[LOOT]
* Overhauled the loot system, so that rare equipment tiers such as Ebony, Elven, and Glass are only found in high level loot in boss chests at the end of ancient tombs and Ayleid ruins. Daedric equipment is only available from boss chests in Oblivion gates or the Shivering Isles.
* Removed the 'cut-off' for low-level items spawning. All items now have a chance to spawn at higher levels.
* Thoroughly revieved all generic leveled lists and removed any 'recurring' item entries, which were usied in the vanilla game to circumvent the cut-off mentioned above. This is overlooked by almost all mods that remove the cut-off, so that means Ascension provides a much more even distribution of leveled item spawns than other such mods.
* Added more treasure items to boss chests, such as gems and valuable clutter.
* Added more armour and weapons to boss chests, to make up for the reduction of higher level materials in other loot.
* Decreased the number of arrows carried by NPCs and creatures, so that arrow loot drops are slightly more rewarding.
* Removed high tier equipment (above Chainmail, etc) from NPC equipment lists.
* Added Ayleid coins to loot lists throughout Cyrodiil. These are common trinkets from Cyrodiil's lost native civilisation, much like the Dwemer coins in Morrowind.
* Added a chance to find Welkynd Stones and Ayleid Coins in any Ayleid dungeon container. Varla Stones can occasionally be found in boss chests too.
* Added enchanted arrows to random loot. Previously, they could only be found carried by a specific few NPCs and creature variants.
* Decreased the number of arrows and lockpicks available throughout the tutorial dungeon. This provides a small increase in difficulty in the early game, as you will need to gather more of these supplies yourself.
* Added a chance for extra valuable loot to some containers found in houses throughout Cyrodiil. This provides thieves with an occasional score.
* Added Potions of Respite to some healing leveled lists alongside Potions of Sorcery and Healing. Previously, they were very uncommon, and only available from generic potion loot.
* All loot will have random health and enchantment charge. This is influenced by whether the item is held by a container, creature, or NPC, and their Armourer skill also has an effect.
* Increased the rarity for potions, lockpicks, ingredients, repair hammers, and enchanted jewelery found commonly on NPCs.
* Decreased the value of potions and scrolls, as they were mostly vendor trash in the vanilla game and contributed to the broken economy.
* Added fine iron and steel weapons to loot lists.
* Added leather bracers to loot lists.
* Added multiple enchanted items to leveled lists that were unused in the vanilla game. The items are: Grand Ring of Vigor, Grand Ring of Health, Grand Ring of Magicka, Broadhead Gauntlets, Huntsmans Gauntlets, Clear Sight Gauntlets, Vvardenfell Traders Cuirass, Cuirass of the Farlands Trader, Blower's Cuirass, Gauntlets of Lockbreaking, Gauntlets of Passing, Magnifying Gauntlets, Smugglers Boots, Boots of the Forest Stalker, and Boots of Soft Walking.
* Corrected a vanilla error in the LL0NPCArmorHeavyHelmet75 leveled list, which would spawn Steel Helmets at levels 4, 5, and 5 rather than 3, 4, and 5 like other NPC helmet leveled lists.
* Corrected another vanilla error similar to the above with LL0NPCArmorLightBoots50. Leather boots spawned at 4, 4, and 5. This was changed to 3, 4, and 5.

[CREATURES]
* Removed the 'cut-off' for low-level creatures spawning. All creatures can now spawn at higher levels.
* Removed the highest level creatures from generic spawn points, meaning they can only be encountered at boss spawn points.
* Added a new scripted feature that dynamically decreases the health of the toughest creatures. This prevents combat becoming spongy at high levels.
* Some low-level creatures have a chance to spawn in small groups at higher levels to offset the reduction in difficulty due to them still spawning at those levels.
* Added helmets to skeletons as a visual indication of their strength. The helmet tier is dependent on the type of skeleton (e.g. a Skeleton Guardian may wear a steel helmet if it fights in melee, or a chainmail helmet if it is an archer).
* Added Fine Steel Mace to Skeleton Guardian Weapons list. This bridges the gap between Steel and Silver.
* Added Battle Axes and Claymores to Dremora Valkynaz weapon lists. In vanilla, they will always carry Warhammers.
* Added the respawn flag to wild horses.
* Increased the speed of Mudcrabs to prevent the awkward wait as they slowly emerge from the shoreline.
* Added a magicka regeneration ability to ethereal undead (ghosts, etc) and Will-O-the-Wisps. This prevents them from running out of magicka and not attacking due to the global magicka regeneration changes.
* Fixed a vanilla issue where creature power attacks do not do increased damage.
* Fixed a vanilla issue where creatures carrying weapons can do less damage than those that don't. Their weapon damage is now added to their base attack damage.

