Overview

In the past, Skyrim could only read texture slots from diffuse and normal slots for landscape records. This is why parallax would have to be the alpha layer of the diffuse texture for example. This has several drawbacks:

• Breaks alpha blending (Mods like Terrain Parallax Blending Fix are a good workaround for this)
• Performance: since the parallax map had to be the same resolution as the diffuse, which was often very high resolution, it reduced performance. Parallax does not usually have to be so high resolution.
• Segmentation between meshes and terrain. Meshes that are part of terrain, such as dirt cliffs, needed their own parallax map which was different from terrain. This mod now allows the same files to be used across meshes and terrain
  

This mod reads extra slots (for now only height slot) and includes them in the terrain shader for ENB to read.

Terrain Helper is open source and the repository can be found on GitHub - If you can, give me a star there if you decide to endorse here!

Requirements

• LATEST VERSION of ENBSeries that was released on 3/1/2025
• po3's tweaks
• A terrain mod that supports Terrain Helper (though this mod will not break anything if installed as is, without such mod)
  

Mod Authors

Skyrim has a notion of "default landscape texture set". This is usually set in skyrim.ini but you can only set diffuse/normal in the ini file. It is by default set to dirt02.dds and dirt02_n.dds, respectively. Since you probably want extra slots for the default set too, this plugin reads the texture set with the editor ID LandscapeDefault to find them. This is included in TerrainHelper.esp. In your mod you should override this record and ensure TerrainHelper.esp is a master. This ensures that multiple terrain mods won't have duplicate editor IDs if the user has multiple. It will also be another hint for users that this mod is required for those that miss it.

Other than that, all you need to do is override vanilla TXST records that are referenced by LTEX records and this plugin will pick it up, assuming you are using one of the compatible slots. Parallax in the alpha of the diffuse is no longer needed! See ExampleTerrainParallax.esp download for a basic example.

What about complex material terrain?

It is possible for this mod to expose environment mask textures to the terrain shader as well. However, there are other complications with CM in terrain that I know less about. Maybe something similar to it will be available in the future but no promises at this stage.

What about Community Shaders support?

I have implemented Terrain Helper as a feature into community shaders and it has been merged to their codebase. There is a test build on their discord, and I will add the feature to this page once CS updates on Nexus.

Acknowledgements

This plugin would not be possible without the work of the Community Shaders team. Their PBR feature allows for terrain with PBR-relevant slots, so I was able to analyze their code to better understand a method of accomplishing this. The Community Shaders repository can be found here. Give them a star!

Thanks to Boris from ENBSeries for integrating support for these extra slots into ENBSeries.

Thanks to the helpful people on the Community Shaders discord, ENBSeries discord, and the Skyrim RE discord, for helping figure out some concepts needed for this plugin as well as testing.

Lastly thanks to po3 for making po3 tweaks, and everyone in the RE community who works on commonlib, I could not have done any of this without that.