Liminal Portals
A Guide to Teleportation

Mods in the GIF: TrueHUD for the health bars, A Matter of Time for the clock and symbol above the compass, Immersive Interactions for the character animations, and Lind's Court Wizard Robes for the clothes.

This mod was inspired by the original Liminal Bridges - A portal mod by darkness947. While I originally only planned to modify their mod to add more portals, I ended up creating my own version from scratch to add a number of new features, and so this mod does not contain any content from Liminal Bridges. If you would prefer a simple mod to place two portals with no other complications, I recommend you check theirs out! Without Liminal Bridges to show me that this was possible, I never would have made this.


Summary of Features

• Place up to 6 pairs of portals (12 portals total) anywhere in the world, and teleport between them. Paired portals will always lead to each other (Portal 1 A leads to Portal 1 B, and so on).
• All spells are learned from a single spell tome, sold once you reach 40 Conjuration (added to leveled list by a small script when you first install, so no patches needed).
• Freely add/remove individual spells from your spellbook by reading the spell tome again (the tome has zero weight so you can carry it around). Removing a spell does not affect the portal, so you can remove the spells for your more permanent portals once you are happy with their placement, and free up your spell list.
• Customize the action of your portal spells. If the portal is open and you cast it, do you want it to move the portal to you, close it, or hide it? (More on hiding in a moment) You can change the default action, and set a separate default action to occur if you cast while sneaking.
• Hide portals! Hidden portals are invisible and cannot be entered, but can be exited. If you exit a hidden portal, it will be visible for a few seconds before fading away (can be changed to stay open when you exit until you manually hide it again). Optionally, you can set portals to automatically hide if you enter them while sneaking.
• Customize the default size of newly placed portals. Perfect for fitting them in small homes.
• NPC support (sort of). While there is no AI that I am aware of that will cause an NPC to use the portal, if an NPC does activate the portal they will be teleported. You can order your followers to use the portal, but if the destination is far away then they will immediately move most of the way back to you as part of the vanilla following behaviour. Still, this can be useful if you want to teleport them short distances, or if you have another mod that lets you order non-follower NPCs to interact with objects.
  

Detailed Features

There are a total of 13 spells, 12 linked to their own single portal, and a master spell that can modify any portal. The portals are in pairs numbered 1 to 6, with each pair having an A and a B portal.

All 13 spells are learned from a single spell tome, which is added to the Adept Conjuration leveled lists by a startup script when the mod first loads. It can be purchased in the College of Winterhold upon reaching 40 Conjuration. This spell tome contains my best attempt at lore-friendly flavour text (based on the vanilla book "Liminal Bridges" and the Teleportation Lore page of the UESP wiki), and does not disappear when read. Instead, reading it is how you access the customization options for the mod, including adding and removing all the spells. Since the tome is intended to be carried to access all features of the mod, it has zero carry weight.

If you don't want to mess with the options, you can simply open the book, select "Add All Spells", and close the menu. The second option will let you add or remove the Master Spell from your spell list. The third option, "Add/Remove Individual Spells" will let you control which of the 12 individual portal spells appear in your spell list.

Casting the spell for a portal will have a number of different actions, depending on the state of the portal (open, closed, or hidden), the state of the player (standing or sneaking), and the selected customization options. These options are:

 - Open. This will open the portal at your current location. If the portal is closed, this is the only option. If the portal is open or hidden somewhere else, it will be moved and unhidden at your location.
 - Hide. If the portal is open, then this will hide it at its current location.
 - Unhide. If the portal is hidden, this will unhide it at its current location.
 - Close. This will completely remove the portal, regardless of whether it is hidden or not. This option is not really required, hiding should be sufficient in most cases. However, if you want to be sure you never accidentally teleport to this location again, or if you are troubleshooting and want to remove this mod's objects from a cell, this option will do the trick.

The following table will show which options can be selected as the default. The options depend on the current state of the portal (left axis), and whether the player is sneaking or not (top axis). The included defaults are highlighted in bold, but can be changed. Alternatively, you can choose "ask me every time" for any of the conditions, which will cause a dialogue box to appear every time you cast the spell under those conditions, allowing you to manually choose the action taken each time (except for when the portal is closed, since the only option is to open it).



The default options are meant to be intuitive. Casting while standing will always move the portal to your location, unless it is hidden. Casting while sneaking will switch between hidden and unhidden. To close the portal, you must first cast while sneaking to hide the portal, then stand and cast again while standing to close it. To make it easier to understand what's going on (since some effects will target a portal that not visible), the action that is being taken will be written briefly in the corner of the screen.

Alternative suggestions are: setting the portal to hide or unhide if cast while standing, and always move to your location when cast while sneaking. Or perhaps always move to your location if cast while standing, and ask you every time you cast while sneaking.

There are a few more customization options in the "Other Defaults" menu. If you hide a portal, then enter its paired portal, the hidden portal will reveal itself so you can exit. By default, the portal will hide itself again after a few seconds, but this can be disabled. Disabling this option leaves the portal unhidden until you manually hide it again, which synergizes well with the next option. It is not enabled by default, but you can choose to have portals you enter while sneaking automatically hide themselves as you go through. So if you change both options from the default you could place a hidden portal somewhere like a merchant or smelter, and it will unhide permanently when you exit. Then when you have completed your business, enter the portal again while sneaking and it will hide itself behind you. This setup would allow you to leave hidden portals around that you can use without needing to recast the spells. It is not configured by default because having the portals permanently change states without casting the spells can be confusing for users who did not read the mod page, but is included as an option feature.

