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Basic Needs PLUS - A fun to play needs and diseases mod
Basic Needs PLUS is a simple mod for needs and diseases that creates incentives for the use of food while being easy and fun to play and offering a good level of detail and complexity.
This mod is not about a realistic or optimized satisfaction of needs, but about the creation of a complex system for the emergence of basic needs and about simple and easy ways to satisfy such needs. I want to make you eat and drink, without affecting your playstyle.
As usual with every needs and diseases mod you get sick if you eat or drink something wrong. The mod will not just try to infect you with diseases while eating, drinking or sleeping. The mod will weaken your disease resistance and also infect you while looting corpses and during combat with Draugr, Falmer and Ash Spawn. So, some of the dungeon battles will be more difficult.
Be prepared to deal with diseases taking away 30% of your armor resistance in the middle of a fight with a group of Falmer, or getting over-encumbered while fighting a group of Draugr, or losing your fire resistance when you fight Ash Spawn.
This ain't fun you think? Well, so far you haven't been able to meditate to heal yourself.
Features
- Needs for hunger, thirst, fatigue - 2 stages each - applied over PC activity, time and location
- Full compatibility with the in-game food and cooking system
- Works with all races (considers/supports vampires, werewolves, cannibalism, beastform as well as particularities for Argonian and Khajiit race).
- Considers/supports fast travel and cart travel (no irrepressible needs at arrival)
- Full water integration (quench your thirst at every river and every source of water)
- “Fallout 4” like water activation for quick and easy water detection and bottle filling
- Long term evaluation of food and beverage consumption, as well as analysis of short term eating and drinking behavior, to assess and control the PC’s well-being and infection with diseases
- Contaminated locations and places, infested by Skeevers, Draugr Falmer and Ash Spawn
- Tracking of food in inventory that has been taken away from contaminated locations
- New diseases caused by improper or poor diet, bad food, dirty water, or eating, drinking and sleeping in contaminated places
- New contact diseases caused by melee combat and long range weapon hits from infested Draugr, Falmer and Ash Spawn
- Full compatibility with the in-game disease, cure diseases and disease resistant system
- “Witcher” like meditation to recover from sickness, cure disease, and/or restore magicka, health and stamina (configurable to support different gameplay styles)
- Intuitive gameplay integration with simple “dos and don'ts” notifications, listings in active effects menu, and soft IMOD effects to alert the player to notifications
- Quick activation for PC action without using any objects or spells, simply by pressing the activation button (getting water has never been easier)
- Integration of standard animations for eating, drinking, meditation and getting water (eating and drinking idles can be turned off)
- Configurable needs timers and thresholds, message interval, time scale, risks of diseases, quick activation control, learning mode, etc.
- Use of formlists - no change of game assets!
This mod is focused to needs and diseases only. By default it is limited to the vanilla food available and, except for the additional water functionality and a few medicine recipes, does not provide additional food or cooking recipes, or change object classification for ingredients or food items, and it neither adds nor does it change any plants to harvest or animals to hunt for food.
To learn unknown food and beverage items added by other mods the mod has a learning mode.
Needs
The needs shall make you consume food, drink or go to bed and sleep, without affecting your playstyle. Ignoring your needs shall not make you feel like doing something wrong or being close to dead. Ignoring your needs won't make you ill.
The mod provides the needs for hunger, thirst and fatigue. Vampires won’t get hungry or thirsty, but have a need to sleep. Hunger, thirst and fatigue have two stages each.
- Hunger impacts the damage you take in combat and your health regeneration rate,
- Thirst impacts the damage you are doing in combat and your stamina regeneration rate,
- Fatigue impacts your spell powers (spell cost and spell duration) and your magicka restoration rate.
The debuffs will (more or less) affect you only while in combat. But even if you don't have food or drink on hand, or don't have time to sleep, you can always make up for it by drinking more potions. However, if you get thirsty in combat, drinking water or even a beer can be more beneficial than any potion.
Hunger, thirst and fatigue have two stages each. When you get hungry, thirsty or tired the mod will show you a prominent notification highlighted by a soft bright blur effect.
In the magic effects UI menu you can always see the current status of your needs and well-being. In addition, the mod gives you recurring reminder notifications.
Hunger
- Stages: Hungry and Starving.
- Hungry: damage you take in combat is increased by 20% and your health regeneration rate is reduced by 50%.
- Starving: damage taken in combat is increased by 50% and health will regenerate only very slowly.
