Category Archives: TES: Skyrim

Game dev, Games, TES: Skyrim

Alchemy Overdose Mod

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So, one of my first characters in the Tamriel world was an Alchemist. It was a custom class, one that focused on the Alchemy skill with a side helping of magicka and some minor skills in One-Handed.

To me, the Skyrim perk tree for Alchemy seemed weak. So I started up a little mod that tweaked the heck out of the Alchemy skills to increase the potency of created potions. Most mods out there that tweak magicka didn’t really seem to touch the Alchemy skill.

I won’t lie and pretend I had balance in mind as so many perk tweaking mods do (and then proceed to make life a living hell if you actually rely on those skills coughstealthrebalancedcough), especially for high levels in the skill. It just seems to me that if you’re a Master Alchemist (or Master Anything really) you should be able to make legendary items. Since it’s a perk tree, alchemy will be pretty much the same if you don’t invest in the perks, but the idea behind it is to make the potions more useful than 2 seconds of freaking invisibility, for example, especially when starting out with Alchemy perks, and by the end, being able to do amazing things with the ingredients. I got really tired of having a billion useless potions in my inventory that weren’t worth selling.

To that end, I restructured some of the default perks, combining the perks dealing with beneficial potions into one set of perks, and creating a new perk with the leftover.

Instead of making the healing potions super strong and the other beneficial potions somewhat strong, it makes everything a little bit stronger in general, but the overall boost to healing potions is slightly less than what it is in default. I thought it was a good sacrifice to make. Poisons get an extra boost as well.

The leftover perk went into a boost for skill-based potions, so your smithing potion should work just a little bit better.

I also added some high level perks to increase ingredient gathering, my thinking is that an experienced alchemist would know how to use more parts of the plant, and unless my memory is totally failing me, that had been one of the added effects of gaining Alchemy skill in Oblivion.

From Oblivion, I really missed the ability to create two potions at once, so I added that back into Skyrim, too, placing it at the higher end of the skill tree.

A truly exceptional Master Alchemist should be able to do these things, I’m reasoning out. You hear the stories of what Alchemists and Enchanters can do in lore, but you never get to do them yourself. Likewise, I feel if your enchanting skill is at 100 and you’ve got all the perks you should be able to reconstruct the Staff of Chaos.

The mod itself is in an alpha stage, as I am not quite sure if I tweaked the skill potions properly, but testing it out should prove interesting.

Game dev, Games, TES: Skyrim

My Mod Ideas

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I felt like just writing down some mod ideas I have for Skyrim. Mostly just small ones, ones I may or may not get around to. I sort of believe that anything one attempts to achieve, one should have a good plan, after all. I’ve had a lot of experience struggling with ill planned attempts at… well, pretty much everything. I’m definitely the sort of person to charge ahead and give it a whack sometimes just to see what happens. I think I wrote some nonsense like that a month ago….

  1. A Mountain Climbing Mod. Skyrim’s full of mountains. More so than Oblivion. I’m surprised they didn’t implement some sort of feature like this already.
  2. A small farm mod, a place you can grow ingredients or food. (Something I actually am working on.)
  3. An Altmer follower. I think there isn’t any in the base game, and the only Altmer you can marry is Taarie….
  4. A quest mod about the Thalmor. They’re the bad guys in Skyrim, but I prefer having broader choices than Bethesda likes to give us. I think of a mod I used to play for Oblivion, that allowed you to join the Mythic Dawn for real…
  5. A prequel and sequel set of mods for Oblivion and Skyrim.
  6. A tropical island escape. There’s already a few out there, but I kind of want to do my own thing with one. Skyrim’s so cold despite being next to the ocean…
  7. Going to Akavir. I don’t think anyone’s ever done that, but it’d be amazing!
  8. Overhauling the alchemy system to make it better.

Whether or not I can find the time to do all of those is another thing, but I like dreaming. It’s the first step in creating.

 

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

How to Create a Crafting Recipe

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Crafting recipes are an important part of an armor mod, or useful tools for other types. Here’s a quick how-to on how to create one. Note that tempering items will be covered in another tutorial.

