TES5LODGen

Trees LOD and Objects LOD generator for Skyrim

Installed a mod that moves or changes trees but they remain unchanged when far way, or you can't see new farm houses from a new shiney villages overhaul when a top of the mountain? Then you need this tool.

Make sure to install TES5LODGen outside of Program files folder, somewhere with write access rights, or run as Administrator.

Run TES5LODGen.exe, wait for it to load your plugins, then select worldspaces to generate LOD (by default only Tamriel worldspace is selected), and click Generate. Wait for it to complete, you can watch progress and check possible errors in messages list. When finished, close the program manually.

Mod organizer users: Install TES5LODGen in a directory of your choice. Add TES5LODGen.exe to MO executable list by clicking the gears button and then browse for TES5LODGen.exe to fill the "Binary" field. Add a dedicated output directory by adding -o:"C:\TES5LODGenOutput" to the "Arguments" field. Once LOD generation has completed copy/move files from the dedicated output directory to the game data directory or into a custom mod (recommended for load order management) in MO.

TES5LODGen has several options when building LOD, please read technical details below to understand what they do.

How LOD works in Skyrim

LOD in general is what you see in the distance, beyond the infamous uGridsToLoad setting value. It can be increased to lessen popins of objects and there are mods to help with stability when doing so, but there is still a memory/CPU limit of how much you can force the game to render environment in full quality. Skyrim uses static LOD which means that LOD information is prebuilt and doesn't change when mods modify objects in game. Some mods include updated LOD files to address this issue, but they are usually incompatible with each other and require compatibility patches of their own. Those LOD files are generated with Creation Kit which is quite complex procedure unaccessible by majority of users. TES5LODGen tries to address this issue by providing a simple one-click automated LOD files generation for the current load order of user, taking in account all mods that have content visible from distance.

Skyrim LOD is divided into 3 parts:

Terrain (landscape) LOD - the shape of landscape in the distance (files in Meshes\Terrain\<Worldspace>\<Worldspace>.... BTR and Textures\Terrain\<Worldspace>\<Worldspace>.... DDS where <Worldspace> is the name of worldspace). Those files are rarely updated since mods almost never change terrain shape or changes are minimal and would be hardly noticable when far away. Terrain LOD files are generated by OScape, TES5LODGen doesn't create them.

Objects LOD[