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About this mod
A comprehensive overhaul designed to vastly extend the replayability of Skyrim gameplay through the reintroduction of tried and true classic Elder Scrolls game play dynamics. Includes Classic Elder Scrolls Attributes, thousands of new enchantments, new perks, many new spells, updated NPCs, and new challenges. Implemented in a lore-friendly way.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Donations
Skyrim Unlimited
Because as good as the base game is, the opportunities and challenges of Vanilla Skyrim are far too limited!
I have a patreon now! The continued encouragement and helpful feedback from fans of SU has always been wonderful, and now you can support me in another way. Skyrim Unlimited has been a labor of love for several years now, and it has gotten to the point where I want to spend more time creating new content for you all, but real life income needs take up more of my time than I would like. The less time I can spend working on other, less meaningful things to make ends meet, the more you all can enjoy the things I love giving to you. Become one of my patrons on patreon to see more of the content you like at a faster pace.
https://www.patreon.com/adendovahkin
Version 1.23 Released!
The update is finally finished! I want to extend a heart-felt thank you to all of the fans of Skyrim Unlimited for waiting patiently while it was developed, and I hope you all will derive as much enjoyment from playing it as I do. Please keep an eye out for bugs and report them to me in private messages, as that would be immensely helpful for making a better Skyrim experience for all of you.Version 1.23 Released!
Be aware that if you are updating from a previous version of Skyrim Unlimited, your previous game saves will almost certainly not be compatible with the new version. You must start a new game if you want to use the new version without issues.
My immediate plans involve creating many compatibility patches in order to make this newest version of SU as friendly towards playing with other mods as possible, as soon as possible. This version includes a great deal of potential for future mod content, and is designed to put tools in the hands of other players and modders alike which they have never had before. For starters, this includes an inventory leveled list system that allows precise control of what every single NPC wears, has in their inventory, or drops upon death. A potentially even more powerful addition is the ability to change NPC vital statistics such as life, stamina and speed for future areas, in-game using the 'choose attributes' lesser power. This can be found in the options sub menu.
After many compatibility patches are complete, I will work on a new and improved enchanted item update which will include vast numbers of new enchanted armors, followed by an alchemy update designed to work well with alchemy mods currently on the nexus.
As usual, the latest change log updates can be found at the bottom of this mod description. Keep the constructive feedback coming and I wish you all the most amazing and fun adventures in Tamriel!
Full Feature List Overview
This is a melding of the best parts of forgotten elder scrolls game dynamics and a substantial overhaul of many game dynamics, both blended with the awesomeness of Skyrim Special Edition. This includes classic elder scrolls attributes for the player and NPCs, a complete overhaul of NPC leveling and abilities, overhauled vanilla perks, dozens of new perks, dozens of new enchantments, thousands of new enchanted items, over fifty new spells, magical sneak attacks, many new challenges, and much more!
At the Heart of Skyrim Unlimited: Classic Elder Scrolls Attributes
What attributes will you use?
What attributes will you use?
Gain more power in totally new ways for Skyrim, through the reintroduction and lore-friendly reimagining of the basic attributes of Strength, Endurance, Agility, Speed, Intelligence, Willpower, Personality, and Luck. The new system makes the game more interesting, challenging and truer to the classic Elder Scrolls style. Increase your health to new heights with the endurance attribute as well as the normal method of increasing it. Deal more damage with physical blows and increase your carry weight with the strength attribute. Augment the agility attribute to increase your stamina and more skillfully aim your strikes to ignore the enemy's armor . Run faster and swing your weapons more swiftly by increasing your speed attribute. Increase your intelligence to gain more magicka, increase your maximum spell burst charge and improve your enchanting and alchemy skills even further. Improve your willpower to recharge your magicka more quickly, charge up powerful spell bursts more quickly and make your spells and alchemy effects last longer. When you need to haggle for lower prices, sell your own wares at higher prices, or just be better at persuading others, develop your personality attribute. Finally, your Luck attribute has many possible effects, ranging from increased loot to better critical attack damage, and all of these new abilities are unlocked with new perks in several different perk trees.
