From the way the mod is set up, it seems that the only monsters added to your game are the monsters you install from the list of OPTIONAL requirements. So, for example, if you install this mod, alongside the Wraiths SE mod, than this mod would add those monsters to the game in the way the mod goes about doing that.
From what I seen in the lists, there aren't any spiders, but, just make sure you don't install any spider related mods, and you should be fine.
That’s one of the unintended consequences of spawning in random locales. HPH shouldn’t do that often because the odds are very low of multiple in the same spot, but there are a few locations with multiple HPH spawns where it can happen by random chance. It requires multiple NPCs to be replaced in the same cell, and the replacements having factions that oppose each other.
I’m considering an update that would mitigate this while improving some of the variability. Just need time to screw with it.
No. Carnivoriance adds creatures to some vanilla leveled lists. They have a chance to spawn in the locations in your load order where that list is used. That might be random encounters in some mod, but I doubt it given the specific lists I relied on. It is more likely to replace a mud crab that is always near Solitude, or a spriggin in a grove, or what have you.
I don’t know what those patches do. If they are modifying the spawns themselves, it’ll conflict the edited spawn points. Won’t cause any issues, just whichever plugin has priority in your load order will control what spans at that location.
This is designed to scale with the player level. Enemies do not appear until the player is at or very close to their minimum level.
I really like what you've done here, great idea, but doesn't this mean that the spawn points from HPE will spawn no enemy 50% of the time for categories you don't have any creature mods for? In other words, the new leveled lists you redirect those spawns too are empty by default, so if they get chosen (50% chance) and are still empty because you don't have any creature mod installed that would populate it, doesn't that mean no enemy would spawn?
Just trying to make sure I understand this correctly. It would seem that if I then install perhaps only a single supported creature mod, then most of the HPE spawn points will spawn no enemies roughly 50% of the time.
Each HPH unique leveled NPC list starts off as a reference to the vanilla list. So the only thing it does by default is refer right back to the same leveled character that would be there anyway.
Each Skypatcher ini removes that reference if it still exists, then adds the new creatures into the leveled list NPC.
So basically:
1) plugin replaces the placed NPC reference with a new HPH NPC record.
2) HPH NPC record refers to a new HPH leveled NPC that references both the vanilla leveled NPC and a new unique HPH leveled NPC.
3) the unique HPH leveled NPCs in the plugin references the same vanilla leveled NPC so without a compatible creature mod the game ends up loading the same NPC would have anyway, just with an extra step,
4) at game start, Skypatcher loads any creature mods into corresponding HPH unique leveled NPCs, and removes the vanilla reference if it still exists (because no other Skypatcher plugins have already done it).
5) now the placed NPC refers to the new HPH NPC record. It references a leveled character with a 50% chance of choosing either of two options - vanilla leveled NPC list or unique HPH leveled NPC lisr.
Theoretically would work for the whole game if it didn’t require editing each placed NPC record, which would be a compatibility and development nightmare. If there was an SKSE mod to edit placed NPC records with some filtering, it could be done.
Carnivoriance skips editing the placed NPC cell and worldspace records, and instead drops creature NPC records into more selective vanilla leveled lists.
Thanks for the detailed explanation, but I'm possibly very dense and might be missing something. You said in Step 3) that "the unique HPH leveled NPCs in the plugin references the same vanilla leveled NPC so without a compatible creature mod the game ends up loading the same NPC would have anyway." I don't see how this is possible.
Example: Unique HPH leveled NPC item HPHLCharWitch has the Skyrim record LCharWitchAny as well as the HPH record HPHLCharMagicAnyAdded--and both are set at Level 1. The way the game engine works is that, because the two flags are set on the LL ("Calculate from all levels <= player's level" and "Calculate for each item in count"), the game will pick either of these, not necessarily the first one. This means that the game could jump down the LL HPHLCharMagicAnyAdded, which could very well be empty, meaning no enemy spawns.
On a separate note, for the SkyPatcher files, you mention they remove the vanilla references if they still exist--how is they done? I'm not seeing anything in the SkyPatcher files that would delete references, only add ("addOnceToLLs").
You’re right. It’s been a minute since I finished the mod. (The stupid FOMOD took forever with this many files.) I can’t remember now if that’s what I did for Carnivoriance, or if that was an earlier version of HPH that I abandoned because of problems in testing.
I suppose you are correct that there is a chance of an empty spawn. It would require the user to have no enemies matching a particular archetype, and even then would have a low chance of occurring very often. If you think of a remedy or an urgent need to change it, I’m all ears.
Carnivoriance looks good, as it only adds NPCs to existing Skyrim NPC leveled lists. All good there.
For HPH, you would need to think about restructuring the way you process leveled lists so that they would by default always start off populated with at least one leveled NPC entry (something from vanilla Skyrim). You could use a Skypatcher command to first remove that entry, then add the modded creature. There's a lot of different ways you could approach this.
Again, I really like your overall approach here, as it solves some big challenges that adding lots of creature mods typically causes. Perhaps with some tweaks to your leveled list approach, you can ensure spawns always happen, regardless of what creature mods users have installed. I don't want to clog up your comments with my ramblings about leveled lists, but feel free to shoot me a message if you'd like to discuss further. I've spent a couple years doing deep dives into leveled lists for my Skyrim and FO4 mods...not sure why I did that to myself, lol.
The best way I see would be to make separate HPH LChar entries for each specific enemy type. In the plugin, make the HPH LChar reference only the corresponding vanilla LChar. Then each Skypatcher file remove that vanilla LChar entry if it still exists, and add the creature NPC. I might tinker and test a little to see how it plays out in game.
