SKSE plugin that deforms the game's real landscape geometry in The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition — walk through snow, sand or mud and leave genuine 3D footprints and tracks that persist. Pure geometry deformation: no shader replacement, no geometry injection, fully ENB compatible.

• Real landscape deformation (LANDSCAPE vertices) — true 3D trenches and footprints, not decals
• Player footprints in snow / sand / mud with material-dependent depth (sand & mud leave shallow imprints, no mounds)
• Horses & animals leave independent hoof prints — exact V1 stamping algorithm (v630)
• NPCs, enemies, wolves / horses / bears / foxes, Dwemer machines leave trails as they move
• Corpses leave a shallow imprint pit + surrounding snow mound on death or when grabbed and dropped
• Weapon strikes raise snow mounds; arrows / spell impacts blast craters
• Dropped items carve rolling trails
• Footprints persist across cell borders — continuous world-space deformation field, seamless
• Recalculated normals (dual-pass Gaussian smoothing, kNormScale 3.0) so footprints catch light correctly
• Jump detection — no stamps while airborne; corpse imprints are kept
• Fast startup — first attempt ~5s after load, 1s retry until ready
• Works alongside ENB Series (tested)

• Skyrim Special Edition (SE / AE)
• SKSE64
• Address Library for SKSE Plugins
• Smooth Terrain (high-density terrain meshes — provides the deformation grid)
• DynamicShader Core (DynamicShader.dll — core runtime this plugin connects to)

1. Install all requirements first.
2. Install with Mod Organizer 2 / Vortex, or extract the mod folder into your Data folder.
3. Load order: SKSE64 (automatic) → Address Library → Smooth Terrain → DynamicShader Core → DynamicSnow.

Edit Data\SKSE\Plugins\DynamicSnow.ini (in MO2: right-click the mod → "Open in Explorer"):

[General]
MaxFootprints=100    ; footprints / snow piles kept alive (trail length vs cost)
                     ; 100 - 2000, default 400 (~10s trail)
                     ; lower = shorter trail, steadier FPS
                     ; higher = longer trail, heavier per-stamp rebuild cost

Restart the game to apply. Log: My Games\Skyrim Special Edition\SKSE\DynamicSnow.log

• Works alongside ENB Series (tested)
• Do not enable together with Community Shaders' dynamic snow feature (pick one)

• Fully restore the original V1 (00afed2) horse/animal stamping algorithm: ForEachHighActor (high-priority active actors only), 300-unit distance, global 300 ms throttle shared by all animals, 20-unit gate per foot, single-point ellipse hoof print (rL=6 / rS=4, depth 0.3 → pit −5.4, shape 14)
• ForAllActors keeps only corpse imprints (v590+)
• Riding leaves clean ellipse hoof prints under each hoof

• v620 sand/mud shallow imprints · v621 horse 4-hoof independent stamps · v622 fast startup (~5s) · v623 jump detection + unified hoof depth · v628–v629 V1 algorithm recovery · smoothed geometry & normals (kNormScale 3.0)

1. Run build_ninja.bat (loads VsDevCmd → cmake --preset NINJA → build → auto-deploy).
2. Output: build\NINJA\DynamicSnow.dll (requires DynamicShader Core's DynamicShader.dll at runtime).

Requirements: Visual Studio Build Tools (MSVC x64), CMake ≥ 3.24, Ninja, vcpkg (spdlog preinstalled), a local CommonLibSSE-NG clone.

Licensed under GPL-3.0-or-later WITH Modding Exception AND GPL-3.0 Linking Exception. See LICENSE and EXCEPTIONS.md.

This project is derived from the following open-source projects (all GPL-3.0):

• Skyrim Community Shaders (Copyright (C) Community Shaders contributors) — core codebase; based on the "Snow Deformation feature" pull request by PppPlyr1 (Josef), including kSnowClasses and GetShapeBound helpers
• Smooth Terrain by hakasapl (GPL-3.0) — RE offsets, call-site patching and terrain mesh methods

Build dependencies (MIT, not derived from):

• CommonLibSSE-NG (MIT) — RE/REL framework
• spdlog (MIT) — logging

If you use or modify this code, please keep these attributions and the GPL-3.0 license notice.