A visual only Wabbajack modlist for Skyrim SE
- Preamble
- Installation
- Updating
- Noteworthy Mods
- Creating your Character
- FAQ
- Tweaking Performance
- Removing the Modlist
- Credits and Thanks
- Contact
- Contributing
- Changelog
Total Visual Overhaul is a nearly visual only Wabbajack modlist. It has no additional quests, followers, items, or significant gameplay changes. In the interest of having a playable FPS on a reasonable range of computers most textures are sized to 2k, even if the mod name says 4k.
Citys, towns, and villages have been overhauled with a combination of JK's Skyrim, Cities of the North, and Obscure's College of Winterhold. These are the only significant gameplay facing changes from vanilla skyrim.
While this modlist is significantly easier to build upon than other Wabbajack modlists, you will still need to do it properly if you want a stable and properly functioning game. This means you will need to use xedit. A lot. Using xEdit is the answer to every compatability question.
These steps are only needed if you install this Modlist for the first time. If you update the Modlist, jump straight to Updating.
I doubt you need to do this since you likely already have this installed. The package is required for MO2 and you can download it from Microsoft. Download the x64 version under "Visual Studio 2015, 2017 and 2019". Direct link if you can't find it.
The Steam Overlay can cause issues with ENB and is recommended to be turned off.
Open the Properties window (right click the game in your Library->Properties), navigate to the General tab and un-tick the Enable the Steam Overlay while in-game checkbox.
SSE is still being updated by Bethesda (they only add Creation Club content). Whenever the game updates, the entire modding community goes silent for the next one or two weeks because some mods need to be updated to the latest game runtime version.
To ensure that Steam does not automatically updates the game for you, head over to the Properties window, navigate to the Updates tab and change Automatic updates to Only update this game when I launch it. You should also disable the Steam Cloud while you're at it.
Just do it. This entire Modlist is in English and 99% of all mods you will find are also in English. I highly recommend playing the game in English and I will not give support to people with a non-English game.
Open the Steam Properties window, navigate to the Language tab and select English from the dropdown menu.
I highly recommend uninstalling the game through Steam, deleting the game folder and reinstalling it. You should also clean up the Skyrim Special Edition folder in Documents/My Games/.
After you have done everything above and got a clean SSE installation ready, start the Launcher and open the Options menu.
- Click on High
- Set the Aspect Ratio and Resolution to your monitor's native values
- Set Antialiasing to Off
- Check Windowed Mode and Borderless
Start the game and exit once you're in the main menu.
Grab the latest release of Wabbajack from here and place the Wabbajack.exe file in X:\Wabbajack
The download and installation process can take a very long time depending on your system specs. Wabbajack will calculate the amount of threads it will use at the start of the installation. To have the highest amount of threads and thus the fastest speed, it is advised to have the working folder on an SSD.
- Open Wabbajack
- Load the Modlist from Disk
- Set TVO to install to X:\Total Visual Overhaul and download to X:\Total Visual Overhaul\Downloads. Your downloads folder can be on a separate drive to save space but wabbajack's install speed will be limited to your slowest drive.
- Click the Go/Begin button
- Wait for Wabbajack to finish
There are a lot of different scenarios where Wabbajack will produce an error. I recommend re-running Wabbajack before posting anything. Wabbajack will continue where it left off so you loose no progress.
Could not download x:
If a mod updated and the old files got deleted, it is impossible to download them. In this case just wait till I update the Modlist.
Wabbajack could not find my game folder:
Wabbajack will not work with a pirated version of the game. If you own the game on Steam, go back to the Pre-Installation step.
Download the latest ENB Series from here and copy d3d11.dll and d3dcompiler_46e.dll to your game folder.
Copy the all of the files from the X:\Total Visual Overhaul\Game Folder Files directory into your game folder.
If this Modlist receives an update please check the Changelog before doing anything. Always backup your saves or start a new game after updating.
Wabbajack will delete all files that are not part of the Modlist when updating!
This means that any additional mods you have installed on top of the Modlist will be deleted. Your downloads folder will not be touched!
Updating is like installing. You only have to make sure that you select the same path and tick the overwrite existing Modlist button.
TVO comes with JK's Skyrim, Cities of the North, and Obscures College of Winterhold. The relevant patches for TVO have been merged across the various merges. If you wish to install anything that would require a patch for any of these mods, I suggest that you unmerge all of the merges while going through the patch fomod.