This is just the tip of the iceberg: these attributes do much more when you unlock new perks and modified versions of old perks designed to use them. NPCs will use the new attributes as well, and they receive the same bonuses you do from them. All changes are balanced, as lore friendly as possible, and guaranteed to give you a more interesting play through. Your starting attributes depend on your race and gender. Orcs and Redguards generally start with higher strength and/or endurance, high elves start with higher intelligence, wood elves start with higher agility, and so on and so forth. This is arguably more lore-friendly, immersive, and fun than making all characters exactly the same in terms of vital statistics. Having to make choices about how to build your character is a wonderful and badly needed thing in vanilla Skyrim.
Attributes can be improved in several ways. For every level you gain, you can use the new "Choose Attributes" lesser power to allocate 10 attribute points to any attributes you choose. You will receive this power after loading the game with SU installed. Additionally, increasing your skills will grant you some passive gains for the attributes closely related to the skills you focus on, and these increases will also occur after gaining levels. Finally, if you need to increase your attributes as far you can go, invest perk points in new attribute perks in the perk trees of your choice. Every perk tree now has attribute perks that will increase the most appropriate attribute for the skill in question. You will get a notification in the upper left side of the screen every time an attribute increases, including derived attributes of health, stamina, magicka and carry weight. Each basic attribute's current level can be viewed in the active magic effects tab of the magic menu. There are enchanted armors and jewelry that will now appear in loot and merchant's inventories that will increase your attributes. They are disenchantable and you can put the enchantments on any type of armor or jewelry.
If choosing attributes after every level isn't for you, maybe because it breaks the immersion for you, be aware you can also set up an auto-attribute system which will take care of your attribute points for you, based on your selections at the start. You can enable this feature in the options menu of the 'choose attributes' lesser power. Using this feature means you effectively may only need to choose attributes once.
New attributes aren't enough for you? Don't worry. There is so much more ahead.
What will your focus be?
Why be a pure warrior, pure mage, or pure sneak? In Vanilla Skyrim there was no reason to be any of those things. In Skyrim Unlimited, there are more interesting choices to make. Focus points give bonuses to many related abilities for either Warrior, Sneak, or Mage abilities. Your magic focus improves the power of all your spells. Your Sneak Focus improves many abilities from your damage with daggers, lockpicking prowess, pickpocketing and of course your sneaking abilities. Warrior Focus does one thing and one very well: augment your damage with physical weapons.
Focus points are gained by increasing the skills most closely associated with each type, by completing important quests in the main storylines of Skyrim, including the DLC quests, or by converting Dragon Souls with the 'convert dragon soul' power you will receive at the start of the game. You can view your current focus points, along with your attributes, in the active magic effects menu.
If you don't ever want to a pure warrior, sneak, or mage, don't worry. You definitely can avoid focus points all together. That's the beauty of Skyrim Unlimited: it doesn't penalize you for choosing one path or another, but it does give you dramatically improved depth of choices to your character development. Focus point enchantments can be found on enchanted necklaces and amulets late in the game, too. They are disenchantable and chances are, no matter what character build you're going for, these can help you do something you like, better.
My Notes on Attributes
I designed Skyrim Unlimited to provide much needed depth to the character progression system, but with only the most appropriate, balanced and integrated changes to the system used by vanilla Skyrim. Furthermore, it needs to be noted you will not be penalized forever by choosing to raise one or two particular attributes at the expense of other attributes falling behind: if you play long enough, you can increase all of your attributes to their maximum possible levels. It will definitely affect your play-through in interesting ways if you focus on a few attributes at a time, however. That having been said, there is no ever lasting opportunity cost of choosing one attribute over another. You can be the ultimate super attribute god dovahkin by the time you reach level 100.
Attributes make the game much deeper and more involved, primarily by providing bonuses that reward you for choosing to increase them and by training skills that are more closely related within each class. There is synergy in using combat skills, and the same can be said of magic and sneak skills. Most attribute increases occur after gaining levels.
