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About this mod
Turns Cliff Racers passive unless you use Levitation, Jump spell effects or supernatural Acrobatics.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
An attempt to make Cliff Racers a little bit more sensible ecologically and gameplay-wise.
If you've had the pleasure to watch crows in the wild a lot, you will have witnessed them harass and even attack bigger birds, including large predators. It's called mobbing and some birds are very good at it. I've always explained Cliff Racer's suicide charges with this concept in my mind. There is a dev joke (or deep lore if you prefer) about Cliff Racers driving the dragons out of Morrowind, so this is in character. But of course it doesn't make much sense. Mobbing works best flier-on-flier, and the PC doesn't pose a threat for the Racer's ecological niche and nests... except... when they're flying. Cliff Racers are monarchs of the Vvardenfell sky, and they will defend it.
This mod edits Cliff Racers as well as the Blighted and Diseased variants. It lowers their Fight rating (70) so non-blighted Cliff Racers are not aggressive towards the PC unless provoked. Blighted Cliff Racers have the aggression range of a Mudcrab (but move around more, of course). The mod adds scripts to them (incorporating the vanilla scripting for diseased creatures). Those scripts check 1/s if the player is Levitating, using the Jump effect or has Acrobatics of 120 or higher. If so, the Cliff Racer is ordered to attack the player. It stays aggro'd for the rest of its life too, via local variable.
Of course this is an over-simple approximation of mobbing behavior. Things like hit-and-run attacks, constant screeching, following the player at a distance and ruining stealth, calling in reinforcements, guarding nests and hunting grounds are beyond my abilities -- and might be incredibly annoying to the player.
A side effect is putting a bit of a cost on popular transportation modes. It's going to be a little more annoying to Jump 100 over that mountain or levitate all the time. Well, about as annoying as vanilla.
Thank you to Improved Cliff Racer AI which never worked all that well for me but which I took a closer look at to learn how to do this.
If you've had the pleasure to watch crows in the wild a lot, you will have witnessed them harass and even attack bigger birds, including large predators. It's called mobbing and some birds are very good at it. I've always explained Cliff Racer's suicide charges with this concept in my mind. There is a dev joke (or deep lore if you prefer) about Cliff Racers driving the dragons out of Morrowind, so this is in character. But of course it doesn't make much sense. Mobbing works best flier-on-flier, and the PC doesn't pose a threat for the Racer's ecological niche and nests... except... when they're flying. Cliff Racers are monarchs of the Vvardenfell sky, and they will defend it.
This mod edits Cliff Racers as well as the Blighted and Diseased variants. It lowers their Fight rating (70) so non-blighted Cliff Racers are not aggressive towards the PC unless provoked. Blighted Cliff Racers have the aggression range of a Mudcrab (but move around more, of course). The mod adds scripts to them (incorporating the vanilla scripting for diseased creatures). Those scripts check 1/s if the player is Levitating, using the Jump effect or has Acrobatics of 120 or higher. If so, the Cliff Racer is ordered to attack the player. It stays aggro'd for the rest of its life too, via local variable.
Of course this is an over-simple approximation of mobbing behavior. Things like hit-and-run attacks, constant screeching, following the player at a distance and ruining stealth, calling in reinforcements, guarding nests and hunting grounds are beyond my abilities -- and might be incredibly annoying to the player.
A side effect is putting a bit of a cost on popular transportation modes. It's going to be a little more annoying to Jump 100 over that mountain or levitate all the time. Well, about as annoying as vanilla.
Thank you to Improved Cliff Racer AI which never worked all that well for me but which I took a closer look at to learn how to do this.