Introduction

Oblivion Scaling Unclusterfucked is an ambitious project that tries to, as the name suggests, uncluster the mess that is Oblivion's encounter and loot scaling. Put simply, the vanilla game does a horrible job. You start out fighting mud crabs, rats and goblins and by the end of the game you're still fighting mud crabs, but the rats and goblins have mysteriously disappeared to be replaced with Ogres and Trolls. You start out finding iron and steel swords and face bandits with fur and leather armour. You finish by finding countless ebony weapons and face superbandits with daedric armour. This is not on. For starters I'm fairly confident none of these bandits have entered any Oblivion Gates recently to loot them. In fact I'm certain they'd all run away if they saw an Oblivion Gate. So that's where this mod steps in. In the spirit of such mods as Morrowloot and the Skyrim Scaling Stopper this mod has a similar, albeit smaller, scope for making changes.

The Changes:

One (Daedric) Sword To Rule Them All:

This mod took one look at the levelled lists for weapons and decided to throw them out the window. Which I then had to pay for the repairing of it. But once that was done I argued "no, levelled lists still have a place, just not the ones Bethesda came up with." So I went outside, picked up all the levelled lists off the ground and put them back into the game. But this time they were different. The new levelled lists do not scale past silver weapons with only a few rare exceptions for some specific dungeons. Which dungeons? You'll have just to find that out for yourself. 'But hang, oh so brilliant mod-maker, how will I acquire my late-game god weapons of Ebony and Daedric? What about those precious Orichalcum-made Orc weapons? Didn't you even leave me some Elven goodies?' Well let me answer those questions for you. I only made minor changes to the inventory lists for shop owners, so once your character levels up some you can still buy items up to Orcish quality. What you can't buy, however, is anything Dwarven or Ebony or Daedric. So now you might be asking 'But good sir, if you have removed those items from levelled lists and they cannot be purchased, how am I to acquire this loot?' Fear not for I have thought of that as well. Dwarven, Daedric and Ebony weapons have been hand-placed in specific parts of the game world and cannot be found anywhere else. Why? Well for Dwarven it should be obvious: there are no Dwarven ruins in Cyrodiil, so it is beyond unlikely to encounter random Bandits or foes running wielding these weapons. It's just not cricket. The same goes for Ebony and Daedric. Well..maybe not Ebony as Bethesda were kind enough to hand place a set of Ebony gear in the game world for me.


This Had Better Be Worth My Time...

Have you ever completed a quest, only to be disappointed by the reward? Have you ever perused your inventory, only to realise all those quest goodies were now completely useless? Have you ever questioned why that nasty necromancer decided to leave you a magical item just perfect for the level you just happened to be when you just happened upon him? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you are in luck! A new feature of OSU is that all quest reward weapons, armour and clothing items have been unlevelled to their maximum values. No longer shall those pesky Counts and Countesses fob you off with second best. No, sir, you are the Hero of Kvatch and deserve appropriate recompense for your efforts. As it happens it's just as well I've done this, because Umaril is now always level 24 and so is his rapestick, err, sorry, Claymore. Sword. Thing. Better find those juicy Crusader Relics...


The Emperor's New Clothes:

Taking essentially the same approach to armour as I did with weapons, armour does not scale past Steel for heavy and Chain for light. Again, there are some rare exceptions to this but for the most part don't except to find anything above either of those, unless you are looting it from specific NPCs in the world or highly levelled bosses. Like with weapons, you can find complete sets of the more valuable armours hand-placed in various parts of the game world. There is 1 set each of Elven, Dwarven, Ebony, Mithril and Daedric to be found in the game world. Some might be quest-locked, others simply buried deep in a cave in some long forgotten corner of the province. It is up to you to find them and bring back the element of discovery and accomplishment that was lost when finding loot become entirely dependent on your level.

On top of this some bosses now always carry higher level armour as loot, including Umaril who now always drops a set of Elven armour. Skeleton Champions drop Mithril armour. That may seem excessive however Skeleton Champions do not spawn very often so you are unlikely to break the game's economy with their loot. There is finally a fixed set of Glass armour to be looted as well. Where? Well I guess you'll have to go crawling through Ayleid ruins to find it, won't you? Now, why is there no Orcish set hidden somewhere in the world?



