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About this mod
Fundamental overhaul to the way skill books work. Studying skill books will grant permanent bonuses to the relevant skill. The bonus depends on the skill being studied. You can't learn everything in one sitting: you will need to study the same book multiple times to learn everything it has to offer. Requires MWSE.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
I was underwhelmed with how skill books worked in the vanilla game: open a book and immediately get a free level. The free level is usually nice but it's not particularly noticeable, and it happens so fast that it doesn't really feel earned. Skill books also aren't marked in the UI, so unless you memorize the names/locations, you don't know if something is a skill book until it's already leveled you up.
This mod tries to address some of these shortcomings, by making skill books...
- Easy to identify: Item tooltips will now tell you if something is a skill book, and they'll tell you which skill it's for.
- Have a bigger gameplay impact: Skill books will now offer unique bonuses to their related skill, along with a boost to earned XP for that skill.
- Multi-use: Skill books are no longer something you open once and forget about. You will have to revisit them multiple times as you level up your character.
- A more active and engaging experience: You gain bonuses by "studying" skill books. You can always study a skill book if it's in your inventory. But in order to study a book that's lying out in the world, the owner of that book has to like you, and they can't be a book merchant. If you want to study those books, you'll have to buy/steal them.
- Dependent on your character class/stats: In order to learn everything a book has to offer, the associated skill will need to be at a high level. (This ties in with the multi-use point: you can study a book at a low level to learn some of its content, and then revisit it later to learn more.)
Description
1. How studying skill books works
Skill books now have "knowledge meters". They work as follows:
- Each time you study a book, you fill up the knowledge meter a little bit.
- After studying a book, you won't be able to study it again until you level up the related skill.
- The limit on how much you can fill the meter depends on: your character class, skill/attribute levels, and how the amount of progress made in skill books that target the same skill.
- These limits are calculated based on the current values of all those things. So, if you max out a books knowledge meter at skill level 5, you'll be able to make additional progress if you revisit the book at skill level 20. (And so on.)
2. What skill books do
Skill books now offer permanent stat buffs that are unique to each skill. Here are some examples
- Alchemy books: increase brewing chance and potion strength.
- Security books: increase lockpicking/probing chance.
- Magic books: increase cast chance and decrease magicka cost.
- Athletics books: increase movement speed.
- Acrobatics books: decrease fall damage.
Currently, every skill except for Speechcraft and Mercantile have have at least one or two unique bonuses that can be obtained from studying skill books. In addition, skill books will also grant a permanent XP boost for the related skill. Feel free to suggest ideas for other skill boosts that you might like to see at some point.
3. UI Improvements
These ones are best explained by the screenshots, but here's a summary:
- Skill book tooltips: will now indicate that they are in fact skill books. The tool tips will also show you how much progress you've made studying a book, as well as the maximum amount of progress you can make from that book (depending on your current character statistics).
- Skill tooltips (the ones in the character stats menu): will show you the bonuses you've earned from studying the relevant skill books, and present you a list of your current progress on every skill book (so long as you've opened that book before).
A word on balancing
These changes make skill books stronger in some ways, but weaker in others. In total, I think they make skill books more powerful than in the vanilla game, but the extra power feels earned.
While each individual skill book does offer more benefits when compared to the vanilla game, you won't be able to unlock the full potential of most skill books. Your related skills and attributes need to be fairly high leveled in order to learn 100% of what a book has to offer.
The rewards from reading skill books are also less immediate: each individual study attempt will not award a huge amount of XP. To counter act this a bit, reading skill books will grant permanent boosts to the amount of XP earned in the relevant skill.
The balancing might still need some fine-tuning though, please feel free to share any suggestions on how the mod could be made more balanced.
Compatibility
- Magicka of the Third Era: mostly compatible. The updated spell magicka costs/cast chances will not be reflected in the UI if Magicka of the Third Era is installed, but they will still take effect when casting spells. So, if you have the -5% spell magicka cost bonus, then that -5% bonus will be applied to the values listed by Magicka of the Third Era. This means that the amount of magicka spent on a spell will be 5% lower than the value listed in the UI. Note: The spell chance bonuses won't do much if using the Determinism setting in Magicka of the Third Era. I have not encountered any other compatibility problems between these two mods.
- Reading is Good: Not very compatible. My mod also includes XP bonuses for reading books, and it blocks skill books from being treated normally as skill books. So there are going to be some weird interactions.
- Mods that add skill books: should be compatible. This mod uses lua to detect which books are skill books, so all the functionality of this mod should apply to skill books added by other mods.
Future plans
- Add support for custom skills added via the Skills Module. This would allow mods that add custom skills to register certain books as skill books, and provide unique bonuses for studying those books, much in the same way it can be done for the vanilla skills.
- Add some more unique bonuses, rather than mainly adding stat boosts.
- Add custom bonuses for all the skills (only a few are currently missing, and all skills currently have the XP modifier).
- Fine-tune the formulas some more.
- Flesh out the MCM.
Appendix: add your own custom bonuses
The mod was designed to make it fairly easy for other mods to add reading bonuses to skills. You can do this by providing:
- The name of the bonus being added.
- A list of skill ids that this bonus will affect.
- A formula for how the bonus should be calculated, based on the players current (cumulative) knowledge of the skill, and `id` the bonus is being calculated for.
- The id of the `tes3.event` that the bonus will affect.
- A `callback` function that takes in two parameters: `self` and `eventData`, and then performs some calculations based on the player's knowledge bonus. You can fetch the current bonus to use within the even by using the `self:get_bonus(skill_id)` method.
All of the bonuses in this mod are made using this framework, so you can look at `data/knowledge_bonuses.lua` for a complete list of examples on how this all works. For example, here's all the code responsible for handling the "XP Modifier" bonus:
new_bonus{name="XP Modifier",
calculate_bonus = function(x)
return 0.33 * (1 - 2 ^(-0.00002 * (200 * x + 0.5 * x^2)))
end,
skill_ids = table.values(tes3.skill),
event_id = tes3.event.exerciseSkill, ---@param e exerciseSkillEventData
event_callback = function (self, e)
e.progress = e.progress * (1 + self:get_bonus(e.skill))
end,
event_priority=-10,
sort_priority=100,
}
(The `sort_priority` key is responsible for determining the order in which bonuses are displayed in the Skills tooltip.)