Hi there!

I was trying to tweak something in Wintersun, the goal being to make a patch that lets any race choose any possible worship option when starting the game (within that dialog that opens up shortly after character creation)

I'm having a hard time figuring out where to edit this. I'd imagine it's a matter of finding the right list and adding more records to it... Is this better handled in CK or in XEdit? what am I looking for?

Hey there.
I was revisiting Sinister Seven, the mod that sends killers after the player. I've gone through the bosses a few times in the past. They're terrifying, but make for pretty good moments where you absolutely have to play at 110% to beat them and force you to prepare in advance.

This time however I decided to focus on the other part of the mod - the periodic minions. I enabled them, and made the bosses only spawn much later...

....... and they all one shot me. constantly. I do not understand why this is the case.

they level with the player, have no multipliers and no offsets, and don't have unique perks. Their skills are nothing insane. They don't have particularly good gear.

I have no clue why it is then that I'm walking around in Ebony Plate armor and these guys oneshot me with iron/steel weapons. I have 400 armor rating. I'm at level 10. They have no business doing this much damage.

Am I overlooking something important or something, here??? are these guys flat out busted? I don't have mods that change NPCs much outside of named bosses, or very very specific faction overhauls that are not holistic to enemies as a whole.

like, dude, I'm sorry, I draw the line at invisible enemies with crossbows 50 meters ago that one-shot me while blocking and hitting the shield directly. there's hard and then there's straight up unfun. Is there something to the settings in these mods that I should tweak? I have it set to just -one- assassin every like hour or two, but each time one appears it's like pulling a tooth. these guys are deadlier than my modded bosses. hell, at times they feel harder than the actual Sinister Seven bosses themselves...

Hi there. I am writing tgis post to perhaps get a second (or third) perspective around a mechanic in Albedo Redux, the mod I am working on.

Original Albedo has transmutation. It allows you the player to convert a *lot* of items into a *lot* of hopefully *better* items.

Previous version was too bloated, because it had no dependency on any skills or perks so it had a lot of recipes visible.

The new version is only meant to have two or three teansmutation recipes per item, but they get better as your Alchemy Skill levels up.

So.

My issue is how to make this system not feel toooooo cheaty. It is meant to feel rewarding to level Alchemy fully; giving you access to rare materials more reliable, and as a major convenience for other crafting needs. All these recipes can be accessed via cookpot at specific xp brackets.

Plans so far involve:

- ALCHEMY 40

First transmutation options appear. Firewood-to-iron, and iron can also become steel and silver and corundum.

Mass production of salt, turning wood to charcoal.

Turning quarried stone, malachite, orichalcum and various bottles to glass.

Very basic leatherwork recipes to turn strips back into full leather, and to make linen wraps.

Making ink, paper, and quills economically (useful for many other mods)

*that's it. By Alchemy 40 you get access to useful but basic options.*

- ALCHEMY 60

More efficient iron-to-others transmutation. Can now create gold, moonstone, quicksilver, orichalcum and malachite. Can also create basic gemstones.

Can be used to create various advanced reagents. Glow dust, ectoplasm, wisp wrappings, spriggan sap, and so on. Recipes are not very optimal.

Can make empty soul gems using glass, void salts, and glow dust.

Can make glass from simpler sources.

Can extract various powerful materials from dragonbone and dragonsales, i.e. elemental salts. Other objects, like Dwemer Centurion Cores (dwarven oil), briar hearts (Spriggan sap) etc, also open up.

- ALCHEMY 80

Can now create all ingots up to ebony starting from iron.

Can also create dwarven ingots. Dwarven oil can also be made directly.

Soul gems (except black) can be filled up with ectoplasm. Black soul gems can be made using empty grand soul gems.

Gemstones can now be refined into flawless.

Flawless gemstones can be broken down into some advanced reagents.

Can extract useful reagents from more varied forms of powerful materials such as Heart Stones (fire salts) , Stalhrim (frost salts) and Soul Husks (void salts).

Can also extract ectoplasm from charged soul gems.

- ALCHEMY 100

All transmutation recipes are simplified. Very basic materials - firewood, iron, leather, salt, glass, charcoal, and so on... - can be generated for free, without limits.

Firewood can be directly turned into gold ingots. Can fill Black Soul Gems. Can create Ayleid Varla Stones (rechargable common soulgem, added by rares curios) and Welkynd Stones. Flawless diamonds can be transmuted into some of the strongest custom reagents in the mod. Elemental salts can be interchanged between elements. Human hearts and daedra hearts can be exchanged. Bone meal can be used to make full skeletal parts synthetically, i.e. dragonbone, troll skulls, etcetera, used for some mods or for crafting armors. Lastly, can turn gold ingots directly into a large amount of septims. (Not that you're ever short on money at 100 alchemy, lol... 10 seconds of picking flowers by an alchemy store can net you 5000 gold in vanilla by now, kek)

Just wanted to ask if you see yourselves using such a system if it were to work like this. The rest of the mod is fully implemented and tested, even custom ammo is up and running now.

