tl;dr added a new experimental patch type using FormList Manipulator; might be better for some situations, but you don't have to change anything if you have a working setup.
Hi folks, as part of version 3.1 I've generated an alternate set of patches that use FormList Manipulator; each can replace the corresponding premade ESP patch for its spell mod.
Initialization is still required; as of v3.0 and higher speed is about the same for all patches regardless of style. It should be safe to install, uninstall, or change classifications for spells mid-game, but please make sure to re-initialize after each time you do so. This is an experimental option, meaning that there may be bugs; please let me know if you have any problems.
Benefits of these patches over the regular ones:
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- They're easier for a human to read and write than the regular patches; for small spell packs, I think it's potentially viable to write your own patches by hand using these as a reference - They should still work if you compact and ESL-flag / merge / etc the spell mods the patches are for, unless your merging process involves changing EditorIDs - Only one patch plugin (DinoSpellDiscovery - FormList Manipulator AIO Patch.esp) is required; this may help if you're on VR or have another reason to restrict the number of even ESL-flagged plugins in your load order
Downsides of these patches:
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- If you have multiple mods that use the same EditorID for spell, scroll, staff, or tome records, weird things may happen. I think this is unlikely to occur much, but please do let me know if you run into it so I can put a warning somewhere. - If you can't use FormList Manipulator, naturally these patches won't work.
If you have any problems with initialization using these or the regular patches, please let me know! The information I'd need to help track down the problem is (1) which if any premade patches you're using, (2) which if any spell mods you've used the patcher script to make a custom patch for, and (3) the error message given when you try to initialize (which is usually along the lines of "spell at index 0 in principle 8 is missing a property").
Debugging steps you can try on your own (for initialization problems):
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- Check that versions of spell mods listed in this article are the same as the versions you have installed; if spells, scrolls, or staves were added, removed, or renamed between versions patches could break - Remove spell mod patches one by one to see if the problem is caused by a specific one - If you're using FormList Manipulator based patches, check the log which should be generated at some path like Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition/SKSE/FormListManipulator.log; try searching for the keyword "invalid" and seeing if there is a place where this mod's patches have invalid entries (which would result in spells or other items not getting added, potentially causing spells to be missing or breaking the patch structure entirely) - Run set aaSimpleVarInitDoExplicitCopy to 1 and set aaSimpleVarInitNoParallel to 1 in the console; this will revert initialization to use the older code from before v3.0 which may help if you're running into a bug. It's much slower, fair warning.
so, this mod was working perfectly fine and so was the auto patcher. However, I updated my modlist by adding around 150 mods, a couple of which added new spells. Ok, I go an create a new patch for this mod... But it asks me to recreate spells from vanilla? Like, EVERY SINGLE ONE. I am sure I choose the right options when starting the patcher. I thought that maybe this was my mistake, because I first ran the patch without selecting any ESPs. However, even after reinstalling the mod, this problem persists. I tried to get through a couple of the vanilla spells, but then Mysticism spells started appearing too. Mysticism was chosen in the FOMOD, and I chose the option to skip already patched spells. Any idea what could be causing this? I really don't want to do every single spell in the game by hand, but I also don't want to part with this amazing mod.
I tried redownloading everything again, even the scripts, to no avail. Idk what is happening or why. Guess I'll just play with some spells missing from discovery. A shame, but it is what it is
When running the patcher, given that you've selected premade patches in the FOMOD, you shouldn't select every plugin in xEdit when running the patcher-- just the spell mods that don't have premade patches. The patcher only runs on spells that have tomes within the records you select in xEdit when running the script, so for example if you had Mysticism, some other spell mods that have patches I've provided, and a couple of Darenii's newer packs that don't currently have pre-made patches, you'd just select the plugins from the new Darenii mods. You shouldn't get any pop-ups for vanilla or Mysticism spells in this case.