Hunger is applied over time (every 6 hours without eating) and/or 3 times a day around the usual mealtimes (breakfast, lunch and dinner). When you are getting drunk, after having too much beer or wine, you will get hungry as well. Swimming and combat can make you hungry. If you were wounded in combat, you may need to eat sooner to regain your strength. As you become hungrier, you will get Starving (after 15 hours without eating).
Eat some food to restore your hunger. It doesn't matter how much you eat or whether you eat cooked or raw food – just eat some food.
Thirst
- Stages: Thirsty and Incredibly Thirsty
- Thirsty: decreases the damage you are doing in combat by 20% and reduces your stamina regeneration rate by 50%.
- Incredibly Thirsty: damage output in combat is decreased by 50% and your stamina will regenerate very slowly.
Over time, every 5 hours without drinking, you will become thirsty. Some food can make you thirsty, at some locations you might get a desire to drink something, and when you drink (depending on what you drink) you might want to drink even more. Sprinting to exhaustion and combat can make you thirsty. If you have been exhausted in combat or sprinting, you will get thirsty sooner. After 10 hours without drinking, you will become incredibly thirty.
To quench your thirst, you can drink beer, wine, milk, water or any other drink.
The mod makes use of the water functionalities and the resources of skywater. So you can get water at any natural water source or at wells or at your own custom made water sources. Empty water bottles are sold by vendors and can be crafted at a smelter. To craft a bottle you need Molten Glass, which you can get by melting Empty Wine Bottles or Glass.
Alternative to the usual “bottle equip-method” to fill your empty bottles, the mod allows you to fill all of your water bottles or drink from a water sources with a simple press of the activation key (quick action activation).
- Stages: Tired and Dead Tired
- Tired: your spell powers (spell cost and spell duration) will be reduced and your magicka restoration rate will be decreased by 50%
- Dead Tired: your spell powers will be further reduced and your magicka rate will restore very slowly
You get tired after 16 hours without sleep and after 26 hours without sleep you are getting dead tired. You will need to periodically sleep in order to restore your fatigue. When tired it takes 6 hours sleep to fully recover, being dead tired it takes 10 hours sleep to fully recover. Having slept less than the hours to fully recover, you will be still tired or get tired earlier. You also might get tired late at night (bedtime). As a Vampire you might get tired early in the morning (dawn).
Wellbeing, Sickness
The mod will record and analyze what you eat and drink. On basis of your overall eating and drinking behavior the mod does a diet evaluation. Based on such overall diet evaluation plus your recent eating and drinking behavior, the mod will do a disease evaluation and assess your well-being and your health status.
- Stages: Unwell and Sick
- Unwell: Skill improvement rate is reduced by 5% for the next game hour. Disease resistance is reduced by 50%
- Sick: Skill improvement rate is reduced by 10% for the next game hour. Disease resistance is reduced by 75%
Depending on what you eat and drink or do not eat or drink, you could feel unwell or sick. Also, you can feel unwell if you eat too much food or too much wrong food or drink too much dirty water.
The water you get at natural water sources might not always be clean of bacteria. You can boil your water and milk at any cooking place to get you Clean Water (or Hot Milk). You may also drink beer or wine instead. Beer and wine are free of any bacteria, but can make you hungry or drunk, if you drink too much. Being drunk makes you slow and drugged (short effect duration) and feeling unwell, too.
To recover your will have to change your eating and/or drinking behavior. Therefore, the mod will give you hints of what you should do, like “you should eat more fruits” or “don’t drink so much beer and wine“ or “eating spoiled fish can make you sick”, etc. However, even if you directly do whatever the mod indicates to do and eat or drink something, your will stay unwell for at least one hour (in-game time). If you do not change your eating and/or drinking behavior you will probably get to the next stage.
When you are sick, the mod will give you a clear indication how to change your eating and/or drinking behavior to recover. However, beside your further skill improvement rate reduction while sick, the mod will now try to infect you with a disease.
As long as you are not infected with a disease you can fully recover through eating or drinking the right food as indicated, but you will stay sick at least for one game time hour.
Medicine
Drinking a Hot Milk with Honey or one of the energy drinks Red Hot Apple, Fresh Green Sap, Purewater Skooma and Sweetheart Liquor (included in Skywater), will fight the symptoms for being unwell and make you feel better right away.