Here is a breakdown of only the most basic effects of each attribute:
Strength
Carry Weight (5 x strength)
unarmed damage
1/3 stamina regeneration
with perks:
melee weapon damage
Endurance
Health (5 x endurance)
1/3 stamina regeneration
with perks:
blocking effectiveness
Speed
walking and running speed
melee weapon speed
Ranged Weapon Draw Speed
with perks:
pickpocketing
sneaking
Agility
stamina (5 x agility)
1/3 stamina regeneration
with perks:
ranged weapon damage
lockpicking
sneaking
Intelligence
Magicka (5 x intelligence)
Spell Burst Maximum Charge
with perks:
enchantment potency
potion potency
Willpower
Magicka regeneration
Spell Burst Charging Rate
Offensive Spell Force Projection
with perks:
spell durations
potion effect durations
Personality
with perks:
persuasion success
intimidation success
vendor prices
player reputation
bribery cost
Luck
with perks:
critical hit chances of weapons
critical hit damage
chance to find additional loot
Carry Weight (5 x strength)
unarmed damage
1/3 stamina regeneration
with perks:
melee weapon damage
Endurance
Health (5 x endurance)
1/3 stamina regeneration
with perks:
blocking effectiveness
Speed
walking and running speed
melee weapon speed
Ranged Weapon Draw Speed
with perks:
pickpocketing
sneaking
Agility
stamina (5 x agility)
1/3 stamina regeneration
with perks:
ranged weapon damage
lockpicking
sneaking
Intelligence
Magicka (5 x intelligence)
Spell Burst Maximum Charge
with perks:
enchantment potency
potion potency
Willpower
Magicka regeneration
Spell Burst Charging Rate
Offensive Spell Force Projection
with perks:
spell durations
potion effect durations
Personality
with perks:
persuasion success
intimidation success
vendor prices
player reputation
bribery cost
Luck
with perks:
critical hit chances of weapons
critical hit damage
chance to find additional loot
NPC Attribute Customization
Play with characters the way you want them by customizing NPC statistics to whatever your heart desires! The 'Choose Attributes' lesser power's options menu can be used to change the vital statistics of essentially every character in the game, including their life, stamina, speed, strength, etc., to whatever you please. If you don't like the way NPCs move faster at high levels of speed, change it. If you think NPCs aren't giving you enough of a challenge at higher levels, change it. Please be aware that funky settings like 0% speed or strength are possible, but not recommended. That is recommended only if you need to laugh, or possibly crash your game. Or both. You take your quality game time into your own hands if you go down that road, but I also doubt you will ever find another mod which gives you, the player, this choice and option.
Eight New Weapon Enchantments and Thousands of New Enchanted Weapons
Literally thousands of new enchanted weapons have been added into leveled lists of loot, vendor inventories, and yes, even in the hands of some NPCs. The new enchanted weapons include 8 new enchantment types and range from enchantments that weaken your target to enchantments that poison them for a slow death. Better yet, sooner or later you will come across powerful weapons with two or even three enchantment effects at once and of comparable power to the weapons you could be making yourself with a high enchanting skill. Use them to dramatically boost your damage potential or sell them for a lot of coin at the nearest blacksmith. There is no longer a drastic need to focus on enchanting as a skill in order to create the most powerful weapons.
Reworked NPC Vital Statistics
NPC levels, attributes, and corresponding abilities have received a substantial overhaul. Instead of remaining at stagnant levels throughout Skyrim, they now vary to a subtle degree in level and generally gain levels at various rates as the game progresses. For example, regular, run-of-the-mill bandits in vanilla skyrim never exceeded level 1. The next tier of bandit was a hard coded level higher than that, and so on, and so forth. Boss bandits generally were never much stronger than you, and typically in the late game were at an unimpressively lower level than you. I remember the first time I played Skyrim, and by the time I was level 25 nothing could touch me. In Skyrim Unlimited, typical NPC levels can be anywhere from 1 to as high as your level, and bosses very often will be even higher in level than you! The rates NPCs gain levels are carefully balanced to respect the vanilla power distribution for all NPCs. If an NPC was weak compared to another NPC in vanilla skyrim, it will still be weak to that same NPC now.
