heya. i love the whole idea and concept of the mod. downloaded and everything worked great up until the point i went to craft the golden quill to try out the new forgery system. there's no option for me to craft it even though i have the new crafty tool in my inventory with a quill and inkwell and well over 200 septims.* ( this had me wondering if it's my fault the currency in the game is labeled gold instead of septims) other than that everything is going smoothly, i can craft the boots and the armor as well as the spells and mysterious books along with receiving spell tomes. thank you for the time and effort you put into making this mod.
Thanks, Breaker, and you're very welcome. I'm trying to figure out what would cause this, and I doubt it's the gold. Unfortunately, I can't see what the version you downloaded was (Nexus only properly tracks it 'sometimes'). As long as you have the Crafty Tool in your inventory you should see it listed in the forge. If you don't see it listed in the forge at all, then there may be a problem with the version you have. If you do see it in the forge, then it's likely to show you what component(s) you're missing right at the bottom. If you don't see it at all, try downloading the latest version and see if that does it; if not, we can dig deeper. Sorry for any inconvenience caused, and thanks for your patience.
my fault. I didn't realize there was a new version that came out on the 30th/ I didn't update the mod. too excited to try it out i guess. thank you again for your quick response and the mod. you have an endorsement from me. keep up the great work.
This is a fantastic idea, and I like what it's got so far. I'm going to make a few suggestions, but these are highly subjective, so I won't be offended if you don't like them. Even if you're not a fan of the ideas, just keep in mind that I'm only taking the time to comment because I very much like what's already here.
I really like the simplicity with which you've approached soul gems. If you've got the inclination, the black soul gems, at least, could be a bit more immersive by making it impossible to craft them directly. Instead, make it so you have to convert a grand soul gem directly into a black soul gem (one-way conversion, unlike the other soul gems). It should really have some other requirement, but I'm not sure what. In the lore from previous games, they're made by placing them in/on an altar one every 8 days nights (if I remember correctly). Personally, since the mod seems to be going for a more utility approach, then if I was the one to implement it, I'd probably go for any night, but only at night. (Even if the ability to reverse the process is kept). Alternatively, this would be a pretty simple target for an MCM option. "Black soul gems only craftable every X nights" with X defaulting to 0. If it's 0, then they're craftable any time. 1, and they're craftable any night. another integer, and they're only craftable if the current day (which will be a float equaling the number of game days since the beginning of the game) is evenly divisible by that integer. The scripting for the check would be pretty simple, and there would also be other ways to handle it, but this would probably be the simplest. (This would have to be checked when the forge menu is opened.)
With the Dawnguard expansion, there's the end of the Aetherium Wars questline where you end up with a single item out of three. It'd be really neat if there was an option to recreate the three pieces of the key needed to make the others. Since those were solid aetherium and soul gems produce dust, it could easily take hundreds or thousands of soul gems to manage it, but having it be at all possible would be really cool. Each piece of the key might require 1000 dust to create, which is about 30 grand soul gems, so about 100 altogether.
Something that might be cool on its own, but would also be really neat as a spell tome creation component, would be magicka storage crystals (or something similar). Basically, in order to create a given tome, you have to have a given number of the crystals accounting for some multiple of the spell's normal cost (ignoring the player's perks). Maybe, like, 10x. So, if the spell costs 25 magicka to cast, then you need 250 magicka worth of magicka crystals to craft it. Each crystal might hold 5 or 10 magicka. The reason it might be neat on its own, I think, would be if the player gains the ability to create these crystals on the fly. Maybe a lesser power that costs a flat 10 magicka to produce a 5 magicka crystal. Or 15 to produce a 10 magicka crystal (I'm only imagining one of these options would be available, not both). Or maybe it's a 1 to 1 ratio with no loss. However, the lesser power would take a few seconds to cast. The way I'd personally handle it would a concentration spell that doesn't, on its own, cost anything. But every few seconds, it depletes X magicka and produces a crystal. Then, at any point in time, you can break the crystal open (whether as a potion, food, or scroll) to get that magicka back. It'd be sort of like potions that the player can create, except instead of ingredients producing it through the alchemy skill, they create it purely out of magical aptitude.
If I think of anything else, then I'll be sure to add in those ideas later.
Thanks so much, Xander. I'm glad you like what's already there, but wow, what a well-thought-out series of suggestions. I can honestly say that I like them all a lot and will certainly get to adding them shortly. I'm sure I won't do justice to your lore adherence or exact suggested mechanics as there are certain goals that I want to make sure I keep at the forefront. As you stated already, utility is one of them; convenience is another. Here's what I'm thinking for your base three ideas...
Black Soul Gems — I absolutely love the concept of night-only crafting (similar to daedric). I'll add that right away. I still feel that they should be a craft from Aether Dust to keep the liquidation concept intact though. Also, the longer I can stay out of MCM configuration the better. Once I go there, I'll also need to build FISS support, and I have no idea how involved that will be.