I just find it amusing that even though I have frequently tried out other overhauls of the College of Winterhold over the years, I keep returning to the Magic College of Winterhold.

I dunno, there's just something cozy about it; it feels actually meant to help mages at the start of their craft. Other overhauls like JK's College, or Obscure, are also amazing. but there's this......... I don't know how to describe it. They don't feel as welcoming, they feel like an archmage's private property where he allows assistants to exist. Even with Obscure's amazing quality-of-life features and JK's expansions for alchemy, I end up just preferring the more grouinded but tasteful way Magical College goes about making the College more enticing.

Mostly I'm just looking for other opinions, so what's your favourite? I am not trying to slander JK's or Obscure's or any other such overhaul. I love all of them.

It is considered illegal to transmute matter into gold.

I wish to challenge this assertion.

Why is it illegal to turn a block of wood, or a brick, or a plate, into solid gold? Everyone acts like the moment you do you are breaking economy and taxation, yet no one bats an eye if you open an entire business that sells your mixtures. At the end of the day, you are, in both cases, using the alchemic arts to turn mundane materials into wealth. We are expected to be efficient in our craft, but *Tiamat forbid* we optimize a step out of the process.

If you even have the skill required to turn mundane material to gold are you somehow not entitled to the fruits of your efforts? Academics and economists abd (ew) tax collectors alike will say 'Nay!' , yet every sorcerer gets to plunder riches as they please through their ability to chuck fireballs at people they dislike. But domehow *we* are the criminals.

Legalize auric transmutation.

Essentially losting this to ask for your opinion on enabling Alchemy XP gain from using a cookpot. My upcoming Alchemy mod remake uses a cookpot, and I feel that it is unplessantly clunky to be encouraged to level alchemy up to unlock its recipes, but it cannot, itself, help you progress.

Would you consider an alchemy add-on that also changes this to be too much overreach / feature creep?

Albedo was the second mod I made and one I'm very proud of, which has received constant little tweaks over the last year.

That is partly why I think this is necessary at this point - it's starting to feel a little archaic in some ways. I wasn't even using CK when I did it. I think the biggest issue with it right now is that it has several hundred recipes, intended to let you bypass regular alchemy as a skill and instead offering premade concoctions.

In many ways, similar to Alchemy Redone.

I think my mod does a few things beyond the scope of AR. For instance, AR does not include material transmutation, or ways to synthetize rare materials (which can be used for other mods). AR is only focused on the practical side of alchemy as it exists and does that job spectacularly, but I always wanted something that expanded what an alchemist can -actually- do in more ways. in how alchemy can solve other problems that aren't just "this bottle improves or kills something".

But AR actually works alongside alchemy, not paralel to it like mine currently does. Ultimately I think this is a huge flaw of my original design. It has a LOT of recipes that were balanced around not investing points or raising skill levels in alchemy, and this results in a mountain of alternatives that just bloat everything. Most of them not practical.

so I've been thinking about it over the last few days and here's what I'm landing at.

- no perks. no hidden effects. no crafting items. no books you must read in order to unlock recipes. It remains as QOL friendly as it is and avoids the very annoying part of Alchemy Redone where you can't even start it without first grabbing 5 very expensive / hard to make items. hauling these items in AR meant extra weight in the already restrictive Survival Mode for those who play it, and it added a LOT of intermediate items, some op (nitrum flamans goes brrrrrrrt lol) some useless, all of them cluttery. The only "intermediates" I intend to use are potions that can be used elsewhere.

- instead of a main recipe, then a special recipe using Rare Curios, then an alternative recipe, then a synthetic version, then two more expensive alternatives, all to make *the same potion...*

which is one of the biggest problems about Albedo right now...

instead of that you get ONE (maybe two in some cases) recipes for each thing. but that recipe only exists until a specific alchemy level. reaching that level disables the early recipe and a more cost-efficient one activates. as an inexperienced alchemist your methods are wasteful, but as your skill level increases you find ways to arrive at the same result spending less and less and less materials, and making more and better things out of basic stuff - you stop needing ultra rare things.

- following the better QOL of newer mods I've made, I'd use craft requirements to partition visible recipes and not clutter the menu to infinity. ideally, rather than currently having like 8 different ways of reaching some of the reagents, which options are available would depend on alchemy skill level. transmutation recipes would be enabled or disabled depending on having the requisite material to begin with. etcetera.

This would also involve a major rebalance of the various custom potions and poisons, which after a few hundred hours and dozens of playthroughs have clearly superior and inferior choices and isn't as interesting and balanced as I originally imagined (again... this was my second mod). There'll be more of an incentive, I hope, to use regular alchemy alongside this, but it'll still offer a few cool options for not-dedicated alchemists. I think the sweetspot should be "some QOL and reliable tools for non-alchemists, but a much smoother and more efficient experience for actual pros".

