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Declutter: Outdoor Decorative Plants

A simple "declutter / remover" mod that removes:

* decorative, outside plants (but not trees)
* dead tree limb piles (usually seen washed-up on the coasts)
* hay piles & mounds (but not bales, since things could be sitting on them)
* patches of leaves on the streets of Riften
* gaudy snow patches on the ground at Winterhold college
* small, glowing, falmer root lines seen in Falmer dungeons (but not the big ones in Blackreach)

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Goal

For this "remover", my goal was to clear the landscape of "filler" plants that don't impact game play too much while keeping actual trees around. I found it annoying that you can go into the .ini to switch grass off completely, but there was no way to turn off these small plants, too.

While this may give some a frame rate boost (maybe...not making any promises), it's important to note that these decorative plants do serve the purpose of hiding a lot of LOD and object pop-in / change. They basically provide a "blind" to keep your attention focused primarily on the foreground, not noticing the changing textures and such happening in the background. When you remove these plants, you'll notice this background changing much more. I personally don't mind it, as I'd rather see important stuff around me rather than feel like a bunch of worthless plants are blocking my view. Your mileage may vary, so I'm just letting you know that it may be more immersion-breaking than just making the landscape look more barren. You'll notice the LOD pop-in more if you've disabled HDR Blur in the .ini.

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Background

Morrowind & Oblivion had "remover" mods that tried to boost FPS on older computers by removing (deleting) assets from the game. My series of "declutter" mods may help do that for Skyrim. However, as a person with an almost OCD-like compulsion to simplify things, my alterior motive was to remove useless stuff that I felt cluttered things up, got in the way, or was annoying to look at or avoid.

I'm keeping them modular, each targetted on their own distinct clutter, that way folks can mix-n-match them as they see fit. However, since Skyrim has a limit on how many mods you can load, I will eventually create a merged "all-in-one" that combines them all.

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Notes

Back in Morrowind days, you could just delete an object, and the .esp would just store "this object is deleted", which made "remover" mods pretty small.

Skyrim's CK, however, stores every cell's reference to that object in the .esp, too. If you delete an object that's used a lot, then that's a lot of references that get stored along with the deleted object in the .esp. So, these "declutter" .esp's have a larger file size than would normally be expected for just "removing a few things". (eg: this mod is MB big as opposed to just a few KB big).

Also, for this mod particularly, butterflies use some plants to spawn/land on. Some of the plants deleted also deleted themselves from the AAAMoth... form, which is what tells the butterflies what plants they can / can't land on. If you load a current save game after installing this mod, you may see some butterflies landing in mid-air on plants that are no longer there. I believe these are butterflies that spawned prior to mod installation, as when I was playing, eventually I noticed butterflies stopped doing that. I think the old butterflies got replaced with new ones that take the altered landing Form into account, thus not landing on removed plants. During a new character creation with this mod installed, and after several days on a prior save game, it seemed the butterflies sorted themselves out. They still land on random logs, ingredient plants, etc. So, it's not like they're just continuously flying now.

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Change Log

1.1
* removed misc ground debris (hay piles, Riften leaf patches, Winterhold snow patches)
* removed skinny Falmer glowing roots


1.0
* original version
* removed quite a few WorldData > Statics > Plants and Landscape things