Aetherium Wars — In my ~3,000 hours of Skyrim, I can honestly say that I barely remember the quest line. I do, however, think that sounds like an absolutely perfect use case for Aether Dust. I will do this, certainly; I just need to go through that quest again to even remember what I'm agreeing to. Also, this will obviously be included once I work the DLCs in (which will probably be pretty big already), so this may take me a while.
Magicka Crystals — I've had this concept rolling around for a bit, but it's the delivery that I have been struggling with. Sure, having a magicka crystal act as essentially a magicka potion would work, but I've been trying to figure out a good way to implement a Soulfire-esque system. Something like: you cast a toggle lesser power on yourself that runs a magicka detection script that consumes crystals and restores magicka when you've fallen below a threshold (say 10%). I expected to make the creation of them roughly: cast a spell/power that calculates how many hundreds of magicka you have and considers this the amount of crystals to create, checks to see that you have 5 Aether Dust for each crystal, consumes 5 Aether Dust for each crystal, and then drains all of your magicka (fails if you do not have enough Aether Dust). I will probably create this, but given what I want to do with the consumption effect, this might take a bit. I completely agree that this should, and will, be a component of the Create Spell Tome.
Thanks again for taking the time to write up these awesome suggestions. I hope to do them justice in the coming days/weeks.
Nice update! The forgeries are really clever; I love the idea.
Out of curiosity, are you comfortable with distributing items to leveled lists? It can be a tricky thing to do, so many people (myself included, usually) avoid it, but it would open up a few possibilities. The thing I'm thinking of specifically would be really simple (as far as game impact goes), which would be to add more blank paper, some blank notes, and some blank books and blank journals to the misc item lists general merchants use. It's always slightly annoyed me that the game doesn't have these items in large enough quantities (with most of them not existing at all), which means making books usually ends up using ruined books, which I always find really weird (not to mention you have to then specifically collect ruined books...).
Hopefully you noticed the v1.2 release there in between; it covered 2/3 of your suggestions (noted in the changelog).
As for leveled lists, I was trying to avoid them, for sure. I could probably do some injection, but I'm not really a fan of going there, when the main purpose in the mod was to add extra crafting opportunities out of often previously useless items.
For Blank Notes, I tried thinking about new ways to create them (Roll of Paper, breaking down other 'regular' books and notes, etc.), but for now I thought that the Ruined Books would suffice the concept.
For Mysterious Tomes, I thought that having them be Ruined Books that were altered by the Aether Dust to reinvigorate their former glory was a good process. Even if I do get into leveled lists, I probably wouldn't have Mysterious Tomes be sold. Perhaps looted, but not sold.
I, personally, think adding Ruined Books to the "always collect" list (similar to how Legacy of the Dragonborn did) is a good thing. The real toss-up for me now is whether to make inkwells able to be crafted. You need them a lot for forgery, and while they're not really rare in end-tables and the like, they're not something you come across a lot on a toon that doesn't steal. I'm waiting for my next thief playthrough to know how it balances out to be sure. Fortunately, that's my next playthrough, I believe, so it shouldn't be too long.
Oh, I'd noticed the update with my suggestions included. Suffice it to say I'm rather pleased with the results haha.
I'd actually also thought of using other books to become blank books. One idea would be to make it possible to craft some magical erasure solution or something like that. Using the solution in your inventory would let you choose a book (or more, if you have more solutions) to erase (using a gift type menu). Then, the player ends up with blank books from previously created ones. Just a thought.
I like the idea behind Ruined Books -> Mysterious Tomes. Never seen Legend of the Dragonborn. Not sure how I missed it, so I'll definitely be adding it to my next playthrough.
For the inkwells, those are, if nothing else, something you can steal quite a few of, and the most fitting character to use them would be a less morally strict character, anyway, so it might not be necessary to make them craftable. Although, getting one or a few out of an iron ingot and some mountain flowers would a simple solution.
Yeah, Legacy of the Dragonborn is a pretty large mod (~15 gigs if memory serves) that adds a ton of aggregated content and a really awesome place to put it. I used it for probably my last ~30 or so playthroughs. It has a new faction that you create that one of its features is to turn over Ruined Books to one of the NPCs for a benefit (no more on that). So needless to say, I was more than used to collecting them en masse.
I'll wait on the inkwell decision until after I play my next thief, for sure. I'm also really eager to get this first round of changes capped off so I can move on to the v2 (Campfire and DLCs).
On a side-note, have you had a chance to use the Aether Crystals/Magicka Coffers yet? I'm thinking of increasing Magicka Coffers's buffer to 20%, but I'm not sure how other would people feel about this, so I'd love some feedback. I'm finding that it's really super helpful, but that 10% is a pretty low bar when some of your spells won't let you drop low enough to break a crystal, but are too costly to be able to get that one off.
To be honest, I cheated in the quill, inkwells, ruined books, and linen wraps to make the various items (everything that I could buy, I bought instead, but I don't think any of those are sold anywhere, and I'm neither a thief nor in a dungeon. I'll just pretend I grabbed them somewhere in my 33 levels of experience lol.
