Help

Getting in

Thornswood is in alpha and is eighteen and over, and the world is open by application. Anyone can install it. Come into the Discord, open a ticket and pick Apply to be an alpha playtester. It asks whether you are eighteen or over and whether you accept the rules. When you are accepted you are given the Playtester role, and that role is what unlocks Play. The join page says more.

Installing it the first time

You need Skyrim Special Edition on Steam, on build 1.6.1170, and Vortex with a free Nexus Mods account. Nothing else has to be installed first. Anniversary Edition is not required.

Thornswood leaves the Skyrim you already have alone. The launcher builds a game folder of its own, C:\Thornswood\Game, out of your Steam copy and what Vortex put into it. Most of it is hard links to your own files, which take no extra space, and the few files other programs rewrite are real copies. Vortex keeps the mods in a profile of their own, so switching back to your usual profile and running Purge Mods leaves your own Skyrim the way it was.

1. From the Downloads page take the installer. One file. Run it. It fetches Thornswood's own content while you watch, about half a gigabyte, and puts the launcher, the script extender and Thornswood's content into your Skyrim.
2. Open Thornswood from the desktop shortcut. If your Skyrim is newer than 1.6.1170, which most copies are, a card on the front page says so. Press Downgrade and Steam downloads that build under your own account. It is a few gigabytes, so give it a while.
3. Install the collection in Vortex. The link is on the Downloads page and on the launcher's Diagnostics page. Not optional: without it you have a launcher and no mods, and the server turns you away when you press Play.
4. Press Connect Discord on the launcher's front page. Your browser opens, you say yes, and it closes itself. You never do this again. It works once your application has been accepted; before that it says your account has not been accepted into the alpha yet, and applying is the fix.

Updating to collection revision 2

Close the game, select the Thornswood profile in Vortex, and update the collection to revision 2. Let Vortex finish installing and deploying it. Then open the Thornswood launcher and let its update finish before pressing Play. The collection supplies the mod baseline; the launcher supplies Thornswood's newer content and generated behavior and covered body files.

Keep CBBE.esp and RaceMenuMorphsCBBE.esp switched off. In the 3BA installer use the Nevernude body, leave prebuilt meshes off, choose Full SMP and No SOS, and do not install the optional CBPC configuration. The mandatory base component can remain selected; the separate CBPC physics mod is absent from this revision.

If the launcher reports a plugin mismatch, open Diagnostics, press Scan, then Fix. Use the Thornswood shortcut for the main world and the Dev shortcut for testing. Each has its own game folder and update source, so updating one keeps the other separate.

Why does Windows or Defender warn about the installer?

The installer is Authenticode-signed (Azure Artifact Signing). Most of the time Windows lets it through without a fuss.

A brand-new build can still get a soft SmartScreen ask once in a while, because reputation follows the file hash and a fresh hash has none yet. If Windows shows a blue Windows protected your PC box, press More info and then Run anyway. The publisher should not show as Unknown.

Do not turn Defender off and do not add an exclusion for the installer. Check the file instead: every build's SHA-256 is printed on the Downloads page next to the button.

Starting it after that

Open Thornswood from the desktop shortcut. Not Skyrim, not Steam, not SKSE. The launcher checks for updates, patches anything that changed, and the Play button starts the game and connects you. There is no password to type and no address to enter.

If an update is waiting, the launcher takes it before it lets you play. That is on purpose: everybody has to be running the same files or nobody can connect.

The launcher also compares every plugin with the server's copy, byte for byte, when it starts. If one differs it says so. See LOAD ORDER ERROR below.

Your first character

The game loads to its main menu and asks who you are today. Pick an empty slot to make a new character. Nothing about a character is chosen in the launcher.

You arrive dressed in a plain tunic and boots in a quiet stone hall. The race menu opens there to make your face, with your clothes kept on as you change race. When you are done, the panel behind K opens by itself. That panel is where the rest is chosen: your profession and the half of it you will make your own, your class, and your Home, which is the town you wake up in. Those are the choices on the Professions page.

Only the town has to be chosen before you leave the hall. Your class and profession can wait, and can be picked later in the world from the same panel. Press Confirm on the Review page and you wake up at the inn in the town you chose.

Nothing else is handed out at the start, except a tool to the four picks whose work needs one: a Miner is handed a pickaxe, a Woodworker a woodcutter's axe and a Farmer a shovel and seed to sow. A Fisher is handed a crude fishing pole. Each tool is supplied at the moment its pick is made.

Keys

These are the keys a fresh install has. The launcher's Controls page lists every key and changes them: press Change, then the key you want, with Skyrim closed.