Throwing my hat on the ring over this ongoing discussion, I feel strongly that this perspective comes with a few major flaws.

I am not writing this out of spite, or a desire to diss the developers. I mean to discuss and question, not to antagonize.

That said... when asked if it would be possible to add highly requested features like armor weapon and mech customization, Shams Jorjani responds the following:

> that's something that's requested a lot. it really limits the design space for us so its not something that we'd consider without serious analysis.

I take some issue with this response. How come exactly this limits your design space?... The content you work on and ship in updates is the same. We players just get more value from it.

Developing content involves time and skill and planning. Skill, you have it - you're releasing warbonds. Time, you have it - and delays are acceptable. This isa patient community. Planning, you need to do all the same - to conceive, create, and release said warbonds.

Setting up a system that allows customization means future content just gets shipped with that in mind, and ceases to really be a factor. Look if you will at Primary customization. Set up once, and now each primary we get benefits from the feature by default. Can you imagine Hyena without the option of removing muzzle break and choosing a Short Magazine?

Past that point, you continue to release content as normal. No extra hurdles or cost in dev time. We still get new primaries. Did Sweden explode by adding this feature? Well, given updates keep coming I think everyone is fine.

Instead of selling exosuits, you could sell exosuit arms. Same cost. Same end result. But we get more flexibility from it. You still design the new part of the system (the guns), balance them, model, code, texture them, and ship them. Same work. Same cost. Same ROI. but in a hypothetical world, we the clients can then use what we bought in more ways. More value to us.

You can release a warbond with a new armor passive. People must buy the warbond to access it. Same result. But we being then able to use the new passive on older armors would give it a lot more value to us. You still developed an armor with a passive as part of a 1000SC warbond. But we get so much more from it, and you lose nothing.

This kind of thing just confuses me. Even you guys at AH would stand to gain by making armor passives swappable. Several warbonds are badly held back in player perception by having passives people dislike, but good looking armors... making the passive swappable means possibly more sales from people who otherwise would ignore it over the armors. Look at Siege Breakers for instance. Bad passive. Great aesthetic.

And you could even monetize this and add loose armor sets to the Super Store the same way we had on release. and you wouldn't even need those to have a passive to begin with. because due to being able to put other passives in them, it would be pointless to spend dev time making a new passive. And it's still more value than the 36th Engineering Kit armor. You could start slapping armors in superstore for 400/500SC as basically transmog / skin options and all you'd need to do for them to sell is a cool design because function is swappable.

It's like you folks like leaving mobey on the table, too.

Sometimes it feels like you folks are terrified of big sweeping changes even if you acknowledge change is needed. Look at Warframe, lol, they remade Focus completely some crazy 5 times. And melee. And weapon modding. Etcetera. Massive systemic changes. Because it was needed.

I just dunno what you could mean with 'limits our design space'. All I take from it is 'limits player ability to enjoy more of the things they paid for'. I have every warbond. I use maybe 15 armor sets because the rest are a combination of "looks good. Useless passive" or "practical and useful passive. I look dumb wearing it on this planet."

Customization can add YEARS to a game's life cycle, why are you so against it... it's like you'd rather make players leave.

Heya.

I'd like to tweak a couple things on Aurification. This is the level 80 perk in Alteration that lets you convert a target into 100x their level's worth of septims every 6 hours.

My intention is to remove the cooldown and set cobversion to 10x instead of 100x.

The mod right now encourages a prwtty unhealthy playstyle of freezing 4 dudes, aurif one, move away far enough to wait 6 hours, qnd repeat the process 4 times. You can completely brick the gake's econpmy with this perk... by using it in a boring way that kills game flow. Amd once you know tgis, not doing it feels like deliberately playing suboptimally

Which is why I want it to change.

Any directions are welcome. I suspect? that what I need to tweak involves a papyrus script tied to the perk.

I was playing an illusion mage after a long hiatus and wanted to revisit one of my favorite and silliest combos from a few years back - Pale Shadow + Irresistible Dance, a pretty strong combo that locks enemies into a harmless dance state for several seconds which lets a mirror copy of them kill them one blow at a time.

Very strangely, I'm currently hunting down a few giants and what happens is that when I start playing the flute, the Giant coming to kill me stops - but the giant illusion I conjured up also stops and stands there. At times, the illusion is even aggro'd to me and counts as an enemy.

Any idea why? I don't have any cloak spells or anything that should be negatively affecting the Pale Shadow, and this effect was working against this kind of target not even 5 minutes ago.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/187015

I hope this mod helps you avoid boredom and grind in your future playthroughs. I am happy to release it, now with a grand total of 318 unique items to gear up your adventurers with.

A massive, massive thank you to Enai Siaion, UserMingzi, Sarthes Arai, the Arcane University discord, and a few other friends, for their continuous support in creating what I consider to be my first actually good mod.

I've spent the last 5 days creating a mod that adds roughly 150 craftable items to Skyrim. Implementation is nearly complete - just the recipes missing.