For future reference, if you do want or need to make a single custom patch at some point, the typical reason for this behavior is that another mod touches the spells in question (having USSEP or a bashed patch, for example). It's done this way because in the case of mods like Mysticism, properties of spells may be changed so the patcher needs to give you the option to re-configure the spell. However, assuming it's just fixes or tweaks to those spells that don't need changing for the patch side, you can ignore it. In the pop-up that asks you to set properties for a spell, there should also be a list of plugins that modify the spell, including the last one that has this record, and a button to ignore that file and try to use existing configurations (something along the lines of "skip file always"). You might have to click this button multiple times depending on your load order but you should eventually get the existing configurations for Mysticism or vanilla as appropriate. (But again, this shouldn't be necessary if you're using the premade patches-- just need to make sure you're only selecting the unpatched spell mods in your load order when running the script.)
that's weird, because it ran fine the first time I used this mod with the custom patcher. I just selected every plugin and it just worked™. I will run it again with only unpatched mods next save, though. Thanks for the help
@LeucisticDinosaur, hi, thanks for the mod that you created. I used to use Spell-research mod but found it too complex. Your mod simplified things a lot. If it is possible, can you increase the 'max limit' of spells per principle(perhaps Quadruple it or more , I don't know how the mod is made, I hope I'm not asking for too much)? New and interesting spell mods keep coming up and I am running a skyrim with more than 6000 total spells(some of the spell-packs are no longer available on nexus anymore, some I ported from 'Old-rim' by changing their form, for example 'Lost Grimoire' spell-pack, i highly recommend it). Many are left out by the mod and I end up having to compensate them with another mod (spell-forge). I used your mod and created "custom spell-pack patches' for my spell-mods and ended up getting an "initialization error" (which I assume is because I exceeded the maximum limit).
Please, if it's possible, increase the maximum limit PER PRINCIPLE so that I can incorporate more spell-packs into the mod.
Increasing the max is in fact already on the to-do list, but I'm not working actively on this mod right now so it may be some time before I get around to it. This mod's scripts admittedly also need a big cleanup + refactor that I've been putting off.
(I'm perpetually surprised and impressed by how many spells folks have in their games-- in the original version, the limit was actually 128 per principle which at the time I assumed would be more than enough!)
In the meantime, if you'd really like to patch more spells into the mod, you may be able to get some mileage out of categorizing some spells differently. If the mod fails while initializing, it should tell you a number 0-19 which corresponds to the principle it fails on, in the order listed on this page (so 0 for Modification, 1 for Construct, etc). Since I think the total spell limit now is actually already >10000, it's very likely that you're hitting the limit on a couple of specific principles (currently 512 per), and from past experience the most likely case is unaspected destruction which the mod would refer to as principle 11-- I should really clean up that error message sometime to give the names instead. If that is the case, and if you'd be ok with putting some of those into other principles when you make your custom patches, you may be able to get below the limit.
This is a great mod, but I wonder if it has anything to do with freezes I get with spells every now and then. The game sometimes freezes (no crash, must be forcefully closed) when I am casting spells. Is there a chance that this mod could have a negative interaction with another mod?
With the automatic spell learning feature on this mod does do some script work just after you finish casting a spell, but it's pretty hard to freeze up the whole game on SE with script work afaik and this script should only be doing real work in one thread at a time, just after your character finishes casting a spell. You could try turning this option off if you have it on anyway and see if it helps-- I'd be surprised, but please do let me know if that fixes the freezes for you so I can take a look!
Just when I think that my mod list is "feature complete" something new always creeps in. I just recently discovered the mod Experience which changes player leveling to only level by doing things like exploring, questing, reading books, and with some add-ons lock-picking or crafting. I thought to myself that it would be really cool if someone made a patch to generate XP from discovering spells. Seems like a perfect fit, but alas way way beyond my meager modding skills.
