ELFX - A Substitute?

[OneShotPaddy]

Hey folks, hope everyone is doing well. Merry Christmas to those who celebrate. I'd like to ask about your mods. Does anyone use something for lighting, other than ELFX? I feel like the mod is getting pretty old and I'm finding that some mods have a hard exclusion against it in their descriptions.

I always liked the darker dungeons and more primal lighting, natural lighting, but I don't know where else to go for that. I recently tried to get a mod list working with Luminosity, but that load order didn't work out. So while I'm building a new one, I thought I'd ask for the community's suggestions.

Btw: I REALLY love the slanted light rays that come through windows in interiors. However, I tend to use a lot of modded locations, so whatever the lighting mod is needs to be compatible with a lot of things.

[matt]

What problems have you had with ELFX? I guess there's Enhanced Lighting for ENB[www.nexusmods.com] and Lux[www.nexusmods.com].

[OneShotPaddy]

Originally posted by matt:

What problems have you had with ELFX? I guess there's Enhanced Lighting for ENB[www.nexusmods.com] and Lux[www.nexusmods.com].

Hi matt, thanks for the suggestions. To answer your question, I just always seemed to end up with flickering in certain interiors, or lights doing weird things. As I understand it, ELFX adds bulbs, but if I use new interior locations (player homes, new dungeons, etc.) then I'm not sure ELFX works in those areas, I'll have to check.

Most importantly though, I've been reading newer mods that say they are not compatible with ELFX at all. And all it takes is 1 mod to be incompatible in my list for me to need to find a new lighting option. I'm assuming it doesn't help that ELFX hasn't been updated since 2017.

[Minoris]

For interiors I always go with Enhanced Lighting for ENB.
There still are flickerings and weird ♥♥♥♥ sometimes though, because it's Skyrim, so don't expect a miracle whatever you use.

[matt]

ELFX accomplished its goals and doesn't really need to be updated, except for compatibility patches. That's admittedly a pretty big deal if you're constantly adding mods that change the worldspace. Lux is being actively developed and apparently has a good number of patches. That might be what you're looking for.

Flickering lights are difficult to avoid. My understanding is that it comes from having too many shadow-casting lights in one place. This can happen if you overwrite ELFX, which will revert some of its changes.

[Vlad 254]

Currently I'm looking to Lux as well. For interiors "Window Shadows" is a great mod. The author seems to have left recently but left open permissions. The mod does a great job on lighting without adding bulbs casting shadows from sunlight, especially from windows.

I last used it with Relighting Skyrim but since it's been integrated into the mod:
https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/37831