NPCs are now sporting more appropriate levels, skills, and perks which suit their faction, job, and level. Expect high level NPCs to surprise you if you've never played with SU before. High-ranking guild or main quest characters in particular are now considerably more competent across the board. I do not recommend starting a fight with the companions or the mages at the college of winterhold at the start of the game, for example. For even more hilarity, attack characters like daedric lords or the few existing aedra in the game and see what happens. I highly recommend saving your game first.
NPC attributes can be viewed with the new "Dragon Sense" lesser power, and I recommend using it to judge how much stronger and tougher the NPC will be compared to in Vanilla Skyrim. You will receive this power after loading the game with SU installed. For example, a strength value of 100 means the NPC will do 2x the normal damage with melee weapons that it would be dealing in vanilla skyrim.
This is all part of an on-going effort to make the world of Skyrim less bland, less predictable, and more challenging in fun ways. The balance of power between the player and NPCs has been tweaked so that you shouldn't get too comfortable at high levels. Your enemies will make you regret it if you do.
A Vastly Improved Magic Paradigm
Skyrim Unlimited adds over fifty new spells into Tamriel, and some of them open up the potential for entirely new mage builds focused around illusion, alteration, or even restoration. Each new spell is unique, integrated into leveled lists and spell tome lists, and both your allies and enemies alike will use them too at some point during your adventures. They are balanced on the player side and the NPC side.
All vanilla and SU fire and forget spells can be charged up for a spell burst. Spell bursts are supercharged versions of offensive or defensive spells which improve both the magnitude and duration of spells. You can charge spell bursts simply by holding a charged spell in either or both hands. After about two seconds, you will notice some new FX effects around your character, which indicate a buildup of energy. Your magicka level must remain constant during charging, or charging will not happen: this means you cannot cast a concentration spell or use magicka potions during charging, for example. Your intelligence directly determines the maximum charge level, and your willpower directly influences how quickly you will charge spell bursts. The color pallette of the FX effects will gradually change to indicate the charge level and will progress from red, which indicates a charge level between 0 and 25% greater magnitude, to green, then various shades of blue and then purple, and finally, white, once you exceed 200% burst charge. The maximum burst charge depends only on your intelligence attribute, and thus it has no hard limit. When a spell burst hits a target, you will receive a notification message similar to the sneak attack damage multiplier notification, which will tell you how much extra magnitude it had. Better yet, the damage bonuses from spell sneak attacks and spell bursts are multiplicative, offering the potential to deal massive damage in a very fulfilling way before your enemies even see you. You can even 'hold' a spell burst charge for a few seconds after charging and change to a different fire and forget spell to use the charge with, or transition to another area and fire a maximum strength burst at any enemies waiting for you there. The time you can hold it before dissipation is equal to 1 + your magic focus level. You can even charge up a spell burst in one hand and use a spell in the other hand to apply it.
No matter what kind of offensive spell you use, you can now project force onto your target and knock it away when you deal enough damage and if you have enough willpower. As you increase both your willpower and the damage inflicted by your spells, you will be able to fling your targets away at impact as if they were rag dolls.
For the Destruction mages that are tired of using only flame, frost, or shock spells, try the new arcane damage type! Arcane damage is pure magical essence that has not been channeled into an elemental affinity. Arcane spells can typically be cast very rapidly, and they incur no damage penalty against any race. However it should be noted that Arcane spells also have no special effect (like enduring flames, slower movement speed, etc) and more importantly, magic resistance effectively counts twice against arcane damage. Each spell fits nicely in the vanilla schema that Bethesda used for spells. In addition, I would like to introduce my new beam spells, which can hit at extreme ranges and come in heat, cold, shock, and arcane variants. They are inspired by ideas from spells in Midas Magic.