This mod should already work with Experience afaik, but as you say it doesn't add to level-up experience directly so only your skills would level from researching spells. I don't use the mod myself tbh but I'm guessing it could be done readily with Game.SetPlayerExperience. At this point there's a long list of feature additions and bug fixes I want to investigate the next time I circle back to working on this mod, so it'd be somewhere in the pile of requests unfortunately, but I'll keep it in mind! :)
The more-or-less whole point to Experience is that skill XP no longer contributes to level XP, leveling is now from other activities like questing, exploring, and (optionally) killing monsters and crafting. I'll take a look at what you said, though alas script writing and editing is beyond my capacity. Thanks again!
Hey. Reporting in here, a lot of the time your mod just randomly does not work whatsoever for me, especially if I'm doing the run on new save thing from the MCM, that's beyond dead. I got around it by just manually running it on game start, but even that's broken in my game now too, and i'm not learning any new spells, people in my modpack are also reporting this.
I'm wondering if we can get a more up to date version of even just simply the spell learning feature ? In a love hate relationship with this mod, as it's easily the best and it's not even remotely close, spell learning feature. (casting spells causes you to learn similar spells) Admittedly, this is the only feature of the mod that I use to make the game overall have a less "modded" feel, as the other features seem a little modded. But it seems as if when your game is doing a lot of other s#*! or it's in bigger modlists, this functionality starts to lose functionality or consistency.
Am I following you correctly that you have two issues-- (1) initialization sometimes (or always?) fails with an error and (2) the automatic spell learning feature stops working sometimes? Worth mentioning that auto spell learning is purely chance based-- there's no guaranteed minimum rate or pity bonus mechanism, so it's pretty common in my experience to have streaks of no spells learned even if you're casting a lot. So perhaps the question is what exact behavior you're seeing with this feature-- is it stopping permanently at some point, while there are still lower-level spells that could be learned?
Initialization-wise a number of people have reported issues when having the mod + patches installed from game start and have mentioned adding them later as a workaround, but I've never been able to replicate this problem in my own game so haven't been able to figure out why it's happening for those folks unfortunately. Anecdotally this does seem to be related to heavier script usage behind the scenes, as you say. You might try setting global variables aaSimpleVarInitDoExplicitCopy and aaSimpleVarInitNoParallel to 1 as mentioned in the sticky, which will revert it to use a slower method which appears to be less prone to such bugs. However, given that it sounds like waiting to initialize doesn't help and you're also encountering issues later on, I'm wondering if this could be a sign that the script engine is getting regularly overloaded in your game (which could cause other problems if so, it'd just be more obvious with this mod because it relies on scripts for most of its functionality).
For auto spell learning, you might try enabling in the MCM General > Automatic Spell Learning > Add spells only on location change / rest, which was designed to heavily limit the amount of script work this feature needs to do in 'active' situations like combat. Spells will be learned a little later but the overall rate should be similar.
Alternatively, if you're finding that automatic spell learning stops entirely at some point but works well up to that point, you might try disabling the feature, closing the MCM, waiting a second or two, and then opening the MCM and re-enabling the feature. There's a variable that can theoretically get stuck in script overload situations, and although it'll unstick itself after a while, manually disabling and re-enabling should also wipe it back to normal without the wait.
I think the majority of patches are still actually up-to-date enough (as in, although the version number may have changed, if spells weren't added/removed/given new IDs, the old patches should still work). If patches you want to use aren't up-to-date you can also use the xEdit patcher to generate them on your own. I'll probably get around to another update for this mod eventually, but things are quite busy for me right now so it's unlikely to be soon.
However, the error you're describing can also happen even if the patches are up-to-date due to a bug I haven't been able to track down yet since for whatever reason it never happens to me-- so I'd recommend first trying the last bullet-point under 'Debugging steps you can try on your own' above:
Run set aaSimpleVarInitDoExplicitCopy to 1 and set aaSimpleVarInitNoParallel to 1 in the console; this will revert initialization to use the older code from before v3.0 which may help if you're running into a bug. It's much slower, fair warning.
Nevermind I figured it out, for whatever reason, starting the game with your mod and patches enabled will cause errors. But after initializing a new game and then adding your mod and patches made it all work correctly.