I did notice a couple of things about the usage of Create Aether Crystal. It's a restoration spell, which seems okay on the surface, but Aether Crystals are otherwise very strongly tied to soul gems and those are almost exclusively conjuration. It's subjective, but I'd personally make it a conjuration spell. Or maybe even make it a power (since they can still function as a spell, it shouldn't interfere with functionality).
It feels very strange as a concentration spell because of the jumps in magicka. I can see two relatively simple ways of fixing that. 1: Make the magicka part of the normal spell cost, and just make sure it's not affected by any perks that reduce spell cost. (It might have to be disassociated with the various schools to manage that, but I don't recall. It's been awhile since I messed with spells.) That way, it naturally uses up magicka, and after roughly 100 magicka has been consumed, it creates a crystal. This would make it /feel/ like a concentration spell, but make it mechanically about the same as it is now. 2: Make it a fire and forget spell with the magicka cost handled the same way it currently is, but make it so that if it's dual cast, then it automatically creates as many crystals as you can afford. This one will probably /require/ remaining within one of the schools to have te dual cast perk for that school, but I don't know for sure.
If you have the power enabled while making the crystals, it's thankfully smart enough not to use a crystal while casting Create Crystal. However, it will use the crystal immediately afterward if you stop casting while below the 10% threshold. I'd put in a simple toggle in the script to deactivate crystal usage when the usage power detects the creation spell being cast, and then reactivate it only when the spell isn't being cast && their magicka is back above 10%. (If you're feeling thorough, you could also add a check for whether or not they're in combat, and if they are, then only check that they aren't currently casting the spell and ignore the threshold. This way, if they cast the spell between encounters and are surprised, it'll immediately turn back on.)
Now, with those points out of the way, there's not a whole lot to say about it except that I really like how it turned out. It's easy to use once you get the spells, and it's limited by the soul gems you come across, which is a nice balancing mechanic, I think. For whether or not to change the 10%, I can see a couple of ways to deal with it. Either just make it customizable is some manner, or make it so it goes by EITHER a relative 10% or an absolute of, say, 20 magicka, whichever is more. This way, at lower levels when your fire and forget spells are less likely to hit the 10% mark, it just goes by magicka. When you've got more magicka, 10% is a lot more useful, and you're more likely to manage to get below that before needing the crystal.
If you do go that route, which I think is the better option, personally (although having both wouldn't hurt, either), I'd suggest adding in a global variable of some sort to tracker whatever or not the player has gotten up to 200 magicka (or whatever would make the relative threshold match the absolute threshold). The first time the script sees that 10% of their magicka is >= to the absolute threshold, that absolute threshold becomes just extra function calls even when they've got plenty of magicka left. It'd lighten the effect's script laod a small amount. (Hopefully you don't mind that I'm just throwing around random efficiency notes. Just thought of it, so I figured I'd share...)
Oh, and I looked at FISS, and it appears to be really easy to use. You basically just call a couple of functions to start the saving process, and then you list each variable you want to save with a function specific to that type of variable, and call another function to stop the process. To load, you do the same thing. The example doesn't list it, but I'd personally follow it up with a forced page reset when it's done loading so the changes are shown immediately (assuming it doesn't use a background menu, in which case it might require closing the MCM to operate). However, if you're not keen on doing that yet, MCMs are still useful even when they don't have FISS support. (I have it installed, but only use it for a few mods like AutoHarvest and SkyTweak, which both have tons of settings that I keep the same from game to game. Most other mods I just redo at the start of the game since they usually only have a handful of settings, and I won't change most of them, anyway.)
Alternatively, if you want to avoid the MCM for now but still include the customization, you could always go the global variable route: just check its value in the script and list the variable's names and effects in the mod description so we can use the console's "set" command. It's not as pretty as an MCM, but it'll work just as well and be super simple, too. I'm not sure I'd personally bother with this until you're ready, if ever, to just go for the MCM, but it's an option. I'm not saying these because I REALLY want the customization, mind you. Just thoughts.
Oh, and for the inkwells, I just wanted to point out that I don't actually like my previous idea of using mountain flowers for inkwells. Instead, I'd add the ability to make charcoal from firewood (since that's actually how it's made), and then make inkwells from charcoal and an iron ingot. since Charcoal is actually traditionally used to make ink, and it even shows in the in-game inkwell (the inkwell is opaque because ink made from sharcoal degrades when exposed to too much light, so opaque inkwells protect it). This way, it's limited by the iron, but not by anything else. Firewood can be boring to collect, but it's free, easy, and chopping blocks are super common. This is actually one of the recipes of my mod Simple Recipes. It's unreleased (it's been sitting around since January), but I think this has prompted me to go ahead and release it. It'll play nicely with this, I think. (And with several other mods, too, which was the idea behind it in the first place.) I did go ahead and add ruined books and linen wraps, since I've seen those in several mods, but I hadn't thought of them before. So, you could either add a few of the relevant recipes to your list, or you could potentially point them to mine if you'd rather stick to utility items and avoid recipes for just the base items (which is exactly what mine covers).
