• Simple, fast, lightweight, and compatible with everything
• Spend your downtime learning new spells, writing spell tomes, or enscribing scrolls
  
  • You'll need rolls of parchment*, inkwells, and quills, which are all consumed at different rates
  • Scrolls also require filled petty soul gems to create
    
• Downtime is the time that passes when you used the wait menu to wait for one or more hours
  
  • Sleeping is not downtime
    
• No need for additional plugins to register spells, it will find every spell tome you have installed, no matter which mod it came from, and use that to identify playable spells and scrolls. Everything is automatic, with no need for compatibility mods or manual classification of spells.
  

Gameplay

There is a book called "Arcane Studies Primer" added to the world in various easy-to-find places. There's one laying near the dead mage in Helgen Keep, one on the floor of the abandoned prison cell for Alternate Start players (if you install the optional file), one in Arcadia's Cauldron next to the alchemy table, etc.

Reading the "Arcane Studies Primer" scans through all of your installed books and scrolls and then gives you four new lesser powers: "Arcane Studies", "Write Tome", "Enscribe Scroll", and "Pause Studies". Scanning and indexing your spells may take a few minutes, if you have a lot of spells installed. You can go ahead and keep playing while it works.

When you activate Arcane Studies, Write Tome, or Enscribe Scroll, your equipped spell is selected for studying, writing, or enscribing respectively. If you had different spells in both hands, the spell in your left hand is preferred. If you didn't have a spell in either hand when you activated the power then you resume using the same spell you used for that activity previously.

From then on, until you activate a different one of the four powers, when you wait (but not when you sleep) the hours are spent studying the selected spell to learn similar spells, writing tomes of the selected spell, or making scrolls of the selected spell.

You can also study scrolls. Just equip a scroll instead of a spell and activate Arcane Studies. The scroll will be removed from your inventory, but the scroll's spell will be one of the first ones you learn in your subsequent studies (not necessarily the very first) and once you know the spell you can create scrolls or tomes for it.

There are a couple of necessary restrictions on scrolls: You can only make a scroll for a spell if there is a scroll version of it in the game or one of your installed mods, and you can only use a scroll for study if there is a matching spell tome in the game or in one of your installed mods.

When enscribing scrolls or writing tomes, if you switch to using a different spell for that activity the time and materials invested into your current scroll or tome are lost. On the other hand, if you are enscribing scrolls and you don't have any filled petty soul gems, the nearly-completed scrolls are stored, and once you acquire the needed soul gems the scrolls can all be completed in a single hour of downtime. You can freely switch between activities and switch back without losing progress, as long as you don't select a new spell for the activity.

* "Roll of Paper" has been renamed "Roll of Parchment," in a fit of realism fervor. Actual paper was a true rarity in the medieval world, while parchment was far more common.

Requirements

Hard Requirements

The following are necessary for the mod to work:

• SKSE
• PO3's Papyrus Extender
• JContainers SE
• PapyrusUtil SE
• MCM Helper
  

Synergies

There are a couple of other mods which are not required, but recommended for a better experience:

• Survival Mode or another needs mod of your choice, to give a reason to occasionally set aside your studies to deal with other needs
• FIZZLE or the more recent Unattuned makes it so that learning a high-level spell isn't the same thing as being able to cast it (But scrolls still work...)
  

Writing Materials

The optional Writing Materials mod adds crafting recipes for parchment, ink, and quills. The recipes are moderately realistic. You can totally use a different mod for crafting these materials (there are several on Nexus) or none at all if you want to require questing to acquire your writing materials. The recipes are all hidden if you don't have the necessary component materials in your inventory, so they won't get in the way and you can have fun trying to figure them out, if that's your thing.

The recipes are listed in the Articles section, for those who don't want to figure them out on your own.

Configuration

For the most part, you can just use the MCM menu to configure the mod. However, MCM's limitations mean you may also want to edit the config file directly. It will be automatically created if you change any settings from their defaults in the MCM, or you can create it manually. It's stored in Data/MCM/Settings/ArcaneStudies.ini

Scroll-specific sections

Settings file sections whose name exactly matches the name of a scroll can be used to configure that specific scroll.

Setting sIndexAs to a string will cause Arcane Studies to behave as if the setting value were the scroll's name. This allows scrolls which were given names that do not follow the common pattern to be correctly recognized. For example, users of the Fabulous Familiars mod might create a section like:
[Scroll of the Flaming Familiar]
sIndexAs = Scroll of Call Flaming Familiar

Setting sSpellMod and iSpellFormId can be used to link a scroll to a specific spell in a specific mod, which can be useful if you have multiple mods installed which add spells of the same name:
[Scroll of the Gargoyle Brute]
sSpellMod=MysticismMagic.esp
iSpellFormId=15204053

The tricky part when using the mod name and form id this way is that the form id has to be written in decimal, rather than the more common hexidecimal format.

Acknowledgements

This isn't the first mod of this general type, not by a long shot. I want to recognize the contributions of Spell Research and Dino's Spell Discovery in particular. They paved the way.