The purpose of Artificium is to provide the player an alternative to enchanting / smithing grind.

These consist of armors, jewels, weapons, that all have 2-effect enchantments placed on them by default. There are set bonuses among the armors and weapons of the same material. The enchantments are not disenchantable / learnable, and not insanely powerful - roughly on par with intermediate loot, except with two effects.

The recipes have no requisites. You do not need smithing perks. This also means you cannot improve them at a sharpener or armor table.

Instead, the crafting costs are quite high for the effect you are getting. Usually, numerous ingots of the related material, on top of a filled grand soul gem, a filled greater soul gem, abd various reagents like elemental salts, heart stones, daedra hearts... per item. Some particularly potent versions, i.e. daedric / dragonbone Artificium items, include filled Black soul gems and precious ingots.

If you had the 10 perks (and hours of grinding) to do something similar the normal way, Artificium is trash. 25% blocking and 25 extra hp isnothing compared to Enchanting 100. Abd you'd only need one grand soyl gem to gey what you want, abd not a shopping list of expensive things.

That's the point. These items are intended to fill a niche between not being a craftsman and only having artifacts as an option.

Mod releasing in the next few days as I fine tune some details, crafting costs, enchantment values, and so on.

Been playing Enairim for 10 years as a mage main, and picked up some wicked tricks over time. Here are some.

Restoration:

you can cast Decompose + Vile Seed (name may be wrong. Early resto spell that lifesteals from afflicted target if your hp isn't full) + boiling blood.

Tons of damage and selfdamage + 2 lifesteal to furtger melt ebemies and not melt yourself.

The strongest combo for restoration I know of combines Finger of Death, Nature's Balance, and Welling Blood. Welling Blood auto-kills a target if they lose over 60% max hp. FOD attempts to instakill the target but if they have more hp than you, you are left at 1% hp. Nature's Balance gets your hp percentage swapped with target.

You can cast Welling Blood on a very strong character and nothing happens. Proceed to cast FoD abd you almost die. Cast Nature's Balance and your 1% hp is exchanged with the target, who is set to 1% hp abd triggers welling blood. One-taps dragons.

Illusion:

Go up a cliff. Cast ghostwalk. Go towards enemy. Cast Shadowbond. Shadowbond cast breaks ghostwalk invisibility and you teleport to where you cast ghostwalk. Sjadowbond makes target and caster invidible and swaps places once invisibikity ends.

Jump off cliff. Eat food. Food breaks invisibility. Tepeport swap and make enemy reappear falling off a mountain and about to receive 30.000 fall damage.

Another trick is the Voodoo Campfire. If facing a dangerous boss, cast Figment of Pain. Stationary Npc that shares damage to target. Cast Wall of Flames under it. cast invisibility. enemy cannot harm you, you cannot harm enemy, but enemy's voodoo ghost is unable to move and sits on a fire pit, passing full damage to its target. Very safe and very fatal.

Another nasty one involves conjuration. Any minion will do. Cast Shared Trauma on target. Cast Shared Trauma on minion. Damage to minion now transfers to first target. From here, be creative! Get them to fight and the target will often kill themselves with self-afflicting power attacks. Fus ro dah the minion off a cliff and give your target a very amusing death.

There are several extremely fun interactions with Irresistible Dance (Ordinator). You can cast Curse of Silence and immediately put your hands down and use Irresistible Dance. This makes an ebemy mage stand around dancing uncontrollably while Curse of Silebce deletes their entire magicka reserves. You can win entire mage duels doing this, and that spell is cheap. You can also combine this with Fear + Soulcrusher to put a pause button on any fight and fully restore magicka very safely (soulcdusher causes Feared enemies to pass 25 magicka to you per second long as you are somewhat close). Of course, Phantoms (like the 1hp novice phantom spell) can also combo great with the Irresistible Dance effect. So does the Nemesis illusion perk effect.

Conjuration:

Cast Raise Undead. During reanimation animation, cast Necroplague (restoration) on corpse. Corpse now causes an enormous amount of DoT damage to anything that approaches it, and if used on a melee undead will actually TRY to get close to the enemy. You can reanimate victims later to repeat the process. Does Expert-Destruction-With-perks-that-improve-spells levels of damage by itself, necroplague is extremely strong due to being so situational.

If using Apocalypse Expanded, this is an extremely strong combo I call Exeduo. wield a Bound Battleaxe and invest in Execute perk. It causes a gigantic mega crit to enemies near death if struck with a forward power attack with battleaxe. Cast Deliver Unto Oblivion on target. DuO gives a Conjuration Duration Multiplier scaling off of negative hp on a corpse. Very few things accessible to a conjuration mage (outside of extreme fall damage) cause this amount of overkill damage. You can get well over 2000% duration from doing this.

ExeDuo affects bound weapon perks, including Void Burn. this combo turbs Bound Bow into a guaranteed certain death sentence to anything you hit, because Void Burn consumes enemy mp and sp, and then burns hp over time and after Exeduo can remain applied for 3 minutes. You can Exeduo a single mage and proceed to clear a dungeon with megafuckingcursed bound arrows that condemn anything you shoot to a very certain, inevitable, and horrific death that also soul traps, silences, and exhausts them the entire time.