The basic steps, before we go into detail.

  1. Create recipe
  2. Decide what it produces
  3. Decide materials it requires
  4. Choose to make the recipe disappear when you don’t have the materials.
  5. Save.

 

Creating your recipe

 

  • Create your recipe: duplicate an existing one or create one from scratch.Before you can do anything, you first must create a new recipe. You can find recipes in the Object Window > Constructable Object.
    Image1
    You can find all crafting recipes and tempering recipes under this section. Tempering is a little bit different, so we want the recipes. I find it easiest looking for a recipe that’s fairly close to what my finished recipe will be. For instance, if I wanted to have an item that required five iron ingot and be workable from forges, I’d probably choose one of the iron armor or weapon items.

Image2

  • Give your new recipe a unique identifier, something like RecipeNameOfModItem.
    Personally, I usually go by the default naming scheme, especially if I’m doing a big crafting project, but ifs up to you if you want your recipes to display all together or with similar times.Image5
  • Choose your required items.
    Image6
    The required item list is where all the items you need to craft the recipe is located. You can add a new requirement by right-clicking in the Required Item List and selecting New. Highlight the new addition. To change the default item, use the drop down menu to the right and find the item you want. Change the number required just below.
  • Change the created object.
  • Image8
    You can also change the number of items created just below. It’s fairly straightforward.
  • If you want this recipe to be creatable from another option, like the alchemy table, change the workbench keyword.
    Image9

 

Making a recipe appear only when you have the right materials

Next, consider adding conditions to the recipe that hide it in the crafting menu until you have the items required for making it. This reduces clutter in the crafting menu, especially since so many crafting mods don’t do this, resulting in very cluttered crafting categories. If this is an option you wish to implement, consider adding an in-game book listing all of the recipes that are available in your mod for easier discovery and use. 
Image10

  • Look below where it says “Match conditions” and right-click, add new.
  • Change the condition function to GetItemCount
  • Click the button where it says INVALID. That’s the function info. Click it and select one of the required items in the recipe.
    Image13
  • The Comparison menu has a list of “greater than” “less than” “equal to” et ctr items. What you’ll want is the “Equal to or greater than” function.
  • Change the value to the number of items you want in your inventory before the recipe will show up.
    Image14

You can customize this so you can have your recipe show up when you have only one of the required items or only show up until you have all of the required materials and are ready to create it. Add more conditions for each item.

And that’s it! Stay tuned for Tempered items.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

My Random Notes on Skyrim Mesh Editing

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Well, I haven’t had much luck fixing that worldspace of mine with it’s LOD, and I have been doing my homework on it. I still don’t know what did it, but I did manage to get that weird floating cell ala Salvadore Dali to disappear, but I had to restore the ESP file from my back up. ALWAYS a good practice to save your changes in small steps in separate files. The LOD didn’t really work though something shows up, and there’s that whole lack of water thing. Anyway, I will write up a post all about that later, for now, here’s a few consolidated notes to remember from my meshing endeavors earlier last month, courtesy of everything I did wrong.

When you’re exporting an armor with parts like the Steel Plate Cuirass that use bones that is not present in the base body mesh, you should add the proper bones and bone weights before exporting. A skirt part that is supposed to move independently of the legs will show up as attached to either one leg or the other or both and will have awkward stretching.

If you’re editing an existing armor, it’s perfectly all right to use the bone weights from the original vanilla mesh if you haven’t changed things significantly. Likewise, it’s all right to use the skeleton from the original mesh as long as you import a clean one. I’ve tested both.

If you edit an existing mesh, don’t forget to check the texture and adjust the UV mapping if it’s needed.

If you’re running the Nifscripts and wind up with the wrong skin partitions or multiple BP_TORSOs, check to make sure that you do not have any overlapping assignments in the faces. If you have two BP_TORSOs and both BP_RIGHTARM and BP_LEFTLEG and the latter both have the correct assignments, and the BP_TORSO is split between the two, it’s fine. Just rename both BP_TORSOs to the correct Skyrim body value. Alternatively, try fixing the Nifscript to allow 22 bones instead of 18.