That's why.

Diamonds and Emeralds and Rubies, Oh My!

The smaller loot has received some changes, with the values for precious gems raised substantially. With the exception of Pearls, the base value for previous stones is now set beween 10-50, depending on the stone, and each successive tier is worth roughly 4-5 times the previous tier. On top of this ALL gems from ALL tiers have a chance to spawn from level 1, with the exception of Flawless Diamonds and Emeralds which only spawn later on. A similar model for jewellery has been applied with necklaces and amulets (rings are still to be done). Bronze and Copper amulets are still worth the same as in vanilla, but every tier of amulet above that is worth double the previous up to a worth of 640 septims. Necklaces do the same thing, but from a base value of 10 septims for the Bronze Necklace through to 320 septims for the most valuable tier. A rather dry description of what this change is but sometimes you can't always be funny. Oh well. One more thing: the Imperial Dragon Armour has had both it's value and armour rating drastically increased. The value was increased by something in the order of around 10000% (Cuirass went from 120 to 9525) and armour rating increased by 80% Why? Well it's the ultimate prize for saving the Empire and ending the Oblivion Crisis. I always thought it was severly undervalued and under protective, considering it's only ever made normally for the Emperor himself.


The Ten Plagues of Cyrodiil

The Monster Manual
Did you never wonder what happened to all those wolves and Ghosts? Or why suddenly you found trolls and ogres wandering the wilds where before there were none? Or WHAT THE HELL ARE MINOTAURS DOING THIS FAR FROM KNOSSOS? Were the Ogres and trolls simply hibernating while they waited for you to become worth their time? Well fear not, for the answers are come! Basically the game takes a look at your character and determines, based on your level, what difficulty the current encounter should be. So when you come to an encounter, the game picks a monster from the levelled list relevant to your location based on your character's level. In the vanilla game you get wolves from levels 1-4-ish and from then on you get through boars, timber wolves trolls and other various beasties up to ogres and minotaurs. I decided this was stupid and made changes. Now you could face wolves and timber wolves and boars at pretty much any stage of the game. You might even find the odd Ogre as well. This is done to give the player some sense of progression. As they get stronger, they'll find themselves still faced with most of the same kinds of monsters along with a few tougher ones later on, but you'll get the feeling of being a tougher bastard (or bitch) as you level up. That is not, however, the only change I have made.

Dude, Where's My Immersion?
Certain monsters now only spawn in very specific levelled lists (Wisps) or, in the case of Minotaurs, in specific spots and some ugly fuckers are almost completely gone and remain only in a scant few places in the whole game. Imps, Wisps and Minotaurs are now much rarer, especially Minotaurs who now only spawn in 2 places in Cyrodiil. I seriously considered removing them altogether, but decided against it. They are still levelled and stronger versions will spawn when you are at higher levels. Wisps only spawn within 1 levelled list now and in a few places along the road to Leyawiin. Imps have also been scaled back and only spawn within a small number of lists, though not as few as Wisps. Ogre and Trolls are just modified apes, I can live with that. But Minotaurs and Dreughs seriously killed some of the immersion I had managed to build up when playing. So I decided to do something about it.

A Tale of Two Dungeons
Due to their fearsome and aggressive nature, Land Dreughs have long been feared and hated by the local populace of Leyawiin and Bravil, for they are known to often haunt the road between the two cities, causing many a trade cart or traveller to disappear only to be found floating half-eaten and bloated on the Lower Niben, fouling its waters. Nobody was in any doubt as to who the culprits were and eventually fear turned to hate. And this hate turned into an uprising, of sorts. In 3E 432 a great purge was executed upon the land and the Dreughs and their mindless aggression was driven from the Blackwood. As the year progressed one or two were claimed to have been spotted in the far north west and south east of the Niben but extensive searches of these regions came up empty. By the time the year 433 rolled around it appeared the purge had been a shining success. Or so it seemed. As a result of the purge they have been confined to just two dungeons on the Niben where they have been living out their lives ever since. It's up to you, the Hero of Kvatch, to find out where they are and put an end to them once and for all. Or not. You know. Whatever.