Good to know, thanks! Actually, if you don't mind, can I ask if you use Papyrus Tweaks NG or another mod that affects script execution speed? I've heard a few reports of this behavior (errors when starting up with mod + patches, ok if added later) but have never hit it on my setup and am wondering if this is a possible reason.
Hey sure I can get that for you, I am having a different issue tho, I am getting stuck in the enchanting furniture for some reason. I am able to use all the items properly but I can't get off or move or anything.
By enchanting furniture do you mean this mod's imbuing lab furniture? (The one with reverse-engineering and staff / scroll / tome crafting.) The base table's just a static item and the other activators use the same code as the non-furniture ways of using those functions-- and the player character doesn't attach to this furniture the way they do with vanilla alchemy/enchanting tables and the like-- so I have no idea why you'd be getting stuck, sorry!
would your arcanum patch work with this version of the mod that (among other things) removes some particularly buggy spells, or would i need to modify it?
Looks like this version is for Arcanum v4 (with Conjuration spells), right? From a quick glance at the patch I think the removed spells weren't in my patch anyway, either because of those bugs or because they weren't available in regular leveled lists, so it should work although I haven't tested it.
If you'd like to double-check, the easiest way to do it is to load up the version of Arcanum you want alongside my patch ingame, then follow the instructions at the end of this mod's description under 'Testing Patch Spells'. If nothing breaks and you get the expected spells from Arcanum loading in your magic menu after using the cheat spell, you should be good to go.
Edit to add: actually, it looks like I mentioned that fix mod in the patch version article, so I guess I must have tested them together at least briefly when I put together the patch? But that was a while ago so I don't remember the specifics. May still be best to test it yourself if you want to be sure.
This sounds awesome and more streamlined than Spell Research. The only thing that bugs me is that it doesn't interact with spell tomes. Yeah, you can use a spell tome mod, but I think It'd be better if you could "reverse engineer" them like with scrolls (possibly for an easier time learning the spell). Then you could just use Don't Eat Spell Tomes to kill the original functionality. All three of the spell tome learning options sound like they have their own issues, so it'd be awesome if this mod were more holistic.
Yeah, I think I've considered before making a DEST add-on to have reading a spell tome queue up that spell as the next one to be learned by research + maybe give you a couple spellcrafting notes. Adding it into the reverse-engineering system is a little more difficult UI-wise (for scrolls and staves I can get the item from what the player has equipped, which doesn't work for books). I'll put it on the list to think about for a possible future update. :)
Neat. One more thing: Have you considered adding more principles to Destruction magic to accommodate mod-added spells? Like Water, Wind, and Earth? What would be the process in adding new principles if someone were to attempt it themselves? Would scripts need to be updated or will your scripts be able to handle new principles existing in whatever formlist handles principles?
EDIT: I suppose that wouldn't work, as there are interactive elements.
I suppose I just need to add all Earth, Water and Ice spells to some combo of Fire, Frost, Shock (like Fire + Ice = Water, Shock + Ice = Wind, ect.) If I leave them unaspected by default they'll hit that 512 limit for sure. In the interface can you choose more than one principle? The mod's description states that you can assign "one or more" principles, so I'd hope that you could lock a spell behind multiple principles.
Edit: Upon further reading of the mod description, it doesn't seem like that is possible. I'd thought at first that spell selection was based on the notes you had (like Spell Research does), but it seems you select a single principle and all spells associated with that principle (whether or not they have other principles) are discoverable. Not sure if this really meets the needs of a modlist with more complex or varied spell types. It sucks because I really like it as a streamlined Spell Research. If spells could be discoverable just by the combination of notes you have, that'd expand it a lot.
The four-principle structure is pretty thoroughly hard-coded into the mod. At design time I was focusing on keeping the principles grounded and straightforward-- I had a whale of a time learning the archetypes in Spell Research back in the day, for whatever reason a lot of them didn't really click with my brain, so I wanted to heavily limit the spell classifications for this mod and four ended up being the minimum I thought would work. Then when I got around to optimizing things, I wrote a bunch of the sorting and searching logic in a way that assumed there would always be four principles per school (it's a bit more complicated than this, but arrays instead of FormLists, essentially).