Over twenty new Conjuration Spells have been added into Tamriel. These are my new Familiar spells and undead summoning spells, and are designed to work in exactly the same manner as the vanilla familiar spell. However, now you can potentially summon 21 kinds of 'spirit' animals instead of just the one, and you can summon five different types of skeletons with different modes of attack, ranging from swords, to bows, to spells, or warhammers in the case of the dreaded skeleton warlord.
Playing as a summoner has never felt this good, as summoning skills are now much more interesting across the board. Potent Atronachs are nice and all, but lets be honest, what you really want are Ascendant summoned creatures. All atronachs, familiars, and summoned undead can now become Ascendant when you choose the right conjuration perk. Additionally, new perks in the conjuration skill perk tree allow you to increase the vital statistics of your summoned creatures based on your conjuring skill, your intelligence attribute, and your magic focus level.
Have you ever wanted to use Force Powers like a jedi in Skyrim? Now you can. Have you ever been attacked by a guard and thought "I really just want you to go away". Now you can make it happen. Three new alteration spells specialize in not only dealing damage, but projecting force in a way that pushes or even blows targets away. Look for force bolt, force push, and force blast to satisfy your need to use lethal force.
Feather spells and unlock spells are back and are designed to fit nicely into Skyrim, almost as if they had never been absent. In addition to making your maximum carry weight increase, feather spells can also reduce or even eliminate the damage you take from long falls.
You can fortify your attributes or resistances with new restoration spells, or depending on the tactical situation, maybe you will fortify your followers with the same effects using the 'endowment' versions of those spells.
Weakness spells and enchantments have been added into Tamriel, fresh from the Illusion school of magic. They not only damage your target's health by attacking the mind, they create an illusory field around the target that weakens its physical attacks, movement speed, and more. Fade, Debilitate, and Cripple, are respectively apprentice, adept, and expert spells. Be aware that at first, you will only be able to harm the living with weakness spells, but certain perks in the illusion skill perk tree can alleviate this limitation. Weakness spells can be devastating to melee characters, whose physical attack damage and speed will be dramatically but temporarily reduced while they take a fair amount of damage
Absorption spells and enchantments are back, are better than ever, and have been enveloped into a new spell archetype I call "absorbance". As the name suggests, they don't just damage your target: you steal all of the health (and later, stamina) that you can get out of them, for yourself. Absorbance typically works only on living targets, but rumor has it, gifted restoration mages can make absorbance work on the undead, daedra, or even automatons. Strictly speaking, three new restoration spells have been added: siphon, absorption, and osmosis.
Sneak Attacks with Spells!
Spell sneaking is back! All novice, apprentice, and adept destruction spells will successfully sneak attack while the caster is sneaking, undetected, and the target does not hear or see the spell coming. There are new perks available in the sneak perk tree that will increase your chances of successfully pulling off a spell sneak attack, and will increase the damage of your spell sneak attacks as well. Spell sneaking is the perfect blend of sneaking gameplay and spell casting gameplay, and will offer many hours of new, original character builds not possible with any other mod.
Create New Things with the Arcane Manipulator!
The Arcane Manipulator has been added to the world of Tamriel! This device allows for new crafting recipes of items that would otherwise be uncraftable and potentially unobtainable otherwise, such as the most powerful of spell tomes or magical scrolls, for example. It also allows you to convert rubies, sapphires, diamonds, etc., into soul gems. The list of craftable goodies will grow much larger with future updates. It resembles a smaller version of the arcane altar after a fashion, and has been placed near many arcane enchanting tables in 17 places all across Skyrim. You can most easily find them in player homes, like hjerim or proudspire, and in the study areas of important mages, like Farengar. You will only see the gem recipes in the Arcane Manipulator when you have gems in your inventory. You will only see and be able to use the recipes of spell tomes you can create when you have the mastery perk directly underneath the spell's mastery perk. For example, you can only create the fire bolt tome when you have the novice destruction perk and you don't already know the fire bolt spell. You will only see and be able to use the recipes of magic scrolls when you have the scroll crafting perk from the enchanting skill perk tree and you have learned the spell you are attempting to create the scroll version of. You will also need blank scrolls of the correct type and soul gems of sizes corresponding to the mastery level of the spell in question. Blank scrolls are available from most court wizards and college of winterhold vendors.