As long as you are not infected with a disease medicine will immediately recover you from being unwell or sick. Drinking medicine will also restore your disease resistance (if any) and, therefore can reduce the risk of getting a disease significantly. But medicine does not cure you. So, if you do not change your eating and/or drinking behavior, you will become unwell or sick again soon.
Off course, you can also drink a heeling potion or take any other measure to cure a disease. This, will always work and completely take away any debuff, including your past improper or poor diet causing a debuff.
Meditation
Instead of drinking something soothing, you can also meditate (like “The Witcher”) to recover right away. Meditation is possible while being unwell or sick, and even without having such debuff immediately after sleep (while "Meditation" buff is active).
As long as you are not infected with a disease meditation will immediately recover you from being unwell or sick. Meditation does also reduce the risk of getting a disease (restore of disease resistance). But again, until you do not change your eating and/or drinking behavior, you will become unwell or sick again soon.
Right after having slept for 6 or 10 hours, is the best time for meditation, as this meditation will cure all symptoms for feeling unwell or sick and cure all your diseases.
For whom this is too complicated or annoying, can configure the meditation effect in the settings menu:
- Options: Always Restore, Cure Diseases
- Always Restore: Meditation will be always possible and fully restore Health, Magicka and Stamina
- Cure Diseases: Meditation will always cure disease
- Always Restore plus Cure Diseases: for Milkdrinkers.
To meditate stand upright and still, make sure the crosshair has no reference, and briefly press the activate button on your controller or keyboard (one brief button press). The event will fire on button release (quick action activation).
The meditation animation will last about 15 to 20 seconds and has a slow-time effect. Dependent to your setting it can be repeated as often as you like. However, as meditation is not available during combat, you better have some medicine at hand.
Diseases
Once you get a disease you will suffer a severe health or stamina or magicka damage plus a skill damage. Depending on the mod’s diet and disease evaluation the mod can infect you with:
- Food Poisoning: Picking locks and picking pockets is 30% harder and Stamina regenerates 50% slower.
- Parasite Infestation: Weapon skills are reduced by 30% and Magicka is damaged by 25%.
- Bacterial Infection: Armor prevents 20% less damage and Stamina is damaged by 25%.
- Pearl Skin: Carry weight is reduced by 20% and Health is damaged by 30%.
- Bone Rot: Prices, Persuasion and Intimidation are 40% worse and Magicka regenerates 50% slower.
- Alcohol Disorder: Picking locks and picking pockets is 50% harder and Stamina is damaged by 25%.
- Rat Fever: Weapon skills are reduced by 20% and Health is damaged by 25%.
- Mold Poisoning: Armor prevents 30% less damage and Stamina regenerates 50% slower.
- Draugr Rot: Carry weight is reduced by 30% and Magicka is damaged by 30%.
- Ash Curse: Resistance to fire and frost is 30% weaker and Magicka regenerates 50% slower.
Disease effects remain active until cured. You can’t make this go away through eating or drinking or sleeping a little longer. Werewolf and Vampire races won’t get unwell or sick and are immune to diseases. Racial and enchantment related disease resistances are taken into account. Argonians and Khajiit are immune to some diseases as well.
The risk for getting infected with a disease when you are unwell or sick is configurable (default risk is 30%).
You can also get a disease if you are not unwell or sick. Eating raw food has a risk to infect you with Parasites or Rat Fever or get you a Food Poisoning. Be careful what you eat and where you eat.
Eating spoiled food in places where you could run into Draugr, has a risk to infect you with Bone Rot. At musty mold Falmer places you can get Mold Poisoning, and eating dirty food at Skeever infested places has a high risk to get Rat Fever. Needless to say that you should avoid drinking from dirty water sources as well as sleeping at contaminated locations.
Bone Rot, Mold Poisoning and Ash Curse are also contact diseases, which you can get from combat with Draugr, Falmer or Ash Spawn and from looting theirs race typical items (Bone Meal, Falmer Ear and Spawn Ash). Also, looting from Skeever (Skeever Tail) can infect you with Rat Fever. You better wear gloves when looting from corpses.
Bathing (optional SKYWATER_bathing required)
When you are “Filthy” you can get a Bacterial Infection, Parasites or Rat Fever. The mod will warn you to “pay attention to your body hygiene” and, after another game time hour, the mod will try to infect you repeatedly with the disease. “Go and wash yourself” to avoid getting a bacterial infection.