• Enter opens the chat, and / opens it with the slash already typed.
• K your character panel, P your friends and party, J your journals.
• Looking at somebody: Y asks them to be friends, H offers a trade, L stops you hearing them. A friend request, a party invite, or a trade offer shows on their screen with Accept and Refuse.
• V held to talk, O keeps the microphone open until you press it again, B steps between a whisper, your normal voice and a yell.
• G opens the emote wheel. Eight quick slots sit in the middle, and the rest of the emotes are a list you can search. Tab moves to that search. N stands you up out of an emote. While the wheel is open, 1 to 8 play a slot. With it shut they are Skyrim's own favourites hotkeys.
• U presses a blank key mold into the lock of the door you are looking at.
• F7 opens the help in the game, without the chat: talking, people, living, work, land and getting help, with the keys as you have them set. Help on the K, P and J panels opens it too.
• F1 turns the names over heads off and on, and F2 hides and shows the overlay.

Voice

Voice runs in the launcher, not in the game. Leave the launcher open while you play.

Hold V to talk, or press O to keep the microphone open for a song or a long speech. B steps between a whisper, about 7 metres, your normal voice, about 30, and a yell, about 85. The voice card on the launcher's Play page says whether it is working.

If nobody can hear you, check that the launcher is still open and that Windows has not handed your microphone to something else.

Getting staff in game

Type /helpme and a few words about what is wrong. Anybody from staff in the world is told at once, with where you are, and it goes to the staff channel in the Discord. /report, the person's name and what they did, reaches staff and nobody else. The game tells you whether it got through; if it did not, open a ticket in the Discord.

Wedged in a wall or a rock and cannot walk out? Type /stuck. It takes you back a few steps to where you were last standing safely, or to the nearest temple when there is no such spot. It works once every 5 minutes, not while you are dead, and in a fight it waits 15 seconds first, which moving or being hit cancels. It is only for being truly stuck: every use is logged for staff, and using it to get out of a fight or to travel can mean a warning or a ban.

When something goes wrong

1. Look at Known Issues first. A lot of what looks like a bug is a limit of how a shared Skyrim works, and it is written down there with the reason.
2. If it is not there, report it. One line about what happened is enough to start with.
3. If you have a screenshot or a crash log, drag it into your ticket in the Discord, or say in the report that you have one. Where the logs are is below.

LOAD ORDER ERROR

The game compares every plugin with the server's at login: the same names, in the same order, with the same bytes. If one differs you are turned away with that message.

Close the game, open Diagnostics in the launcher and press Scan. It names the plugin that differs. Then press Fix, and press Play again. When the plugin that differs is another author's mod, Scan and Fix name the mod to update or reinstall in Vortex: the server hands out Thornswood's own plugin and nobody else's.

What Fix does: it puts your plugin list in the server's order, puts back plugins Vortex has that the game folder lost, downloads the server's copy of Thornswood's own plugin when its bytes differ, names the mod to update or reinstall in Vortex when another author's plugin differs, and moves another server's files and stray Creation Club plugins aside, never deleting them.

Scan also looks at the rest of the install: an update waiting, Thornswood's game folder behind what Vortex has deployed or missing files, this build's own files changed, Windows' Skyrim folders left pointed at Thornswood after a crash, the shortcut icon, the multiplayer client, Steam and the Skyrim build. Fix puts right everything it can, bringing the game folder up to date from Vortex first and taking a waiting update last. Then it looks again and says only what is still wrong, why, and what will put it right.

If Scan says a plugin is missing rather than different, the collection is not fully installed or the wrong Vortex profile is active. The launcher says which.

Where the logs are

The launcher's own log, for anything that went wrong before the game started:

C:\Thornswood\Profile\launcher.log

Crash logs, if the game closed itself, are in Thornswood's own My Games folder:

C:\Thornswood\Profile\MyGames\SKSE\

The easy way to send them: in the launcher open Diagnostics and press Build the report. It makes one zip with the newest crash log, the script extender log, your plugin list and the launcher log, and opens the folder it is in. Drag that zip into your ticket in the Discord. Settings, Open log opens the launcher log on its own.

Things that are normal here

• No saving. The server holds your character. Quitting is safe.
• Most mod settings menus keep your choices: MCM Helper menus in a file on your machine, and Apocalypse, moreHUD, Atlas Map Markers, Skyrim Unbound and chfshVariousActions on the server, with your character. QuickLoot, the instrument menu, MCM Recorder and SkyUI's favourite group and unequip options still forget themselves every session, because there is no save to write them to.
• No levelling, no fast travel, and the difficulty is fixed at Expert.
• The creation hall is a bare room. Your face is made there, and everything else is chosen on the panel that opens by itself once it is done.

All of that is deliberate. None of it is worth reporting. Known Issues covers the rest of what a shared Skyrim cannot do, and which of it is going to change.

Restart warnings

A countdown in the chat comes first. A notice means the world freezes for a few seconds and your game does not close. For an update, your launcher closes the game when the count runs out, installs it and puts you back in, unless it already has it. A restart means the server is going down: get somewhere safe and log out before then.