Skyrim Special Edition

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jg1

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jg1

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About this mod

Enhances the basic destruction enchantments with new particle-based visuals, with support for illumination, combination enchantments and different weapon types.

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Similarly to Enchanted Arsenal, See Enchantments and Visual Animated Enchants, this mod adds fully animated visual effects to existing weapon enchantments in Skyrim. It also adds two features I've found myself missing in all of those (otherwise excellent) mods: Lights and combination effects. With Vibrant weapons, a flaming sword will light your way in the darkness, and an axe with both Fire and Frost enchantments will burn in paradoxical Frostfire.

The approach is a bit different from those other mods. Rather than editing the enchantment itself, this mod adds a standalone visual effect on top of your weapon. This turns out to be more flexible, since you are no longer bound by the game engine's rules about what effects an enchanted item will show. The cost, perhaps, comes in form of a more complicated implementation. For most of its work, the mod uses an SKSE plugin to extend the scripting language.

The effects are designed to look best in 3rd-person view. They work in first person too, but might be a little too vibrant in some cases.

Features
  • Enhances the visuals of all basic Fire, Frost and Shock damage enchantments, both pre-made and player-made, on vanilla or mod-added weapons.
  • Automatically changes the shape of the effect to match the type of the weapon (sword, dagger, mace, etc.), whether single or dual wielding
  • Supports combination effects. Any weapon with both Fire and Frost damage enchantments automatically gets unique Frostfire visuals, etc.
  • Enchantments cast light. Fire enchantments illuminate the surroundings. Shock enchantments flash periodically (sensitive viewers be warned :)).
  • Extendable framework. Support for additional effects, combinations and weapon types (even custom ones) can be added by standalone plugins.

Limitations
  • Affects melee weapons only
  • The effects will not fit to just any weapon. They adapt to the type of the weapon, not to its exact shape. The effects are modelled after Believable weapons, but any weapons of similar shape (LeanWolf's, e.g.) should look good. If any particular weapon looks really bad, you can forbid the mod from adding effects to it by use of an in-game Lesser Power.
  • Multiple lights do not stack (when dual wielding). They are technically Light spells, and the game only shows the strongest one. They also do not stack with the Candlelight spell, or any other spell or ability that uses the Light archetype. However, they do stack with a carried torch.

Requirements

Recommended
Believable weapons (for the best fit between weapons and effects)

Compatibility
This mod does not change any existing files or records, so load order does not matter.

There will in general be no conflict with mods that change e.g.
  • the cost of enchantments,
  • the strength of enchantments,
or similar things.

Texture replacers for fire, frost and shock effects (e.g. Arctic/Inferno) will affect this mod, for good or ill.

Other changes to enchantment visuals (from the mods mentioned above, e.g.) will be stacked together with this mod. It might look good, it might look bad.

Known conflicts:
  • (Patch available) Enchanting Adjustments and Price-Charge Bug Fix: Will prevent Frost effects from showing (alone or in combination).
  • Immersive First Person View: Fire and frost particles will show in the wrong location in 1st person. This may be difficult to fix.

Installation/uninstallation
Install like you would any mod, no special procedure is required. The very first time you start the mod on a new save file you might experience a delay before it starts working, especially if you have other scripted mods running. Unless you see an error message, wait a little while. You must also re-equip your weapons for any effects to be applied. However, the mod will be working immediately on any subsequent load.

There are no particular risks in uninstalling this mod. It has scripts, but they have no lingering effects.

Performance
The effects make extensive use of particles, which could have a performance cost. I haven't had any fps loss myself, but also haven't done any proper benchmarking.

Source
GitHub