Buffs
By default the game provides the rested and well-rested buffs for sleeping. With the rested (well-rested) buff all skills improve 5% (10%) faster for the following 8 hours (game-time). The Mod adds similar buffs for eating and drinking.
- Buffs: Well-Fed, Quenched
- Well-Fed: When you eat, all skills improve at least 1% faster for the following 3 hours (default). The duration of the buff is half the time to get hungry. Depending on what you eat you can gain a maximum skill improvement rate of 3%. Cooked food (meat, fish, vegetables) gives a skill improvement rate of 2% and a cooked meal (combination of meat and vegetables or fisch and vegetables) gives the max of 3% faster skill improvement.
- Quenched: When you drink, all skills improve at least 1% faster. The duration of the buff is half the time to get thirsty. Non-alcoholic drinks provide a maximum skill improvement rate of 2%.
The buffs add up and are shown in the active magic effects menu. You won’t get the well-fed buff or the quenched buff while being unwell or sick.
Cure Diseases
I guess you know how to cure a disease. Doing so will completely cure the disease as well as your sickness. The mod will delete all food consumption records. So, your past worse eating and drinking behavior will be cleared as well – and you can try again. You can always do this at any stage of a sickness.
Meditation will always cure diseases when the optional setting is on. And, independent from the configuration, meditation right after having slept for 6 or 10 hours will cure all your diseases as well.
Diseases Resistance
All diseases take the PC’s disease resistance into account. As known Argonians and Bosmer have a 50% disease resistance. Disease resistance is also applied by wearing enchanted items of increasing resistance. So, wearing the right item can make you 100 % resistant to diseases.
No matter how resistant you are, the mod will reduce your resistance when you are unwell or sick. Also and regardless of your well-being the mod will reduce the resistance for contact diseases in combat. Every unblocked hit during combat with Draugr, Falmer and Ash Spawn will reduce the disease resistance (if any) and, therefore increase the risk of getting infected with Draugr Rot, Mold Poisoning or Ash Curse.
Quick action activation
Quick drinking from water sources, quick filling of empty water bottles and quick meditation are performed without using objects or spells, simply by pressing the activate button. To do this, go to a water source (or step into the water), stand upright and still (or swim) with no weapons drawn, look at the water (make sure the crosshair has no reference), and briefly press the activate button on your controller or keyboard. A notification message will be shown and the event will fire on button release and play a corresponding animation.
Meditation is performed in the same way, except that you don't have to be at a water source to meditate. You can meditate at any location (by the default setting the meditation will be only available if you are “unwell” or “sick”).
The quick action feature will not work in combat or if you have your weapons drawn or while walking, running, sprinting, riding, jumping, sneaking, sleeping, sitting. And, of course, it doesn’t work in menu, journal or dialogue or during the normal activate action.
While the quick action activation is controlled by the player, the action performed will be controlled by the mod. Meaning, if you are thirsty and swimming or standing in the water, the mod assumes you want to drink, rather than meditate or filling empty bottles. If not thirsty but feeling sick or not well and having empty bottles to fill, the mod would assume that you want to fill your bottles only if you are standing at a water source. If not standing at a water source or no bottles to fill the mod would assume that you want to you meditate.
To prevent unintentional actions or/and potential conflicts with other mods you can configure the quick action feature to work only while sneaking, i.e. instead of standing upright and still you would have to be standing in sneak position and still. Also, instead of quick action activation, you can configure the meditation as a lesser power.
By default the mod checks for Quick Light SE and the quick action activation event will not fire if quick light is toggled on or off. So, Quick Light SE users make sure to release the activate button before quick light will be activated.
Configuration
The mod’s configuration menu you’ll find in the magic menu under lesser power’s. You can choose one of the playstyle presets or configure the mod individually to fit your playstyle.
- Playstyle Presets: Novice, Apprentice, Adept/Dual Wield, Warrior/Rogue, Archer/Assasine, Battlemage/Warlock
- Generals Settings: Enable/Disable Mod, Needs Timers and Threshold, Message Interval, Time Scale, Uninstall, Learning.
- Optional settings: Quick Action Key, Animations, Meditation, Disease Risk, Food Tracking, Bathing
Message interval sets the in-game time between the repeat notifications the mod will show you. This applies to both the repetitive notification of needs and the notifications of dos and don'ts that are supposed to influence your diet in a positive way (to avoid diseases). Therefore, the notifications are very useful and it is recommended to set a low message interval value.
