Anequina) and Arenthia (Valenwood), with other roads branching off. There should be no land tears anywhere! But watch your step nonetheless...

Here is a map of the Southern Alliance.

Now focusing on the middle area of the greatest conflict.

New Senchal seen from a beach in Anequina.

Standing on the strait connecting Anequina and New Senchal.

Once Hauk gets over his scorpion fever, he and Lena will set off again, after all they do have that blank scroll of parchment from the Cartographers Guild to fill in... The roads of Pelletine are not marked on the map, we need to change that, and of course to watch for any decidedly floating rocks, trees or houses... Let the adventure continue! Finally!

WOW!!! I need to hurry up and finish a couple quest lines so I can reload everything and go explore what you have done.

Thanks, Macole! Don't rush though - if you wait another month, there's likely to be an update to the Southern Alliance as we go exploring it in game. But it will never be perfect because it will be discarded eventually when TWMP Valenwood Regrown finally gets released. I have to find a balance between investing too much into a throw-away project and having a nicely laid out game here and now. And being impatient as I am... umm... you see where this is going, don't you?

OK, I got things to do for few months or so.
I haven't paid much attention to TWMP so I know nothing about Valenwood Regrown. Been trying to google it but I'm coming up empty. Where can I find info on it?

Oh sorry, I don't think you'll find anything any more... There are some snippets of information in the comments to Elsweyr Pelletine on Nexus, but it is all very hush-hush, which is why I am staying away from it, even though I've got the file. It was a project hosted on Assimilation Labs, an attempt to redo Valenwood so that it would blend with Elsweyr Pelletine. Now that Assimilation Labs has gone down, everything they hosted is essentially lost.

But because Valenwood Regrown was based on TWMP, it is important for Pelletine which is also based on TWMP, and I mean the old land layout, with that big landmass in Southern Valenwood. Valenwood Improved is only about half of that size, and is of a different shape. I don't know the history exactly, but Haldar made TWMP Valenwood Improved which is basically the original Valenwood Improved made to work with other TWMP mods. It was more of an exercise in technicalities than land layout, because it is still very much the same as the original. I am not even sure it's necessary, but I didn't want to take any chances, hoping for a better match with Pelletine. My solution is to keep as much landmass as possible.

So, to end this confusing tale... I haven't actually looked inside Valenwood Regrown and don't know which land mass they chose. So I don't know what of Valenwood Improved is still to be found in it, but I heard from several people that that project was very ambitious, is well advanced, yet is still very unfinished and still unplayable... Doesn't sound like a small job, plus there's that "minor" issue of copyright. The author of Pelletine - EnvyDeveloper - is in communication with the author of Valenwood Regrown, and in all likelihood will get the rights handed over, but from what I gathered, it hasn't happened yet. Anyway, they don't expect to have anything finished for a while still, may be a year, may be more. This is too uncertain for me, so I went ahead with my patch.


PS. Come to think of it, I might just drop in the original Valenwood Improved in place of TWMP Valenwood Improved and see what happens. Since I don't touch any assets of Valenwood Improved besides fixing land tears, I might get lucky. Or not. Worth an experiment.
This was a bad idea. The "TWMP" in TWMP Valenwood Improved stands for form IDs of all those new land cells added by the mod. The original Valenwood Improved is not based on TWMP, so where new cells had to be added, it generated its own form IDs. When you try to use that with any mod that is based on TWMP, you get unresolvable conflicts, giant land tears that cannot be closed. So, without going into detail as to why this is happening (unless you ask me to explain), the conclusion is that we must use TWMP Valenwood Improved.

This post has been edited by Lena Wolf: Feb 28 2022, 06:47 PM

I declare TWMP Southern Alliance finished for now. I released version 3 which has all land tears repaired, all landscape smoothed over and repainted to my best ability (that is, where the new texture would stick), and all roads checked and fixed. The roads in Valenwood and Anequina were already fine and only needed merging on the border, but the roads in Pelletine required resurfacing, including making path grids. NPCs require path grids to navigate the land, and roads should have "preferential" nodes assigned to them so that the NPCs would be able to tell the roads from the rest of the terrain. This is a manual process. The roads in Valenwood don't always have preferential nodes in their path grids but I haven't done it in this round because Valenwood didn't need any work at all otherwise. May be in version 4.

I made new Tamriel in-game maps in HD that include all the new roads. This is a departure from the Dynamic Map - these are static maps to replace the default in-game map, and they don't zoom. However, I switched to using that instead of the Dynamic Map myself because I found that the Dynamic Map caused performance degradation in my game, and together with the flickering and a few other annoying problems, it just tipped the scales for me to forgo zoom functionality and use a static map. This may well be just due to my rather low end PC, but then again, I know I am not alone in this. Which is why I released the static maps, in case someone else would like them. I shall still update the Dynamic Map module with the new roads too.

