The RNAM record being set to a vanilla race obviates any need to change armor, weapon, and other records to account for the new race. This is perhaps the most common oversight in race modding. It is not actually practical to do anything else but set the RNAM to a vanilla race with the same general body/head shape and gear-using capabilities, because there are thousands of armor and clothing mods and you won't be able to add your custom race to all of them, item by item. Even doing it for vanilla gear only would be incredibly tedious and ultimately pointless. This sort of thing is one reason that custom playable new races for Skyrim are markedly less common for than for Oblivion and Morrowind, which had fewer complications of this sort. It's simply not immediately obvious to a new modder what to do to make a new race work properly, especially once third-party gear mods are involved. Fortunately, the RNAM is another situation where "close enough" should work. Most of the vanilla humanoid races are equivalent when it comes to equippability of most gear types. Some exceptions are that various Elven races have specific heads meshes and equip variant headgear meshes (if your new race has a head based on Altmer, don't pick Nord as the RNAM); beast races do as well, and cannot even equip all headgear types at all due to their snouts; and vampire race variants (since Update.esm) will no longer equip crossbows, the weapon specialized for hunting them.
In the decades following Tolkien, they will often be depicted as more technologically minded than other fantasy races, verging on (and sometimes overtaking) Steampunk, but this is in keeping with their engineering and crafting skills both from the classic Fantasy depictions and from actual mythology. Their societies tend strongly toward a Reasonable Authority Figure (usually a warrior king) ruling over a socially conservative but rather egalitarian society of soldiers, miners, and craftsmen. In most settings, dwarves and humans have enough in common to treat each other with respect. They are frequently allies against outside threats.
References to "I" or "me" are because I, Trisscar, the author of this modlist guide, finally got off my ass and went in to add explanations and flesh out the guide, as before it was short and terse due to Discord's character limit. Credit to Felinoel, Chevalier XLIV, and everyone else from Rim of Magic, Madness, LotR, and a few other servers who helped me figure out (and post) this entire mess of a guide, and the intricacies of modding with Rimworld in general, over the course of like.... two and a half years. Ya'll are awesome.
Unless stated otherwise, categories further down override categories further up.
(e.g., If a mod is adding both map gen AND pawns, it goes in Races [races being the latter]; if it adds items but it's a faction mod, it goes in items [items being the latter category]; etc.).
CE is a compatibility mess that can more than double your modlist based on patches for mods, and then patches for those patches, alone. It's a cool idea, I just wish it's execution was better. Or at least less destructive. If you want to use it cool, but I highly recommend building the rest of your modlist first and adding CE and it's patches at the end of the process.
Love the look of this . I am having issues getting this to work with Argonians though. It's probably my mod list, but I don't have Immersive Jewelry and the vanilla necklaces show up. When equipped, it shows up on all races except on the Argonians. Not sure this is something that can be helped, but I've been troubleshooting for a while and still haven't figured it out. If anyone knows why I might be having this problem any help would be appreciated. Been looking for something like this, thanks @ Don
Found the solution. It looks like the Argonian race wasn't included in the ARMA Records under additional races in the ESP. If you're having issues with this, It's a quick fix with SSEEdit. Just apply the below script to the mod and save the ESP.
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