At one point I was doing something similar to that. I was planning to more selectively choose which creature could replace which vanilla NPC list. The numbers didn’t add up, though: some of the vanilla LChars are only used a handful of times in Hand Placed Enemies, so the odds of encountering enough random creatures were way too low.
Thanks again for your thoughtful comments and kind words. I do this for shits and giggles and my own gameplay, so it’s nice to know someone appreciates it.
No. The full version and the light version have different file names, and Hand Placed Horrors requires the light version as a master file. I have no idea if the formIDs are the same in both mods to where you could simply swap masters, but even that requires a little xedit knowledge.
This sounds incredible, will be testing it out! Quick question, how does this interact with the other mod you just released Carnivoriance? It looks like they have files with the same names, should I be using them together and if so which mod should win the conflicts.
They are compatible. Carnivoriance covers all the same creatures and more because I excluded primarily overworld creatures from HPH. HPH, on the other hand, does not disturb any regular leveled lists so its creature integration changes nothing except Hand Placed Enemies.
I don’t think you’d get a huge number of enemies appearing even with both mods, and you wouldn’t get any more enemies spawning than Hand Placed Enemies does anyway. So you could use both, and maybe Carnivoriance just for overworld creatures. But I would personally pick just one.
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From what I seen in the lists, there aren't any spiders, but, just make sure you don't install any spider related mods, and you should be fine.
I’m considering an update that would mitigate this while improving some of the variability. Just need time to screw with it.
I have tested this mod with Carnivorence, but I can't tell how successful Carnivorence is, I presume it targets random encounter spawns?
Also, are the added mobs properly scaled around the PC's level? Remember that being a problem with the original Mihail mods.
This is designed to scale with the player level. Enemies do not appear until the player is at or very close to their minimum level.
Just trying to make sure I understand this correctly. It would seem that if I then install perhaps only a single supported creature mod, then most of the HPE spawn points will spawn no enemies roughly 50% of the time.
Each HPH unique leveled NPC list starts off as a reference to the vanilla list. So the only thing it does by default is refer right back to the same leveled character that would be there anyway.
Each Skypatcher ini removes that reference if it still exists, then adds the new creatures into the leveled list NPC.
So basically:
1) plugin replaces the placed NPC reference with a new HPH NPC record.
2) HPH NPC record refers to a new HPH leveled NPC that references both the vanilla leveled NPC and a new unique HPH leveled NPC.
3) the unique HPH leveled NPCs in the plugin references the same vanilla leveled NPC so without a compatible creature mod the game ends up loading the same NPC would have anyway, just with an extra step,
4) at game start, Skypatcher loads any creature mods into corresponding HPH unique leveled NPCs, and removes the vanilla reference if it still exists (because no other Skypatcher plugins have already done it).
5) now the placed NPC refers to the new HPH NPC record. It references a leveled character with a 50% chance of choosing either of two options - vanilla leveled NPC list or unique HPH leveled NPC lisr.
Theoretically would work for the whole game if it didn’t require editing each placed NPC record, which would be a compatibility and development nightmare. If there was an SKSE mod to edit placed NPC records with some filtering, it could be done.
Carnivoriance skips editing the placed NPC cell and worldspace records, and instead drops creature NPC records into more selective vanilla leveled lists.
Example: Unique HPH leveled NPC item HPHLCharWitch has the Skyrim record LCharWitchAny as well as the HPH record HPHLCharMagicAnyAdded--and both are set at Level 1. The way the game engine works is that, because the two flags are set on the LL ("Calculate from all levels <= player's level" and "Calculate for each item in count"), the game will pick either of these, not necessarily the first one. This means that the game could jump down the LL HPHLCharMagicAnyAdded, which could very well be empty, meaning no enemy spawns.
On a separate note, for the SkyPatcher files, you mention they remove the vanilla references if they still exist--how is they done? I'm not seeing anything in the SkyPatcher files that would delete references, only add ("addOnceToLLs").
Thanks!
I suppose you are correct that there is a chance of an empty spawn. It would require the user to have no enemies matching a particular archetype, and even then would have a low chance of occurring very often. If you think of a remedy or an urgent need to change it, I’m all ears.
For HPH, you would need to think about restructuring the way you process leveled lists so that they would by default always start off populated with at least one leveled NPC entry (something from vanilla Skyrim). You could use a Skypatcher command to first remove that entry, then add the modded creature. There's a lot of different ways you could approach this.
Again, I really like your overall approach here, as it solves some big challenges that adding lots of creature mods typically causes. Perhaps with some tweaks to your leveled list approach, you can ensure spawns always happen, regardless of what creature mods users have installed. I don't want to clog up your comments with my ramblings about leveled lists, but feel free to shoot me a message if you'd like to discuss further. I've spent a couple years doing deep dives into leveled lists for my Skyrim and FO4 mods...not sure why I did that to myself, lol.
At one point I was doing something similar to that. I was planning to more selectively choose which creature could replace which vanilla NPC list. The numbers didn’t add up, though: some of the vanilla LChars are only used a handful of times in Hand Placed Enemies, so the odds of encountering enough random creatures were way too low.
Thanks again for your thoughtful comments and kind words. I do this for shits and giggles and my own gameplay, so it’s nice to know someone appreciates it.
Can "Hand Placed Enemies - Light No ambushes" be used aswell? Or only the version with the ambushes?
I don’t think you’d get a huge number of enemies appearing even with both mods, and you wouldn’t get any more enemies spawning than Hand Placed Enemies does anyway. So you could use both, and maybe Carnivoriance just for overworld creatures. But I would personally pick just one.