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The COMPLETE
Gardening Mod 1.42
by SurfingApe
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Version 1.42:
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Fixed accidental commentification of a menu option.
Changed bag movement code to allow for direct modification of units used etc, rather than going through scroll.
Fixed a scaling menu bug with fertilizers... you should now be able to use scaling options and size-changing fertilizers at the same time without resulting in massively wierd plant positioning.
Other small tweaks.


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INTRO:
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This mod is my humble addition to Oblivion. I always have wanted to cultivate a garden, both in Morrowind and Oblivion. This mod allows the player to do so! Collect two 'parts' from any flora in the game (ie, any plant or mushroom) and put them in a Planting Sack (created via the Gloves of Gardening or a spell). Once you do this, a new plant will appear in that location in 5 days (default setting). This is a fully compatible mod with no conflicts. See "COMPATIBILITY" for full details.

The MOD introduces two new items to the game: Gloves of Gardening, and a scroll titled "About Gardening". Equipping the gloves creates a planting sack at your location, ready to be planted. Using the scroll lets you modify various settings within the mod. The mod also introduces a new spell: Create Planting Sack. The gloves are accessible from Patient Mode, and the spell is useable in Mage Mode (see details later, under "SETTINGS".)

Only plants or mushroom parts that can be harvested from a live 'flora' or mushroom will be recognized! There are some ingredients with no plant counterpart, notably ginkgo leaf. The sack does not generate a plant for these.

These plants are treated like any other flora model in the game. They regenerate their ingredients when the cell is reset (after 3 days of being left alone.) The plants do not go away or disappear when harvested, unless you have the Harvest mod installed (in which case they will come back.) They can be created -anywhere-, it is up to you to determine realistic placement. I consider growing a plant on a house windowsill more realistic than growing one in a pitch black room.

The sack becomes 'planted' after recognizing two identical ingredients - if you put multiple sets of ingredients, it will most likely recognize the first set only. The only other type of item recognized by the sack is fertilizer. A few ingredients in the game count as fertilizer.

The sack, once planted, flips over and shrinks in size a bit. The ingredients are removed, and further use of the sack will not be recognized unless it is fertilizer being put inside.

If you have 95 or higher alchemy, the sacks require ONE ingredient, not two, to generate a plant.

The sack will disintegrate if unused for a certain amount of real time.

I recommend setting a hot key to the Gloves of Gardening while planting. This avoids repeatedly opening the inventory menu.

Also, regarding the constant (and reasonable!) requests for a removal spell/tool, or any way to get rid of plants that are not wanted... I haven't come up with an elegant solution, or any solution at all for that matter. The best interim fix is to open the console, click on the plant (make sure you see the text up top signalling you clicked on a plant and not, say, part of the world), and type 'disable'. Then close the console.

There areplayers who require PRECISION placement of their bags, and would like to get a bag halfway up a tree, so that a wood-eating shelf mushroom is correctly placed. These players, thanks to the encouragement of Tom Supergan, can now manipulate the sack with the greatest of ease. In the settings scroll, enable bag movement and change the bag movement settings (due to script size limits, the movement settings are stuck on the scroll rather than through the bag itself.) When a planting sack is created, you may manipulate it by activating it and selecting an option.

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SETTINGS:
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The mod's settings are modifiable by the player, through a fully functional multi-level menu system. The menu is activated by reading the "About Gardening" scroll the mod adds to your inventory.

There are two 'modes' available, Mage and Patient. This is configurable by the PLAYER, using only one ESP to access all 'modes' of gardening. To switch between these two, read the scroll and pick a mode. Mage Mode creates sacks via a spell, and the plants grow instantaneously. This is for you speed-demon junkies who can't wait a few days for a plant to grow. Patient Mode has a default 5 day wait for plants after seeds have been planted, and the sack is created by equipping the Gloves of Gardening. I feel it is a more realistic mode.

You can tweak the time for a plant to appear, as well as set a default scale for the plant. You can also see how much flora you've planted with the mod. Finally, you can enable bag movement and adjust bag movement.

