How It Works

In order to understand what the mod will and will not do, it's important to understand how the Oblivion engine respawns (or resets) cells.

First off, what do I mean by "respawn"? Well, don't think of it in a Diablo-esque sense. You cannot respawn monsters in the area for a hack-and-slash style horde of monsters that continually come at you from off screen. In Oblivion, every cell contains data about what's in it: NPCs and monsters, items (both placed by the designers and dropped by actors including the player), havoked items (like books and dishes), plants, food, and containers. When a cell is respawned, a number of things happen:

• dead actors (and their inventories) are removed
• new actors are "spawned" if there are any spawn points in the cell
• havoked items that are still in the cell are returned to their original positions (books onto shelves, dishes onto tables, whatever)
• food that was initially in the cell (not dropped there by an actor) is replenished (this is a special case, and seems to have to do with NPCs being able to eat via the AI packages; other non-edible ingredients that have been removed do not replenish)
• items that were left in the cell are removed
• plants have their ingredients replenished so they are harvestable again
• containers that are not marked as "non-respawning" (ie, most containers other than those in player houses) have all their contents removed and discarded, and new contents are generated.
  

Everytime you enter a new cell, whether it's a shop, a dungeon, or a "cell" in the wilderness, that cell gets a timestamp indicating when it was last visited. The next time you enter that cell, the timestamp is compared with the respawn timer and if enough time has elapsed then the cell is reset. This has a number of ramifications:

• A cell that is visited fairly frequently, say once every couple of days, will never respawn with the default timer of 3 days. (EDIT: 10 days in Skyrim. END EDIT.)
• A cell that is visited only once in the game still has all of it's data stored in the savegame file; it does not get reset (and garbage cleaned up, etc) until it is visited again.
• The length of the respawn timer should not affect savegame size; only the number of cells visited (in addition to quest variables and all that) affects the amount of data in the savegame.
• An inordinately long respawn timer (that never changes) will have the effect of making the world seem less dynamic, especially in cities and dungeons (see point 1).
  
  

This means that every cell you enter is checked against the _current_ respawn timer value. So what this mod does is randomizes the respawn timer. Say it's been randomized to 36. If you've been away from this cell for more than 36 hours, it'll reset, and the timestamp set to the current time.. At that time (when you've entered your new cell) a new value is rolled; let's say it's 62. The _next_ cell you enter is checked against the _new current_ respawn timer of 62 hours. Again, if you've been away from this cell for more than 62 hours, it'll reset and the timestamp gets reset and all that... BUT! If you haven't been away from the cell long enough for it to get respawned, the timestamp STILL gets set to the current time. Hence the problem with revisiting a cell over and over within the respawn time limit: it'll never respawn.

What this mod doesn't do is spawn new types of monsters, or affect the contents of non-respawning containers (such as in your house), or distribute new spawn points around the world (EDIT: (in an OOO/MMM overhaul type of sense) END EDIT.), or allow you to have certain types of cells respawn on a different schedule than the rest of the world.