Does the unleveling of this mod affect the Mantellian Crux or exclude it? The other Unleveled Mobs mod turned it into an actual harpy nest, swapping most monsters for harpies, which really ruined the final dungeon experience ((yeah i know, the crux is classed as a harpy dungeon behind the scenes).
This mod is definitely geared towards spellcasters, as you'll need the ability to hide beyond stealth, and those insta-kill spells are more valuable (banish and disintegration) along with calm. Warriors and thieves aren't going to get far in dungeons without some sort of magic, unless already moderately levelled (if not overleveled). At least for creature dungeons - NPCs still scale to level so NPC dungeons are generally the easy ones.
Main quest is best delayed until a much higher level.
I'd like to repeat the comment I made about 2 months ago regarding enemies being over-leveled in general, as I just started a new playthrough
I happened to find a dungeon where the enemy list was challenging but doable as a level 2 character. It was goblins and rats (with 'horrible horde' mod), some orcs and a couple of orc sergeants. It was as I said challenging and I died a few times, but it was achievable and I managed to complete my quest. So it was a really good/fun experience
Then I stumbled upon several dungeons filled with enemies like giants, or mummies + vampires, and obviously at level 2-3 it's impossible. And when you have 'Travel Options' mod, you can spend half an hour of real life time to get to the dungeon, only to realize that you can't even get some loot out of it to make up for the cost of the travel. Then the guy at the fighters guild is talking to you like 'yeah, did you even try ? loser.."
And when this happened several times I ended up making a save before taking a quest, then instant teleport to dungeon, check what enemies are inside, reload the save and repeat the process until the dungeon was achievable. And that's honestly no fun at all to have to save scum just because I want to do some dungeon crawling
Aside from the no fun this creates, it also makes it impossible to level up the character, because most of your skills increase through combats. If you only do local quests and courier quests, your skills hardly increase, so it's way too long to just get from level 2 to 3. Which makes the over-leveled dungeons problem even more of a problem because you have no alternative outside dungeons to level up at a decent rate
The old mod that Unleveled the base game had an alternate file where you could set the starting level at which the world would go full unleveled. I remember experiencing the exact same issues with the basic version of this mod, and I had installed at some point this alternate version to set at 7 the level at which everything goes unleveled. This made the early game far more enjoyable, and then later on it made mid-game more challenging but not impossible as I had spells/gear/more hp etc. and was as a result more prepared to tougher enemies
So what I am suggesting is a similar setting where player could pick a level at which everything gets unleveled, but prior to that some spawn lists in dungeons would be 'disabled' based on player level to prevent a new character to enter a dungeon filled with vampires + mummies, in order to be able to do dungeons and actually progress through early levels
As others have commented, this mod can/will create very hard dungeons, even on main quests.
I just did one for Queen Aubk-i and ended up going to a castle where the first encounter was a Ancient Vampire. At level 5, this is unwinnable. I recommend saving before entering a dungeon and, if on a main/important quest, peeking inside to see if it's going to be over leveled. I was able to temporarily disable MUDEX, enter the dungeon and then re-enable it.
Thanks for this mod, I wanted to ask you : are there some limitations to the "unlevelness" ? meaning by that, can you encounter any enemy at any level right from level 1, or are there limitations to prevent top level enemies from spawning before a certain threshold
In classic Daggerfall, each dungeon type has a spawn table of 20 slots. Each time a monster needs to be placed in the dugneon, the game makes a roll on that table. However, the roll is strongly influenced by your level and the roll will almost always be within 2 levels of you current level. So, for example, at lvl 5 you will get monsters from slot 3, 4, 5, 6 and 7. The monsters placed in these 20 slots are at increasing difficulty. Slot 0 might be "Giant Rat" slot 10 might be "Vampire" and Slot 20 might be Ancient Lich.