Oh, and a really random thing that might be nice. Make it possible to break down soul gem fragments into, like, 1 Aether Dust? Could be a simple way to put them to use that's already very closely relted to the other soul gem crafting your mod has.
Yeah, I actually don't think that the Aether Crystals should be directly associated with Conjuration at all, to be honest. It was, after I discovered that I needed to add it as a school's spell in order for it to work the way I wanted, a tough call between putting it in Restoration (since it's there to create a restorative item) or Alteration (because it's making manifest the magicka into a new, solid form). Problem is, Alteration is so popular for mods to dump spells into, I wanted to try and make sure that people could still find it in the sea of other mod-added spells. Also, yes, I could change it to use magicka directly, but I don't want perks or effects in a school to circumnavigate the 1:1 relationship. As for it not belonging to a school, that's the curse of it being a concentration spell.
I'll try to look into how to better manage Magicka Coffers being enabled while filling up the stocks, but after using it for a while, I didn't really see an issue with it. I'll look harder.
As for FISS, the what I meant by that was that once I went to MCM I'd (personally) feel obligated to add it in the same manner that Campfire/Frostfall do, as far as how they immediately save settings to a profile and load them on subsequent playthroughs. Having 130~200 mod loadout on average means a real pain to initial configuration and I'd be pretty upset with myself if I complain about mod authors not doing it better and then went and did it myself just as poorly. I figure it's not overly complex, but it is another layer of complexity that I need to consider. Oh, and I really don't like the idea of having console commands be needed to interact with my mods.
On charcoal, I probably won't add this because there are two or three mods in my load order already that do this, so I'm assuming people already have it. We'll see though. I don't like the idea of relying on what someone might have installed, but then again, we're also talking about this being really only if I add an inkwell recipe.
As for fragments, I'll probably do something about them, but just haven't decided on what yet. They are a bit tricky given that there are five of them (if memory serves), and they're a bit rare in the base game already.
I'm in the middle of one of my thief playthroughs, so I'm not really working on the blue-side at the moment. I'm really just testing out the forgery system, and trying to think of ways to help "hardier" characters going forward. As always, thanks for the thoughts though. You've been a great inspiration to the project.
I'm amused by the FISS auto-loading bit because I wasn't aware that any other mods really did that. The one I release does, though. Took a bit to get it working right. Making it load settings when installed was easy, but making sure it was going to properly update and also not badly interfere with other mods using FISS at the time was tricky. I ended up just setting a randomized delay. It takes under a second to load, so I'm hoping a 1 minute delay is long enough for the average user's computer to go through all of the start-up needed, and that the shortness of the call will prevent overlapping with other mods. Now that I know there are actually mods that do it, though, I may take a look at how so I can see if there's a better way.
For the inkwells/charcoal and whatnot, I released the mod. (I renamed it to Simple Crafting instead of Simple Recipes, but the name-change was unrelated to this mod. My friend thought Simple Recipes was a bad name for it.) So, it's now an option to point to that if you want to. (Not saying you need to or should, just that it's an option.) It's got an MCM to disable any recipes you don't need to help avoid having 4 mods all doing the same thing.
Regarding the school, I did say it was pretty subjective lol. I can live with it being restoration. I'm now distracting myself by working on another mod, so I haven't even gotten to try out the forgeries yet. I should definitely do that soon...
Love these ideas, and great stuff for non-mages in here I see Neat update with the magika sink as well, I am thinking how my non-magic-using character can RP with those for the time you need a spell or something...
The Atronach Stone from Disparity would be amazing for that. Oh, and once I make the Ordinator version I'll certainly see about having them consume and restore Vancian spells (as well as not trigger on The Monarch).
As for non-mage stuff, thieves (or generally green-tree characters) are going to get some shiny new toys in 1.3 (which I'll hopefully be able to post today) with the new forgery system. I still feel like I'm far too light on the red-side, so 1.4 will hopefully focus on improving that. Assuming I do a good enough job on evening the field, I'll start getting into the DLCs and then probably the Ordinator version (since I, and everyone in my gaming group, use Ordinator religiously).
Thanks for the kind words. I hope you get to thoroughly enjoy it!
Unfortunately, I don't actually play Requiem anymore, and haven't in a long time. Based on the review of a friend who did for a long while, however, he recommends trying the mod out in its current state. Other than some possible scaling/difficulty issues, he said there shouldn't be any incompatibility based on what he sees.
If you try it and it doesn't end up working for some reason, let me know what specifically you'd like to see changed and I'll see what I can do. I'm not trying to alienate Requiem users, but not playing it myself makes it difficult for me to build and test for.
Obviously, you'll want to create a specific non-Crafty save before installing so you can go back if you encounter issues, but I'm not hearing that there should be any.
