BIOMES I

BIOMES

Botanically Imagined Optionally Modular Ecosystems of Skyrim

Hey all, it's your friendly neighborhood DV here with a (very) long in-progress landscape project.  There are already approximately 9,999,999,999 grass mods for Skyrim, and most of them are fantastic.  It would be reinventing the wheel just to give a fish a bicycle for me to attempt yet another grass overhaul, when so many excellent ones already exist.  Still, tinkerer that I am, I've never been satisfied to roll with a prefab environmental setup, even ones so eye-meltingly perfect it'd be a crime to mess them up (lookin' at you, Freak's Floral Fields, Skoglendi, Voluptuous, Verdant, etc.)  What I haven't seen many grass mods do as of yet is to work in a modular fashion so as to better mix and match with other grass and landscape mods.  They're mostly all-in-one setups, which makes a lot of sense given how the game sprinkles certain grass types all throughout the gameworld.  But I wanted to provide a way to slot in just one biome at a time, in case you, like me, wanted to try something new for a change in one area but also wanted to keep someone's version of somewhere else.  I also wanted to play with some diversity in the biome types- no so far as to be too jarring to the base game's world image, but a little different than the usual sorts of landscape that tend to be repeated and iterated on in other setups.  So began the BIOMES project, and boy howdy has it been slow going!

This first pack contains grass setups for the Marsh, Reach, and Volcanic Tundra regions.  The rest of the regions, from the Fall Forest to the Beach, Snow to Solstheim, will eventually be released.  Rather than wait for my nitpicky ass to tweak everything just so before sharing, I figured I'd drop these piecemeal as they're more or less finished.  Since the whole point of the project is for each biome to stand alone, with its own ESL plugin for ease of mixing and matching with other grass mods, this works OK.

All of these beautiful plants were rendered into Skyrim by other, vastly more talented modders.  All I've done is combine them in certain places, and occasionally messed with the colors.  Massive props to Dr. Jacopo for the monumental Cathedral project.  Dig it here (you'll need to in order to get the meshes that many of these grass records use, so drop an endorsement and some kudos while you're there).  Thanks also to Odin for Flora Orientalis, Grumbledoook for Folkvangr, Elyem for Veydosebrom, and Frolique for her custom Fluffy Fields mod.  All the plants are their doing (and their mods are all, of course, fantastic in their own right).  If I missed someone, please holler at me- this thing's been in the works for a long time and I've a memory like a colander.  Because of the collaborative nature of this project, unfortunately permission to use any assets contained herein for other mods is closed;