Spell sneaking is back! All novice, apprentice, and adept destruction spells will successfully sneak attack while the caster is sneaking, undetected, and the target does not hear or see the spell coming. There are new perks available in the sneak perk tree that will increase your chances of successfully pulling off a spell sneak attack, and will increase the damage of your spell sneak attacks as well. Spell sneaking is the perfect blend of sneaking gameplay and spell casting gameplay, and will offer many hours of new, original character builds not possible with any other mod.
Create New Things with the Arcane Manipulator!
The Arcane Manipulator has been added to the world of Tamriel! This device allows for new crafting recipes of items that would otherwise be uncraftable and potentially unobtainable otherwise, such as the most powerful of spell tomes or magical scrolls, for example. It also allows you to convert rubies, sapphires, diamonds, etc., into soul gems. The list of craftable goodies will grow much larger with future updates. It resembles a smaller version of the arcane altar after a fashion, and has been placed near many arcane enchanting tables in 17 places all across Skyrim. You can most easily find them in player homes, like hjerim or proudspire, and in the study areas of important mages, like Farengar. You will only see the gem recipes in the Arcane Manipulator when you have gems in your inventory. You will only see and be able to use the recipes of spell tomes you can create when you have the mastery perk directly underneath the spell's mastery perk. For example, you can only create the fire bolt tome when you have the novice destruction perk and you don't already know the fire bolt spell. You will only see and be able to use the recipes of magic scrolls when you have the scroll crafting perk from the enchanting skill perk tree and you have learned the spell you are attempting to create the scroll version of. You will also need blank scrolls of the correct type and soul gems of sizes corresponding to the mastery level of the spell in question. Blank scrolls are available from most court wizards and college of winterhold vendors.
Stronger Werewolves and Vampire Lords
Transforming into a Werewolf or Vampire Lord will increase your abilities like never before. Both forms have received massive bonuses to attack damage, damage resistance and general attribute bonuses appropriate to each form. Several dynamics related to feeding have been modified to be more fulfilling and filling at the same time. New perks are coming for each beast form's perk trees, as well.
Viable Unarmed Combat
Have you ever wanted to be a monk who fights with fists alone in Tamriel? You can do that in Skyrim Unlimited. Your hand to hand damage increases with your strength and your one-handed skill. Your one-handed skill will also increase as you successfully deal damage with bare-handed blows. Three new and powerful perks in the one-handed skill perk tree are waiting for all of the bare-fisted Dovahkin out there. Beware however: NPCs, big or small, receive exactly the same bonuses. Brawls and feats of strength aren't going to be contests you will want to blink in while playing Skyrim Unlimited. Bare handed blows now have a whopping 5x multiplier to sneak attack damage. The new damage potential offered here opens up new possibilities for unarmed combat as a mainstream play style, and particularly when combined with the new Khajiit or Argonian claw damage bonuses of 30% or 20%, respectively, instead of a flat 12 point bonus.
Realistic Sneaking
Sneaking is now considerably more difficult in Skyrim at the start, but your new potential stealth skills and new stealth enchantments like Silence and old favorites like Chameleon can allow you to become a master of the darkness like never before if you use your potential wisely. Staying hidden is very tricky for a starting character, since light and sound have a greater effect on your stealth. Enemies will not just stop looking for you after sixty seconds, so you will probably have to put a lot more distance between yourself and your pursuers before you can regain your stealth after being discovered. It is recommended to take extra care around enemies you used to sneak around easily. Effective stealth will require careful forethought, more training with sneak trainers, more perk investments in the sneak perk tree, and well-chosen and well-developed enchantments for your apparel before you can safely and reliably sneak.