Good stuff, thanks! More development and expansion encouraged, especially using the gloves and soul gems, and adding new world items! Thank you for sharing
Thanks much for the kind words. I will certainly be adding more to the Ather Dust/Aetherius Gloves concepts. I actually just slowed that down a bit because I didn't want those concepts to completely dominate the mod. I feel that making those the only real focal point of the mod would take away from people who play as I do (usually very defined by a character) who weren't casters.
Also, when you say "new world items", do you mean fixed objects like crafting benches and the like, or items new to the game such as the Aether Dust or Packrat Armor? I only ask because I hope not to disappoint, but I don't plan for EC to ever have new crafting benches per se (Whiterun's too crowded already). I have thought about adding certain activators to certain locations, but not something as integral as a crafting bench; more like Aetherius beacons that you could find in the word and use as a resource to gather some Aether Dust, or perhaps chalices of Divine Blessed Water in various pools around Skrim that could be used to grant some kind of new recipe, that sort of thing.
I personally would be less interested in new crafting benches, for example, because there could be compatibility issues. I was more referring to new ingredients/components and things to craft/disassemble (and ideally a CACO/CCOR patch if applicable)
Okay, great; we're on the same page about benches then. As for ingredients/components, I may keep that light for a bit, but that's only so I can focus on the final crafted items. Though I have thought a bit about more conversion/liquidation concepts similar to Aether Dust, but for other crafting materials.
Also, patching for CACO is certainly on my list of expansion directions. I'm not really sure what I could do with CCOR though. Actually, my immediate plans for additional masters that I want to extend future versions/patches onto: the DLCs (probably all together), Campfire/Frostfall, Ordinator, Hunterborn, CACO, and maybe Wintermyst (if I can pull off what I'm thinking).
I'm considering building the mod as a Campfire plugin in the near future, but I'm still working through some of the concepts (perk progression, possible craftable activators similar to Hearth Craft, etc), but I'm trying to see the balance between the additional options provided by Campfire, and crafting new items from additional masters. The DLCs were actually one of the main reasons I wanted to make this (craftable heartstones, random staffs, craftable Riekling items, etc), so I'm trying to give that a higher priority.
Thanks! And no, Elves Ear is the herb typically found hanging around cooking pots in homes and inns. I believe it's there to indicate its theoretical use as a spice. I like to think of it as a cool and refreshing herb that adds a lot of body to a stew; something akin to bay leaves crossed with black cardamom.
Thanks! Sad part is that the goulash was my first noticed screw up with the mod. I had planned to add a minor fortification to health and stamina (~10pts), and a small bonus to movement speed or carry weight. Hopefully the change won't dissuade you from using it.
I like it how it is! maybe make it a little harder even, 12 hours buff is pretty big deal after all. maybe throw in a salmon into the recipe or something?
Salmon in goulash?! Heresy! ;p I can add some extra quantity of ingredients, and maybe another seasoning, but... "no salmon!" (said in Edna Mode's voice)
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thank you for the time and effort you put into making this mod.
I really like the simplicity with which you've approached soul gems. If you've got the inclination, the black soul gems, at least, could be a bit more immersive by making it impossible to craft them directly. Instead, make it so you have to convert a grand soul gem directly into a black soul gem (one-way conversion, unlike the other soul gems). It should really have some other requirement, but I'm not sure what. In the lore from previous games, they're made by placing them in/on an altar one every 8 days nights (if I remember correctly). Personally, since the mod seems to be going for a more utility approach, then if I was the one to implement it, I'd probably go for any night, but only at night. (Even if the ability to reverse the process is kept). Alternatively, this would be a pretty simple target for an MCM option. "Black soul gems only craftable every X nights" with X defaulting to 0. If it's 0, then they're craftable any time. 1, and they're craftable any night. another integer, and they're only craftable if the current day (which will be a float equaling the number of game days since the beginning of the game) is evenly divisible by that integer. The scripting for the check would be pretty simple, and there would also be other ways to handle it, but this would probably be the simplest. (This would have to be checked when the forge menu is opened.)
With the Dawnguard expansion, there's the end of the Aetherium Wars questline where you end up with a single item out of three. It'd be really neat if there was an option to recreate the three pieces of the key needed to make the others. Since those were solid aetherium and soul gems produce dust, it could easily take hundreds or thousands of soul gems to manage it, but having it be at all possible would be really cool. Each piece of the key might require 1000 dust to create, which is about 30 grand soul gems, so about 100 altogether.