Another one involves Rat King + decompose (restoration). Decompose drains around 15hp/ second from a target. per allied npc. rat king freely spawns 3 fast minions at the start of a fight. You can cast Decompose on target and they lose almost 50hp per second from rats getting close. If rats die - necroplague them, of course, and raise them as undead. Absolutely BATSHIT INSANE combo.

Destruction:

Cast Wall of X, making a lasting elemental hazard. Once an enemy is on it: cast Tharn's Prison, which puts target in a cage unable to move. Also known as Tharn's Cookpot.

If also an Alteration mage, get the Aurification Perk. Get the Frost Freeze perk. Aurification offers a oneshot to enemies that are petrified and below 50% hp. Freeze counts as petrify. Frost cloak will automatically freeze enemies near you at low hp, making it easy to activate Aurification. This effect scales off of enemy level and rewards large amounts of gold. Used on bosses you can often get over 3000 septims off of a kill, just by being frosty.

Fear has a brutal co bo with Destruction - an Adept Ice spell does 3x damage to enemies if you hit their backs. you can Fear a target and just shank them for insane damage.

Alteration:

Vancian Focus magic + Ice Shards makes you an unlimited ammo ice gatling that does 300% regular damage and never runs out of magicka. Brrrrrrrrrttttt.

Intuitive Magic + Spark of Demiurge makes for incredibly potent setups. Notably, Runes. Now completely free, you can apply Spark of Demiurge, Dual Casts, and Rune Range perks to gain access to spammable almost instantaneous explosions doing over 400 damage to everything near them.

Int Magic + Destruction Multi-Dualcast Perks is also very strong. You can for ibstance dual cast a firebolt for free 6 times in a row, lose nothing, and teigger Pyromancer Ascension to gain 50% cost reduction and a Firewalltrail. Proceed to spam Fireballs with extra power and reduced cost. Or simply spam icicles endlessly, creating a surprisingly lethal frost hazard where you stand. Ice spells by the time you have this perk also reduce frost resist of enemies so it just hurts like a mfer.

Vancian Magic + Evil Twin lets you endlessly spawn apparition. You will win any fight, it just takes time. With Broad Vancian... you can do this like 80 times a day.

The mod I intend to make has to do with enchanting and crafting and the flaws I see in both. After playing with Ritualcraft for well over a year and realizing that most of the time I enjoy characters that don't spend half their game time smithing or enchanting things, this mod idea came to mind. Rather than try to revolutionize or redo both systems, I thought of what makes them unpleasant / boring / op

• smithing: it gets kinda broken in how much you can improve equipment stats. That said enemies scale their own stats crazy too, so it isn't the end of the world. But i feel that what makes smithing wtrong isn't crafting, it's tempering. It is a huge perk sink as well, and entirely passive.
• enchanting: it ruins exploration because you make better at home. It makes uniques / artifacts feel weak. It is also very grindy and boring to max level. And it can be customized to the point of being more impactful on your character than perks. Two enchantments, all of them very strong in scaling, all of them exactly what you want, in every possible slot, is BROKEN yo.

In vanilla, you have pre-enchanted variants of equipment, usually what you find as loot or buy from vendors. Internally, these are set up as a distinct item that was assigned an enchantment. This enchantment is usually scaled on a tier going from 01 to 06, with 01 being the weakest (i.e. Ring of Minor Magicka (20 points of Magicka) and 06 being the strongest loot variant (Ring of Peerless Magicka (70 points of Magicka)).

When disenchanted, you learn the 01 version of the enchantment. this is the weakest, because it expects the very strong skill+perk multipliers of Enchanting skill to be used in the calculations; even if they're weak, a master enchanter will handily outclass most finds. More unique items are often given a particularly strong enchantment, and tagged as impossible to disenchant to maintain this balance.

so, my mod idea:

• the forge offers a few pre-enchanted versions of every armor and weapon set in the vanilla game.
• this pre-enchanted armor has NO perk / crafting requirements, similar to Ritualcraft.
• it is not disenchantable.
• it comes with unique enchantments meant to give each armor set a theme and each weapon set a specific vibe. Still designing these. Still thinking on the best course of action. There'll be sets very good for survivability, sets that when together make you tanky against mages, sets that provide lifesteal and regeneration in droves, sets that specifically go for damage or a classic playstyle (hello stealth archer)...
• unique enchantments are 2-effect but not that strong. They will be around 03 in strength, but with two effects. For instance, you could find here something in the ballpark of Elven Gauntlets with Fortify Archery 25% and Fortify Stamina 50 points. Is it good? absolutely. trip on a rock after level 20 and you find rings giving you 40% archery, making this probably not very good anymore (but still good when you get it).
• recipes to craft these cost a filled grand soul gem + extra alchemy materials depending on the specific set theme, so they actually cost more to craft than normal emchantments.

it's not too different from Ritualcraft, my first mod, except rather than go for uniques, it has its own as an alternative to crafting progression.