So while I think the idea of having additional principles as optional add-ons is reasonable, at this point the structure of the mod doesn't support it at all unfortunately. It's theoretically possible but would need a complete script refactor. To be honest this mod has been due for a refactor anyway for some time, because the code has gotten messy and I've learned a lot about scripting good practice since I initially started making it, but there are also known issues like initialization errors some folks encounter that would be ahead of any such changes on the priority list in any case. I can say I'll keep it in mind as a potential option, if I can see a clean way to introduce such functionality. :)
Which is all to say, the process for adding new principles is that I would have to do a bunch of stuff first and that's not likely to happen in the near future, sorry! You can rename individual principles more readily ('Principle Name Examples' in the miscellaneous files) but that's about the limit of it.
Edit: Missed your edit-- yeah, the mod is really centered around individual principles and doesn't support combinations beyond allowing you to get those spells via any of their principles. It's more or less a design difference with Spell Research-- Arcane Studies may be worth checking out as I think it also handles such flexibility better with its resistance/keyword check system.
I have a really stupid idea that's probably not going to work:
Spellforge uses the same backend, right? I assume then I can change the names of its archetypes as well? If I can do that, here's what I'd like to do:
1.) Reserve your spell learning mod for spells that fit the vanilla archetypes. Don't import most of Kittytails spells and Natura, as well as Triumvirate. 2.) Rename Spellforge's achetypes to fit the more esoteric styles. Since these are mostly nature, mystical and celestial-types, the visuals of Spellforge would fit them more. 3.)Add the mod-added spells to spellforge, disable all vanilla spells in Spellforge.
That'll create a good dynamic and make the nature/mystic spell learning feel more...natural and mystic. I guess I"m off to see if I can pull that off.
If I manage to pull this off, would you mind if I uploaded my "patches" that would enable this setup? I'd have to ask Arctal as well, of course.
Sure, I think that would work; Spellforge does indeed use a backend based on an earlier version of this mod's scripts, so the structure is very similar. You're more than welcome to upload such patches if it works well-- please do let me know if you end up doing so, I can link to it from this page as an add-on. :)
All the same regions are editable in spellforge. I think this will actually work, lol. Honestly, I think this will be really cool, not only because of expanded spell support but because one thing that bugged me about Spell Research was that it was only academic in nature (which this mod is as well). If I pull this off, there will be a meaningful difference between the baseline academic magic and the more natural/mystical magics that would be created through mediation at the Spellforge (which places them outside in nature).
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Hi folks, as part of version 3.1 I've generated an alternate set of patches that use FormList Manipulator; each can replace the corresponding premade ESP patch for its spell mod.
Initialization is still required; as of v3.0 and higher speed is about the same for all patches regardless of style. It should be safe to install, uninstall, or change classifications for spells mid-game, but please make sure to re-initialize after each time you do so. This is an experimental option, meaning that there may be bugs; please let me know if you have any problems.
Benefits of these patches over the regular ones:
- They should still work if you compact and ESL-flag / merge / etc the spell mods the patches are for, unless your merging process involves changing EditorIDs
- Only one patch plugin (DinoSpellDiscovery - FormList Manipulator AIO Patch.esp) is required; this may help if you're on VR or have another reason to restrict the number of even ESL-flagged plugins in your load order
Downsides of these patches:
- If you can't use FormList Manipulator, naturally these patches won't work.
If you have any problems with initialization using these or the regular patches, please let me know! The information I'd need to help track down the problem is (1) which if any premade patches you're using, (2) which if any spell mods you've used the patcher script to make a custom patch for, and (3) the error message given when you try to initialize (which is usually along the lines of "spell at index 0 in principle 8 is missing a property").
