ELE-ELFX Consistency Patch and Tweaks

ELE-ELFX Consistency Patch and Tweaks

For many of us who have been using Neovalen's Skyrim Revisited: Legendary Edition, as well as any of its "spiritual successors" like DarkLadyLexy's Legacy of The Dragonborn Special Edition guide, no lighting mod by itself can beat the combination of three of the most popular lighting mods for Skyrim and Skyrim SE, ELE - Enhanced Lighting for ENB, ELFX - Enhanced Lighs and FX and Relighting Skyrim (the latter thanks to Neo's own tweaked plugin), each addressing some particular aspect of interior lighting and resulting in a very dramatic, yet completely playable experience.

Still, the mileage would vary between users, as different set-ups, different sensitivity and different personal preferences always led to some remarking that certain interiors were too dark to be fun, while others would swear by how fun and rewarding it was to sneak around in complete darkness and having to use lights to find their way or stuff they were looking for, while taking the risk of being seen. This mod started as (and is still not much more than) an attempt, perhaps doomed, to cater for both.

Both ELE and ELFX darken the game a bit - ELE by changing interior cell imagespaces and lighting templates, ELFX by removing many vanilla light "bulbs" while adding others, aiming at a more realistic experience where all light should come from visible light sources like fire, candles, lanterns, torches, windows, rock crevices, etc... Combining both often results in a beautiful contrast between mainly dark places and locally lit scenes, other times in better lit areas with shady corners, but the contrast is always there because of what both mods do. ELFX does a great job adding more light sources to compensate the absence of the ambient light (that one may rightfully deem "artificial"). But with ELE also in the picture, some places were still too dark, at least for some users.

An example, and what started this mod, is the Winking Skeever in Solitude. Using both ELE and ELFX, the whole pub is immersed in darkness, with only a few candles barely lighting the faces of patrons sitting at the tables. There is a bard, Lisette, who sings mostly in the dark (poor thing!) and a few markers are in places with no light at all. Often I'd find Gollum-Ei leaning against the wall beside the entrance door, only "seeing" him because of the GUI and would make the entire dialogue without even been able to look at whom I was talking to. While carrying a lit torch or lantern makes sense in a dungeon, should we need to carry our own light source in a tavern?

In parallel, when using these two mods and loading ELE last (as you should) many light (LIGH) records from ELFX are overridden by ELE, with very different results. It's probably another matter of taste but I found ELFX to be