Take Me To Your Leader
Some parts of the game worlds, specifically inside some dungeons and a few select quest-related places, have had their balance of enemy levels altered. That is, some dungeons will have easier minions but tougher bosses, and some visa versa. Some minions now spawn like wolves; you can face them any time at any level. I have specifically capped the encounter levels of Kvatch around 5-7 to make it a "safe" place to gain some experience. The other area related to the main quest I have made specific changes to is Miscarcand. It will now have consistently tougher bosses but slightly weaker minions. Oh I also created a level 25 Dremora Valkynaz Lord to block your path through The Fury Spike. Why? Because why not? :)

Trickle-Down Economy
Unlike the real-world idea, this cake is NOT a lie. I've reformed the levelled lists for dungeon encounters, mostly to do with Goblins and Undead, into what I like to call "downwards-filtered encounter specifiers". Fancy gibberishspeak aside, what this means is that lower level monsters have been filtered through the higher levels of the lists, but the lowest level monsters only filter most of the way down. So for instance, the stock-standard level 1 Skeleton filters down through the levelled lists to about level 10. The stock standard level 3-ish Zombie filters down to about levels 12-14 and the stock standard level 6-ish Ghost filters down till about level 14-16. These "filters" punctuate the spawning of the other higher level monsters. Effectively this means that as your character gets higher in level, they will still face low level foes, but the types of low level foes also changes. In fact the filter-down enemies actually includes Ancient Ghosts are well so there are 4 different lower level foes that will, in effect, follow you right through your playthrough. The best way to imagine this would be to place enemies on a horizontal scale representing their levels with your player somewhere on that scale. Now draw a box around your player extending about 1 level above and 5-10 below (depending on how high a level you are). Wherever you draw your player, this box roughly contains all the enemies that COULD spawn at any given encounter because of the way I've reorganised what spawns at what levels. Make sense? No? That's ok, I'm not entirely sure what it means either but it sounds fancy so I'm sticking with it.


If I Had This Many Caps in New Vegas I Could Buy The Bozar

Another element of this mod is the level capping of People of the Land, err, I mean NPCs, and monsters. Rather than scaling indefinitely, most bandits are now capped around level 18, with bosses closer to 25. Vampires will cap out above or below approximately level 24 and Ogres between 30 and 40. Guards are all now static at level 20 and the faction leaders (the Guilds, etc) are between 20 and 30. The Arena did not escape my notice; different contestants now level on their own individual scales, starting at 5-15 through to 11-21 with the Grey Prince set at level 30. Why all these caps? Well firstly I've already bought the Bozar, so I decided I needed to do something else with them. I made up my mind to use the caps to improve Oblivion. Again these changes will give the player a sense of progression when they start surpassing the foes around them, something which the vanilla game was sorely lacking. And that is something I feel also gives a more immersive experience. As of 0.125.0 Conjurers have had their level caps changed from 1-18 to 1-14, roughly.

Notices:

Error: 404 - Brain not found

Due to a rather embarrassingly beginner-level error on my part (namely not backing the file up before manually adding masters) the 0.130.2-0.135.0 update file become completely un-usable in the Construction Set and I have been forced to start work on those version again from 0.130.1, which I have re-uploaded as the most recent stable version of the mod. Unfortunately this does mean that the Weatherley Ogres bug is once again present, but considering the problems I found in 0.130.2 (namely a completely missing master in the form of Knights.esp and several other glaring problems) I decided that it is the lesser of two failures. Because of this, for the moment, I am providing only an NMM archive instead of the usual 3 options.

Et Tu, Brute?

As of version 0.130.1a, I will no longer be supplying OMOD or FOMOD versions of this mod. With everything that's going on and the problems I've had, it's one extra thing I just can't bring myself to find the time to do (it takes a good 15-20min each time I want to upload a new update to make these two new files available) and from now on only Nexus Mod Manager archives will be available. I do apologise for any inconvenience this might cause, I know there were those of you who used those download options but I just can't afford the time investment anymore. I thank you for your understanding and hope you continue to enjoy this mod into the future.


IMPORTANT

This mod changes a good many things, and if you have a large load order, I strongly recommend you build a Bashed Patch using Wrye Bash to merge the levelled lists because this mod changes so many of them.

As of patch 0.120.0 this mod requires the Knights of the Nine DLC because it makes changes to Umaril and a few edits within Garlas Malatar.


Oblivion Reinstallation Counter: 3