Something that might be cool on its own, but would also be really neat as a spell tome creation component, would be magicka storage crystals (or something similar). Basically, in order to create a given tome, you have to have a given number of the crystals accounting for some multiple of the spell's normal cost (ignoring the player's perks). Maybe, like, 10x. So, if the spell costs 25 magicka to cast, then you need 250 magicka worth of magicka crystals to craft it. Each crystal might hold 5 or 10 magicka. The reason it might be neat on its own, I think, would be if the player gains the ability to create these crystals on the fly. Maybe a lesser power that costs a flat 10 magicka to produce a 5 magicka crystal. Or 15 to produce a 10 magicka crystal (I'm only imagining one of these options would be available, not both). Or maybe it's a 1 to 1 ratio with no loss. However, the lesser power would take a few seconds to cast. The way I'd personally handle it would a concentration spell that doesn't, on its own, cost anything. But every few seconds, it depletes X magicka and produces a crystal. Then, at any point in time, you can break the crystal open (whether as a potion, food, or scroll) to get that magicka back. It'd be sort of like potions that the player can create, except instead of ingredients producing it through the alchemy skill, they create it purely out of magical aptitude.
If I think of anything else, then I'll be sure to add in those ideas later.
Black Soul Gems — I absolutely love the concept of night-only crafting (similar to daedric). I'll add that right away. I still feel that they should be a craft from Aether Dust to keep the liquidation concept intact though. Also, the longer I can stay out of MCM configuration the better. Once I go there, I'll also need to build FISS support, and I have no idea how involved that will be.
Aetherium Wars — In my ~3,000 hours of Skyrim, I can honestly say that I barely remember the quest line. I do, however, think that sounds like an absolutely perfect use case for Aether Dust. I will do this, certainly; I just need to go through that quest again to even remember what I'm agreeing to.
Magicka Crystals — I've had this concept rolling around for a bit, but it's the delivery that I have been struggling with. Sure, having a magicka crystal act as essentially a magicka potion would work, but I've been trying to figure out a good way to implement a Soulfire-esque system. Something like: you cast a toggle lesser power on yourself that runs a magicka detection script that consumes crystals and restores magicka when you've fallen below a threshold (say 10%). I expected to make the creation of them roughly: cast a spell/power that calculates how many hundreds of magicka you have and considers this the amount of crystals to create, checks to see that you have 5 Aether Dust for each crystal, consumes 5 Aether Dust for each crystal, and then drains all of your magicka (fails if you do not have enough Aether Dust). I will probably create this, but given what I want to do with the consumption effect, this might take a bit. I completely agree that this should, and will, be a component of the Create Spell Tome.
Thanks again for taking the time to write up these awesome suggestions. I hope to do them justice in the coming days/weeks.
Out of curiosity, are you comfortable with distributing items to leveled lists? It can be a tricky thing to do, so many people (myself included, usually) avoid it, but it would open up a few possibilities. The thing I'm thinking of specifically would be really simple (as far as game impact goes), which would be to add more blank paper, some blank notes, and some blank books and blank journals to the misc item lists general merchants use. It's always slightly annoyed me that the game doesn't have these items in large enough quantities (with most of them not existing at all), which means making books usually ends up using ruined books, which I always find really weird (not to mention you have to then specifically collect ruined books...).
Not a complaint, just a thought.
As for leveled lists, I was trying to avoid them, for sure. I could probably do some injection, but I'm not really a fan of going there, when the main purpose in the mod was to add extra crafting opportunities out of often previously useless items.
For Blank Notes, I tried thinking about new ways to create them (Roll of Paper, breaking down other 'regular' books and notes, etc.), but for now I thought that the Ruined Books would suffice the concept.
For Mysterious Tomes, I thought that having them be Ruined Books that were altered by the Aether Dust to reinvigorate their former glory was a good process. Even if I do get into leveled lists, I probably wouldn't have Mysterious Tomes be sold. Perhaps looted, but not sold.
I, personally, think adding Ruined Books to the "always collect" list (similar to how Legacy of the Dragonborn did) is a good thing. The real toss-up for me now is whether to make inkwells able to be crafted. You need them a lot for forgery, and while they're not really rare in end-tables and the like, they're not something you come across a lot on a toon that doesn't steal. I'm waiting for my next thief playthrough to know how it balances out to be sure. Fortunately, that's my next playthrough, I believe, so it shouldn't be too long.
I'd actually also thought of using other books to become blank books. One idea would be to make it possible to craft some magical erasure solution or something like that. Using the solution in your inventory would let you choose a book (or more, if you have more solutions) to erase (using a gift type menu). Then, the player ends up with blank books from previously created ones. Just a thought.
I like the idea behind Ruined Books -> Mysterious Tomes. Never seen Legend of the Dragonborn. Not sure how I missed it, so I'll definitely be adding it to my next playthrough.
For the inkwells, those are, if nothing else, something you can steal quite a few of, and the most fitting character to use them would be a less morally strict character, anyway, so it might not be necessary to make them craftable. Although, getting one or a few out of an iron ingot and some mountain flowers would a simple solution.
I'll wait on the inkwell decision until after I play my next thief, for sure. I'm also really eager to get this first round of changes capped off so I can move on to the v2 (Campfire and DLCs).
