“Smalls”: noun, plural noun: 1. informal, british -- small items of clothing, especially underwear.
Whilst adventuring in Skyrim SE, you tend to run across all sorts of bandits, ruffians and ne'er-do-wells. Often, things go south and you end up in a big fight, and if you emerge from that you loot the bodies for armour and treasure.
If you're running with a mod that replaces the default skin with a naked one, it can be a bit disconcerting to discover that everyone whose armour you loot seems to be going commando! What's up with that? Didn't their mothers warn them that they might meet a sticky end one day and thus clearly ought to pack some clean underwear for their trip just in case?
This mod attempts to fix the problem in the least intrusive way possible.
This is the simple explanation. See below for a lot more detail about why it's all a little messy.
When a new NPC is encountered, it is checked to see if its inventory includes some underwear.
If not, an item of underwear is randomly added to the NPC's inventory, from a list of underwear items that Smalls keeps. In some cases Smalls can also equip the item at this point, but more often it is just added to the inventory.
If you later kill the NPC and open its inventory to loot it, you should find that the NPC has an item of underwear.
If the underwear is equipped already, there's nothing more to do.
If not, Smalls will monitor what you remove. If you remove the main clothing item (the one that occupies the body slot and hides the NPC's naughty bits), Smalls will equip the underwear to replace it. Unfortunately, because the new item is only equipped after you've removed the old one, a brief flash can occur where the NPC appears to be naked. This isn't ideal, but it's tricky to avoid, for reasons that are covered below in the complicated version of the explanation!
Exactly which items Smalls adds is determined randomly, using a list that you can configure. By default Smalls knows about a few popular underwear mods, but you can add in items from other mods, and remove any that you don't want to use. See the Configuration section below for more details.
Smalls has an MCM panel which lets you adjust its behaviour.
- Enabled
- Use for males
- Use for females
These options are fairly self evident. You can use them to disable Smalls for females, males, or all NPCs.
- Skip UI Checks
Normally Smalls will only equip underwear on an NPC if the Inventory dialogue is open and targetted on that NPC. This is a safety feature to prevent Smalls from interfering with other scripts that remove items from NPCs. However, this check means that Smalls doesn't work with mods that allow you to loot without using the normal UI. Turning the Skip UI Checks option on should fix this problem, but might cause others. Use at your own risk!
- Try to equip early
Unfortunately, many underwear items are not designed to be worn with other clothing, so can't be equipped until the main armour has been removed. This can cause a moment where the NPC appears to be naked. If you enable this option, Smalls will attempt to equip the underwear on the NPC as soon as it is added, which will be long before you are looting it. This may work for a small number of underwear items, but more likely it will result in lots of NPCs wandering around in only their underwear! Use at your own risk!
- Reset items list to defaults
Clicking on this option causes Smalls to reset its list of underwear, and to re-read it from the configuration files. This will happen once you've closed the MCM. See below for more details on how to configure the item list.
- Enable Logging
In general, you don't need the logging and should keep it disabled. If you are having problems, you might want to turn it on, and take a look in {HOME}\Documents\My Games\Skyrim Special Edition\Logs\Script\User\Smalls.0.log. This should contain a running commentary of what Smalls is doing.
Smalls keeps a list of items, which it uses to assign random underwear to NPCs as you encounter them.
Each item that Smalls knows about can be set to one of the following categories:
- unisex; used for males and females
- male; used for males only
- female; used for females only; entries with this category should be one-pieces or sets that include both tops & bottoms in a single clothing item
- female top; used for females tops only; if an item from this list is picked, then it is paired with a random item from female bottom
- female bottom; used for female bottoms only
- ignore; smalls knows that this is underwear, but doesn't use it
- remove; when you close Smalls, this item will be removed from the list of known underwear
This is not very sophisticated, and does not yet try to match tops & bottoms, or pick appropriate underwear for specific profession, races, tribes, etc. All of these considerations are things I'd like to improve, but... you've got to start somewhere.
The Smalls mod itself doesn't contain any underwear, so you need to install one or more other mods that do, and then tell Smalls to use them.
By default, Smalls uses underwear from a few mods that it knows about, if they are installed.
The list of these mods and items is defined in the file SmallsDefaults.json, which should be installed in the Data folder along with the Smalls.esp file.
Smalls will also look for another file called SmallsCustom.json, and add any entries that it finds there.
If you want to teach smalls about new items, it is better to make SmallsCustom.json and add them there, since changes to this file will not be affected by the mod being updated.
Both of the json files use the same format, which is as follows:
The top level is a dictionary, with each key being the name of the .esp file containing some underwear items.
The value of each record should be another dictionary, containing one or more of the following keys: female, femaleTop, femaleBottom, male, unisex.
The entry for one of these keys should be a list of dictionaries, each of which specifies the id of the item to use.