What original Unleveled Mobs did, was rewrite these tables so the 20 slots mostly just repeated around in 5 slots. So instead of "Orc Stronghold" starting with rats and bats and then scaling up to orcs, then sgt orc, the shaman orc and then warlord orc, Unleveled Mobs just did something like this: orc, orc Sgt, orc ,orc shaman, orc warlord and repeated that until all 20 slots were filled.
MUDEX uses the same trick. However, MUDEX has access (through DEX) to make as many tables as it wants. So instead of there just being one "Orc Stronghold" table that is used in every orc dungeon, MUDEX supplies 5 tables of varying composition. The tables are assigned randomly to orc dungeons based on underlying ID data. So you go into an orc dungeon and you might get an orc table with mostly just normal orcs and some rats. Or it might be a table with a bunch of high-level orcs. or something in between.
Well thanks a lot for this detailed answer, it's very informative
Is there any way as a player to predict the difficulty of the dungeon you're heading into ? I was thinking that maybe, if the dungeon is labelled as a fortress, then it is more likely that the enemies are going to be high level, something like that. Because otherwise you just end up taking dungeon quests and you cross your fingers that the enemies you will encounter will be manageable, and if not, you 'fail' your quest despite the fact that you could not have predict this outcome
Yeah. Completing quests it's now a pain in the butt. The game should be more difficult now, I get that, but my level 2 character got killed by a flesh atronach over and over again just at the dungeon's entrance.
Yeah its kind of silly to package both together instead of giving us the option. I only wanted meaner monsters with DEX support. Unleveled enemies is bonkers, especially if doing an Ironman or inn save only character. Then again I don't make mods so I don't know if that is easier said than done.
Honestly, I did this because I consider playing with only Meaner Monsters to be too hard and/or awkward. If you do not use Unleveled Mobs, the game level scales what enemies you meet, but the scale is all wrong because some monsters are buffed beyond what you can handle at the level the scale thinks it will be easy. So you get stuff like the game just spamming werewolfs at you while werewolfs are now buffed to rip you apart. Or mummys who are now almost unkillable tanks for low-level characters but the level scaling thinks they are a nice medium enemy to throw into any undead dungeon for a low-level player.
With Unleveled Mobs you can go into a dungeon, see that it is too hard and decide to do something else. Next dungeon you go into might have much easier enemies. While without unleveled mobs every dungeon might be equally hard.
That's great for doing just random dungeons found throughout the world but when doing quests I don't want to encounter litches and vampires at level 5.
I would love to use this if it didn't have the unleveled part. I just want meaner monsters with DEX support. Removing the level scaling is just way too much.
You are misunderstanding, friend. By level scaling it means that in vanilla daggerfall a level 1 character will only encounter things like Rats and Bats. With unleveled mobs, you can find all enemies at level 1 meaning you can find Centaur, Giants, etc. It doesn't mean that the mobs are a crazy high level, which is what I thought at first too!
I don't want to change which enemies spawn. I only want the enemies to be tougher because high level enemies will make the game more survival horror where I will have to avoid enemies that are too high for me to fight. I think it would make an interesting concept but I don't want that kind of annoyance. I just want a baseline difficulty increase.
Does not matter as far as I know. As they have no overlap. But if they do have any overlap it is really between PCAO and DEX. MUDEX just edits numbers in DEX.
Are quest dungeons always leveled (do they bypass MUDEX in some way)? I seem to get similar level mobs pretty consistently with quest dungeons. Might just be coincidence though.
32 comments
This mod is definitely geared towards spellcasters, as you'll need the ability to hide beyond stealth, and those insta-kill spells are more valuable (banish and disintegration) along with calm. Warriors and thieves aren't going to get far in dungeons without some sort of magic, unless already moderately levelled (if not overleveled). At least for creature dungeons - NPCs still scale to level so NPC dungeons are generally the easy ones.
Main quest is best delayed until a much higher level.
