SkyChild

It's been around 10 years since I first made The Kids Are Alright. It's had ups and downs since it first released due to reasons. I've been re-releasing all my old mods in high poly, which in my mind improves them greatly. This is loosely based on the original TKAA mod, but is totally rebuilt and restructured, and is NOT compatible with prior versions, prior version patches, or ANY other child replacer for that matter.

SkyChild only includes replacers for the base game and DLC children to keep the mod simple. Additional races will be addressed through future addons as I (and/or others) make them. Also included are new clothing specifically fitted to these children as in TKAA. Children of vendors wear vendor clothes, miner kids wear miner clothes, etc. The mod simply consists of new meshes and textures. No scripts and no edits of existing Hearthfires quests.

TKAA was based on the same low poly face meshes for males and females. SkyChild uses totally different higher polygon meshes and tris for males vs females. I've also simplified the facegen structure by making all hair be three part, instead of the confusing 2 or 3 part naming used before. I made a single exception to this for Aeta, the Skaal child, as she uses a more complex multipart hair mesh. I'm including textures for pretty much every hairstyle I've ever used on my child replacers, to give an all in one resource for patches and add-ons.

INSTALLATION

Use a mod manager. I don't support manual installation. The download should include a plugin and a matching archive. The plugin is flagged as esl. Make sure your mod manager has the plugin enabled after installation. I highly recommended using this mod on a new save, and make sure that any other child replacer is COMPLETELY removed. Mods that are in loose file format will ALWAYS overwrite archived files and are troublesome.

TROUBLESHOOTING and COMPATIBILITY

Dark heads, horse face, scary monster kids - You have a conflict with another child replacer. Make sure that you completely remove any mods that replace the child npc forms and/or have installed loose files that replace the default kids.

This can come from unlikely sources. For example the mod "Cleaned Skyrim SE Textures" includes loose files that overwrite tint masks for kids. This CANNOT be patched. If you want to use that mod, you need to delete these loose files. Why they are even included in the bsa version of the mod (where they are already included), is a question for the ages.

I really wish Nexus mod authors would get their stuff together and stop uploading replacers as loose files, when an empty plugin loading a bsa can resolve conflicts and cut down on support issues.