Here's a simple example:
"CBBE Standalone Underwear.esp": {
"femaleBottom": [
{
"id": "0x00000804",
"name": "CBBE_Underwear_Bottom"
}
],
"femaleTop": [
{
"id": "0x00000805",
"name": "CBBE_Underwear_Top"
}
]
},Note that the dictionary for an item can also optionally include the name of the item, although for now this is only for reference and not used by Smalls.
To help with the creation of this file, Smalls also installs an SSEdit script: Smalls Export Underwear JSON.pas. You use this by opening an underwear mod in SSEdit, selecting the armour records that you want to add to Smalls, and then running the script. This will export the ids to a JSON file in a suitable format. The files that the script exports are not directly usable by Smalls, but you can copy & paste their contents into your custom config file (I recommend also keeping the exported files somewhere for refeference).
If you've edited this file mid-game, you can force Smalls to parse it again by choosing Reset Defaults from the MCM. Note that doing this will also reset any changes that you've made using the MCM configuration interface (see below).
For that reason you are better off either using this configuration file, or the MCM, but not both. Using this file is probably the best option as it can be shared between games, backed up, etc.
If editing JSON files sounds a bit scary, you can also edit the underwear list via an MCM configuration panel.
Make sure that the armour you want to add is in your inventory.
Open up the Smalls / Add Item panel in MCM.
Tick the items you want to add, then switch back to the Current Items panel. The item you've added should now be in the list.
Smalls has to guess which lists to add the item to, based on the slot positions it's marked for, and whether it has meshes set for male, female or both. This information isn't always reliable, so sometimes underwear will be added to the wrong lists. You can fix this yourself using the popup next to the item.
Open up the Smalls / Current Items panel in MCM.
Set the items you want to remove to "remove", then dismiss MCM (or switch away from the Smalls panel).
For those who are interested, here's a bit more information on how Smalls works, and the problems that it is trying to fix.
Any piece of armour/clothing in Skyrim is tagged as occupying one or more body slots.
Most armours and outfits use the main body slot (32), which roughly means that the item covers the torso and legs.
When you equip an item, anything else using the same slot is unequipped. This is why you can't wear two sets of armour at the same time.
Smaller items - gloves, shoes, hats, etc - use different slots. Hence you can wear a hat, gloves, and boots, along with your main armour. Again though, only one item can be in each of the slots so if you equip a second pair of boots using the feet slot, the first pair will be unequipped.
So what about underwear?
In the vanilla Skyrim experience underwear is built into the actual skin of the body, so it isn't really accounted for at all. It doesn't occupy a slot, and is always magically "worn" under the armour.
Body replacement mods that make the skin naked instead effectively remove this fake underwear. To add something back, you have to equip an additional item of clothing.
Many of the mods which add underwear are simply designed to provide a skimpy outfit which is worn instead of armour/clothing. For this reason, they use the main body slot, and if you equip an item like this, any other armour or clothing in that slot is removed.
Having underwear items that occupy the main body slot works fine if the objective is just to have the character in question parade around in their undies. You equip the underwear, and the outerwear is automatically unequipped.
This is how a lot of the mods that provide underwear are set up.
Unfortunately this isn't very immersive.
If you are aiming for something a bit more realistic, what you really want is to allow the character to wear one or more underwear items along with their main clothing items. Ideally they should be covered by the main clothes, but show through any holes or semi-transparent areas.
This isn't just true for underwear of course, but for any sort of layered clothing. You might want a character to have an undershirt, with a shirt over it, a coat over that, and a cloak on top!
This is where the other body slots come in to play. In theory each of these items could have a different slot, and then they can all be equipped together. A few underwear sets have been designed with this in mind. With underwear sets this is generally so that you can mix-and-match different tops, bottoms, accessories, etc.
However, being able to equip multiple items in different slots doesn't guarantee that they actually render in the right order. Each item is modelled differently, and different sets have been modelled independently by different people.
Unfortunately there is nothing intelligent going on behind the scenes, so if you equip some underwear and some outerwear, and the underwear was modelled to poke out further from the body than the outwear was, that's what will happen. Typically this isn't an all-or-nothing situation, but instead you'll see bits of one item poking through or clipping bits of another item.
Ultimately Smalls can't solve these problems, and in general it can't know for sure whether any given piece of underwear is going to work with any other bit of clothing.
What it can do is look at the body slots assigned to an item, and make some guesses.
When it first examines an NPC (which will be when you get fairly close to them, but before you encounter them), it looks for items that are using body slots generally reserved for underwear. Unfortunately even which slots to use isn't standardised completely, but it makes a best guess.
If it finds that the NPC has something tagged as underwear, it doesn't give them any more. Otherwise it gives an a randomly selected item from the list it has been configured with.
If the randomly selected item is using underwear slots, then Smalls will try to equip it right away. This is better in theory as it means that the NPC will be wearing the item along with the rest of their gear when you encounter them. It may look bad though if the item clips. There's nothing that Smalls can do to detect this, so eventually I will add some options to turn this behaviour off, either for invidual kinds of items, or for all items.