[STATS]
* Decreased the strength multiplier for maximum encumbrance from 5 to 3.5. This means that the maximum carryweight based on strength alone is now 350 rather than 500. This change makes carrying capacity a real restriction, and forces some hard choices in what equipment and loot you need to carry. It also makes Burden a more useful effect (as NPCs will now have lower carryweight too), and balances Feather versus Fortify Strength.
* Overhauled the fatigue system. Fatigue will now drain whilst running, but is influenced by your athletics and current encumbrance. Characters with high athletics may be able to regenerate fatigue whilst running with low encumbrance, and a master of athletics will always regenerate fatigue whilst running. This makes fatigue and resting more important, and now fatigue must be managed whilst in combat just like health and magicka.
* Decreased the influence that low fatigue has on damage output from a maximum of 50% to 25%.
* Health is now calculated as twice the player's current endurance, and the level-up bonus has been removed. This prevents the need to raise endurance quickly, and means maximum health is much lower.
* Magicka now regenerates much more slowly, but all spells also cost less to cast. This prevents spamming spells, and makes restore magicka effects more valuable. Wizards may need to keep some potions on hand to replenish their magicka between fights.
* Decreased the maximum movement speed penalty from worn equipment weight from 40% to 20%. This helps to balance heavy armour versus light armour, as heavy armour previously made you painfully slow.
* Added a Morrowind-inspired health regeneration feature. Health will restore at 10% of Endurance per hour whilst exploring or waiting (waiting no longer gives full health), but will still fully restore when sleeping. The health regeneration is very slow, so you will likely not notice it when exploring, i.e. a maximum of 10 health every 2 minutes. The main intention is to make the game harder by removing the instant regeneration from waiting 1 hour.
* Increased the health of low-level NPCs from 40% to 60% of their base health and made it scale up to 100% at level 3, rather than level 5.

[MAGIC]
* Overhauled the added value of apparel enchantments, as generic enchanted loot was perhaps the most economy breaking part of the vanilla game (some items could be found in common loot and worth up to 12,000 gold). Enchantment values are much lower now, and the overall spread has been decreased. The value of some heavily undervalued effects, such as Nighteye, have also been increased. These changes also affect enchanting, and makes apparal enchantment costs more comparable to weapons.
* Increased the magnitude of some effects when making custom enchantments, so that they are more in line with what is available from generic loot. For example, the maximum custom enchantment for Fortify Health was only 10 when using a grand soul gem, whereas you could find items with up to 30. Affected enchantments: Detect Life, Fortify Fatigue, Fortify Health, Fortify Magicka.
* Increased the base cost of charm spells and decreased their magnitude (also affects scrolls). Also, the effect has been disabled for custom spellmaking to prevent it being exploited with 1 second effects.
* Decreased the magicka cost of adding area effects to spells.
* Increased the minimum and maximum influence of worn armour on spell effectiveness from 5-30% to 10-50%. This makes wearing armour more of a decision for spellcasters, and spellswords may want to switch some armour for clothing. This partly balances the overpowered spellsword strategy, at least at low armour skill.
* Added a fatigue influence to spell effectiveness, with a maximum 10% drain at 0 fatigue.
* Increased (doubled) the level effectiveness of all level-based spells. For example, illusion spells will now be effective on actors twice the level of the vanilla game.
* Added fatigue drain to casting spells dependent on the magicka cost, which was a feature that went unused in the vanilla game. In the vanilla game, casting spells always drains 1 fatigue, so was barely noticable.
* Decreased the ambient lighting increase when using the Nighteye effect.
* Added damage attiribute spells to spell lists used by NPCs. This adds some more use to restore potions, spells, and scrolls if you get hit by one of these spells.
* Removed Fortify Skill from spellmaking to prevent exploiting 1 second effect spells such as Armourer and Mercantile.
* Removed Restore Magicka from spellmaking to prevent making spells which restore more magicka than they cost.

