Skyrim Mod Ideas

[Mael]

I thought it'd be handy to start a thread for mod ideas for Skyrim rather than trying to dig through the main Skyrim thread for them.Thoughts so far:Enchanting table in the Whiterun house -- maybe add a cellar where the alchemy table goes and put them both down there?Improve container selection in Whiterun house -- this is just for my OCD and probably isn't necessary, but seriously, what's with all the unusable crates and stuff that get left in there? Moar chests plx.Enchanting table in the living quarters in the mages' towers. Found one in the other tower.Find and replace Lydia's a "a healing spell" dialog with silence.Add a stable to Winterhold unless there's something that prevents doing so, such as a quest, lore or otherwise. Perhaps even make it a quest where you have to get horses or something.Ready go.

[Arthmoor]

Well if the house in Whiterun is any indication, houses are going to need some love in general. No display cases makes my lizard and his wife sad. Those extra clutter crates should be swapped out for cases or something.

[Dwip]

What's that business with Lydia, exactly?Neither the Whiterun or Solitude houses is of much account, and I'm definitely going to be making a house mod in fairly short order once we get the tools. Whether or not it's going to be it's own thing or the sort of thing I did with 2006-2007 versions of AFK_Weye where it's a placeholder house and then a much larger mod, I'm not sure yet, but Jesus Christ.An mod to the Whiterun house for containers and stuff wouldn't be too hard, but I'd personally rather do my own thing. There should be about 80 Whiterun house mods the day the CK releases anyway.Somebody needs to darken the hell out of like every single dungeon, too.

[Arthmoor]

Someone also needs to darken the nights because I can see just fine as though I were a Khajiit. Seriously, I think the default night brightness would be awesome as Khajiit night vision and/or the night eye effect. NOT the "you don't need torches ever" kind of thing we ended up with. They don't seem to get it since darkness mods are among the first ones out, every time.* Make it possible to use the carriage system when you're too overloaded to run. WTF Bethesda.

[Morena]

Find and replace Lydia's a "a healing spell" dialog with silence.

Oh, God, yes... How many times do I have to tell her I'm not a priest?

[Arthmoor]

I was going to suggest a fletching mod but someone already beat us to it. Although I am personally wary of any ESP that's being created right now since it's not using the proper toolset. FNVEdit is nice, but it's no miracle worker when used improperly.And for the love of God, can we please get smelting added to the smithing skill list? It would have made it a lot easier to be able to get into bothering with the whole thing since all of the second tier and above perks need ridiculously high skill levels to reach them.

[Thomas Kaira]

I already see myself making a number of perk changes. First off, the Lockpick perks would be changed from "makes this level lock easier to pick" to simply "allows you to pick this level lock." You know, make the lockpick skill actually worth investing in.Actually, I would make all of those into two-tier perks (exception of the Novice perk, of course). First rank allows you to pick that grade of lock, second is the vanilla perk effect.I will also be looking into adding back in some of the roleplaying aspects that Bethesda stripped out of the game. One of those ideas is Guardian Stone commitment: when you select your Guardian Stone, that stone is yours permanently and cannot be changed. However, every Standing Stone whose birthsign is a child sign to your Guardian Stone you will be able to receive an extra power from, but only those. Any other Standing Stone whose sign is under a different Guardian will be locked. This will allow you to choose where you want to focus your character and add in that sense of commitment, but not really forcing you down that road as the actual effects of the Guardian Stones will remain unchanged (just a slight bonus in skill progression rate). Essentially, the Guardian Stones will become the "choose your specialization" section of the game. If attributes are possible, those will be returned as well (but with some Fallout influence as I like the SPECIAL system that was used for those games).I have plenty of plans on re-tooling the gameplay....

[Arthmoor]

I have this odd urge to mod a retaking/rebuilding of Helgen.Also, as I was poking about a Dwemer ruin, I thought to myself, "Self, why can't you have a cool robot companion?"

[Dwip]

Funny, I was thinking to myself "You know self, AFK_Helgen has a neat ring to it..." I suspect we're not alone in that feeling, which is why I'll probably go find some spot in the wilderness, but. Was also thinking it would be nice if the _rest_ of Winterhold made an appearance, not that you can do much on the bottom of the ocean.

[Thomas Kaira]

Maybe a quest series to rebuild Winterhold to the way it was before Red Mountain went Apocalyptico?That might be a nice thing to expand on.

[Thomas Kaira]

Well, it looks like UI modding should be pretty easy, since we already have people replacing fonts and adding new stuff to the UI. Looks like there is yet hope for this ungodly terrible interface to be rescued on PC, all that is needed is to be versed in Flash programming and have a program to decompile/recompile SWF format.

[Mael]

After getting used to the interface, I actually prefer it to the Oblivion style. I wish the mouse would work a little better -- sometimes during dialog it doesn't click what it's hovering over.I definitely hope someone comes along and make alchemy easier to level. I mean, I made 50 restore health pots just to see how much it would get me... Like 1.5 points. That's harsh.