Challenging Lockpicking and Pickpocketing
Lets face it: in vanilla Skyrim, the challenge of lockpicking is a joke. Any one with level 25 in lockpicking and a handful of lockpicks could learn to open even master locks with very little effort. Its shouldn't be a breeze to get through master locks with a mediocre lockpicking skill. No longer. In Skyrim Unlimited, you will need most of the perks in the skill tree and probably some skill trainers to boost your skill level in lockpicking before you should attempt to tackle master locks, and expert locks will be very tough. The loot of containers will more properly scale upwards with each higher lock placed on them.
Pickpocketing has been revamped a bit. Pickpocketing gold is going to be twice as hard, item weight makes a bigger difference, and the victim's skills make a much bigger difference now. On the flip side, you can get much better at lockpicking if you use the right attributes and perks!
Hint: lockpicking and pickpocketing potions and enchantments aren't almost pointless now, and if you really want to excel in both, invest focus points into your sneak focus level.
Staffs Worth Using
Staffs in Tamriel, to me, have been very boring since as long as I can remember. Not any more. Now, staffs have considerably bigger advantages over normal spellcasting. The new synergy perks in every magic skill perk tree boost the damage of all staff magic effects when you dual cast with two staffs. In addition, staffs now last longer before needing to be recharged. The total number of staffs in Skyrim have been doubled, and as a general rule, there is a staff for every offensive spell in the game, including many spells from Skyrim Unlimited. Be wary, Dragonborn: your enemies may occasionally use these new staffs, as well. It may be possible to craft master level destruction spell staffs at the Arcane Manipulator... Only a master of a destruction magic with many spells learned may be able to determine this.
Potions and Ingredients Worth Investing Time In
Skyrim Unlimited adds 40 new alchemy ingredient effects and over two dozen new ingredients, with more incoming in planned future updates. Many of the effects will look and feel very familiar to fans of elder scrolls games from the past, but a few of them are very new and very powerful. Please see the readme and changelog for more details. New ingredients include alchemical dusts of many common metals and new varieties of hearts from many different animals, to name just a few. They can be found in all of the same common places you already habitually find loot on a regular basis, but you'll need to invest in three new alchemy perks in order to be able to find and collect them. Alchemy effects added include:
Shielding, Spell Absorption, Frailty, Thorns, Chameleon, Debilitate
Fire Cloak, Frost Cloak, Shock Cloak
Fire Damage, Frost Damage, Shock Damage, Arcane Damage
Fortify Armor Rating, Candlelight, Burden
Fortify Agility, Fortify Intelligence, Fortify Personality, Fortify Speed, Fortify Willpower, Fortify Endurance, Fortify Luck, Fortify Strength
Damage Agility, Damage Endurance, Damage Intelligence, Damage Luck, Damage Personality, Damage Speed, Damage Strength, Damage Willpower
Drain Agility, Drain Endurance, Drain Intelligence, Drain Luck, Drain Personality, Drain Speed, Drain Strength, Drain Willpower
In vanilla Skyrim, potion users and food collectors (you know who you are) may be aware that when in danger, the Dovahkin could essentially spam health, stamina or magicka effects from potions, food or ingredients to stay in the fight at will. In other words, in its vanilla state, the game more or less supports you with "Don't worry, if you get into trouble in the middle of a fight, you can freeze time and eat a ton of cheese wheels you stole out of sheer kleptomania and regain all of your health immediately, constipation not withstanding." This, in my mind, is a cheat. If you don't see why, this mod probably isn't for you. Going into a fight knowing you can essentially regenerate your health, stamina and magicka at will for as long your stores of potions hold out is tantamount to knowing the enemy has to one-shot you in order to be a threat if you bring enough potions. I fixed this.
In Skyrim Unlimited, most consumables that restore health, magicka or stamina now restore the same amount, but over five seconds. This means you will probably have to use some strategizing where you didn’t before. Even better, with a high willpower attribute, you can extend the duration further with the right perk, which means that if you put some more thought and effort into how you play, potions can potentially be much more powerful than in vanilla Skyrim.
