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The Letters From Home feature has been introduced in version 2.2.0
NPCs who you have not seen for a while (past followers left behind, or your spouse and kids at home) will write you all sorts of letters. The letters and their theme is dynamically generated based on the writer's attributes and relationship towards the player.
Letters are delivered by the vanilla courier.
By default, the settings allow the feature to run quietly in the background, with you occasionally getting a nice letter from a friend far away. (But you're not getting spammed with them.)
However, this feature is not an exception in being extremely customizable. It comes with its dedicated MCM page, with all sorts of scary-looking sliders and toggles.
This page is here to explain what they do, how they affect your gameplay, thus to help you navigate them to set up the best experience you'd like.
MCM keys:
Allow Letters from Home: enables or disables the entire feature. When disabled, already delivered letters are not removed.
Force reliable caching:
Spoiler:
The Creation Engine is very limited when it comes to letters, and the mod needs certain tricks to make this feature work.
These tricks are affected by your input device: keyboard+mouse / xbox controller / steam controller / (etc...)
Large effort went into optimizing the mod so that it predicts your setup to function correctly, and conveniently.
However, there are some special cases (especially if using a keyboard with mods that change the inputs so that the game can work with both controller and keyboard at the same time, but other setups might be affected as well) where the mod can't perform it's standard tricks on your setup, and it can't adjust itself.
'Force reliable caching' makes the mod use another technique to achieve its functionality, which does NOT rely on your input device (and will thus always work on any setup). However, this technique has a compromise:
When you open a letter from your inventory, read it, and the close it down, you will also be kicked out of inventory view, straight back into the game. If you wanted to stay in your inventory, you have to open it back up.
That's the compromise. It's inconvenient, I know.
So what should you do with this key?
- At first, leave it. Play the game and receive your first letters.
- See if they work. They work? -> then you don't need to force reliable caching.
- BUT:
If the letters get the bug where the sender's name in the title doesn't match the name in the signature, or opening a letter shows the same text as another letter did just before, or text is getting mixed up in other weird ways, then you must enable reliable caching to fix the letters. Sadly you'll have to live with the compromise I explained above about exiting the inventory when reading a letter.
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The Creation Engine is very limited when it comes to letters, and the mod needs certain tricks to make this feature work.
These tricks are affected by your input device: keyboard+mouse / xbox controller / steam controller / (etc...)
Large effort went into optimizing the mod so that it predicts your setup to function correctly, and conveniently.
However, there are some special cases (especially if using a keyboard with mods that change the inputs so that the game can work with both controller and keyboard at the same time, but other setups might be affected as well) where the mod can't perform it's standard tricks on your setup, and it can't adjust itself.
'Force reliable caching' makes the mod use another technique to achieve its functionality, which does NOT rely on your input device (and will thus always work on any setup). However, this technique has a compromise:
When you open a letter from your inventory, read it, and the close it down, you will also be kicked out of inventory view, straight back into the game. If you wanted to stay in your inventory, you have to open it back up.
That's the compromise. It's inconvenient, I know.
So what should you do with this key?
- At first, leave it. Play the game and receive your first letters.
- See if they work. They work? -> then you don't need to force reliable caching.
- BUT:
If the letters get the bug where the sender's name in the title doesn't match the name in the signature, or opening a letter shows the same text as another letter did just before, or text is getting mixed up in other weird ways, then you must enable reliable caching to fix the letters. Sadly you'll have to live with the compromise I explained above about exiting the inventory when reading a letter.
Frequency:
This set of keys control how often you'll be receiving letters.
Minimum interval: The minimum number of days required to pass between each letter delivery.
Maximum interval: The maximum number of days allowed to pass before a new letter delivery.
The time the mod waits between deliveries is a random number between these two limits. This number is then further affected by the next setting.
Time factor: This is an important key to understand, because it plays a crucial role in how long you actually have to wait for your letters.
This key mimics the effect of "having more friends mean a larger chance of mail". If you have a short list of friends, the actual time between deliveries is scaled up with this factor. If you have lots of friends eagerly waiting to send you letters, the time is not scaled up (that much), thus you'll get more frequent letters.
For transparency's sake: the time to wait between deliveries is multiplied by MAX[ (time factor)/(Number of NPCs) , 1 ].
Now what does this ugly formula mean:
For example: Let's say you set this 'time factor' to 5.0.
If you have 3 NPCs who can write you letters, then after the number of days to wait is selected from the interval limits (for example, let it be 10 days), it is multiplied by 5/3, leaving you to wait for 10*5/3 = 16.6 days.
If you have 5 or more NPCs, you'll have to wait just 10 days, because it gets multiplied by just 1.
Best setting for this key is probably to set it to how many NPCs you expect to be your friend. If you want frequent, reliable letters, set it a bit lower, or if you want to scale more aggressively, set it higher.
Setting the time factor to 1 disables the scaling (since the time is always multiplied by 1, doing nothing.)
Writers at same time:
Sets how many letters you can receive at the same time in one delivery. It's expressed as a percentage of the number of your NPCs in the eligible writers list. If you have 5 friends, setting this to 50% means you get between 1-3 letters with each delivery.
Limit letters at same time:
For technical reasons, sets a hard limit on how many letters can be delivered in one delivery. If set to 5 for example, then even if you have 123413641 friends and 'writers at same time' is at 100%, the max number of letters you can get will still be just 5.
List of friends:
This section is for managing your eligible letter writers.