Random scaling is enabled in a .75 to 1.25 range, as is random plant model selection and random plant rotation (random rotation around the z axis helps prevent a garden of clones all oriented identically).

It is a good idea to settle on one mode and finalize your settings, then set the scroll aside and garden away. The defaults should be realistic and very usable - this settings scroll only exists if you feel you must tweak some aspect of the mod.

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FERTILIZERS:
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Currently only a few ingredients are recognized as fertilizer.

To make your plant larger when it appears, place up to 4 atronach salts (frost, fire, void salts) in the bag.

To make the plant smaller, place up to 4 mort fleshes and/or 8 rat meats in the bag. They have a -12.5% and a -6.25% scaling effect, respectively. The plant cannot get smaller than 50% of normal size, due to Oblivion's hard-coding.

To make the plant appear -immediately-, put in the bag a daedra heart and one of two things: glow dust or ectoplasm. Two daedra hearts also acheive this effect.

You can also enrich the soil with organic soil amendments. Each unit of bone meal, crab meat, or fish scales reduces the time required by 1 day. If on the day of growth already, it should immediately grow. Putting in more fertilizer than shown here results in no abnormally large bonus for any fertilizer (If you put too much in, only the maximum effect happens.) Fertilizer can currently be added at any time, right up until germination and also when the seeds are put in the bag.


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Installation, Uninstallation, etc
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INSTALLATION:
Unzip the .esp to your Data folder, located inside Oblivion's main folder. On my computer, which is NOT the default, this is C:\Games\Oblivion\Data. Then add the esp to the 'checkbox list' under Data Files, when you load the game.
Do not put the esp in the folders located inside My Documents.


UNINSTALLATION:
Simply uncheck the esp under Data files, and delete the esp if desired. It's unknown if the flora planted by the mod will remain in game after you remove the mod.


UPDATING:
There will be a huge notice if I make a version incompatible with the previous versions. So far, that hasn't (really) happened. Oblivion's mod handling is much better than morrowinds' :) Just copy over the new esp and keep on playing! In the later versions (1.4+) I have the quest automatically reset when a new version is installed, just to avoid compatibility errors.


MOD COMPATIBILITY:
As far as I know, this mod is FULLY compatible with other mods. The only changes the mod makes to the game is the creation of 4 unique items with associated scripts - there are NO scripts attached to the plants or ingredients. This means the HARVEST mod works with this.The scripts simply create a new plant, identical to all the others in the world, at the location the sack was placed. Reports from the forums tell me the Harvest mod is fully compatible (thanks Galthran). Please report if you do notice compatibility problems.


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CREDITS
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Credit goes to Bethesda for producing another masterpiece, and to my girlfriend, for putting up with me while coding this. Oh, and a description of 'the' gardening mod for Morrowind set me off on this project. I didn't look at or borrow any code or scripting, but the creation of this mod was spurred by hearing about Morrowind's gardening mod. If anyone knows the author of the mod, I will include their name in this readme.

Credit to Galthran on TES forums for his comprehensive playtesting and reporting his results!
Credit to -Zarkis- on TES forums for the brief timer code snippet that showed how to use gamedayspassed properly

V1.4 Credits:
Credit (again) to Galthran for debugging 1.3 and showing exactly how bad my menu system was.
Credit to OblivionMasta and (indirectly) Fraktyl for their multi-level menu code that clarified the procedure and showed me where I was going wrong.

Version 1.3 credits:
Credit to RunicNomad, indirectly, for the fertilizer idea (His idea was watering...) and the tracking variable.
Credit to Tom Supergan; he requested custom sizing and got it, and as a result of that creating Fertilizers was easy (had already coded in dynamic sizing..) He also first posted the plant-removal method on the official forums. I'd neglected to spread the word on that particular trick.

Credit also goes to everyone who downloaded the mod and also especially those who posted that they like it. Thank you guys (and gals)! Makes this modder's day.


