Head and body difference is an annoying bug that can break your immersion in Skyrim. So let’s see how to fix the Skyrim head different color than body in this article!
Head and Body mismatch glitch, or when NPC’s head has a different skin texture color than the body often happens with heavily modded games. But sometimes, even in the base game of Skyrim (vanilla game), you can notice your NPC females have a different neck color seam or head color from their torso despite originally having the same color/tone textures.
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What Caused Skyrim Head Different Color Than Body to Happen?
In Skyrim, the Player’s and Npc’s faces use a “detail map” texture to render face complexion like freckles, and wrinkles,…. It only applies to the face and head. So different mods can overwrite different parts of body color texture, causing this. In vanilla Skyrim, some modders theorize that this happens because of the system of DDS compression/decompression Bethesda used, particularly in the DXT1 method.
How to Fix Skyrim Head Different Color Than Body
#1 Remove The Mods That Caused This
The most popular source of problem for this bug is 2 or more texture mods/ body mods clashing and resulting in conflict. To find the exact mod that caused the problem, try disabling it one by one instead of all at once.
After figuring out the problem, you should disable the mod. If you still want to keep both mods, try to change the Installation order.
To safely disable and remove mods, it is recommended to use Mod Organizer. Or the leftover files would plague the save files and lock the appearance change for the rest of the playthrough.
Also, you should use LOOT – The Load Order Optimisation Tool. LOOT will check any load orders errors and conflicts (incompatibilities and missing requirements) and notify you of bugs and glitches like this.
#2 Use Creation Kit
The brown/dark/gray face bug is also a prevalent problem. And you can tell if the heads are dark. NPCs get this bug when the facegen data is severely changed. NPCs may have been altered by one or more of the mods without exporting the resulting face data, causing them to turn brown.
The character tint masks must be generated again if a new NPC is established or the face of an existing one is changed. The skin tone of the actor with the new face will be darker or grayer on the head and face than it is on the rest of the body. Between the two skin tones, there will be a distinct neck seam line.
The usual solution is to manually export all of the facegen data again. To do this, load everything into the Creation Kit, choose the offending NPC(s), press CTRL + F4, and then wait for the export to complete. Then, put the exported meshes and textures into your data folder/Mod Organizer.
#3 Check Lighting Problems
A less popular reason for this problem is the lighting. Try disabling ENBs mods if you have one to see if this is the case.
Conclusion
This bug often happens because too many downloaded mods with conflicting data try to change the base game at the same time. So to prevent this, having a good grasp of load order, knowing what each mod does, and utilizing LOOT and Mod Organizer is very important. Hopefully, you can fix Skyrim head different color than body in no time!