Oblivion

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migck

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miguick

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About this mod

Adds arrow and staff enchanting, scroll scribing, magic item renaming, and uses Fundament to keep it all under control like you've never seen before!
Also adds an Enchanting skill, right in your character stats menu. Such is the power of MenuQue.

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[size=7]Fundament Enchanting Addons[/size]


(Not as FEA as it sounds!)


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Requirements:
  • OBSE 21+
  • Fundament
  • AddActorValues
  • MenuQue, version 16 or higher!
  • After running the game or CS with MenuQue for the first time, you'll find a MenuQue.ini in the Data/OBSE/Plugins/ folder. Make sure the X-Skills functionality is enabled in it (it is by default)
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Description
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This little plugin adds some features you might have missed regarding enchanting. Specifically, it adds:

- An ACTUAL ENCHANTING SKILL! Since MenuQue 11, adding new skills to the game becomes a possibility. This requires you to have AddActorValues and MenuQue installed, and X-Skills functionality enabled in MenuQue.ini
You'll find an actual Enchanting skill in your character tab, whose behavior is completely controlled from this mod's ini file. You can customize anything about it, including of course what it affects and the experience gained from different actions.
At a basic level, Enchanting can affect the following:
  • Amount of charge restored by soulgems, and base charge of newly self-enchanted weapons.
  • Max charge cost of newly self-enchanted weapons.
  • Constant effect factors of all magic effects, for newly self-enchanted apparel.
  • Bonus to effects in scribed scrolls.
There are enough customization options for all these to provide interesting features, so for example you can set a skill threshold under which you'll suffer a penalty instead of a bonus to any of the above, and control how much benefit each point of Enchanting provides to each feature separately.
Experience in enchanting comes from pretty much any action that uses magical charge. Enchanting and disenchanting items, using them, and recharging them, all can give experience which you can customize extensively.
Enchanting has four perks you can customize, including the mastery level they come into effect. They affect charge consumed by magic weapons, cost of CE enchantments, and even allow weapons to recharge on their own or reenchant apparel with additional effects.
And lets not forget trainers and skill books! The file MigFEA - Custom Trainers.ini allows you to define your own trainers and skill books for the enchanting skill, even the level to which the trainer can train you. By default, Delmar and Ungarion are provided as trainers, and a few books which taught Enchant in Morrowind are provided as skill books.

- Staff enchanting: while you could enchant staves in vanilla, the result was a staff that only fired on touch range. This mod will fix the enchantment on any staff you enchant yourself so that it fires at target. It also adds some unenchanted staves to the staff loot lists, and you can even install some very fine staves with models from Armamentarium, which you can enchant yourself. The new staves are:
  • The three vanilla staff models (wood with a purple, green or yellow ribbon)
  • Wooden staff, similar to the one from Morowind
  • Iron staff
  • Dwarven staff
  • Elven staff
  • Glass 'spider' staff
  • Daedric staff
Their quality is tied to the level in which they start to appear, with wood staves appearing at level 1 and onwards and daedric staves at level 20. Since they are unenchanted, they will be useless until you enchant them.
All of this is enabled with the enchantStaves ini setting. Setting this to numbers greater than 1 will act as a multiplier for the likelihood of these staves to be rolled in the leveled lists.

- Magic item renaming and and disenchanting: While in the inventory menu, put any weapon, armor, clothing or self-made potion item under your cursor and hit the key defined in the RenameKey ini setting (default F). Depending on the item's characteristics (whether its enchanted or not, and whether you have created it or it is from the game), you will have the option to rename it or disenchant it.
Renaming is available for any weapon, armor, clothing or potion that you have enchanted or disenchanted yourself. Disenchanting is vailable for weapons, armor and clothes, whether they are created by you or not. You will have to pay the price difference between the enchanted and unenchanted item times the disenchantUseGold ini setting. Set to 0 to disenchant for free, set to < 0 to receive the difference instead.
A new option, disenchantSaveToSigil, allows you to save the enchantment from the item you disenchant to a sigil stone, so that you can place it somewhere else. For weapons, the sigil stone will have as many uses as the weapon you disenchant, excess charge trimmed.
By default, disenchating is not available for quest or scripted items, but this can be enabled in the ini.

- Skyrim style enchanting learning: this ties to the disenchanting feature, making it so only effects from items you have disenchanted will be available at the enchanting altar. Thus you will not be bound to effects in your spellbook, but instead will build a library of effects as you disenchant items. Note that effects without the flag making them available for enchanting will not be made available by this feature.
This feature is controlled by the skyrimEnchantLearn ini setting. Even if this feature isn't enabled, any item you disenchant will have its effects added to the enchanting library behind the scenes, so that if you enable it later on any effects you had harvested will be available.