The priority looks like this (same order as MO2, the ones at the bottom overwrites the ones at the top):
- High Poly NPC Overhaul
- Ethereal Elven Overhaul
- Kalilies NPCs
- Pandorable's NPCs
- Pandorable's NPCs - Dragonborn
- Pandorable's NPCs - Dawnguard
- Bijin NPCs
- Seranaholic
- Valericaholic
If you change the load order of any of these mods in mo2 you must change the plugin load order as well or there will be black face bugs. If you add any additional NPC retexture mods you must add the plugin name to NPC Visual Transfer in zEdit or there will be black face bugs.
TVO comes with three different weather mod choices, Obsidian, Cathedral, and Picturesque. Obsidian is enabled by default with all of its relevant parts and additions merged and patched for you. If you swap out Obsidian make sure to disable the entire separator in MO2 or you'll get some weird visual results.
Obsidian Weathers and Seasons provides sharp, ominous, and atmospheric weathers that accentuate proximal detail while obscuring distant landscapes with mysterious fogs. It has the support for the widest range of ENBs and is in my opinion the best weather mod once merged together with all of its addons. However, the horizon seam on Obsidian is not great.
Cathedral Weathers would be clearly the best weather mod on SE if it wasn't such a pain in the ass to make an ENB for. The enb options for Cathedral are good, it just does not have the wide range of choices that Obsidian does. Cathedral fixed the horizon seam issue that Obsidian has. Now that Rudy for CW is a thing, CW is the default weather for TVO and Rudy CW the enb that I personally use
Picturesque is an incredibly good weather/enb combo mod. If you want an effects heavy experience similar to that found in LE this is about as close as you'll get in SE. Picturesque as an enb-weather combo uses game settings for some of its enb setttings, be prepared to adjust your game inis to fine tune brightness.
TVO does not come with any prepackaged ENBs. Swap them around using ENB Manager until you find one that you like. In general you want to find a recently updated ENB due to the numerous, frequent, and significant changes Boris makes to ENB. Here are a list of ENBs I have used and would suggest:
Obsidian
Cathedral
Picturesque
- Picturesque ENB - you must use this enb with picturesque
At this time Synthesis is still in beta and thus a little rough around the edges in terms of end user experience. Due to the complexity of getting it to work and rapid development pace nognog is at I will not provide instructions here on how to get synthesis to work properly until things stablize. If you need to rerun synthesis ask in #tvo-support and someone will guide you through the steps beyond just hitting run.
Simply step up to the statue of mara and choose a start.
Why are the weathers unticked at the bottom of mo2
- They're supposed to be in the separators a but a wabbajack bug puts them at the bottom of mo2. Just move them to the appropriate separator if you're using them.
Is x mod compatible with this list?
- I have no idea, check it in xEdit
Will you help me add x mod to this list?
- Not beyond the already provided materials. You're going to have to open up xEdit and figure it out.
The modlist is down, when will it be back up?
- Sometime soon most likely, check the pins in #tvo-support
Will you make a version of this for lower end machines?
- No
I think this texture/mesh/mod is better than the one used in tvo
- file a github issue with comparison screenshots and a link to the mod
Can I use this to build a wabbajack modlist?
- Yeah sure go ahead, just give me credit in some form.
My Setup:
- Ryzen 2600x
- AMD 5700
- 32GB DDR4-3200 RAM
- Game and MO2 running on a m2 drive
I highly recommend using BethINI.
You can just remove the MO2 folder and be done with it. SKSE and ENB files will still be in your game folder so I recommend using ENB and ReShade Manager if you want to remove the ENB.
- YOU for actually reading the readme. Thanks a ton!!
- The Phoenix Flavor by Phoenix - General ideas and awesomesauce derived therefrom
- Lotus by erri120 - Repository template and NPC visuals
- JDsmith2816 - who's readme I forked from the lotus readme
- Halgari and everyone the WJ Team - Wabbajack is awesome and so are you
While I'm always available on the Wabbajack Discord and on My Discord, I would advise checking the Issues (open and closed ones) on GitHub first if you have any problems. The same goes for Enhancements or Feature/Mod Requests. DO NOT DM ME ON DISCORD. I WILL NOT PROVIDE SUPPORT FOR YOU IN DMS.
See Contributing.
See Changelog.