I happened to find a dungeon where the enemy list was challenging but doable as a level 2 character. It was goblins and rats (with 'horrible horde' mod), some orcs and a couple of orc sergeants. It was as I said challenging and I died a few times, but it was achievable and I managed to complete my quest. So it was a really good/fun experience
Then I stumbled upon several dungeons filled with enemies like giants, or mummies + vampires, and obviously at level 2-3 it's impossible. And when you have 'Travel Options' mod, you can spend half an hour of real life time to get to the dungeon, only to realize that you can't even get some loot out of it to make up for the cost of the travel. Then the guy at the fighters guild is talking to you like 'yeah, did you even try ? loser.."
And when this happened several times I ended up making a save before taking a quest, then instant teleport to dungeon, check what enemies are inside, reload the save and repeat the process until the dungeon was achievable. And that's honestly no fun at all to have to save scum just because I want to do some dungeon crawling
Aside from the no fun this creates, it also makes it impossible to level up the character, because most of your skills increase through combats. If you only do local quests and courier quests, your skills hardly increase, so it's way too long to just get from level 2 to 3. Which makes the over-leveled dungeons problem even more of a problem because you have no alternative outside dungeons to level up at a decent rate
The old mod that Unleveled the base game had an alternate file where you could set the starting level at which the world would go full unleveled. I remember experiencing the exact same issues with the basic version of this mod, and I had installed at some point this alternate version to set at 7 the level at which everything goes unleveled. This made the early game far more enjoyable, and then later on it made mid-game more challenging but not impossible as I had spells/gear/more hp etc. and was as a result more prepared to tougher enemies
So what I am suggesting is a similar setting where player could pick a level at which everything gets unleveled, but prior to that some spawn lists in dungeons would be 'disabled' based on player level to prevent a new character to enter a dungeon filled with vampires + mummies, in order to be able to do dungeons and actually progress through early levels
I just did one for Queen Aubk-i and ended up going to a castle where the first encounter was a Ancient Vampire. At level 5, this is unwinnable. I recommend saving before entering a dungeon and, if on a main/important quest, peeking inside to see if it's going to be over leveled. I was able to temporarily disable MUDEX, enter the dungeon and then re-enable it.
Aside from that, I really like this mod.
MUDEX is NOT a replacement / update for DEX
MUDEX is a replacement / update for Meaner Monsters
Use MUDEX and DEX together and remove Meaner Monsters
What original Unleveled Mobs did, was rewrite these tables so the 20 slots mostly just repeated around in 5 slots. So instead of "Orc Stronghold" starting with rats and bats and then scaling up to orcs, then sgt orc, the shaman orc and then warlord orc, Unleveled Mobs just did something like this:
orc, orc Sgt, orc ,orc shaman, orc warlord
and repeated that until all 20 slots were filled.
MUDEX uses the same trick. However, MUDEX has access (through DEX) to make as many tables as it wants. So instead of there just being one "Orc Stronghold" table that is used in every orc dungeon, MUDEX supplies 5 tables of varying composition. The tables are assigned randomly to orc dungeons based on underlying ID data. So you go into an orc dungeon and you might get an orc table with mostly just normal orcs and some rats. Or it might be a table with a bunch of high-level orcs. or something in between.
Is there any way as a player to predict the difficulty of the dungeon you're heading into ? I was thinking that maybe, if the dungeon is labelled as a fortress, then it is more likely that the enemies are going to be high level, something like that. Because otherwise you just end up taking dungeon quests and you cross your fingers that the enemies you will encounter will be manageable, and if not, you 'fail' your quest despite the fact that you could not have predict this outcome
With Unleveled Mobs you can go into a dungeon, see that it is too hard and decide to do something else. Next dungeon you go into might have much easier enemies. While without unleveled mobs every dungeon might be equally hard.
Please use it, it makes the game better!
Which should have higher load priority, this mod or Physical Combat And Armor Overhaul ?
Thanks