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About this mod

Elegy aims to craft a more rewarding, balanced, and immersive Skyrim experience, whilst making minimal changes and maintaining much of the vanilla gameplay and feel. Loot rarity has been greatly increased, crafting progression is more natural and doesn't require grinding, leveling is smoother, combat is more fluid, and much more.

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Elegy
Requirements:
Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch
Survival Mode (optional)



Introduction

Elegy aims to craft a more rewarding, balanced, and immersive Skyrim experience, whilst making minimal changes and maintaining as much of the vanilla gameplay and vision as possible. This is achieved by drastically increasing the rarity of loot around Skyrim, overhauling the crafting experience to make it require less spamming of materials, and adjusting the rate at which skills level up, amongst various other changes. Underused, exploitable, or inconsistent game elements, such as tempering recipes, alchemy, and food have been thoroughly completed and rebalanced—essentially, making them as they should have been from the start. A range of other difficulty and balance tweaks are also included, all of which are fully itemised below in the description. These include: decreased carry weight, unleveled quest rewards, and faster paced combat. In addition, Creation Club's survival mode is fully supported, and Elegy is also available for Xbox One users on Bethesda.net.

Basically, what I'm trying to say is that Elegy is JSawyer Ultimate Edition, Skyrim style.

Enjoy,

PushTheWinButton


Description

Skills & Leveling
The aim of the skill overhaul was to make increasing your skills much more natural. The main feature is the move from exponential to linear experience increase requirements, meaning that later levels are easier to gain, but earlier levels are slower. All the crafting skills have had their experience entirely reworked, and now shouldn't require crafting excessive quantities of potions, weapons, and enchanted items to level effectively (this meshes really well with the increased loot rarity, making crafting more of an art). A couple of perk effects have also been changed to make them more viable, and some oversights and exploits in the vanilla experience gains have been amended.

  • Experience required to increase skills now increases linearly, rather than exponentially, but the overall experience required to go from 15 to 100 is the same. This means that leveling is slower at low levels, but quicker at high levels.
  • Smithing experience completely overhauled. Item value has a greater influence on the experience gained, tempering gives a meaningful amount of experience, and crafting a new item for the first time grants double the experience. Therefore, it's best to craft a range of items to get the most experience. Also, if you activate a smithing forge whilst sneaking, you can view a list of all the items you've previously smithed, so you can find out what gaps you have left to fill.
  • Smithing perks have been reworked slightly so that heavy armors aren't associated with perks on the light side and vice versa. Some perks were renamed: Steel Smithing -> Apprentice Smithing; Dwarven Smithing -> Ancient Smithing; Orcish Smithing -> Reinforced Armors; Glass Smithing -> Amorphous Smithing.
  • Alchemy experience completely overhauled, so it's no longer a grind and can't be exploited. Each potion brewed grants a fixed amount of experience, rather than scaling with value, so crafting high-value but useless potions is no longer a viable way to quickly increase your skill.
  • Enchanting experience rebalanced.
  • Light and Heavy Armor skill experience changed so it is no longer dependent on damage. This means that they increase at the same rate, regardless of what difficulty you play on.
  • Lockpicking perks (Novice, Apprentice, Adept, Expert, and Master) now affect all locks. Each perk increases the sweetspot size by 20%, up to 100%, meaning that having all perks has the same effect as in vanilla.
  • Magic mastery perks (Novice, Apprentice, etc) incrementally increase spell magnitude and/or duration by 20%, up to 100%, in addition to their vanilla effects.
  • Extra Pockets carry weight increase decreased from 100 to 50.
  • Training sessions allowed per level increased from 5 to 10.


Crafting
The crafting changes mainly complement the new, less grindy skill progression. Also included are tempering recipes for all vanilla weapons and armor (all of which now benefit from one of the smithing perks), some quantity changes for existing recipes, and a couple of new recipes for crafting vanilla items.

  • All weapons and armor now have a Smithing perk associated with them, meaning that they can all benefit from increased improvement.
  • Tempering recipes have been added for all armor and weapons that were previously missing them.
  • Added some recipes for previously un-craftable items e.g. Longbow, Hunting Bow, Fireaxe, Pickaxe, Silver Sword, and a few others.
  • Smelting iron now requires 2 ore rather than 1, to match all other ingots.
  • Charcoal can be crafted by smelting Firewood and it can also be split into 2 Charocal Sticks. You can find Charcoal in various loot and for sale at merchants too.
  • Steel is smelted using 2 Iron Ore (or one ingot) and 1 Charcoal (or 2 Charcoal Sticks), rather than requiring Corundum Ore.
  • Dwemer scrap smelting recipes have been expanded and altered so that the ingot yield is based more on the scrap weight. The weight of several scrap items has also been changed to be more logical.
  • Pelts and hides yield half the amount of Leather. This prevents mass-producing Leather, and maintains the balance of the less grindy, improved Smithing experience.
  • Werewolf Pelts can now be tanned to produce Leather.
  • Cooking recipes added for Grilled Leeks and Baked Potatoes.
  • Lockpicks can be crafted using Iron Ingots (5 Lockpicks for 1 ingot).
  • Reduced Firewood weight from 5 to 1.


Combat
Rather than arbitrarily increasing damage, Elegy's combat changes aim to improve the mobility of the quite stilted and clunky vanilla melee combat. Fairly few changes have been made here, the intention being that you can pair Elegy with a dedicated combat mod of your choice if you wish.