- Arrow enchanting: Just what it says on the tin, enchant arrows (and bolts)! The number of uses from the enchantment or sigil stone, times a multiplier you can set yourself in the ini named enchantArrows (default and suggested is 1.0) is the maximum number of arrows you will enchant, rounding down.

- Instant weapon enchantment effects: if you press the right mouse button while in the enchanting menu, a message will appear informing you of the following: any enchantment effect you have added with 1 second duration will be set to 0 when the enchantment is done, making them instant effects like the ones you can find on the stock enchanted weapons.

- Scroll scribing: this feature has many optional restrictions placed onto it, not only to make it less overpowered, but more immersive as well.
Basically, in your spells menu, while you have a spell under your cursor, hit the RenameKey (again default F), and if the restrictions allow you, and you have at least one piece of regular blank parchment, the scribing begins. A text prompt will appear with the name of the spell and the name of the scroll which will result, and which you can edit. After hitting 'Scribe', another prompt appears informing you of the number of parchment pieces, and optionally inkwell uses, you have left. You can then enter the number of scrolls you want to scribe, allowing you to scribe them in batches. Hit scribe again and voila, that number of parchment pieces is removed and you get that number of scrolls with your spell in them.
They'll have the same cost as the spell they come from, but this can be altered in the barter and container menus to limit the profit you can get from selling them through the scrollCostMult setting, since otherwise you'd be pretty much getting money for nothing.
At the very least, you'll always need a piece of parchment per scroll you scribe, and you can only scribe regular spells (no powers, etc). The restrictions you can enable/disable on scribing are, along with the ini setting:
  • Quill and ink (maxInkwell): an interesting restriction, makes you need one quill and use inkwells for scribing. The maxInkwell number, default 5, is the number of uses each inkwell has before it dries out and is tossed away. The needed quill is mostly for consistency, it isn't used up.
  • Sitting (scribeNeedSitting): you have to be sitting somewhere to scribe.
  • Special spells (scribeAllowSpecial): spells which are either immune to absorb/reflect, explode with no target, have area effect that ignores line of sight, or have script effects that always apply, are by default off-limits to scribing, mainly because enchantments can't replicate those properties.
  • Skill mastery (scribeNeedMastery): you need to be able to cast the spell before scribing it
  • Magicka cost (scribeNeedMagicka): same as above, you need to have at least as much magicka as the cost of the spell.

In the file MigFEA - Custom Scribe Items.ini you can define items that will be used by this mod as quills, inkwells or parchment pieces. They are stored in arrays, and used up in the order you have added them in the ini. By default I provide the vanilla quill, inkwell and blank parchment items set for this purpose, but you can define any book item as parchment, and any misc item as a quill or inkwell, from any mod.
Your Enchanting skill level can provide bonuses to scroll scribing, making the effects in them have greater magnitude or duration that the spells they come from. This effect is customizable as always.

Remember you can customize everything in the ini!

- Localization: Under Data/Menus/Strings you'll find the file MigFEA_strings.xml, which contains the strings I used all across scripts and objects, and which you can translate or edit as you see fit. I've even provided a Spanish translation in the '99' folder.


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It gets better and better...
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"But wait! I already know of countless other mods which add the same things and more!!!"
That is where Fundament comes into play...

Fundament, specifically the part of it named Formulator, is ripe with scripting resources that allow modders to control the usage that their scripts make of cloned forms. A cloned form is, as you might guess, a copy of a 'form', which is a thing, any kind of thing defined by its own formID hexadecimal code, present in your game. When the clone is created, the result has a new formID that is not stored in your mod files, but in the very savegame itself, and therefore it is almost impossible to delete and quite difficult to manipulate for long term plans unless advanced scripting storage functions are used... like the ones Fundament provides.

The most immediate examples of cloned forms are the items you enchant yourself, the spells you make and the potions you brew. All of them are cloned forms, in the case of enchanted items both the item itself and its enchantment are a cloned form each. These cloned forms result from normal gameplay and as such are nothing to worry about.
However, many mods, this included, create clones directly through their scripts to provide their features. In the case of arrows, for example, what you see is not exactly your arrows since it is not possible to make actual "arrow" type items appear in the enchanting menu. What you see is a dummy weapon with your arrows' stats and looks, but it is a "weapon" type item. And how was it created? Exactly, by cloning a dummy weapon, make it look like your arrows, and adding it to your inventory each time you are in the enchanting menu. And after you enchant it, the resulting item is again cloned into the actual arrows with the enchantment you have made.