The default value is 1 game-time hour. With the Skyrim standard time scale of 20 a game-time hour takes about 3 minutes in real-time. Therefore, you could set the interval to 2 or 3. For lower time scales (e.g. 10 or 6) the default value of 1 game-time hour is fine.
In the configuration menu you can set the time scale as well.
Compatibility and Requirements
The mod makes use of vanilla meshes and textures only. There should be no conflicts or incompatibilities with other mods, at least not caused by this mod. This mod does not change any of the game assets. It cannot break you game and it will not mess up your game if you play with a different language version. This mod is safe to install and uninstall mid-game.
Before uninstall use the uninstall feature in the configuration menu to stop the quest.
The mod is made for SkyrimSE and needs SKSE and SKYWATER_survival (no, it is NOT meant to be played in survival mode). Skywater has its own brief intro quests, which you can skip using console command:
- setstage h2oSkyWaterIntro 30
- setstage h2oWaterGemHunter 30
You should also install the SKYWATER_wellspatch. That little patch lets you get water from the original wells in game, regardless of already included or added by another mod.
If you want to play dirty I recommend to install SKYWATER_bathing, which is supported by this mod. And check out the SKYWATER_washtub.
This mod comes as .esp flagged as a light master file, so it won’t count for the plugin limitation. Place it after SKYWATER_survival in your load order and plugins-list.
Customization and patches
In learning mode the mod can learn any new food items (potion or ingredient) as long as it has one of the food item keywords (VendorItemFood, VendorItemFoodRaw). The learning mode will guide you through the following food classification.
The mod is using formlists (FLST) to categorize food items. For a custom food item to be recognized by the mod, it must be classified as either eating item (FLST: CS7_ndItemNdsEating) or drinking item (FLST: CS7_ndItemNdsDrinking). Add your custom food into one of these two formlists.
- Example: a Meat Stew or a Potato Soup would go into FLST: CS7_ndItemNdsEating. Milk or Beer would go into FLST: CS7_ndItemNdsDrinking.
Eating items have to be further classified as meat, vegetables, fruits, fish or, if nothing fits, as ingredients. And each of these categories differentiates between raw and cooked food, whereby cooked basically means that the item is not raw - it doesn’t have to be heated (FLST: CS7_ndItemDisMeatRaw, CS7_ndItemDisMeatCkd, CS7_ndItemDisVegeRaw, CS7_ndItemDisVegeCkd, CS7_ndItemDisFrtsRaw, CS7_ndItemDisFrtsCkd, CS7_ndItemDisFishRaw, CS7_ndItemDisFishCkd, CS7_ndItemDisIgrdRaw, CS7_ndItemDisIgrdCkd). Add your custom food into one or more of these formlists, but separated to raw and cooked.
- Example: a Meat Stew would go into FLST: CS7_ndItemDisMeatCkd. A Meat and Vegetable Stew would go into FLST: CS7_ndItemDisMeatCkd and FLST: CS7_ndItemDisVegeCkd. Although most of the recipes for meals use salt or garlic, you won’t place such meal into the FLST: CS7_ndItemDisIgrdCkd or FLST: CS7_ndItemDisIgrdRaw, as such formlists are only used for items you cannot assign to the other formlists (i.e. pure spices, bread, cheese, honey, sweets, etc).
Drinking items have to be further classified as either natural or boiled or alcohol and, exclusively or in addition as medicine (FLST: CS7_ndItemDisBevsNat01, CS7_ndItemDisBevsBld, CS7_ndItemDisBevsAlc and CS7_ndItemDisBevsMed).
- Example: Milk and Water would go into FLST: CS7_ndItemDisBevsNat. Hot Milk and Tea would go into FLST: CS7_ndItemDisBevsBld. Hot Milk with Rum and Grog would go into FLST: CS7_ndItemDisBevsAlc. Hot Milk with Honey would go into FLST: CS7_ndItemDisBevsBld and FLST: CS7_ndItemDisBevsMed. Pure medicine like a Healing Potions would go only in FLST: CS7_ndItemDisBevsMed (although there might be some alcohol in).
That’s it. Now your make your own food items work with this mod or make your own patches.
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Do not upload my files to other sites.
Feel free to use my file as master for your mod or to modify my file; including releasing bug fixes or improving any of the features my file adds to the game, and upload it as a separate file.
Feel free to use my file as master for your mod or to modify my file; including releasing bug fixes or improving any of the features my file adds to the game, and upload it as a separate file.