On a side-note, have you had a chance to use the Aether Crystals/Magicka Coffers yet? I'm thinking of increasing Magicka Coffers's buffer to 20%, but I'm not sure how other would people feel about this, so I'd love some feedback. I'm finding that it's really super helpful, but that 10% is a pretty low bar when some of your spells won't let you drop low enough to break a crystal, but are too costly to be able to get that one off.
I did notice a couple of things about the usage of Create Aether Crystal.
It's a restoration spell, which seems okay on the surface, but Aether Crystals are otherwise very strongly tied to soul gems and those are almost exclusively conjuration. It's subjective, but I'd personally make it a conjuration spell. Or maybe even make it a power (since they can still function as a spell, it shouldn't interfere with functionality).
It feels very strange as a concentration spell because of the jumps in magicka. I can see two relatively simple ways of fixing that. 1: Make the magicka part of the normal spell cost, and just make sure it's not affected by any perks that reduce spell cost. (It might have to be disassociated with the various schools to manage that, but I don't recall. It's been awhile since I messed with spells.) That way, it naturally uses up magicka, and after roughly 100 magicka has been consumed, it creates a crystal. This would make it /feel/ like a concentration spell, but make it mechanically about the same as it is now. 2: Make it a fire and forget spell with the magicka cost handled the same way it currently is, but make it so that if it's dual cast, then it automatically creates as many crystals as you can afford. This one will probably /require/ remaining within one of the schools to have te dual cast perk for that school, but I don't know for sure.
If you have the power enabled while making the crystals, it's thankfully smart enough not to use a crystal while casting Create Crystal. However, it will use the crystal immediately afterward if you stop casting while below the 10% threshold. I'd put in a simple toggle in the script to deactivate crystal usage when the usage power detects the creation spell being cast, and then reactivate it only when the spell isn't being cast && their magicka is back above 10%. (If you're feeling thorough, you could also add a check for whether or not they're in combat, and if they are, then only check that they aren't currently casting the spell and ignore the threshold. This way, if they cast the spell between encounters and are surprised, it'll immediately turn back on.)
Now, with those points out of the way, there's not a whole lot to say about it except that I really like how it turned out. It's easy to use once you get the spells, and it's limited by the soul gems you come across, which is a nice balancing mechanic, I think. For whether or not to change the 10%, I can see a couple of ways to deal with it. Either just make it customizable is some manner, or make it so it goes by EITHER a relative 10% or an absolute of, say, 20 magicka, whichever is more. This way, at lower levels when your fire and forget spells are less likely to hit the 10% mark, it just goes by magicka. When you've got more magicka, 10% is a lot more useful, and you're more likely to manage to get below that before needing the crystal.
If you do go that route, which I think is the better option, personally (although having both wouldn't hurt, either), I'd suggest adding in a global variable of some sort to tracker whatever or not the player has gotten up to 200 magicka (or whatever would make the relative threshold match the absolute threshold). The first time the script sees that 10% of their magicka is >= to the absolute threshold, that absolute threshold becomes just extra function calls even when they've got plenty of magicka left. It'd lighten the effect's script laod a small amount. (Hopefully you don't mind that I'm just throwing around random efficiency notes. Just thought of it, so I figured I'd share...)
Oh, and I looked at FISS, and it appears to be really easy to use. You basically just call a couple of functions to start the saving process, and then you list each variable you want to save with a function specific to that type of variable, and call another function to stop the process. To load, you do the same thing. The example doesn't list it, but I'd personally follow it up with a forced page reset when it's done loading so the changes are shown immediately (assuming it doesn't use a background menu, in which case it might require closing the MCM to operate). However, if you're not keen on doing that yet, MCMs are still useful even when they don't have FISS support. (I have it installed, but only use it for a few mods like AutoHarvest and SkyTweak, which both have tons of settings that I keep the same from game to game. Most other mods I just redo at the start of the game since they usually only have a handful of settings, and I won't change most of them, anyway.)
Alternatively, if you want to avoid the MCM for now but still include the customization, you could always go the global variable route: just check its value in the script and list the variable's names and effects in the mod description so we can use the console's "set" command. It's not as pretty as an MCM, but it'll work just as well and be super simple, too. I'm not sure I'd personally bother with this until you're ready, if ever, to just go for the MCM, but it's an option. I'm not saying these because I REALLY want the customization, mind you. Just thoughts.
Oh, and for the inkwells, I just wanted to point out that I don't actually like my previous idea of using mountain flowers for inkwells. Instead, I'd add the ability to make charcoal from firewood (since that's actually how it's made), and then make inkwells from charcoal and an iron ingot. since Charcoal is actually traditionally used to make ink, and it even shows in the in-game inkwell (the inkwell is opaque because ink made from sharcoal degrades when exposed to too much light, so opaque inkwells protect it). This way, it's limited by the iron, but not by anything else. Firewood can be boring to collect, but it's free, easy, and chopping blocks are super common. This is actually one of the recipes of my mod Simple Recipes. It's unreleased (it's been sitting around since January), but I think this has prompted me to go ahead and release it. It'll play nicely with this, I think. (And with several other mods, too, which was the idea behind it in the first place.) I did go ahead and add ruined books and linen wraps, since I've seen those in several mods, but I hadn't thought of them before. So, you could either add a few of the relevant recipes to your list, or you could potentially point them to mine if you'd rather stick to utility items and avoid recipes for just the base items (which is exactly what mine covers).