For non-armor meshes: If you get an error on importing into Blender, open up your NifSkope again and delete the value Blender reports as incompatible. You may have to re-add that value when you export.

While trying to import an arrow mesh into Blender, I discovered it wouldn’t import another property not mentioned in many tutorials: BSEffectShaderProperty.

Games, TES: Skyrim, Tutorial

World Spaces and Height Maps

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So the first thing to do when starting a new mod with new locations and world spaces is to start creating those new locations. At least, that is what I’ve gathered so far in my research. For a decent mod, you’ll of course want to have a proper navmesh, and the only way to do that is to have an ESM file containing your spaces. It’s easier to create the basics of what you need and navmesh it, convert it to ESM, and then clutter and create your scripted scenes in an esp file companion.

So that’s what I’ve started with. For my mod, I’m creating a new world space. Two, actually, and both are islands.

The quickest and easiest method for terrain generation of any sort is to create a “height map.” If you’ve been to school, you probably know what one is. In the odd occurrence where you haven’t, a height map is an image of an area or locale with gradients in hue or shade depicting whether something is higher or lower in relation to other spots on the map.

To create and convert a height map into a form you can use in Skyirm, I highly recommend the tutorial from the good people at Hoddminir. It’s what I’ve been using to generate the height map for my island world. A long time ago, I used to create world spaces for Oblivion using a height map. This is actually a lot more easy.

You may have to fiddle around with the settings to get exactly what you want, and I had difficulty when the tutorial spoke of adjusting the height map for import into TESAnnwyn. I created several versions of my height map until I came out with something I was satisfied with. My advice, when lowering the brightness on your TIF file, is to take the eyedropper tool and click on the lightest part of your map, and then adjust the brightness until it falls within the acceptable range that Skyrim can handle. It will tell you in the color panel what gray % your highest area will be. Be warned, however, that at 76% it will generate as the highest possible mountain and if you don’t have a smooth enough gradient, it WILL create rips in the space-time continuum, as below:

hilarious

If you have a small island, like mine, what I would do (and actually had to, with this height map) was reduce the contrast until the landmass fell between 92% at the highest and 97% just before water level. It created a pretty good world.

bviere

Imagf1

 

I tried it with 95% to 98% and got a much smaller island.

smallerisland

Helpful Tip: If you preview your new world space in the Creation Kit, as I did, you may notice that it will only render a few amount of cells at a time. Provided that you aren’t running anything else, and that your world space is barren like the ones above, you can click File> Preferences > Misc Tab and change the “Grids to Load” from 5 to any number between that and 20. You may want to stick with 11 or 13 if your computer is lower end, but I have had success using 20 grids before. Don’t use this on larger, populated world spaces like Tamriel unless you’re absolutely sure you want to crash.

Now, LOD generation is provng to be much more difficult. My first attempt at setting up for LOD via the first method described in the tutorial was… interesting. I loaded it up in Skyrim, and coc’d my way into the world space, and found myself surrounded by water on all sides.

Oops.

Apparently, by following the tutorial, it somehow raised the water level… to… some really… really… epic depths. I had to toggle god mode on, take the water walking boots off, and swim down for three minutes straight before I hit the top of the mountain on my island. For a while I thought there wasn’t going to be a bottom.

It turns out I had forgotten to add the – before 14000.0000 for the default water height and LOD water height. I adjusted that to the right value.

TESV 2013-05-31 23-31-24-39

 

Flipping eggs.

Oh well, at least I’m ready for the next step: Creating LOD.

Using the CK, I loaded up the esp file and went to World> World Lod and started generating. Of course, it has crashed at least once and I am wondering if it plans on crashing again. Either way, this process is taking far too long for my taste. I think, for future world spaces I may use, I’ll probably populate it before generating the LOD.

bizzareworld

 

What the ever loving….

….

 

Okay, yeah, that looks like a Salvadore Dali.

I have no idea how this happened.

map

Well, at least the map is working. Sort of.

Back to the drawing board.