Reactor ENB & Water

[Fear2288]

I recently decided to finally try out Reactor ENB after using Vogue ENB for a long time. I heard good things about Reactor despite it apparently being one of the more demanding ENBs, and screenshots looked great.

So I grabbed it, installed it correctly, made the suggested adjustments to certain settings, and off I went.

I’d say I’m about 90% satisfied with it - especially after adjusting the saturation of reds and greens (WAY too saturated by default IMO), but my water looks…kinda awful.

Before this, with Vogue ENB, I was using WET and water looked great. No issues at all.

Reactor suggests using WET, Vivid Waters, and a reflections tweak - which I set up correctly.

But now my water is sometimes a lime-like green, a baby blue, a yellow, and a clear-ish sparkly color depending on the size of the body of water and the time of day. If the water is in an interior and it’s “still water” (like in the Gwennet Brewery or the area underneath the gear door in Vault 111) it’s more or less black and has the reflection properties of a mirror.

This is bugging me. I know that historically speaking ENBs have always had issues with water, but I can’t imagine that this is “normal” for Reactor and that all those people who use this and love this ENB just ignore this.

I’ve tried looking for answers elsewhere but I can’t seem to find a worthwhile answer or solution.

Has anyone here used Reactor ENB and experienced this too? Any ideas of what I could do to make the water look like…water?

[Zekiran]

Do you have screenshots? I'm curious about the various colors you're describing. I have none of those things in the game (your mods / enbs I mean) but there are several pool or water placement bits I have from assorted sets, that give a pretty staggering number of water textures, including one that's a gorgeous perfect transparent 'clean water' with a surface that gently moves. Everything from Quantum Lake and Quantum Ride gross water, to the yellowy high rad Atom Spring, that kind of thing.

I wonder whether your other settings such as draw distance related ones / fog settings might be changing this? Do they have screenies of similarly-placed interior or exterior samples from those who are apparently getting something better than you?

[Fear2288]

I think it may have something to do with NAC X (the weather mod required for Reactor ENB).

Switching off the ENB and playing around with all kinds of options in the ENB menu does nothing to the water.

Green water apparently is an issue with NAC X, and there’s a third party mod fix for it.

Later when I’m able I’ll first try reinstalling WET and Vivid Water, making sure both are underneath NAC X in my LO.

If that doesn’t do anything, I’ll try this fix mod and see what happens then.

[Zekiran]

NAC X does seem to have some wild variety of bugs that stem from it, over the years.

[Fear2288]

I think I’ve resolved it.

I first made sure everything was installed correctly and in the appropriate spots in my LO, but the issue continued.

I then tried Luxor’s NAC X Water LOD God Rays Fix and Enhancements

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/66673

Luxor is a pretty well-regarded modder and usually makes good stuff that functions well but this did absolutely nothing. I tried both putting his fix after NAC X but before WET and Vivid Waters, and after all three but nothing changed.

Then I tried RadioaxtiveAngel’s NAC X Water Fix which was released only a few days after Luxor’s.

https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/66740

Putting it between NAC X and WET/VW did nothing, but putting it after all three fixed the issue - my water looks like water again!

Figured I’d follow up and provide those links so if anyone has this issue they can try those two out and see if either works for them.

[Zekiran]

It's like taking more medication to fix the side effects that a medication gave you :D

[Fear2288]

True, but when a mod doesn’t do something the way you want it to you generally have three options: fix it yourself via personal patch, download/use someone else’s patch, or just stop using the mod altogether.


Now, it’s on to the mystery of the random purple textures…

I get these patches of purple sporadically in areas around the swampy bit northwest of the Atom Cats’ garage. They’re mostly areas that are barely above water or areas with shallow water on top of them.

I first thought it was the same issue as the water color NAC X one (or at least related to NAC X in some way), but it’s not.

Purple would suggest “missing texture” but for the life of me I can’t figure out what the texture is or why it’s missing.

Even stranger is that the purple isn’t opaque. You can still see some of the definition of the landscape texture through it. It’s almost like it’s an effect that’s missing (like the purple snow squalls you could get in Skyrim when something would mess with the effect’s .nif file).

I tried removing and/or reinstalling most of my landscape and water mods but it still persists. I even switched back over to Vivid Weathers and Vogue ENB and it’s still there.

I even tried verifying my game cache to see if somehow a vanilla file got deleted somehow, but that didn’t help either.

Clicking on it in the console only tells me it’s “Water” and gives me its formID and baseID but then only has “undefined” for where it’s coming from or what changed it last.

Ugh…I have one or two other things to try so we’ll see if I can figure it out.

[Razör]

The color of water does have varience in the creation kit. When modders touch those, they can create different colors for the different bodies of water to simulate color density. So some bodies of water can appear more clear, or dark based on their size/depth. Your ENB should not touch anything but the surface of water, like a film, for its enb effects.

NAC X in the creation kit objectively looks horrible. It's literally Baja Blast Mountain dew. for every single color for every body of water.. I manually changed it myself to make it more natural. The fix you linked literally turns the water black. It looks better than the power aid blue, but its black tint is pretty awful after awhile. Which is not natural, but if it works for you then yay. I used it for awhile, but then changed it like i said.

So in closing OP: The issue is not you. Just some moron modder applying colors to different water bodies and not testing.


As for your purple texture issue, upload a screenshot.

[Fear2288]

Found it.

The purple splotches were caused by New Landscape Grass (https://www.nexusmods.com/fallout4/mods/7833?tab=description), one of the recommended mods from Reactor ENB.

[Zekiran]

ugh, well hopefully removing that will fix a couple issues, given the weird bug reports of black ground spots and such!

Also lol I think steam had a hissy fit with putting ( ) around that link because it's BLOCKED BECAUSE OMG NO!! never seen it fully block nexus :D