I very badly want to include something a little extra for spellcasters, as they only ever get to use robes, too, and it is very hard to get any meaningful items outside of the College questline unless, again, you spec mega hard into enchanting and put magicka / cost reduction on everything... So I am considering a -few- alternate sets here and there for a more spellsword / nightblade / sorcerer alternative, as well as some hoods, robes, gloves, and boots, and jewelry for all classes. But it is, to me, so jarring that a province with 5000 years of history including ancient snow elves, dwemer, Tongues, a dragon cult, and morrowing refugees, plus nords hailing from Atmora, wouldn't be absolutely plastered with spellcaster gear unless you very very specifically enroll in one college.

You get a grand soul gem and fill it - but that is only a first step. You may need a bunch of elemental salts, or gemstones, or specific alchemy items, or heart stones, to fulfil a specific enchantment's request.
Once you do, you get a good item. on par with the average mortal-made unique (think stuff like Grimsever, Chillrend, etc, stuff someone made rather than a crazy strong divine relic).

You can't improve it because it is enchanted, so you'd need Arcane Blacksmith. And at that point you are investing into smithing, so. typically, unimproved items don't get much better or worse just by their material tier. you're gonna die very fast in Daedric Armor if it isn't tempered and you expect it to help tank giant maces.

The enchantment is good, better than normal one-effect enchantments, but you cannot learn it and have it scale off of enchanting skill. It will be much better than anything you could do without enchanting perks. If you use a mod to disenchant it anyway ... that's on you if the effect breaks balancing. You also can't really choose the effects you get. Early armors have more QOL stuff like carry weight, disease resists, late-game stuff may have magic traits, resists, or help in damage, but you don't get to pick the exact armor you want with the exact effects you'd like, so you may either complete a set (and the sets would be designed with a concise function to them) or you may replace parts of it with loot that gets closer to your needs. And the crafting requirements means you'll have to jump through a few hoops (nothing crazy tho) to get the items. So you certainly explore.

• In exchange
  • you have 0 points in smithing.
  • you have 0 points in enchanting.
• You get access to good enchanted gear that may fulfill a nevessity in your kit, and use one or two you need or treat it as a collector set to complete in your armory. Very interesting usecase for minion mods or dead thralls or followers, letting you mske standardized items without spending two weeks at an enchanter table making set after set after set.
• of course, everything here will be outclassed by playermade things with perks. this has -one- double-effect enchantment at mid strength; a dedicated enchanter can just get two specific enchantments, put them *well past* 06 tier strength, in any combination they want. So. Yeah... you get to have your cake and eat it too, and use this in combination with smithing (to improve these sets) or in combination with Enchanting (to cover gaps in enchantments you still don't know normally).

I would love to make a version using Summermyst, to have variety and a bit more spice in the effects I have available. But for now I'm staying with vanilla enchantments, for compatibility.

https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/87897?tab=description

Having tried out all sorts of mods ranging from respawning fodder followers (Dragon Fodder) to all sorts of summon minion spells on multiple packs, as well as varied Necromancy overhauls, I believe I can point to this specific mod as the one I find most useful.

Practical Necromancy (once known as The Dark Arts) is a close enough comparison; and I believe it offers more depth than Dead And Daedric Guardians. But it is a more specialized mod, with a custom perk tree you can invest extremely heavily. If you very specifically want upgradeable curses and very very deliberate minion effects, it can be superior to D&DG.

Yet I find myself recommending D&DG ahead of it, and that is for a few reasons.

For starters, D&DG covers all forms of minion - PN is exclusively undead, but D&DG enables minions for all sorts of styles and vibes.

Very notably, it lets you conjure daedra; permanent daedra, that can follow you as an assault force or as stationary guardians or patrols.

But even more than that, it lets you create minions that are not even Conjuration based.

You can construct dwemer automatons.

You can create animated mannequins.

Most types of creation have variants that can equip custom items. I have made whole playthroughs centered arpund progressively building better and better suits of armor, enchanted items, synergic enchantments, even minion roles based on builds.

To this you can add commands, including the order to specifically advance independently of you and clear a path, or instantly summon them on top of you (or out of a bad spot). It has basic spells to repair / heal them, and items are not lost upon destruction.

It also has base raids. use creepy mannequins and some superstitious fools may start trying to burn your home down. Call forth hordes of Daedra and the Vigilants of Stendarr will single you out specifically and start sending crusaders at your base of operations. Start being seen with thralls and bound spirits and actual lich hunters will come for you.

This can of course be disabled.

It even has its own form of lichdom, which you can access late-game. You can create (and ride ) undead dragons, dominate the Dragon Priest souls within Phylacteries, and so on. There are plans also for a path around becoming a Vampire Lord, and UserMingzi, the author, is co stantly addressing feedback and pushing new updates.