Check for new NPCs:
New NPCs are added to your friend list when you hug them with the mod's dialogues. When this key is enabled, this scanning is active: Hug an NPC to add them as potential letter writers!
Write just once:
When enabled, then after writing a letter, the NPC is removed from the list. Meaning, they won't write another letter until you meet and hug them again (thus get added back to the list).
Auto-remove expired:
When enabled, if the mod has run out of generated text for an NPC, it removes them from the list automatically so that they don't take up processing time. Disabling this is not friendly to your performance!
The lists:
Manage senders: NPCs on this list are tracked for the feature. How to get NPCs on this list? Hug them with the mod's dialogues.
Very important: this list serves two functions.
1) It shows you who's being tracked by the system at the moment.
2) It allows you to remove them from the list and add them to the Blacklist.
If you just wanted to check the list, then escape by selecting "Back", and then exiting.
If you want to remove an NPC from the list, select their name before exiting.
Removing an NPC will of course cease their tracking and they won't send letters anymore. But it will also put them on the blacklist.
NPCs on the blacklist are completely blocked from the feature. This means that even if you hug them yourself in the game, they won't get
re-added to the senders' list while they are on the blacklist.
Since version 3.1.0, the NPC Debugger (accessible via hotkey from the MCM general page) can directly edit a selected NPC in-and-out of these lists. It has a guided UI.
16 comments
i had to increase the frequency of the letters, because i wanted more of them as i like the interaction as it feels like they need me to come home and take a break from adventuring.
on another note from the hugging animations, i do like that there is an option where your wife or kids will hug you without you choosing the hug through dialogue as this feels realistic because i have been missed.
And thirdly, it's a bit difficult to implement so that "nobody misses out". The letters should retain their randomness, (so it shouldn't be like for example it's always the 3rd letter that gives a quest), but with random letters, especially with players who have them delivered at a slow rate (you mentioned you had to increase their frequency from the default settings), they might simply miss it. So even if I'd consider a feature like this, it would have to be done cleverly, so that player's don't accidentally miss it.
your travels"
"I myself find generic radiant quests without a decent story quite boring and cumbersome to play"
Counterpoint. A letter from your spouse asking you to bring home some eggs and milk (even it it's 'just' RP and not tied to an actual quest goal) would be a touching addition to the random letters you might get from them...
agreed, and it doesn't even have to be a radiant quest, just a request of your spouse and items you might already have within your inventory, and i could see that some of these items might already be inside the home, so the possibility of them already being there could be looked for on the mantle or a shelf and given to her, something like that.
anyway i wrote that comment a long time ago lol. i still like the idea's this game with mods makes so many wonderful things come to existence that really should have existed in the vanilla game, but it is what it is.
i mean i have been playing FO4 for the passed year and there are some things in this game i wish they had in skyrim, but it's still fine, i still love skyrim, but it would be way cool if we had the build menu in skyrim so we could build our own villages without having to go to the creation kit to make them, so it feels somewhat immersive and choose how you wish the town to look in that system, the only thing i would change for the FO4 build menu settlement system is for the ability to build interior's perhaps some of them can be premade but they could be cells that exist in the same community, so the build limit is not as limited due to to many objects bogging down performance like it often does.
But still thank you so much for this mod. <3
THANK YOU so much, WhiteWolf424242 ! Can't wait!!
Thanks for the kind words ^^
it's annoying that it doesn't work like it should, but what can you do....
Edit: Could this have been an issue with accidentally pressing 'take' on a letter that was already in my inventory? If I drop the duplicate, the original letter will say "uninitialized book" instead. It seems I need both in my inventory for the original letter to keep its text.
It's very weird that you have a duplicate. What do you exactly mean by duplicate? When both are in your inventory, they both say the same thing? And how did you acquire the duplicate, was it also delivered by the courier?
This shouldn't happen, it's very weird that it gets confused like that. If not for the duplicate, it may be possible that due to some problem, no text could be generated for your NPC, and an empty string got passed along, or something like that and that is why it says "uninitialized book". But the connection in your edit to having the duplicate in your inventory affecting the original is beyond unexplainable.
So I'll need a lot more info if I'm to look into it. Besides the things I asked, can you also please post screenshots of the entire report that "sqv WW42LettersQuest" prints in the console? It's a long report, you can scroll up/down with the pageUp, pageDown buttons. Please post the entire report.
https://imgur.com/a/4zg1jaK
I received a single letter from the courier, sent by a follower added by Relationship Dialogue Overhaul. Every time I open a letter from this mod, it opens one of two ways: Normally, or with the option to "take" it. Taking it will duplicate the letter. Whichever way it opens is seemingly random.
When both letters are in my inventory, one displays the original text. The other says "uninitialized book". If only one letter is in my inventory, it will always say "uninitialized book" regardless of which one I drop.
Eventually, many hours of play later, I dropped the duplicate letter and it just... disappeared, seemingly fixing the issue by leaving the original one with the correct text. There is nothing consistent about what the duplicate letters display in my experience. I duplicated a letter 4 times and they all displayed the correct text until I duplicated it a fifth time, at which point the same "uninitialized book" thing happened.
As a bonus, I recently received a letter from the same NPC (who is the only one on my 'senders' list) with no name attached to it. Frankly, I feel I've offended the courier in some way and he has cursed me.
Thanks, I've opened a bug report for this, better to discuss further there: https://www.nexusmods.com/skyrimspecialedition/mods/41856/?tab=bugs