Oh, and a really random thing that might be nice. Make it possible to break down soul gem fragments into, like, 1 Aether Dust? Could be a simple way to put them to use that's already very closely relted to the other soul gem crafting your mod has.
I'll try to look into how to better manage Magicka Coffers being enabled while filling up the stocks, but after using it for a while, I didn't really see an issue with it. I'll look harder.
As for FISS, the what I meant by that was that once I went to MCM I'd (personally) feel obligated to add it in the same manner that Campfire/Frostfall do, as far as how they immediately save settings to a profile and load them on subsequent playthroughs. Having 130~200 mod loadout on average means a real pain to initial configuration and I'd be pretty upset with myself if I complain about mod authors not doing it better and then went and did it myself just as poorly. I figure it's not overly complex, but it is another layer of complexity that I need to consider. Oh, and I really don't like the idea of having console commands be needed to interact with my mods.
On charcoal, I probably won't add this because there are two or three mods in my load order already that do this, so I'm assuming people already have it. We'll see though. I don't like the idea of relying on what someone might have installed, but then again, we're also talking about this being really only if I add an inkwell recipe.
As for fragments, I'll probably do something about them, but just haven't decided on what yet. They are a bit tricky given that there are five of them (if memory serves), and they're a bit rare in the base game already.
I'm in the middle of one of my thief playthroughs, so I'm not really working on the blue-side at the moment. I'm really just testing out the forgery system, and trying to think of ways to help "hardier" characters going forward. As always, thanks for the thoughts though. You've been a great inspiration to the project.
For the inkwells/charcoal and whatnot, I released the mod. (I renamed it to Simple Crafting instead of Simple Recipes, but the name-change was unrelated to this mod. My friend thought Simple Recipes was a bad name for it.) So, it's now an option to point to that if you want to. (Not saying you need to or should, just that it's an option.) It's got an MCM to disable any recipes you don't need to help avoid having 4 mods all doing the same thing.
Regarding the school, I did say it was pretty subjective lol. I can live with it being restoration. I'm now distracting myself by working on another mod, so I haven't even gotten to try out the forgeries yet. I should definitely do that soon...
I may need to get with you about your FISS process when the time comes, for sure. I'd just really like to stay out of the MCM until it's necessary.
Thanks for posting your mod, friend. It looks great, and seems like it will certainly help people to get more out of their (more stingy) mods. Kudos!
As for non-mage stuff, thieves (or generally green-tree characters) are going to get some shiny new toys in 1.3 (which I'll hopefully be able to post today) with the new forgery system. I still feel like I'm far too light on the red-side, so 1.4 will hopefully focus on improving that. Assuming I do a good enough job on evening the field, I'll start getting into the DLCs and then probably the Ordinator version (since I, and everyone in my gaming group, use Ordinator religiously).
Thanks for the kind words. I hope you get to thoroughly enjoy it!
If you try it and it doesn't end up working for some reason, let me know what specifically you'd like to see changed and I'll see what I can do. I'm not trying to alienate Requiem users, but not playing it myself makes it difficult for me to build and test for.
Obviously, you'll want to create a specific non-Crafty save before installing so you can go back if you encounter issues, but I'm not hearing that there should be any.
Also, when you say "new world items", do you mean fixed objects like crafting benches and the like, or items new to the game such as the Aether Dust or Packrat Armor? I only ask because I hope not to disappoint, but I don't plan for EC to ever have new crafting benches per se (Whiterun's too crowded already). I have thought about adding certain activators to certain locations, but not something as integral as a crafting bench; more like Aetherius beacons that you could find in the word and use as a resource to gather some Aether Dust, or perhaps chalices of Divine Blessed Water in various pools around Skrim that could be used to grant some kind of new recipe, that sort of thing.
Also, patching for CACO is certainly on my list of expansion directions. I'm not really sure what I could do with CCOR though. Actually, my immediate plans for additional masters that I want to extend future versions/patches onto: the DLCs (probably all together), Campfire/Frostfall, Ordinator, Hunterborn, CACO, and maybe Wintermyst (if I can pull off what I'm thinking).
I'm considering building the mod as a Campfire plugin in the near future, but I'm still working through some of the concepts (perk progression, possible craftable activators similar to Hearth Craft, etc), but I'm trying to see the balance between the additional options provided by Campfire, and crafting new items from additional masters. The DLCs were actually one of the main reasons I wanted to make this (craftable heartstones, random staffs, craftable Riekling items, etc), so I'm trying to give that a higher priority.
http://elderscrolls.wikia.com/wiki/Elves_Ear
Hope that helps.