Other mods would have to clone each of the arrows to be shown in the enchanting menu every time you enter it, and the resulting enchanted arrows would never stack because they will always be different arrow forms with different enchantment forms each time, even if the arrows and enchantments are otherwise identical. And the other clones made in the process would be left unused and unregistered after all this, becoming what is known as "bloat", useless data in your savegame difficult to remove and which can increase its size.

Fundament can improve this process:
- Each type of arrow in your inventory is registered in Fundament after being cloned the first time you enter the enchanting menu with them. Following visits to the enchanting menu with them will use this clone instead of making a new one, as long as the base arrows themselves don't change.
- The arrows which result from enchanting, and their enchantment, are also registered in Fundament. If they are identical to arrows you had previously enchanted, they will be set to that type. The result is that arrows from different enchanting sessions can stack if they are identical to the ones you enchanted previously (same name, model, icon, stats, and enchantment).
For example, if you enchant 80 elven arrows with a shock damage 10 pts for 2 sec enchantment, name them 'Surprise', then enchant another 15 elven arrows with the same shock enchantment and also name them 'Surprise', they will stack with the other 80 arrows and you will net 95 'Surprise' arrows. This sounds extremely obvious, but it is extremely complicated to achieve without Fundament!

This also applies to scribing scrolls. The scrolls you create and their enchantments are cloned, but Fundament can control the process so that scrolls from the same spell will always stack.
The important thing is to always try to name them the same, by default the naming prompt will offer you the name of the spell and that should be fine. For that reason, renaming is not available for scrolls nor arrows, because Fundament would lose its registry keys for them.

And of course, this is so far the only enchanting overhaul with an actual enchanting skill you can admire in your stats sheet, thanks to X-Skills.

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Installation
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This mod is packaged in BAIN-ready format. If you don't want or can't use BAIN, then drop the contents from the '00 Core' folder, and optionally from the '01 Optional Armamentarium staffs' into your data folder. Enable MigFEA.esp, tweak the various MigFEA.ini files and MigFEA_strings.xml to your liking, and you're good to go.
The contents of the '00 Core' are mandatory for the mod to run. If you install the contents from the '01 Optional Armamentarium staffs' folder, or have Armamentarium intalled, and enable staff enchanting in the ini, you will also have a chance of finding new unenchanted staves with Armamentarium models in the staff loot lists. This folder is therefore unnecessary if you already have Armamentarium installed.
No fancy uninstall instructions, just delete the files and you're good. You'll keep any enchanted items you made with this mod, since those are stored in the savegame, but your Enchanting skill will of course disappear.

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Technical
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Other mods that add similar features such as Advanced Magecraft should be compatible as long as you disable the features that this mod also includes. For example, disable Advanced Magecraft's arrow enchanting feature if you are going to be using the one from this mod, and ensure my renaming key is not the same than the AM menu key (they aren't by default), etc... actually other than that everything should be fine.
The icons for the Enchanting skill... suck, because I suck at GIMP. If you have any ideas to improve them, be my guest, but I'm not going to learn to draw any time soon. I also can't figure how to make them display correctly in texture size settings other than large.
Unfortunately, the new Enchanting skill is not selectable to be leveled up in the ObXP level up menu. It is still perfectly usable together with that mod, but Enchanting will be trained the regular way, through use instead of through level up points.

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Credits
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Tejon. This mod would simply not exist without him. Not only his Fundament tool makes the concepts here 100% better, he also guided me into how to correctly use it.
Kyoma, for MenuQue and X-Skills expanding my ways of having fun, and for the Spell Renaming mod teaching me how to manipulate the OBSE text input without making a mess.
JRoush, for AddActorValues.
Trollf, CorePC and Team Arma for the Armamentarium staves included. I hope you like my little choice of their staves.
Dubiousness for the mod name suggestion. This mod may be FEA, but give her a chance and you won't regret it.
Shademe for the CS Extender, which makes modding an actually enjoyable process.
Bethesda Softworks, for the many games within a game that TES offer.
The OBSE team, for taking the time to apply the unlimited power of advanced computer science to a videogame.
You for downloading the mod

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Boring part
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If you can make sense of the scripts in the mod, feel free to do whatever floats your boat with them. If not... I don't really care either way =