This is an armor set made from modified textures and meshes from NordwarUA's fantastic Sons of Skyrim mod. If you love the look of NordwarUA's guard and Stormcloak armors and wanted a more "generic" version for your character and/or followers to wear, then this mod is for you.

The armor is vailable as a standalone armor set, or as a visual replacer for vanilla Steel Armor (requested by user THUNDERHEAD333). The replacer covers Steel Cuffed Boots and Steel Nordic Gauntlets, both cuirass variants and both helmet variants (although the Steel Horned Helmet replacer doesn't have horns). I didn't touch Steel Shin Boots or Steel Imperial Gauntlets.

As of v1.1, the standalone version is distributed via SPID, using the random group generation method from SPID Random Distribution Helper to distribute the armor to bandits. Starting at level 4, about 25% of bandits will wear at least 1 piece of Studded Heavy Armor; about 5% of bandits will wear a full set. (Bandit Mages and Bandit Chiefs are exempt.)

Studded Heavy Armor is craftable with the Steel Smithing perk. It's not as protective as Steel Armor, but it's lighter and cheaper to make, requiring more Leather but less Steel. Each piece can be tempered with 1 Steel Ingot. If you're using my Adamant smithing overhaul, SPARC, there's a consistency patch in the Misc Files of this page that makes Studded Heavy Armor unlock earlier, with Novice Smithing (the same perk that unlocks Leather Armor).

I originally made this as part of a larger modpack of various armors I'm (slowly) working on, but I have no idea if I'll ever finish the full thing, so I decided to release this set on its own.

The armor uses your installed cubemaps, and screenshots were taking using the Ascensio modlist, so visuals in your own game will probably differ somewhat.

To Do
- Alternate cuirass option Done
- Steel Armor replacer, per request Done
- Add distribution via SPID Done
- Consistency patch for SPARC Done
- Pack it all in a FOMOD (eventually)
- Add IPM for consistent naming for replacer version (maybe someday)

Credits
- NordwarUA, who deserves 99.9% of the credit for making such awesome armor and being so generous with permissions; the other 0.1% is just me, a rank amateur, fumbling around in the programs listed below
- Fabric 030 from ambientCG, licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal License
- Metal 006 from ambientCG, licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal License
- fig26uk for SPID Random Distribution Helper, which was invaluable for setting up distribution

Tools Used
- GIMP
- paint.net
- Nifskope
- Outfit Studio
- xEdit
- Sublime Text
- Photo Mode (for screenshots)