A new tropical overhaul for Skyrim LE just came out– Tropical Skyrim LE by Sa547, who is the author of several of my favorite mod homes.
The mod itself comes with its own NLA .esp, which I thought was brilliant. I tested it with both an NLA variant and Caffeine ENB.
As you can see, the mod uses a large number of familiar assets to give a tropical feel, and it’s done with a fairly judicious hand. I walked around quite a bit, and I couldn’t find any places where I felt the greenery was too much or out of place. It all looked natural.
My original NLA variant is a very bright ENB, so I thought I’d try with Caffeine, which will tolerate NLA weathers. Caffeine yielded richer skies, but the light was quite intense, reflecting the tropical setting. The mod’s own NLA settings appeared to be between the two.
In-game, NLA with Obsidian Mountain Fogs looked amazing with this overhaul. The light just shimmered with this brilliant humid haze. I could almost feel the heat radiating off the ground. Unfortunately, that effect was elusive — I couldn’t get it to show up as well in the screenshots as I would have liked.
It should be noted that I’m still fiddling with ENB settings for other purposes and that I normally have my fgamma and other ini settings at levels which do not look good in-game, for the purpose of screenshots which show up well on small things like phones. With this mod, I would strongly recommend a higher fgamma setting or using the ENB overlay if you wish to see darker blue skies.
If I ever end up doing an extensive series of screenshots with this mod, I will probably also review my water settings. I’m using Realistic Water Two with some ini changes and meshes from Pure Waters-Waterfalls; also Watercolor for ENB and probably some other stuff, as I know I tweaked water settings back when I last used Snowfall Weathers. The water here seems a bit bluer than expected, but I didn’t take the time to look into that. I also did not change some of the landscape edits that I had active– if you see any odd hard edges in the shots it is due to mod-added landscape rather than this overhaul. I did not do any conflict resolution at all.
This is an excellently done mod without any of the issues which can be possible with such a comprehensive overhaul; and it looks great with the mods by the same author which add greenery to cities. FPS impact was minimal on my system.
I especially liked the fact that this overhaul came with so many different biomes– there’s savannah grasslands; there’s swamps; there’s coastal and mountain regions; there’s a lush foothills area…. so you really feel like you are traveling through a tropical country, rather than a small area.
I think I’ve finally gotten things under control. I had some bad eye reflections and other issues with the new ENB binaries (not so new anymore, .366), but that’s resolved now. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make it work with the eye meshes I wanted to use.
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