Debugging steps you can try on your own (for initialization problems):
- Remove spell mod patches one by one to see if the problem is caused by a specific one
- If you're using FormList Manipulator based patches, check the log which should be generated at some path like Documents/My Games/Skyrim Special Edition/SKSE/FormListManipulator.log; try searching for the keyword "invalid" and seeing if there is a place where this mod's patches have invalid entries (which would result in spells or other items not getting added, potentially causing spells to be missing or breaking the patch structure entirely)
- Run set aaSimpleVarInitDoExplicitCopy to 1 and set aaSimpleVarInitNoParallel to 1 in the console; this will revert initialization to use the older code from before v3.0 which may help if you're running into a bug. It's much slower, fair warning.
Any idea what could be causing this? I really don't want to do every single spell in the game by hand, but I also don't want to part with this amazing mod.
For future reference, if you do want or need to make a single custom patch at some point, the typical reason for this behavior is that another mod touches the spells in question (having USSEP or a bashed patch, for example). It's done this way because in the case of mods like Mysticism, properties of spells may be changed so the patcher needs to give you the option to re-configure the spell. However, assuming it's just fixes or tweaks to those spells that don't need changing for the patch side, you can ignore it. In the pop-up that asks you to set properties for a spell, there should also be a list of plugins that modify the spell, including the last one that has this record, and a button to ignore that file and try to use existing configurations (something along the lines of "skip file always"). You might have to click this button multiple times depending on your load order but you should eventually get the existing configurations for Mysticism or vanilla as appropriate. (But again, this shouldn't be necessary if you're using the premade patches-- just need to make sure you're only selecting the unpatched spell mods in your load order when running the script.)
Please, if it's possible, increase the maximum limit PER PRINCIPLE so that I can incorporate more spell-packs into the mod.
(I'm perpetually surprised and impressed by how many spells folks have in their games-- in the original version, the limit was actually 128 per principle which at the time I assumed would be more than enough!)
In the meantime, if you'd really like to patch more spells into the mod, you may be able to get some mileage out of categorizing some spells differently. If the mod fails while initializing, it should tell you a number 0-19 which corresponds to the principle it fails on, in the order listed on this page (so 0 for Modification, 1 for Construct, etc). Since I think the total spell limit now is actually already >10000, it's very likely that you're hitting the limit on a couple of specific principles (currently 512 per), and from past experience the most likely case is unaspected destruction which the mod would refer to as principle 11-- I should really clean up that error message sometime to give the names instead. If that is the case, and if you'd be ok with putting some of those into other principles when you make your custom patches, you may be able to get below the limit.
I'm wondering if we can get a more up to date version of even just simply the spell learning feature ? In a love hate relationship with this mod, as it's easily the best and it's not even remotely close, spell learning feature. (casting spells causes you to learn similar spells) Admittedly, this is the only feature of the mod that I use to make the game overall have a less "modded" feel, as the other features seem a little modded. But it seems as if when your game is doing a lot of other s#*! or it's in bigger modlists, this functionality starts to lose functionality or consistency.
Initialization-wise a number of people have reported issues when having the mod + patches installed from game start and have mentioned adding them later as a workaround, but I've never been able to replicate this problem in my own game so haven't been able to figure out why it's happening for those folks unfortunately. Anecdotally this does seem to be related to heavier script usage behind the scenes, as you say. You might try setting global variables aaSimpleVarInitDoExplicitCopy and aaSimpleVarInitNoParallel to 1 as mentioned in the sticky, which will revert it to use a slower method which appears to be less prone to such bugs. However, given that it sounds like waiting to initialize doesn't help and you're also encountering issues later on, I'm wondering if this could be a sign that the script engine is getting regularly overloaded in your game (which could cause other problems if so, it'd just be more obvious with this mod because it relies on scripts for most of its functionality).
For auto spell learning, you might try enabling in the MCM General > Automatic Spell Learning > Add spells only on location change / rest, which was designed to heavily limit the amount of script work this feature needs to do in 'active' situations like combat. Spells will be learned a little later but the overall rate should be similar.