You can also set the default size of new portals here, from 50% size to 150% size. Changing this setting will only affect portals opened after the setting is changed, existing portals will not be resized.


Installing and Uninstalling

Install the mod with your mod manager. I recommend Mod Organizer 2, but some people prefer Vortex.

Do not uninstall mid-save. This goes for every mod, not just this one. If you don't want to use the mod anymore, close all the portals, use the book to remove all the spells, and then remove the book from your inventory.


Compatibility

If you are using Save Unbaker, then you will need to edit po3_SaveUnbaker.ini. Change "Persistent Ref Transforms" to "false". If it is left as "true", then Save Unbaker will prevent your game from loading the positions of the portals from your save file.

This mod does not edit any vanilla records or cells, and should be compatible with almost everything. Adding the book to the leveled list is done by a single script command when you first load the mod, and does not require any patching. The portals re-use some vanilla meshes and textures, and mods that edit these can affect the appearance. Mostly textures from the Snow Elves architecture, but potentially ice and water textures (the game uses these for the shimmer effect).

It's even compatible with the original Liminal Bridges mod, if you want to run both side by side for even more portals.

You can use Jaxonz Renamer to rename the portals as well, without impacting functionality. This can be helpful if you place a row of portals down, and can't remember where they go. Note that changing the name will persist even if you close the portal and re-open it, the new portal will still have the custom name.

The portals are only partially compatible with Jaxonz Positioner. You can use it to adjust the portal position if you want to tweak it a little, but do not try to pick them up. This mod works by keeping a single instance of each portal, and trying to pick up the portal with Jaxonz Positioner will disable the original portal and attempt to place a copy, and the copy will not work correctly.




Technical Info

This information is not required to use the mod, but may be useful if you want to change it, or if you're just curious about how it works.

The portals are using the meshes from the wayshrine portals in the Dawnguard DLC. The textures have been taken from this website (which allows royalty free usage of the photos):

• https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-beautiful-sky-with-stars-at-night-6437443/
• https://www.pexels.com/photo/red-and-orange-solar-flare-73873/
• https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-an-abstract-art-5278835/
• https://www.pexels.com/photo/abstract-backdrop-of-dynamic-smoke-creating-waves-in-air-5984623/
• The solid black texture is a vanilla texture.
  

If you want to change the texture, you can replace the LiminalPortalA.dds file in the textures folder with another DDS file. If you find a picture you like and don't have GIMP or somthing that can convert it, you can use this website: https://convertio.co/png-dds/. Simply convert your chosen image to DDS, rename it to LiminalPortalA.dds, and replace my image with yours. This will affect all of the A portals. You can replace LiminalPortalB.dds to affect all the B portals. Note that there are a lot of types of DDS files, and not all of them can be loaded by the game. If your custom file crashes the game, run it through Cathedral Assets Optimizer. That will convert it to a type that Skyrim can use.

Sometimes, the portal will not look like how you expect. The lighting on the portal can drastically change the appearance, even just rotating it in the same location can cause it to be significantly brighter or darker. It's not a bug, just the way the game renders the portal.

The portal size is set with the "setscale" command. Although my menu only presents a few options between 0.5 and 1.5, the game will support any size between 0.01 and 10. If you really want to go crazy with the sizes, you can use this command to set the default size, replacing the 1 with the scale you want: set Liminal_DefaultScale to 1


For those worried about scripts, there are only 5 scripts in this mod, and none of them run in the background.

1. One script runs when you start a new game, it just adds the spell tome to the leveled list and never runs again.
2. One script runs when you open the spellbook to display the menus and update the configuration options based on your selections.
3. One script runs when you cast the spell to modify the portal state.
4. One script runs when you cast the master spell, and it will then cast the individual portal spell based on your selection.
5. One script runs when someone activates the portal, and teleports the user to the paired portal. Technically, this one will run in the background for 6 seconds if it is waiting to rehide a hidden portal that you just exited, but then it stops.

Tips for expanding this mod

If 12 portals isn't enough and you want to modify the mod to have even more, here is a short checklist. I won't teach you how to do these things, but I can at least tell you what needs to be done to give you a starting point.

1. Duplicate an existing portal object and make A and B versions of the new portal.
2. Place a single instance of each of these new portals in the LiminalCell. Anywhere in the cell will do, the important part is that exactly one copy of the portal exists.
3. Edit the properties of the script attached to the portals, changing the connectedportal to the other portal in the pair.
4. Duplicate the magic effect of an existing portal, and make A and B versions.
5. Edit the script properties on the magic effect, so the portal you placed in step 2 is the target of the spell.
6. Duplicate the spell of an existing portal, making A and B versions.
7. Edit the new spell to use the effects you created in step 4.
8. Duplicate one of the messages that allows you to add/remove spells, and edit the conditions to check if the player has spells created in step 6.
9. Edit the script properties on the book, and add the spells created in step 6, and the message(s) created in step 8.
10. Edit the script on the book. The "add all spells" option needs to include these spells, and you will need to create a new menu tree to have the menu created in step 8 appear after the existing ones. This script is pretty clean, so you should be able to figure it out by reading it.
11. Edit the Master Spell menu and script to include the newly added spells, if you want them to be controllable by the master spell.

You can skip steps 8-10 if you want to just add the spells with the console. Also note that I have found that editing the scripts mid save (as done in step 10) will cause the menus to not appear. If you are going to try this, do it on a new save or before installing the mod.