The South is open to exploring!

The map of TWMP Southern Alliance with all the roads.

Now that the Southern Alliance is generally working, I have been exploring Valenwood Improved. Well, it's TWMP Valenwood Improved but it is exactly the same as the original - the differences are all on technical level only. So yes, it is just as unfinished and all that. And it is wonderful! I really like it. Such elaborate cities, just waiting to be filled with people and things to do. I am surprised no one has done it so far - or have I missed it? Didn't see any add-ons for the original either. Haven't explored any of the dungeons yet, and won't do on this walkabout - this is just the first tour. Won't get to every city either - Lena is due back in Anvil in a week. The story goes on and life continues, but I can certainly see many happy returns to Valenwood.

A note found in the boarded up Chapel of Arkay in Elden Root.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Take that, Prior Livan! Ha! Ha ha! That's what I say to you!

All of you, taken! Who will come and rescue you now, eh? Arkay hasn't heard your prayers, Priest!

Every single one of you captured in soul gems, all neatly labelled - we are professionals! We left a few people around for now, but we might still come back for them. They are scared enough not to ever tell of what had occurred.

And if only you knew... The way to your salvation is so simple! Take the soul gem and throw it into the fire... And your soul will be released! Together with your body and your belongings, I might add. Genius!

But of course it isn't as simple as that - it would be madness to allow it. You have to throw the gem into the fire in the house where the person in the gem used to dwell the most. And if you throw it into the wrong fire... you'll find out for yourself!

Ha! Ha ha! But seeing how I'm holding the gem with your soul in my hands now, you will never read this note! And we will be gone by morning - we'll take you all back to your roots! Search the Ayleids, if you please!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~



It will take a while to fill this in... please bear with me. But the setup is done, and the first four citizens with their houses and belongings have been created. Of course, their souls are currently trapped in black soul gems, poor things...

Elden Root even though I only met a couple of residents walking around, it is my favorite city in Valenwood Improved. A close second would be Haven with its two inns, The Snowy Owl and the Stairway to Haven.

Oh, are you able to enter the Ayleid ruin Noutar Emero just north of Haven? The starting point of an Ayleid teleport system is found here. I just wanted to know if it works for you.

This post has been edited by macole: Mar 8 2022, 05:32 AM

I haven't tried entering any ruins yet because I don't want to get side-tracked too much as yet. But I looked in the CS - everything is there. Internal cells were not affected by the conversion to TWMP, and I believe that the TWMP version is indeed exactly the same as the original. The triple door in Haven proves it. It says "version 1.20" in the mod description, so if anything, it might miss the updates that came with version 1.21, but Eldarie never made an English update for version 1.30, so the TWMP one is pretty much the latest.

However, just as a test I'll try it tonight. I have a save in Haven that I can use.

We haven't found the Snowy Owl inn! Not because it's not there, but because we got lost... Only when we were about to leave and I stopped to properly study the local map one last time and hover over all the doors, did I notice the subscript. Oh well. This is what happens when there are no shop signs anywhere. The first thing I'm doing in Elden Root is putting up shop signs... Well, of course, they will mostly appear only once the corresponding citizens will have been freed from the soul gems, but even so we already have the Eagle's Nest inn and tavern signs, as well as the Merchants Hall. What's that, you say? Well... it's a hall... with merchants... the ones that avoided getting trapped... I just couldn't not do something for Elden Root, it is an absolutely amazing place. It will be lovely to see it gradually come to life as we start recovering the soul gems and freeing the people.

I shall only release this mod when the quest is completely done, which may take a while - there are a lot of people and interiors to create. Still, it isn't as big as Haven... Give it a month or so. Similar quests can be done for other cities as well, eventually.

It is perfectly possible to add TWMP without starting a new game. You can keep Elsweyr Anequina but unfortunately you have to remove the original Valenwood Improved and replace it with the TWMP version. This does mean that all the Valenwood quests will reset because it is technically a different mod. But on the plus side, you get Elsweyr Pelletine thrown in for free, because I would recommend using the Southern Alliance to smooth over the land tears, also between Valenwood and Elsweyr.

I have been enjoying filling in Elden Root. Every citizen has a story. Status so far: 11 citizens created, plus the interiors of their houses. These are all shopkeepers so far, 8 of them were taken into the black soul gems. There will be a few more people around who were not taken, and there's a reason in each case... I leave it to you to find out.

There are 21 empty houses still to fill in, that includes houses belonging to 3 original citizens. Unfortunately their houses are completely unfurnished... Poor souls. We'll need to fix that. I am also looking to establish a chapter of the Mages Guild and of course a contingent of the City Guard. I haven't decided about the Fighters Guild yet. And then there's going to be a few people living in the streets... So I'd say I'm a quarter in.

This post has been edited by Lena Wolf: Mar 10 2022, 12:49 AM