  • Two-handed weapons all swing almost twice as fast, making them more viable. They still swing slower than one-handed weapons (e.g. Greatsword is slower than a sword, Battleaxes are slower than Waraxes, Warhammer is slower than a mace, etc).
  • Movement speed when wearing armor increased slightly for the player and NPCs to help improve the fluidity of combat (e.g. a bit more like Oblivion).
  • Blocking with a weapon is more effective, but no longer scales with the enemy weapon's damage (this is a bug in vanilla—it seems like it should have scaled with your weapon's damage instead).
  • Dual casting cost is decreased slightly, and effectiveness increased slightly.


Loot
  • Loot is drastically rarer. This covers arrows, bolts, clutter, gems, soulgems, gold, potions, food, ingredients, lockpicks, crafting materials, and valuable weapons and armor found in dungeon loot.
  • All leveled quest reward items have been removed. You now received the highest-level variant, regardless of your current level.
  • Unusual Gems (Stones of Barenziah) emit sound so you know when one is nearby (credit: Sounds of Barenziah by Pharros).
  • Skill books are labeled with the skill they improve.
  • Activating a skill book now picks it up instead of automatically reading it, allowing you to save them for later.
  • Desecrated Imperial and Stormcloak corpse loot changed from gold (rather a lot of it!) to clutter matching their living counterparts.



Alchemy & Food
  • Potion values and effects have been balanced. Values are generally less, so it's more difficult to get rich by selling them. Previously useless potions, like Lingering Damage Health, are now more useful.
  • Rebalanced ingredient effects. Alchemy can no longer be exploited or used as a get-rich-quick scheme, and some previously useless effects, such as Ravage, are now more useful (credit: Skyrim Alchemy Fixed by chocolatenoodle).
  • Fortifying potions have their duration extended to 2 minutes (applies to crafted potions too).
  • Player-crafted potions and poisons have a * prefix, so they can be easily located in inventory lists.
  • Food effects completely rebalanced, including generally increased effect magnitudes. Meat-based food restores health; fruit, vegetables, and drinks mainly restore stamina; and sweets and cheeses restore magicka. Food is still mostly less effective than most potions, but is much more common and simpler to craft. This means it should have more utility now, especially due to the increased rarity of potions.
  • The weight of small cooked meat items (Rabbit Haunch, Salmon Steak, etc) have been increased so that they are more balanced in Survival mode.


General
  • Base carry weight decreased from 300 to 150.
  • The Steed stone carry weight effect decreased from 100 to 50.
  • All animal followers now have protected status, meaning that only you can permanently kill them (the same as with all other followers).
  • Wearwolves and Wearbears can be encountered in the wilderness of Skyrim at high levels, as the region's lore suggests.
  • Increased the health and damage of wolves to make them a bit more of a threat (they're still one of the weakest enemies).
  • Reduced the health of the Wounded Frostbite Spider boss in Bleak Falls Barrow, so that you shouldn't have to rely on the archway exploit to kill it.
  • Barter difficulty increased, so that buying prices are generally higher and selling prices are generally lower.
  • Merchant gold increased.
  • Khajiit caravans now buy stolen items.
  • Potions and poisons sell for less at merchants, with potions you brew yourself being worth even less.
  • Reduced the distance that NPCs address the player at, so they no longer spout their life stories at you from across the street.
  • Lockpicking difficulty has been slightly increased overall.
  • Removed the spinning death animation for all creatures and NPCs and replaced it with standard ragdoll effects.
  • The Dawnguard quest-line doesn't start until level 20 now, and Vampire attacks don't start occurring before level 19.


Survival Mode Support
Creation Club's Survival Mode is fully supported by way of a patch. This patches all food items so that Elegy's new effects work alongside Survival's sustenance effects, but also includes some fixes that aren't yet included in Unofficial Skyrim Survival Patch. In addition, all drinks have been changed from 'very small' to 'small' meals, to better represent their hydrating effects.

Optional Files
  • Misc Crafting Experience: enable crafting experience for miscellaneous crafting activities, like tanning, smelting, and using the carpenter's workbench.
  • Restoration Potion Duration: restoration potions (Health, Magicka, Stamina) now act over a period of a few seconds rather than instantly. Also affects player-made potions. All vanilla potion prices are maintained.
  • No Fortify Crafting: removes all crafting fortification effects, so that gulping down potions or donning fortifying equipment isn't incentived before every crafting session. This covers all generic potions, enchanted items, and ingredients, with the exception of few unique items such the Forgemaster's Fingers and Muiri's Ring, etc. Ingredients have been allocated a different logical fortify effect.
  • Restoration Potion Duration + No Fortify Crafting: merges the two above files into a single file, and resolves conflicts between them.


Installation

This mod requires:

Elegy should be placed as low down in your load order as possible. Any patches or optional files should be loaded after.

If you play with Survival mode (from the Creation Club), you should use this mod's Survival patch and the Unofficial Skyrim Survival Patch too.


Recommended Mods




Uninstallation

This mod can be uninstalled at any time and will have no permanent effects on your game. Simply remove the file from you data folder and you're done.


Compatibility

All changes from Unofficial Skyrim Special Edition Patch and Unofficial Skyrim Survival Patch have been included where appropriate. Elegy makes as few changes as necessary, so should be compatible with most other mods. The main general exceptions are other major overhaul mods (e.g. Morrowloot), and other mods which make extensive changes to leveled lists, alchemy, food, skill leveling, or perks, as these will most likely conflict with similar elements in Elegy. However, most conflicts should be relatively straightforward to patch with some very basic knowledge of SSEEdit, and I recommend you always use this to check for conflicts when you change your load order.

A patch for Ordinator is available in the optional files section.


Feedback

I'm interested to hear feedback on Elegy, and I'll take suggestions for new possible features. Keep in mind that I don't want to stray too far from the vanilla vision—there are plenty of overhauls already that go 'too far' (in my opinion, of course).


My Mods

I spend a lot of time creating and supporting my mods, so any donations are gratefully received.