I was looking at the Pacifist ethic, which I've never taken before because I thought it would hurt me in the inevitable fights. This is what the wiki says about it:

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        Empire : −15% Empire size from pops
    Planets :  +5 Stability


  

Policies Principles

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            Edicts Can use the Peace Festivals edict
        X Cannot use Unrestricted Wars War Philosophy policy
        X Cannot use Aggressive Interference Pre-FTL Interference policy
        X Cannot engage in Indiscriminate Orbital Bombardment
        X Cannot use Aggressive First Contact Protocol policy


  

As a person who generally plays turtle and avoids wars because they screw with my technical ascendency sim, this looks like there are no downsides. Can that be right? Are there no hidden horrific events or war debuffs this doesn't cover? Does the Peace faction just kinda chill as long as I'm not starting any fights?

I'm not a fan of most of the current list of popular grass mods for a couple reasons. First, they are often just too tall. Second is that they often put what, to me, are unimmersive plants in the wrong biomes. In particular, I don't like waist-high oceans of wheat on the tundra of Whiterun.

I've been using just the grass meshes from the venerable Skyrim Flora Overhaul. I really like the low ground cover it provides for Whiterun. However, in an age of 3D\parallax meshes, a lot of these meshes don't look that great.

So I'm just curious if any of you are really happy with the grass mods you use and, if so, why.

Just saw some comments on the xEdit Discord this morning from ElminsterAU, the primary dev for the project. He's been backwards-engineering Starfield since it came out, tweaking his project to make it work for Starfield. This is important because, as soon as he does, (safe) plugin-based mods become possible, opening up the floodgates for a whole new class of Starfield mods. Only, in its current state, he's not sure he can make it work. Or, for that matter, that the CK due from BGS "early next year" can make it work, either.

The image I've posted is a collection of carefully selected snippets of a much larger discussion, with all the supporting info being excluded for brevity. This is "headline reporting" at its worst, so I encourage anyone tracking this topic to go to the Discord and dive deeper.

Maybe he's having a bad morning after spending all night attempting to decipher undocumented code that is, literally,

Starting my 3rd playthrough, I felt like it was time to do something completely different. Everyone has their own head cannon, but I was struggling to envision a life path that had me joining Constellation, doing assorted heroic and adventurous things, and then becoming a corporate spy. For that reason, I’ve yet to do the Ryujin faction quests. At least for me, the opposite path, from street rat, to spy, to adventurer, made a lot more sense. So anyway.

In order to make that happen, I decided I wanted to try a non-Constellation start. I’ll get there, eventually, but not immediately. I thought others might want to consider this path so I’ll share how it went for me.

I started the playthrough like normal, all the way up to the initial dialog with Sarah. She’ll invite you to join Constellation, but you have a “not ready for that” dialog option. She’ll understand and offer you a place to stay while you mull it over. At this point, I just left. I had returned their ship, handed them their

You may or may not be aware that the perk for starship shields is currently bugged, and working in reverse. If it's supposed to add 20% to your shields, it is actually subtracting 20%. Kinda surprised this hasn't made the first wave of bug fixes.

The bug is (probably) applied when a modifier is added to you or ship. For some reason, the modifier makes a permanent change to your ship's base stats so that even if you remove your perk (via console), the permanently reduced base stat remains on the ship.

If you are on PC, there is a console fix for this. Well, more of as "workaround" than a "fix". This will probably blow your achievements, so be sure to have an achievements enabler installed.

First, go to space and make a save you can fall back on in case you make a mistake.

Next, remove the shield perk. This may not be absolutely necessary, but it makes it easier to keep the math straight. We'll be adding it back later:

player.removeperk 002C2C59

Because this is a leveled perk, y

Back in 2018, DarkFox127 (Moskom Estate, Caranthir Tower, his YouTube series on how to use the Creation Kit) put out Shalidor's Migrant Portals. It's a pretty nifty mod that, after a short quest (tied to a longer quest), gives you 5 platforms you can use to instantaneously (but immersively) teleport between anchored locations. Since I tend to build bases around Skyrim, this has a permanent place in my load order.

But, in 5 years, this mod has garnered all of 171 endorsements, and that's just wrong. DarkFox probably doesn't care that much about this mod, but I'm throwing this out there in the hopes that someone who might enjoy something like this finds it and, maybe, passes the find on to someone else. It's too useful to fall off the map like this.

Is there a mod out right now that supports dodging by double-tapping the directional move keys that works in Skyrim AE? This is the behavior from the classic TK Dodge mod, but my understanding is that this doesn't work in AE. The replacement mod, TK Dodge RE, has not gotten around to re-instituting this option. I've got a lot of muscle memory tied to this key-binding and I really hope I can use it in my next play-through.

Title says it all. If you think Reddit's been trending down lately, just wait.

A lot of speculation based on images that spent 2 seconds on the screen, but that's what we get until September.

CD Projekt Red has detailed the big finale of Cyberpunk 2077 which includes a massive overhaul of the entire gameplay experience & tons of new features/changes coming in Phantom Liberty.