In the vanilla game, you can jump down almost ten metres (30 feet) without even getting a little bit hurt. However, with Gravity of Nirn (GoN) installed, that will be an entirely different story.


Description

For the player, fall damage is now literally at realistic levels. If a jump would be painful to you in real life, a similar jump will be as painful to your Skyrim character. There are a few mods on the Nexus that attempt to do something similar, but they only increase the difficulty without actually making it realistic enough. Don't use other games as a reference to how much a fall would hurt. Use common sense and what jumps you would dare attempting in real life.

If you climb up a chair or a table, and decide to recklessly jump down from it, it won't be dangerous, but it will hurt a little bit in your feet. Jumping down a cliff that's about the same height as your head may not be super dangerous, but it would definitely be painful for your knees and feet. Jumping down from a house roof is a bad idea.

It's also not just about the damage in itself. Even if some individuals in real life might be able to manage jumping from greater heights, they still need to prepare themselves for it. It's still a scary thing to do. On the contrary, your character in the vanilla Skyrim could make several of those jumps and wouldn't hesitate for a second about it. That is the unrealistic part that GoN is trying to fix – making you think before you jump. In other words, the damage is technically not proportional to the physical damage, but to how motivated you should be to make a jump. If you "only" lost most of your Health by jumping from a tall edge, you still wouldn't hesitate to do it in the game.

GoN is also amazing for roleplaying since you preferably should use stairs if there are any available, and cliffs will suddenly pose much more of an epic challenge. In other words, this mod will make the world feel a lot bigger than before.


Balancing

GoN is not directed towards average players, but rather to those who want the most hardcore survival experience possible in Skyrim.

It has been tested and confirmed that it is possible to survive the jump during Helgen if done properly. It will be very hand and painful though, just as it should. This is the only instance in the game where jumping from a great height is the only available option to you, and since that jump nearly kills you at 100 Health points, it should give you a rough estimate of how dangerous heights will be with this mod installed.

There is an optional version 2.1 which changes the multiplier for the fall damage. This means that the heights from which you take fall damage still are realistic, but the amount of damage itself has been reduced.


Maths and science

The formula for fall damage, which in version 1.0 applied to everyone, but in version 2.0 only the player, is this:

f = ((h - 100) * 0.1)^1.45 * m

The formula for fall damage in version 2.1, which only affects the player, is this:

f = ((h - 100) * 0.0618)^1.45 * m

f is the fall damage output in Health points, h is the height you fall from, and m is a multiplier that will remain as 1 unless you use perks or anything of similar effect.

GoN does not affect fall speed or acceleration, but simply how much damage someone would take from a fall. That is further motivated by the fact that we cannot know for sure what Nirn's standard gravity would be, and calculating it based on what's seen in the game is hardly reliable. Additionally, if we would use Earth's standard gravity as a reference, someone might complain about items falling too slow in comparison, and arrow velocity being too inaccurate, or not compatible with other mods.


Installation

Using Vortex is the recommended method.


Requirements

All you need is SSE.


Compatibility

GoN should be compatible with everything except from mods that attempt to do the exact same thing.

Mods and features that decrease fall damage under certain circumstances or to certain races should still work alongside GoN.