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Copyright, Translation, Use-Of, etc
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This is a copyrighted work. If you would like to translate the mod, that is fantastic. Contact me on the official forums as SurfingApe, just so I know that another version is being done (French and German have been authorized so far - you may of course recreate someone else's efforts.) If you would like to distribute this mod, please ask me. Re-distribution can be dangerous as it results in buggy, out of date versions being available. You may look at this mod's code to write your own, of course. If you wish to directly COPY and/or directly MODIFY this mod for redistribution, please ask me. Include full details about what you want to do and why you want to.


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About the Author
Contact Information
Author Comments
====================

This mod was created by SurfingApe, in May of 2006. I am most active on the official forums, see below.

http://www.elderscrolls.com/forums/index.php?showuser=193274

I prefer that communications regarding this mod are directed through PM's or posts on forums. This is an effort to cut down on email spam.

Comments are ALWAYS WELCOME. Anything you think should be added or changed, I want to hear about it. Plenty of features in this mod are user-driven. If you have a setting that you think simply MUST be changed, tell me about it. Most of the options in the settings menu are also user-driven.


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MY THOUGHTS:
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This was a pain to code each and every single ingredient into a script. I ran into a script-size limit more than once. Also, using placeatme results in a plant that is often floating above the ground. I couldn't figure a way to 'drop' them automatically, as they are static. Instead I calculated an offset for each and every single plant, and I move the plants to that offset when they get created. A lot of back end work but it seems to run smoothly.

Also, the plants can be grown ANYWHERE. In the future I might include a check for the 'outside' worldspace, but this would prevent folks from having a home garden in a well lit interior location.

Being a vampire is a pain in the rear for testing. Unbelievably annoying. "Let's wait 24 hours outside for the plants to grow and get fried by the sun!" "No fast-traveling for you to an interior location suitable for testing!"

"Why I did what I did": I could have scripted each flora to produce a 'seed', but that would make this mod incompatible with any mod that changed anything about flora. Bad News. Instead, I run through a script to check ingredients against a list of flora I made. Lots of if-else statements.


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Version History
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Version 1.4:
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Implemented a PROPER SETTINGS MENU SYSTEM. Throw a party, it's a beauty, and I think I'll turn it into a wiki tutorial. It even recognizes MenuMode and scripts properly while in menu, so no foolish gimmicks necessary to change settings. (Credit goes to OblivionMasta for the idea + some sample code that acted as a 'logic' example.) I like the menu system here a LOT ;-)

Set up the quest to reset when installed (uses a different doOnce number.. heh heh.. I like this solution!)

Discovered that a bag-creating arrow is NOT going to work. Period. Discovered that tree .nifs don't really exist - no custom fruit trees.

Tweaked Scaling options to reflect engine hard-coding (can't go below 0.5 scale notably)

Added an option to turn off random plant rotation (not model selection, just z rotation)

Shortened a few messages to improve readability (they flashed by too fast earlier)

Finally, planting sack movement code has been implemented. Turn on via the settings menu. This movement code enables precise placement of sacks so that correct wood-eating shelf mushroom placement can be performed.


Version 1.3:
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Plants + Mushrooms vary in size now. Due to a request, you can also manually set size in the settings scroll, and turn back on random sizing.

All flora models are in the game, except for dead-spiddal-stick and non-aggressive harrada. If a plant species has multiple models selected, one is randomly picked (vis-a-vi fly amanita and cairn bolete mushrooms.)

To mark the location of your plant, the sack, once planted, flips over and shrinks in size a bit.

Fertilizer has been implemented.

I did extensive back-end work. There is a single glove now, and the glove + settings scroll are not found in the gameworld.

Fixed bugs: Mushroom timer bug, bag-go-away timer bug... (was using a short instead of a float! oops! means that the timer went down one every frame...)


Version 1.2:
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Added alchemy skill check - if you have 95 or higher, it takes ONE ingredient to grow a plant (Thanks 'Wanna-be Geek')

Added "make bag go-away" code for bags that never get used...

Added reliable multiple-day timer, set it to 1 day

Added MAGE settings!!


Version 1.1
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Added rice and corrected spiddal stick height. First release on TESSource

Version 1.0
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Included all flora and mushroom types. First release to the public.