Purpose
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What this mod is made for

• Acquiring magic from a custom-placeable magic crafting station. With all the arcane visual effects that entails. Warriors can make their weapons at their own house, it's time for mages to be afforded the same luxury. That's just an example though, you can put your Spellforge literally anywhere in the whole world.
• Filtering your choices when selecting new spells. With all the fantastic spell packs available these days, spell vendor inventories have truly become an unmanageable, headache-inducing mess. Head over to your forge instead and you can now set any combination of filters you wish for crafting your new spell. Want an Expert level spell specifically? Want to focus on Destruction? Maybe Fire spells to be exact? Only spells that behave as aimed concentration spells (like Flames)? Make your choices and you'll only see what you're interested in. While we're at it, you'll also never see spells in your crafting selection that you've already learned.
• Getting a personal connection to your spells. Kind of like smithing and enchanting, when you've made something yourself it feels a bit more special to use.
• No more book eating. Instead get each spell using an interactive process. You'll be manually converting ingredients to magical materials with associated arcane blasts and flame effects then you'll be personally infusing power into the forging process using your own two hands and your own magicka.
• A new spell currency based on alchemy ingredients. This is something that encourages exploration, is more magical in nature and feels rewarding to find. Gold just isn't that interesting. Only a limited selection of ingredients work in the Forge but they have been carefully chosen so that at least one of them can be found no matter where you are in the world or which dungeon you choose to explore. And you only need 1 type of ingredient to craft any spell, though the amounts needed will vary based on rarity to maintain a fairly stable rate of progression.
• Practical crafting of staves and scrolls. From any spell you know (as long as such a staff or scroll already exists in the game).
• Removing, refunding and hiding spells that you don’t enjoy. There are almost always spells in your spellbook that don’t fit your playstyle, that you tried out and didn’t like or that you’ve outgrown by levelling up. By "trapping" them in the Forge you can break them down into their base components and use those to craft something new instead. When a spell is trapped this way, you can also choose to exclude it from all future crafting.
• Making your own "spell packs". You can use the xEdit spell library generator to exclude spells according to your own taste and create basically your own personal "best-of" spell pack from any combination of spell mods. This way you'll never have to see spells you don't enjoy ever again. You can also decide to share that spell library by uploading its csv file somewhere. Send me a message and I could even host some here on the page. Note that this will not be an actual new stand-alone spell pack, just a filter specifically built to be used by this mod. You will still need all the mods that library was built on in your load order. Also if you go to a normal spell vendor (but why would you?), the excluded spells will still be available there.
  

What this mod is NOT made for

• Time consuming, complicated or rare magic. Which is often part of the goal of Spell Research style mods. This is not meant to make magic harder to get. You can configure the costs however you wish though to decide your own rate of progression.
• Custom spells. Spells acquired are only those included in vanilla or mods, you cannot actually make completely new spells and you can't customize the behavior or numbers of existing ones as that would break balance and is outside the scope of the mod.
• Removing spell tomes from vendors or loot. This mod intentionally does not touch the base game in order to maintain full compatibility. There will however be very little reason to ever visit a spell vendor with this mod installed. So even though they still have spells, it doesn't really matter. If you do want all the vendor tomes removed as well, I can recommend No Vendor Spell Tomes.
  

Getting started
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Installation

• Add the mod via a mod manager to run its included FOMOD installer. It will automatically detect your load order and add spell libraries matching the spell mods you're using, so you can usually just press "finish" immediately.
• You can find a list of spell mods that are compatible out-of-the-box under "Compatibility" below along with instructions on how to create a library custom-tailored for any spell mod in existence. It's a simple process and can be done without any prior knowledge of xEdit.
• You don't have to include all your spell mods into the Forge if you don't want to. Spells you don't have libraries for will simply have to be bought the normal way instead.
  

In-game start-up

• Buy the Spellforge Manual from any novice spell vendor (e.g. Farengar at Whiterun) or find it next to the pre-placed forge in Winterhold.
  

That's all you need to know in advance! How everything works is explained in game via popups when doing the various crafting stages. But if you want to know everything right now, open up the spoiler tag:



Configuration

The mod is highly configurable via the MCM or Manual menu. You can remove the guidance popups, change material cost and refund amounts, magicka costs, entirely turn on/off the item forging and spell trapping features, change how filtering works, remove skill requirements, etc.


World Forge Layouts

If you want some Spellforges already placed in the world instead of (or in addition to) your conjured one, here are some layouts available for download by the wonderful community! These are added on top of the default forge in Winterhold and can be combined with each other unless otherwise stated.