Alternatively, if you're finding that automatic spell learning stops entirely at some point but works well up to that point, you might try disabling the feature, closing the MCM, waiting a second or two, and then opening the MCM and re-enabling the feature. There's a variable that can theoretically get stuck in script overload situations, and although it'll unstick itself after a while, manually disabling and re-enabling should also wipe it back to normal without the wait.
No matter what I do I get like 10 error codes, I get 0, 1, 3, 8, 9, 11, 10...
However, the error you're describing can also happen even if the patches are up-to-date due to a bug I haven't been able to track down yet since for whatever reason it never happens to me-- so I'd recommend first trying the last bullet-point under 'Debugging steps you can try on your own' above:
If you'd like to double-check, the easiest way to do it is to load up the version of Arcanum you want alongside my patch ingame, then follow the instructions at the end of this mod's description under 'Testing Patch Spells'. If nothing breaks and you get the expected spells from Arcanum loading in your magic menu after using the cheat spell, you should be good to go.
Edit to add: actually, it looks like I mentioned that fix mod in the patch version article, so I guess I must have tested them together at least briefly when I put together the patch? But that was a while ago so I don't remember the specifics. May still be best to test it yourself if you want to be sure.
EDIT: I suppose that wouldn't work, as there are interactive elements.
I suppose I just need to add all Earth, Water and Ice spells to some combo of Fire, Frost, Shock (like Fire + Ice = Water, Shock + Ice = Wind, ect.) If I leave them unaspected by default they'll hit that 512 limit for sure. In the interface can you choose more than one principle? The mod's description states that you can assign "one or more" principles, so I'd hope that you could lock a spell behind multiple principles.
Edit: Upon further reading of the mod description, it doesn't seem like that is possible. I'd thought at first that spell selection was based on the notes you had (like Spell Research does), but it seems you select a single principle and all spells associated with that principle (whether or not they have other principles) are discoverable. Not sure if this really meets the needs of a modlist with more complex or varied spell types. It sucks because I really like it as a streamlined Spell Research. If spells could be discoverable just by the combination of notes you have, that'd expand it a lot.
So while I think the idea of having additional principles as optional add-ons is reasonable, at this point the structure of the mod doesn't support it at all unfortunately. It's theoretically possible but would need a complete script refactor. To be honest this mod has been due for a refactor anyway for some time, because the code has gotten messy and I've learned a lot about scripting good practice since I initially started making it, but there are also known issues like initialization errors some folks encounter that would be ahead of any such changes on the priority list in any case. I can say I'll keep it in mind as a potential option, if I can see a clean way to introduce such functionality. :)
Which is all to say, the process for adding new principles is that I would have to do a bunch of stuff first and that's not likely to happen in the near future, sorry! You can rename individual principles more readily ('Principle Name Examples' in the miscellaneous files) but that's about the limit of it.
Edit: Missed your edit-- yeah, the mod is really centered around individual principles and doesn't support combinations beyond allowing you to get those spells via any of their principles. It's more or less a design difference with Spell Research-- Arcane Studies may be worth checking out as I think it also handles such flexibility better with its resistance/keyword check system.
I have a really stupid idea that's probably not going to work:
Spellforge uses the same backend, right? I assume then I can change the names of its archetypes as well? If I can do that, here's what I'd like to do:
1.) Reserve your spell learning mod for spells that fit the vanilla archetypes. Don't import most of Kittytails spells and Natura, as well as Triumvirate.
2.) Rename Spellforge's achetypes to fit the more esoteric styles. Since these are mostly nature, mystical and celestial-types, the visuals of Spellforge would fit them more.
3.)Add the mod-added spells to spellforge, disable all vanilla spells in Spellforge.
That'll create a good dynamic and make the nature/mystic spell learning feel more...natural and mystic. I guess I"m off to see if I can pull that off.
If I manage to pull this off, would you mind if I uploaded my "patches" that would enable this setup? I'd have to ask Arctal as well, of course.