About this mod
Adds balanced cloaks and backpacks that can be worn together.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
- Donations
Requirements:
None
Introduction
I’ve always been a fan of mods which add cloaks and backpacks to Bethesda games. Both items add to the weathered adventurer aesthetic, but also help cover up clipping caused by weapons, quivers, and armour.
Travellers’ Equipment is my own simple, vanilla-styled implementation of the concept, using assets from Travelers Cloaks and Side_s Backpacks. These are the best cloak and backpack mods available for Oblivion in my opinion, and the authors have kindly made their resources available for use.
This mod also has the unique feature that allows both accessories to be combined and worn at once, without the need for amulet-slot workarounds.
Description
Cloaks can be found in containers that typically contain clothing, such as house cupboards and—erm—coffins, and are also available from clothing and general trader merchants. They come in two varieties:
- Common Cloaks (16 colours)
- Expensive Cloaks (7 colours)
Common cloaks have somewhat faded and washed out colours, whereas expensive cloaks are vivid, bright, and can have different coloured linings on the inside. The prices of these cloaks are slightly higher than middle and upper class clothing, respectively.
All cloaks are enchanted and grant the Weatherward ability when equipped, which has 10% Resist Frost. This enchantment prevents you from adding custom enchantments, which is intentional to preserve the balance of the enchanting system. Having an extra armour slot to enchant would allow you to become more overpowered than you already can with custom enchantments.
Backpacks are available only from general trader merchants. They cast the Extra Pockets lesser power when equipped, which grants 30 points of Feather.
Backpacks can be worn on their own, or combined with cloaks and worn together. To do this, simply equip any cloak whilst carrying a backpack in your inventory. Doing so will swap out the cloak and backpack and instead equip a single combined item. To separate the two items, simply unequip the cloak and backpack combo in your inventory and the two original items will be added back.
A select few vanilla NPCs have been given cloaks to wear. These are mostly NPCs which wander the wilderness, like Legion Foresters, Orc Adventurers, and Couriers. Normally NPCs cannot equip tail-slot items, but these NPCs have been given a lightweight script which checks their inventory and equips the cloaks on them whenever they are loaded.
Technical Note
The cloaks add abilities rather than actually being enchanted with the effects because of Oblivion’s enchanted item value system. Normally, an enchanted item’s value is the base value of the item plus its enchantment cost, as long as the item’s base cost isn’t zero. There is no way to change this. As a result, even items with weak enchantments will be worth hundreds of gold, due to the magicka cost of the effect and the effect’s specified ‘constant effect barter factor’. For this reason, all the items in this mod have dummy script effect enchantments showing the name of the ability they add. Because script effects have a barter factor of zero, they add no value to the item, leaving me free to specify exactly what value I want them to be. This way, cloaks can be placed in common clothing loot without breaking the game’s economy.
Installation
This mod has no requirements. Standard installation procedure: add the file to your data folder and check in the game launcher or your mod manager of choice.
By default, backpacks add a Feather lesser power called Extra Pockets, which is automatically cast for no cost. This is a workaround for an engine bug, as it isn't just possible to add a Feather ability since abilities with Feather have no effect. If you want to change this behaviour and instead have the backpacks use a Feather enchantment, you can download the optional file. However, this will make backpacks much more expensive than intended due to the way the game calculates enchanted item value.
Uninstallation
Make sure you have no backpack or cloak equipped, create a new save, and uncheck the mod. Uninstalling this mod will have no permanent effects on your save game.
Compatibility
This mod edits some vanilla container, leveled list, and NPC records. Either load high up and allow other mods to overwrite these changes, or load low down and merge into your bashed patch. The necessary bash tags have already been included.
Known Issues
There are various very minor issues to be aware of.
- The items may clip with some armours.
- Backpacks are fairly uncommon to prevent you from being able to acquire one immediately on exiting the starter dungeon. They will only appear after merchants' inventories respawn, which means they will also not appear immediately when if you install this mod in an existing save.
- Sometimes the active effects menu does not update to reflect your current effect magnitudes when the abilities are removed. This is visual only—the effects have been removed. You will need to exit and re-enter the menu to see the updated magnitude. This is a vanilla issue.
- The Extra Pockets ability is automatically cast when wearing a backpack and will be re-cast automatically when it wears off, rather than being a constant effect ability. This is because constant effect Feather abilities in the vanilla game are bugged and have no effect, so need to be applied via a spell or enchantment.
- Equipping another cloak while having a backpack and cloak combo equipped will not swap the backpack to the new cloak, but it will separate the old pair. You will need to equip the new cloak again to combine it. It is possible to circumvent this with scripting, but the extra complication isn’t worth it in my opinion, as the inconvenience isn’t that great and most players won’t be carrying multiple cloaks anyway.
- The backpack in the combo model has been moved further back to minimise clipping with the cloak, quivers, and weapons. However, this also means that if you take the time to look close-up from a side-on camera angle, you will see that the backpack seems to be floating on the outer edge of the cloak. You’re generally not going to see this unless you deliberately go out of your way to look, since from the front/back/most other angles it looks perfectly normal
This mod was intentionally scripted without OBSE, mainly because I just wanted to try it out for a challenge. I know the scripts could be made slightly simpler with OBSE, but it won’t make any difference to functionality or performance.
Credits
side777 for the backpack assets in Side_s Backpacks
Ph0rce for Travelers Cloaks
Ryu Doppler for RD Cape And Cloth Resource
My Mods
I spend a lot of time creating and supporting my mods, so any donations are gratefully received.