It has radically changed how I use minions, and has even made me invest in far more defensive spells. some forms of healing work on them, wards can save them from enemy mages, and since they can very much die and are costly to make but also never one of a kind or irreplaceable like a real follower, it leads to a very pleasant dynamic where casualties don't necessarily force a reload save just to bring Lydia back.

If I could endorse this thirteen times over, I would.

...shouldn't be the cause of all the headaches and complaints going on. I think this is dividing us on two distinct sides. One side cries foul that people who don't participate shouldn't get rewarded for not putting in the effort. And they have a point. The other side cries fowl that this promotes FOMO that wasn''t there before and players shouldn't miss out on content over what may sometimes not be their fault. And they have a point.

But to me, it pains me simply that for the first time in over a year we had a real and meaningful improvement to the Galactic War system. We finally returned to having free content on the GW. and somehow this, of all things, is causing us to quabble and fight eachother...

I just think that people should try abd be more civil about all this. There isn't a perfect answer to the system. No one side has a perfect argument in my opinion. I think participation should mean something. Yet I am also not going to suffer if someone else gets something I unlocked, so why be mad about it? Someone else's gain isn't my detriment, so everyone getting it is in the end a net positive.

Being angry at eachother over what i consider a major victory for our community, a situation happening because we finally were heard abd AH acted on feedback, is snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. We should be past this.

Hey there. I am the author of Ritual Craft, a mod designed around the idea of acquiring unique items through crafting, bypassing major quests or RP choices you dislike.

Having acquired Anniversary Edition upgrade now that it was for sale, I think it is time to add support for CC mods, especially since I actually have access to them, and thus can patch.

Errr, got a question I'd like to ask you.

how overpowered, actually, do you think it is to be able to craft ebony armor very early in the game?*

I know. The question sounds.... stupid.

But I got myself to thinking.

Armors are good not so much due to their baseline stats, but due to perk multipliers, skill levels, and smithing improvements. Early on you just do not have those.at level 5, having ebony armor won't make you noticeably harder to kill. You still have very low hp max, you don't have armor perks, you can't improve the armor.

And then there's material costs.

I was thinking of these recipes still being expensive. Just because you have access to them, doesn't mean you realistically can get them. Where in oblivion can you find something like 15 ebony ingots, 4 gold ingots, and 4 quicksilver ingots by level 1? That's more or less what the cost in materials would end up being for unenchanted Spellknight Ebony set.

And then you'd need more stuff on top to enchant it.

CC Alternative armors are basically reskins, or weight class alternatives, to regular armor sets. With no enchantments, they're nothing too special. Glorified transmog. It's the unique enchanted version that is special. So I imagined the best way to tackle this would be to add recipe to craft the unenchanted version, then the enchanted recipe requires that unenchanted version plus several soul gems and other rare materials.

Which means, you'd have to have access to the base armors with no perks.

Maybe I am just overthinking it.

Just taking the chance to praise Dead and Daedric, which from all I tried out seems to be the most versatile and not-intrusive expansion to minions.

Specifically, this mod offers the ability to craft permanent expendable minions through various means, ranging from constructed undead and mummefied corpses and bound ghosts, to pacts with lesser (and greater) daedra through the sacrifice of mortals.

But unlike just about any other minion mod, it is not solely a summon/necromancy addon.

It also adds golems!

Particularly, animated mannequins and statues, like gargoyles.

Fooling around with this, my current build is a very noncombatant breton mortal artisan. I make these weak mannequins, i forge their armors, i craft their weapons, and I use them as somewhat expendable minions! Is it mega powerful? No. But it's such a completely unique take on things compared to "summoner playthrough number 471".

There's even craftable dwemer automatons here.

And this mod functions through a follower system of its own. These ardn't summons. more like minions that you conjure or create with materials rather than magicka. You can actually have a ton of them (but the good ones are very costly to ever be used in numbers) and it fits wuth vastlt different roleplay tastes. This Gepetto dude's entire motivation is throwing animated mannequins at his problems so that local guards don't risk life and limb.

Its just wacky to play a minion-themed character with basically no moral quandaries involved.

I visited Lisbon's Military Museum a couple years ago, and something struck me about it. It follows the evolution of Portugal's military since its barbarian / roman roots, all the way into medieval ages, colonial empire era, and through to the 20th century.

I remember being awestruck by the beauty of the instruments of war there. Yes, they were weapons, and weapons have a brutal, and violent, purpose. But they were still beautiful. Armors of carved steel and gold enameling, swords whose wielders are mentioned in famous poems, some with a name, some with a promise, some nameless, all richly decorated. Even some weapons that belonged to the Royal Family of the portuguese monarchy were on display, more art piece than weapon.

This continues throughout the ages, where war, violent as it was, always kept a certain flair, an attempt at beauty. Then you reach the 20th Century, and come across WW1's exhibits.

