This mod is an expansion of the original Northern Cardinal mod, aiming to bring the ultimate seafarer's experience to Skyrim. Now, you can become a true captain who commands your crew sailing to the Sea of Ghosts, where you'll encounter pirate ships, merchant vessels, and even dragons or ghost ships roaming the waters. This mod is both a predecessor and successor to the great Pirates of Skyrim mod by BigBizkit, which showcased the true potential of the mod. This mod uses the random wilderness/roadside encounter system in the vanilla game to reduce script bloat while being highly expandable, many future enhancements are planned so stay tuned.


For features of the original mod, please refer to the mod page here: Northern Cardinal - Traveling Ship Player Home

Travel to Sea of Ghosts
There are different ways to experience the sea encounters.

• The simplest way is to travel to the Sea of Ghosts using the wheel or map. This will guarantee the random encounter processing but it doesn't necessarily mean there will be an encounter event, still, there can be treasure underwater so it's always good to explore first.
• When traveling from port to port there's also a chance a random encounter (default is 30%, can be changed in MCM along with all the other encounters)
• You can also talk to the First Mate you appointed to find a specific type of ship, for now it only works for pirate ships, this will guarantee the encounter with a pirate ship
  

When a random encounter is triggered from the first two options, the game Story Manager will process all the events added by this mod in the order listed below. Everything is configurable in MCM.



Spoiler for the full list of events and their additional conditions.


Civil War Integration
Once you join a civil war faction, talk to Legate Adventus Caesennius (Castle Dour) or Yrsarald Thrice-Pierced (Palace of the Kings) to pledge the service of Northern Cardinal to the faction. Afterwards, you can encounter and attack enemy ships at Sea of Ghosts. They will also ambush you if you sail to the port in their territory. You can also talk to your first mate to find and attack enemy ships.

Port Encounters
Apart from imperial/Stormcloak soldiers, EEC guard will also approach for bounty or attack you if you have high enough bounty with them.

Crew
This feature has been added in SE/AE version but now you can recruit any follower or potential follower from anywhere.
Thanks to the AI voice advancement specifically Elevenlabs used in this mod, your crew will address you as Captain, and will also have greeting/idle dialogues related to being part of the ship crew. This works for all vanilla followers (including unique voiced followers Serana and Frea) and any modded followers using vanilla voicetypes.

Ship Animation
Thanks to Vicn's Animated Ships mod, the Northern Cardinal now has slight ship bobbling animation. It will also play a short animation when arriving at a port with sails up with a transition after arrival. (can be toggled off in MCM)

Misc
You can signal the ship to the current port while it's away in another port. This requires you to have a first mate onboard and have sailed to the port at least once.
Followers/crew can jump over ledges on board when needed, they will try to avoid going through the captain's chamber.
You can sail back to the pirate hideout after the initial quest.
You can recruit a dog as a ship pet.

Addons
Newland Addon provided: Wyrmstooth, Falskaar, Midwood Isle. To sail to their port, you need to complete their initial quests and talk to Marcian afterwards.
EVGAT addon: Add EVGAT animation for climbing up/down main deck.
East Empire Company Armor support via SPID.
Sea shanty addon: Add instrumental sea shanty when sailing to Sea of Ghosts. You can preview the music here: PGN Music

Q: Do I need base version of Northern Cardinal SSE for this mod?
A: No, this is a standalone mod.

Q: Can I use this mod with the base version of Northern Cardinal SSE?
A: No, it requires a new save or a save without existing Northern Cardinal base mod.

Q: Plugin is loaded but mod is not active in game?
A: Make sure you have Backported Extended ESL Support if you are not on latest game versions.

Q: Will you make it compatible with <mod>?
A: Depends on requests. But for now no to the ones listed in the Incompatible mods section below.

Q: Will you make the ship sail to <location>?
A: Depends on requests. For mod location it should be an island or coastal area with enough content and not behind paywall for me to consider it.

Q: How does this mod relate to Pirates of Skyrim?
A: Both mods are based on different base version of Northern Cardinal, PoS is an expansion on LE version of Northern Cardinal and this mod is an expansion of Northern Cardinal SSE. Obviously PoS is a great inspiration for this mod but two mods are entirely different besides that.