[Dwip]

Some notes on stuff:- Lockpicking is pretty hard to level. I never quite hit 75, 213 dungeons into the game. Slightly better xp for fail/success rates might help. Slightly.- Per other thread, most enchantments could probably stand to be cut in half or two thirds. Full enchant skill perk tree is ludicrous.- Want to enchant your helmet? Pretty much it's magic skills or nothing. Annoying.- High level dragons are odd. There's not much reason I shouldn't be running into elder dragons or multiple dragons at high levels, but I only saw one elder dragon ever. The rest were plain old dragons who died easily. I was also essentially immune to their breath at very low levels of elemental resistance.- Loot leveling in stores could really stand to go away. Really, all of a sudden you just so happen to be carrying leet magic gear?- Really, alchemist, I just want to buy some health potions. Y U NO HAVE HEALTH POTIONS- With the exception of Storm Call, most of the damage shouts seemed really lackluster for something that was a really powerful slow recharge power. I was almost always better off doing something else than using Fire Breath.

[Arthmoor]

Found the spot where I'm going to build Arthmoor's Palace and the supporting village. Provided nobody else steals it from me! Now I just need to find a good spot for Keld-Nar. Sure are an awful lot of dungeons packed into the province. Finding space isn't easy.Uh, lockpicking is easy as pie to level. I'm at 66 right now and only level 31. It pays to pick more than just a few random chests in dungeons. A life of crime levels it very quickly.For some odd reason, frost dragons paste me all over the landscape. I don't get why. Maybe I need to find some frost resistant items. I really shouldn't have to rely on high level magic shit when I'm a stealthy assassin type.So.... loot lists. Raise your hand if you think it's gay and lame to find stuff from present day sitting in chests in Dwemer ruins. Or even in long abandoned dungeons. I sense a loot list realism mod forming.

[Dwip]

Oh yeah. We for serious need a dwemer coin mod if nothing else.And yeah, I went village location scouting, and it's super hard. Easier the further north you get, but...Also, raising speech. Somewhat hard? Perhaps.

[Arthmoor]

I've concluded largely that any substantial village mod will need to expand on something that's already there. Unless there's a really good spot out there somewhere beckoning. Thing is, it would beckon to a lot of folks.Raising speech? I dunno, I've got it up to something like 50 points now largely from trading. I have used persuade and intimidate a lot though.

[Dwip]

Either expand or do some pretty significant landscaping. Probably both. River spots are at a premium, as are spots in any reasonable spot around Whiterun. As what I want to do kind of requires a river/lake spot, well. And since it also wants to be the second coming of Raven Rock, argh.I've got a couple ideas, but need to be able to dig into the CK first since they're fairly dependent on what models are available.

[Mael]

Well, you can train lockpicking in the thieves guild at least. I haven't found anyone that teaches speech yet, but I haven't even started questing in most of the cities either.I mean, when you're level 30 and quest rewards are 1250 gold, it's not hard to fund five training hits a level if you have the patience to go hunt down bandits.I'm not sure how the speech leveling system works either. Maybe you could sit at one vendor buying and selling one gold items over and over and that would raise it up the same as buying expensive stuff? Although I don't think there's anything in the game that only costs one gold. Maybe uncooked food somewhere.Also, I have no patience for actually doing these giant mods you guys do, but count me in for playtesting and dialog error finding.

[Dwip]

Pretty sure the mercantile part of speechcraft works like it always did - you get a bump per item sold, not by how much you sell. So yeah, you need to sell individual items individually. Which is fucking stupid, but.I really just want to raise it so I can speech check that one dude in Whiterun. That's it.

[Ysne58]

You also use speechcraft any time you get an opportunity to persuade or intimidate anyone.

I have had it go up right after a conversation where I used persuasion on that gal who admits you to the mages college.

I will be available when you all are ready for testers.

[Mael]

I actually found a speech trainer in one of the khajit caravans. Also, according to some bard I met, there are trainers at the college.

[Thomas Kaira]

A note on the game's new scripting model: with Skyrim and the Creation Engine, Bethesda does not store their scripts in the game data files anymore, instead the CK compiles them into a new PEX format which is then referenced as a resource wherever you want that script to be used.Also, on the sounds, I'm sure everyone is aware of music being in .XWM format now, but the voice files have also changed format to .FUZ (which compresses the sound data and the lip animation data into a single file). This, to me, is actually good news because it means Bethesda was aware of DirectSound3D being a largely dead API, and have moved Skyrim over to xAudio2, which Windows supports. But the bad news is, of course, xAudio2 files will need external tools to decompile them.

[Arthmoor]

So the PEX files are going to be like meshes and textures? Something you need to include with a mod's package? Does this also mean people can write library scripts for others to make use of?Yep, was aware of the XWM thing when I went to try adding more music files and realized they weren't the same format anymore.Hopefully the voice thing won't get in the way of non-voiced mods. I guess Gecko just became useless.

[Thomas Kaira]

Yes, that is correct. And I, for one, am pretty happy with this change because, as you said, this will allow modders to easily provide script package resources now, rather than being forced to implement them into the game in some way. Down side is this will probably increase file sizes, and there fore download times.Scripts are stored in the aptly named Scripts folder if packaged loose (there are no subfolders at all). You can see how Bethesda did things by viewing the Skyrim - Misc.BSA with FOMM.

[Arthmoor]

Would certainly be an odd reason to reinstall FO3 since FOMM won't install without that or NV in place. OBMM won't unpack the BSA, but it will view it. That's roughly as awkward as navigating some of the Skyrim UI menus. I guess this means we'll need to be careful what we name our scripts or risk clashing with someone else's mod.