"Dolce Et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori" does not begin to describe the contrast. gone were the colors, the vibrant uniforms, the superfluous details, any attempt at reflecting civility. Everything was gray and oily and gross. Every weapon was devoid of a personality compared to the colorful blades and spears you could sometimes recognize through their specific silhouette.

You then reach the Colonial Wars - a series of military campaigns in Africa during our dictatorship years, which happened in the 70's and are mostly regarded as our own version of Vietnam, or Afghanistan; with a smaller impact than those wars, but every bit as hated and traumatic for everyone involved. It was somber.

War looks entertaining when there's centuries and orders of magnitude of technological difference between your life and the war that happened in the 1500's. But everything about that 20th century exhibit just felt painfuly real and bitter.

Some of the weapons on display literally had a known or partly estimated kill count. dots and notches. stamps.

straight up chilling to be near a Vickers that was right there in the trenches of the Battle of Lys, writing obituaries in german blood. Having visited WW1 and WW2 battlefields when I was young, it was chilling to as an adult revisit these old nightmares.

This led me to view the Violence layer in a particularly unique light.

the first level is very strongly themed around Ancient Greece. The architecture, the motifs, the boss being the Bull of Minos. Greece was at war its entire history, even (and especially) within itself, with its city-states forever at odds. Yet in those distant times war was considered honorable; there was a perceived glory to it, as back then, war was only possible to wage through personal sacrifice and skill. There was no denying a victor, because to win you truly had to be both smarter, and better, than your enemy.

It was, in a macabre way, a form of art, even if brutal, and I find the book you find there to have a fascinating quote: "Under the divine cross of the Tree of Life, we pay it tribute through the art of violence. / THE WORLD IS YOUR CANVAS / SO TAKE UP YOUR BRUSH / AND PAINT / THE WORLD / R E D . "

Then you enter the second level, and you timeskip to the Last War's beginning, where violence takes over civilization and breaks it under sheer brutality and fire and metal. The first Guttermen. The first Guttertanks. minefields, the area being bombarded by assault pods, the earth blackened and dead. No more illusions, no more marble, just bombs and death (and far away, the looming Earthmovers that ended humanity) the music, the themes, are a complete inversion of Garden of Forked Paths.

It's pure chaos now. It's not an eye-pleasing level. "War is Hell" comes across pretty damn clearly despite this game being at times so amusingly cartoony.

Level 3 meanwhile actually made me stop for a moment and just take it all in. I visited WW2 cemeteries and war memorials and everything about this level felt as eerie as the fields of tombstones surrounding Normandy. It's a level that feels strongly themed around grief; around the loss of so many lives, and the new enemy introduced seems to also invoke this theme of not letting go of the dead (well, until you punch it really fucking hard and it explodes into a shower of gore, for this is indeed Ultrakill!) It's simply a hauntingly depressing level that I still find beautiful in its own way, and given the timeline of events... I imagine it reflects the sheer loss of life in the Final War. what could be more fitting than a graveyard so impossibly vast that not enough lives even exist still to maintain it?

And of course, Level 4 - CLIMAX is where you fight the Earthmover. Where to even fucking begin with this one?

The Earthmover is a walking extinction event. to my understanding of the canon the Earthmover was essentially the ultimate machine that humanity built (with V1 being more of a counter that was never needed, even if it was actually a more destructive weapon). the culmination of humanity's ingenuity was a horrorshow on stilts powered by the blood of its creators doomed to forever wander the ruins of the world that created it. After their introduction, the next 100 years of the Final War were entirely dominated by them. Earthmovers were the main tool of war for half of the Final War and were so obscenely efficient at their task that humanity almost, a l m o s t, went extinct because of them!

What remained of mankind were the minor settlements atop the Earthmovers where life surely was beyond miserable, and people there were more than likely closer to a fuel source for the immense warmachine, that had to be kept reproducing as livestock than as true residents. The world around it is DEAD. nothing remains. nothing wasn't destroyed. all is dark and silent. humanity all but gone because it became too good at creating machines that kill. No cities, no ruins, nothing. eventually the ashes of the war blocked out the sun which partly powered these Earthmovers, and one by one they died off - they too destroyed by being too good at their job, ending the war after 200 years of unending and unforgiving violence.

Strikes me, at times, that the experience I had in the museum kind of reflects the way war before, during, and after the Final War is portrayed in Ultrakill. Knowing that HELL is itself conscious and seems to want to ride out V1's rampage for as many laughs as it can, It is almost like it is showing to V1 the truth about how violence panned out for humanity: they were so good at it that eventually there was nothing more to kill, not even other people. What will happen to V1 once hell is empty? once Heaven is empty? what if V1 goes to the skies then and cleanses the godly realms to sate his endless hunger the same way he's doing in hell?

And what happens afterwards? V1 will simply die the same way all those Earthmovers died, by running out of power and purpose - aptly put, a War Without Reason... And Hell may as well want V1 to know this, want it to know that despite all his conquests, it is all futile.

...Is V1 basically hell's lolcow?