[SKILLS]
* Overhauled Hand-to-Hand damage, so that it is now a viable option for combat if a character is skilled enough and has a high enough strength. Some NPCs may also choose to engage you with their fists too.
* Added further increases to sneak attack damage to Sneak attack perks after Apprentice rank. The damage multipliers are now x2/3/3.5/4/4.5 and x4/6/7/8/9 for ranged and melee, respectively. This makes sneak attacking a more viable strategy for skilled late-game characters.
* Increased the speed of Acrobatics, Athletics, Marksman, Restoration, and Sneak leveling to be more in line with other skills.
* Decreased Alchemy experience from brewing potions by less than a third.
* Increased Alchemy experience from wortcraft so that it is a quarter of the experience for brewing potions. This makes consuming excess ingredients more worthwhile.

[ARMOUR]
* Added value to several valueless pieces of armour, based on similar strength items. This change was made so that these items cost more gold to repair, as the formula is based on an item's base value. Valueless items always cost 1 gold to repair, regardless of damage, which is unbalanced.
* Added a pair of Rusty Iron Boots to complete the set found in the tutorial.
* Modified the stats of Rough Leather Armor. Armour rating, health, and value have been lowered to make the armour worse than leather and more comparable to fur, as previously it was almost exactly equal to leather armour.

[WEAPONS]
* Increased the speed of all arrows by three times.
* Increased the chance of recovering arrows from characters from 50% to 80%. This means you are less likely to loose your rare high-level arrows.
* Increased the number of missed arrow references that the game keeps loaded from 15 to 30, for the same reason as above.
* Added value to several weapons that previously had none. This balances repair costs, as with armour.

[CLOTHING]
* Increased the value of all clothing item according to their class (lower, middle, upper). The increase is small, and was made to coincide with the new clutter value changes.
* Modified the weight of several robe and hood items to make more sense. Previously, many hoods weighed the same as their matching robes.

[POTIONS]
* Increased the strength of restore fatigue (respite) potions from 20/35/50 to 50/75/100 (to match Potions of Sorcery).
* Added restore fatigue, fortify strength, and fortify endurance effects to all alcoholic drinks.

[CLUTTER]
* Added balanced values and weights to most clutter items.
* Increased the value of existing upper class clutter.
* Added valuable gold clutter, which can be found in some containers in houses and dungeons.
* Repurposed existing extra Crystal Ball and Yarn items as more expensive 'Fine' variants.

[ALCHEMY]
* All brewed potions will now weight 0.5, reagrdless of the ingredients used to make them. This removes the need to carefully select ingredients to optimise weight, and also prevents making overpowered low-weight potions.
* Increased the restore fatigue bonus from eating food from 5 to 10. This is an overlooked vanilla feature: eating any food item will give you a bonus restore fatigue effect, regardless of the item's first effect.
* Moved Cure Disease effects from the first slot of some ingredients to prevent you eating them to get the same effect as a potion.
* Fixed a vanilla bug that caused some food items with zero-duration first effects to restore twice the fatigue they were meant to.
* Reduced the value of brewed potions to between 1 and 10 gold to preserve the game's economy.
* Reduced the effect of all apparatus on brewed potion effects by half. This helps preserve the balance of the alchemy system.
* Modified the magnitude and duration of brewed potions to favour magnitude slightly more than in the vanilla game. Brewed potions should now be less effective and more balanced overall for those not skilled in alchemy.