If on the other hand the randomly selected item is using the main body slot, then Smalls can't equip it right away. If it did, the NPC's outer clothing would be replaced and everyone would be walking around in their underwear the whole time (maybe you want an mod like that... but it isn't what Smalls is trying to achieve).
So what it does in this situation is just add the item to the NPC's inventory. Later when you are looting the NPC, Smalls watches for you removing the main piece of clothing, and quickly equips the underwear item when you do. This works, but can result in a brief flash where the NPC appears to be naked. This isn't ideal, but it's the best that can be managed in this situation.
This problem is unlikely to ever be solved completely for Skyrim, because the architecture doesn't really support layering clothing in a generalised way.
However, a few things would make things a bit better.
The first is if the people who make custom clothing/armour considered that people might want to equip individual parts of it. They could support this by splitting the armour up into logical bits, and assigning those bits slots that aren't the default body slot.
Doing that won't necessarily mean that the armour will layer properly with other things, but it will at least make it possible to try!
Note that it is possible to do this yourself, but it involves using Outfit Studio to change the body slots assigned to the models, and using CreationKit or SSEdit to change the slots assigned to the Armour records in the ESP. Which is fiddly and a pain in the arse.
I am actually considering writing a tool to automate this process. I have a lot of the necessary code written, but finishing it off will be fiddly and there may not be enough hours in the day.
This is trickier. On a case-by-case basis you can use Outfit Studio to flatten inner-wear items to the body, and to pull outer-wear items away from it a bit. This will reduce the likelihood of clipping and items poking through, but can't completely eliminate it. Doing it is also time consuming.
I think in theory this process could also be automated. If a tool rendered the body in one colour, and one or more clothing items in another, it should be able to analyse the colours to work out which clothing item is "on top", for any given rendered vertex and camera angle. It should then be able to push the vertices in/out until the right answer is achieved for that vertex and angle. If this process was iterated for each vertex, with the camera pointing through the vertex towards the centre of the model (or maybe the centre of the primary bone, or something), I think you could get a good approximation of a tool that automatically "form fitted" an item. This might work well for skin-tight items, but of course would completely destroy any places where the item deliberately stood away from the skin.
A simpler and more practical solution might be to adopt some sort of Russian-doll approach where all designers standardise on one body shell for inner-wear, and another slightly expanded one for outer-wear. Again this is the sort of thing that really needs tool support if it stands any chance of being adopted widely.
That is all beyond the scope of Smalls, but I'm up for discussing solutions!
Smalls requires SkyUI, Spell Item Distributor (SPID), and JContainers.
Smalls is compatible with UNP, CBBE, 3BA, etc. Just use whichever body and underwear mods you want.
Smalls used to contain custom underwear items, but no longer does. If you were using a previous version of Smalls, some underwear items may disappear when you upgrade. This should be a one-time problem.
Smalls makes new underwear when it needs it, so you could obviously use this mod in theory to farm underwear. If that floats your boat, then go for it. You weirdo ;). However, since the basic point of the mod is to add immersion / realism (of a sort), I'm just going to assume that anyone using it is unlikely to feel that particular urge, and I'm not going to treat it as a problem.
If anyone is interested, I'd like to expand this mod. Things I'm considering:
- a way to tag underwear sets so that they are applied together
- a way to tag underwear to be used for a particular race, class, or wealth level
- a way to apply specific underwear to known NPCs, so that their underwear matches their outerwear
- (possibly) a way to use this mod when interacting with followers (whilst they are still alive!), in order to automatically outfit them with underwear
Use a mod manager. You know it makes sense.
The source for this mod can be found on github.
Does this work with CBBE/UNP/SomeOtherBody?
Yes, it should work with all of them
Does this work with my favourite underwear?
Yes, it should work with all underwear
I've installed it, why is nothing happening?
The mod itself doesn't contain any underwear, so you also need to install some mods that add them. Then you need to configure Smalls to use the underwear from the other mod. If this is all too complicated, you might want to try Equippable Underwear for NPCs, which works in a similar way, but comes with some underwear included.
I came up with this mod (and the "Just-In-Time Underwear" approach, after getting into a mess with Equipable Underwear For Everyone.
I later discovered Underpants, which works the same way. I wasn't sure whether it was ported to SE yet, and in any case I wanted to learn how to mod, so I decided to make my own. Whilst I didn't copy any of the Underpants code, taking a look at how it worked was invaluable. So props to periselene for making the source available.
Some of the changes in Version 2 were inspired by Equippable Underwear for NPCs. The approach of using SPID is better than the way I was doing things before. Again, thanks to wSkeever for including the script source in that mod.
Thanks also to CBBE, Tempered Skins For Males, SOS, etc, for making this mod necessary in the first place.