• Destruction Ritual Quest sites
• Shriekwind Bastion South (overlooking Falkreath)
• Alternate Start - Live Another Life starting cell
  

Speaking of more being released, feel free to try making one yourself! Even with zero Creation Kit experience this is a simple process explained in the spoiler tag below:





Compatibility
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Prepackaged Spell Libraries

The following spell packs have prepackaged libraries that you can select at installation:

• Vanilla
• Anniversary Edition Spells
• Apocalypse
• Arcanum
• Triumvirate
• Mysticism
• Odin
• Tomebound
• Forgotten Magic Redone
• Requiem
• Elemental Destruction Magic (Redux too)
• Colorful Magic
• Shadow Spell Package
  

NOTE: There is spell overlap between these mods. If you grab literally all of them, you will have several spells with the same name and more or less the same function.



Custom Spell Libraries

You can create libraries yourself for any other spell mod using the provided xEdit script (see the end of the mod video for a guide). This "Library Generator" script will also combine all your libraries into one single esp (mainly useful for VR where ESL-flagging doesn't save slots).

Categorizations are already made in the script configuration for lots of spell mods that dont have a prepackaged library which will make it almost entirely automatic to make libraries for them.

If you realize any type of issue half-way through making a library, know that you can cancel the process and still save all your choices so far. So when you run it again later, all the spells you've already configured will be handled automatically. 

If you load your whole LO while generating your custom library, it's likely you'll also load some compatibility patches and bashed patches as well. If any of these contain edits to various spells, the generator script can not know if it's still correct to use the spell categories it has saved for the unpatched spells. Each patch could potentially have changed any spell so heavily that it now has a new category. For this reason, the script will ask YOU to make a call on this. Specifically it will ask: "Are spell changes made by <some_patch.esp> irrelevant to your configurations here? If so, select skip to use configurations from the file above this one instead". In other words: "do you want to ignore the changes this patch has made and just use the config the unpatched spell has?". For a great majority of patches, this is exactly what you want to do. Patches generally do not change how a spell acts, they just tweak numbers and add links to perks and such, so you can safely ignore them. Press the "Skip file always" button to inform the script that this patch is indeed safe to ignore for categorization purposes.

If you make a custom library, be aware that it counts as a Base library. Meaning it cant be combined with the pre-packaged Base libraries nor with any other libraries you make yourself. You should only need one though since it can contain everything from your whole LO. There is a special procedure you can perform to make libraries capable of loading next to each other which you can read about below if you want.

Remember to re-import spells in-game (via the Manual) if you've changed your library mid-save.


Making single-mod libraries that can load next to each other (like the prepackaged ones)

NOTE: This is normally not needed! This section is mainly for people looking to make and release more libraries for others to use:






Incompatibilities

• Mods that trigger when looting spell tomes will not mix well with the spell selection system in the forge (you are technically looting tomes when adding schematics). You are not reading them though, so mods that trigger on that are fine. 
• Spellforge will double-check that no extra spell tomes magically appeared in your inventory while you were using it, this fixes a compatibility issue with Spell Tutor which is now compatible.
• If you are getting crashes when the mod tries to display your spell selection during "Spell Synthesis", it is likely caused by the tomes it is trying to display. Double check that you arent getting the same crashes when visiting a vendor that has the same tomes in their daily shop rotation. An example of a mod that does currently crash is Spell Tome Sorting when used with Mysticism 2.0 (as it hasnt been updated to be compatible with it as of this writing [2022-06-02])
• Let me know if you find any others!
  

VR specific

• A mod I have not yet identified causes you to select an additional spell tome when closing the popup from a previous tome selection with the trigger button specifically. Let me know if you find which one this is. You can circumvent the issue by using 'A' instead or by disabling the popups.
• Selecting tomes with the trigger button instead of 'A' will cause you to get a "spell learned" message even though you didn't actually learn the spell yet (you still need to forge it). This is entirely unavoidable and all I can do is recommend using the 'A' button instead.
  

Credits
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• LeucisticDinosaur for making this mod possible. His Spell Discovery basis is responsible for all of the heavy lifting behind the scenes to import, categorize and filter spells. And he wrote the entire spell library generator script. The existence of such an excellent framework is the whole reason I got the motivation to develop this. Throw some endorsements his way if you like this and get the chance!
• powerofthree for making the rotating Strange Rune that adorns the base of the forge.
• TheRetroCarrot, Galaxy Synth, Hajo, Dragnier and Moonpyramid777 for categorizing spells and sending me their results.
• TheRetroCarrot and Cangar for testing and feedback prior to release.