Overview

During my playthroughs I tend to collect a lot of various items (most of which I don’t even need), and I store them in different containers based on the item type to keep it somehow organised, and easy to find and retrieve when I do need them. For example, I organise my ingredients based on whether I use them for potions, poisons or both, split raw and refined materials etc. This is good to then find the item I want at a later point, however manually putting them into the right containers is time consuming and boring.

There are mods that address this issue, however none of them is exactly what I wanted, so I decided to implement my own, and keep it as simple and as convenient as I could. This is a spell-based system that lets you assign categories to containers, add items to categories, and transfer items between the containers and the player’s inventory. No more, no less, and it’s compatible with Spell Research out of the box. It includes four adept alteration spells:

• Assign Category: assigns one of the 30 available categories to a container of your choice. Only one category can be assigned to the given container. If you want to change it, use the reset option from the menu first.
• Alter Category: adds items from the given container to the category of your choice. Note that this is additive — if you cast it on two containers, the category will include items from both of them, it won’t replace the first set of items with the second. If you want to reset a category, cast the spell on an empty container.
• Transfer Items: transfers items from the player’s inventory to the targeted container. The container must have a category assigned first, and the category must have some items in it in order to do anything. Equipped and favourited items will not be transferred, no matter how many of them you have in your inventory.
• Retrieve Items: transfers any items from any container to the player’s inventory, leaving X (default 70) of each in the container. You can reverse this behaviour (take X of each and leave the rest in the container) and change the number to whatever value you want at any point. If you set the number to 0, everything from the container will be placed in the player’s inventory. Note that this will transfer anything, even invisible items that might have a certain purpose to be in the container, so don’t use it on containers you know of that have a special function. Any average container should be fine. My category markers are invisible items, but I excluded them from retrieval, so you can safely cast the spell on any marked containers (there wouldn’t really be a point of this mod otherwise).
  

In order to cast the spells successfully, you need to face a container while casting. Facing a container means pointing at it with your crosshair, and being close enough so you see the Search prompt. The spells won’t work on locked containers. The container will glow while the spell is doing its job; ideally avoid doing anything else with it while it’s glowing.

If you don’t use Spell Research, you can find the spell tomes in two dungeons.



Configuration

There a two things you can change — the number of items that will be used by the Retrieve Items spell, and the way the spell will use that number. By default, the number is 70, and is used as “leave this many items in the container and transfer the rest to the player’s inventory”. For example, if you have 100 blue mountain flowers in the container, it will transfer 30 into the player’s inventory and leave 70 in the container. You can change it to “take this many items and leave the rest in the container”, so using the previous example, it will transfer 70 flowers to the player’s inventory and leave 30 in the container. Those two things can be changed in-game using the console.

• To change the number of items, type in: set StorageItemsThreshold to X, where X is the number of items you want (default: 70).
• To change the way in which the number is used, type in: set StorageReverseRetrieve to X, where X is 0 or 1. 0 means “the number of items to leave in the container”, 1 means “the number of items to transfer to the player’s inventory” (default: 0).
  

I didn’t include an MCM, because it doesn’t seem worth it just to change two numbers.


Manual Installation

Unpack the archive into your Skyrim Special Edition\Data folder.


Compatibility

Compatible with any containers and any items by design, no patches needed. The only thing that might possibly conflict is a mod that edits cells (e.g. a lighting overhaul), as adding new items to cells involves having the cell record in the mod (and I placed a copy of each book in the world). Just load my mod near the top of your load order so everything else can override the vanilla cell records. None of my records will be overwritten, so it's the safest to just keep it at the top, not far from where you'd have USSEP.

This mod is also compatible with Spell Research (without requiring it), so you can discover the storage spells using the research feature.

All files are ESL flagged (ESP-FE format), so they won’t contribute to the plugin limit of 254.


My Other Mods

• Spell Research — Convenience Add-On
• Cathedral Weathers – Diverse Seasons
• Greybeard Meditation
• Dragon Soul Absorption for NPC
• Talkative Dragons
• Odahviing Improved
• Ash Pile – Texture Replacement
• Combat Fixes for Flying Mod Beta
• Clean and Improved Mage Robes
• Dispel Magic Effects
• Better Blessing of Akatosh
• Dragon Aspect – Mage Version