[STEALTH]
* Decreased the time between an NPC warning you about trespassing to them calling the guards from 30 seconds to 10 seconds.
* Increased the maximum pickpocket chance from 85% to 95%.
* Decreased the influence of item value on pickpocket chance by half.
* Decreased the influence of NPC skill on pickpocket chance by one-third. These changes make pickpocketing more viable.
* Decreased the penalty for wearing any type of footwear whilst sneaking from 14 to 8.
* Increased the influence of footwear weight whilst sneaking from 1 to 2. This and the above change remove the stupidly high penalty for wearing footwear and instead makes the weight of the footwear have a more meaningful effect. Previously, there was not much difference between a set of light and heavy boots due to the high base penalty.
* Decreased the difficulty of remaining undetected whilst sneaking slightly for all characters.
* Increased the threshold required for NPCs and creatures to lose the player once detected. Also decreased the detection bonus from being in combat. This and the above change makes it easier to lose enemies and actually makes it possible for them to stop chasing you if you hide, which was almost impossible in the vanilla game.

[BARTER AND PERSUASION]
* Increased the difficulty of haggling by increasing the dependence on the Mercantile skill. Only those skilled in Mercantile will be able to get good deals.
* Decreased the maximum effect of haggling from 40% to 20%
* Removed the disposition influence on haggling, as it was mostly irrelevant and has a more major effect on a merchant's base offer anyway.
* Removed the influence of NPC level from bribery costs. This was a dumb inclusion in the first place, as it meant high level NPCs were difficult to bribe, even if they were unskilled in Speechcraft.
* Balanced the cost and effect of bribery to make it more reasonable, but still a relatively expensive option, so that Speechcraft wasn't devalued.
* Increased the difficulty of persuasion by offsetting the opposite love/hate and like/dislike reactions slightly. This means that selecting appropriate wedge sizes is more important, and the Speechcraft perks are more of a benefit.

[DECORATIONS]
* Replaced some Fighters Guild sword-and-shield displays placed outside of Fighters Guild locations with new static wall displays showcasing some of the vanilla shields and weapons.
* Replaced some bare armour stands with static displays of some vanilla armour sets.

[OTHER]
* Increased the fenced item thresholds for the Independent Thievery quest by three times, on account of the new clutter values.
* Increased the chance of catching a disease from an infected creature or NPC.
* Increased the volume and range of Nirnroot plants, so it's easier to know when you're near one.
* Added a cap for leveled locks, so that they don't increase in difficulty after level 25. Since almost all generic loot caps before level 25, it seemed unreasonable that locks would continue to become more difficult.
* Added a new scripted feature that makes enemies more likely to poison their weapons.
* Increased the weight of all keys from 0 to 0.1.
* Increased the weight of lockpicks from 0 to 0.1.
* Changed the stats of merchant unique items to exactly match their unenchanted counterparts, including decreasing their value. This change should make buying these items actually viable.
* Increased the cost of repairing items at a smith to double the original. This encourages training your Armourer skill, and acts as a 'tax' when using some of the higher level, high-value gear.
* Removed the skill influence on the chance of a Repair Hammer breaking. Skill still affects the item condition restored per use.
* Decreased the base chance of a Repair Hammer breaking from 30% to 25%.
* Increased the base item condition restored per Repair Hammer use from 0 to 5. The changes to repairing makes using repair hammers harder than vanilla at higher Armorer skill so that merchant repairs don't become redundant.
* Added a small number of lockpicks to general merchants.
* Decreased the base number of Repair Hammers in merchant stock from 20 to 3.
* Decreased the base number of Torches in merchant stock from 6 to 2.
* Decreased the time Torches stay lit from 16.6 minutes to 10 minutes.
* Changed the restore magicka effect from Ayleid Wells to occur over time rather than instantly, as this supplements your existing regeneration and provides more benefit whilst adventuring.
* Modified existing loading screens, menu text, and tutorials to reflect changes made by this mod.
* Added new loading screens to highlight changes made by this mod in a vanilla-friendly way. These all use underused vanilla loading screen pictures, so are compatible with replacers.