Skyrim Special Edition




OK, this is going to take some explaining, so bear with me!

And I should say at this point that the temper fade feature in iEquip was really designed with Requiem users in mind, however depending on the way in which your degradation mod handles the actual degradation it can also have value for non-Requiem players.
Firstly, so there is no misconception, iEquip does not handle the tempering or degradation mechanics in any way, it simply checks the health of the equipped items each time they are equipped or used (i.e. on weapon swing, bow fire, shield/weapon block, OnHit if you have a shield equipped) and displays the actual values retrieved in an easy to understand fashion.  Each time you load your game iEquip retrieves the temper level boundaries and names (in case you have a mod that adjusts or alters them in any way) and from then on uses those values to calculate where the item health currently sits within the current temper tier and displays that as a %.  So if you are seeing Fine (50%) it means the equipped item health is currently half way between the upper and lower temper tier boundaries for the Fine tier.  To avoid any misunderstanding here this is NOT what you see in the Loot & Degradation widget, I'll come back to that shortly.

So it doesn't matter which mods or methods you are using to temper or degrade your items, as long as they are modifying the actual item health value on the object, and not applying buffs/debuffs to the item damage/armour rating in some other way, then what you see in iEquip is correct.

The next thing to understand is that a basic untempered item has an item health value of 1.0 (100%) when queried with GetItemHealthPercent(), the method iEquip uses for retrieving the actual current values from the equipped items.

In vanilla there are six basic temper tiers - Fine, Superior, Exquisite, Flawless, Epic, and Legendary - each of which increment the item health by a straight 0.1, or 10%, up to 1.6 at which point you have a Legendary item.  So the way vanilla works is anything over 1.0 but below 1.1 is classed as Fine, over 1.1 and below 1.2 is Superior and so on.  A Flawless item will return a value of 1.4, or to look at it another way 140% of the health of the untempered item.  This is then fed into all those calculations shown on the UESP wiki page linked above.

This changes completely in Requiem, which not only renames the tiers - Well-Made, High-Grade, First-Rate, Exquisite, Master Work, Legendary - and extends the tier boundaries significantly, but also then segments each main tier into 12 smaller sub-tiers.  When you temper an item in Requiem you actually temper it by one or more of those sub-tiers, so you have to temper an item 12 levels to move it from say High-Grade to First-Rate.  And consequently items can also then be degraded one sub-tier at a time.  In the case of Requiem, iEquip is again displaying the current item health as a percentage within the current main temper tier (not the sub-tier), so an item displaying as Well-Made (50%) will have an actual current health value of around 2.8 (midway between the 2.2 and 3.3 main tier boundaries).

UPDATE - As of iEquip 1.5.0 Loot & Degradation's method of tracking item health is fully supported and used to update the levels displayed in the widget. The following section has been left for information purposes only.

Now let's come back to Loot & Degradation and why what you see in the L&D widget isn't what you are seeing in iEquip.  L&D degrades one full tier at a time, or in the case of Requiem one sub-tier at a time.  It does not actually reduce the item effective item health in between each of those tier drops, but instead uses it's own 'countdown' system which it runs down until the point that it is ready to make a change to the actual value, at which point the item health is actually degraded.  And just to confuse you more, it does this by altering the item health by a miniscule amount each time.  It does this by appending a tiny value - 0.001 -  to the item health, and then using that tiny number as the countdown as it 'degrades' the item.  So for example you have an Exquisite item which L&D has degraded by 63%, the value returned on that item will be 1.30047, and if it keeps degrading when it reaches 1.30000 L&D then drops the value to 1.2001 and starts counting down again.  And it's the same in Requiem but within the sub-tiers.  So for all you see in the L&D widget that the item % is dropping, until it actually drops a full tier or sub-tier there is no noticable change to the item damage/armour rating.  Incidentally, and I haven't looked into how the other degradation mods handle it, but L&D actually 'degrades' weapons on every swing whether you hit something or not, so if you stand there for long enough swinging your weapon in mid air (and you'd have to swing it several thousand times) it will actually degrade a level!

And that's why what iEquip displays (the actual value) and what the L&D widget displays (the micro-counter value) are different.  iEquip is showing you the actual current value within that tier.  For Requiem users particularly this bears no resemblance to what you see in the L&D widget because it's showing it's micro-counter counting down within the sub-tier (or 1/12 of a main tier) whereas iEquip is displaying the actual current health within the main tier.

In the current version of iEquip all of this means that if you are using L&D in a non-Requiem build you won't ever see the temper fade, because the item will always be at 0% within the temper tier boundaries, for example Fine is 1.1 to 1.2. and a Fine item will always return 1.1, so with no actual health change within that boundary range it is always at 0%.  To counter this iEquip ignores 0% and should make the icon fully white (un-faded).  However I am currently working on tweaking it so if you're using L&D and not Requiem I will check that micro-counter and use L&Ds values to set the iEquip display.  For now, I'd just recommend turning off the icon fade option in Temper Settings, and picking one of the item name display formats that doesn't include a numerical percentage.

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dunc001

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  1. dtrail
    dtrail
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    Nice, thank you for the explanation!
    I'm using "Equipment Durability System". I don't know exactly if it uses the actual vanilla degradation system or injects its own, because it's an engine-level implementation via an SKSE plugin - no scripts, no ESP - and no further explanation on its mod page. It comes with a widget, and while its values sometimes seem to match the ones shown by the iEquip widgets, they sometimes show something different. But at the end both widgets are working, which means that EDS uses or modifes the vanilla tempering system, so iEquip can read temper states. I will keep an eye on it and report here whatever I might find that could be of any help.

    Edit: Ok, there is one thing I noticed. EDS uses a scale to show temper state between stages. However, I'm not sure what the maximum number of thet scale actually is. But it seems to match the iEquip widget's filling state. For example I have a sword which I've just tempered. The EDS widget shows "200" and the iEquip widget was filled entirely. After a while it got degraded to 132 in EDS widget, and the iEquip widget was filled around 2/3. Seems they're showing the same thing. But sometimes the iEquip meter shows something different, e.g. it becomes red witrhout a noticeable reason. (But I didn't yet understand the meaning of those colors properly...).

    I suspect that iEquip grabs the proper values, because EDS is modifying the temper states output directly on engine level. EDS is probably adding numbers between all temper stages, which are then shown in its widget. That's the reason why sometimes iEquip's widget does not match the value shown on the EDS widget. But the final temper state is always the same, which means that when an item reaches a lower or higher temper level, both mod's widgets will shows that, too. (I hope that was described somehow well to understand.. xD )

    Here's a link to the mod: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/19023