Realistic Vendor Prices and Inventory
You have the ability to drastically reduce your buying prices and increase your selling prices for all vendors by focusing on your personality attribute and your speech skill. However, vendor selling and buying prices are now more realistically cutthroat and they will rip off unwary customers without mercy. If you have a low speech skill and none of the right perks or a high personality attribute, prepare to pay an arm a leg for their wares. On the flip side, vendor inventories have been deleveled. Merchants now realistically have nearly the full potential inventory they can have, regardless of your player level. You can even find weapons with three enchantment effects on them in vendor inventories at level 1. Being able to afford them that early in the game is another matter. This gives you a much better reason to focus on speech as a skill.
Other Changes
-Natural health regeneration is disabled by default, but can be regained by the Regeneration perk in the restoration perk tree.
-Increasing your magic skills makes your spells stronger or last longer now, instead of decreasing their casting cost. Focus on magicka-cost reduction enchantments to offset this.
-The difficulty setting system has been reworked to be more realistic, more uniform and based more on increasing the pace of combat rather than disproportionately giving the player and other NPCs bonuses and weaknesses to damage dealt and sustained. In other words, instead of making the player stronger and other NPCs weaker at low difficulty or making the player weaker and other NPCs stronger at high difficulty, low difficulty now means all damage sustained and dealt by the players is reduced, and the reverse is also true for high difficulty. This system is designed to make you feel accomplished when you can play the game at high difficulty: you are dishing out a ton of damage and probably receiving a ton of damage in return, assuming you let them hit you. Its a catch 22, and its more fun than feeling like you've been handicapped. The new damage scaling for damage dealt to the player AND BY the player, as a function of difficulty, is as follows:
Novice 0.4
Apprentice 0.7
Adept 1
Expert 1.75
Master 3
Legendary 5
-Many enchantments and spells from previous elder scrolls games are back, and better than ever. The new version of the shield enchantment, now called 'shielding', effectively reduces damage from physical and most magical attacks at the same time, but also reduces your magicka regeneration as a trade-off. It also will not protect you from arrows, poisons, or attacks based on poison.
-Armor, resistances, and cost reductions of spells now use an exponential curve based on points, and it is no longer possible to achieve complete immunity to damage of any type, nor completely eliminate your magicka cost of casting spells. This allows for a more realistic and less broken implementation of the game's dynamics. You will be informed when these values change by a message in the upper left corner of the screen.
-Dual casting has been tweaked slightly to address an imbalance in my opinion. Dual casting cost is decreased a bit to 2.5x, and dual casting power is now also 2.5x your damage with just one hand. For reference, the vanilla cost is 2.8x and the power is only 2.2x.
-The enchanting and alchemy circle of cheatyness exploit is gone. Fortify smithing and Fortify Alchemy enchantments are gone and fortify enchanting alchemy ingredients are similarly non-existent.These effects may return later as very rare and powerful bonuses on equally rare and powerful ingredients and enchantments that cannot be disenchanted.
-The crafting of dwarven, elven, glass, and orcish armor and weapons have now been renamed to dwemer-metal, moonstone, malachite, and orichalcum, in the smithing menu in order to more logically represent the materials being used, rather than the design type of the items being crafted.
-Feather step enchantments on boots allow you to ignore damage from long falls.
-It is now possible to pickpocket with a 99% change of success instead of 95%, if your skills and other effects are powerful enough.
-The sneak attack damage multipliers have been reworked. All weapons but daggers and bows now receive sneak attack damage penalties based on weight: the heavier a weapon is, the smaller its base sneak attack multiplier. Bows are now slightly better at sneak attack damage.
-Reworked sneak attack perks and new sneak attack perks will increase the damage for weapons’ sneak attacks based on your controlling attribute for the weapon in question and your sneak focus level. Melee weapons do more sneak attack damage based on strength, bows and crossbows receive more sneak attack damage based on agility, and daggers receive both sets of bonuses. Spells receive a bonus to sneak attack damage based on agility. All of the aforementioned bonuses now come from perks in the sneak skill perk tree.
-Several powers granted by certain race choices or transformations will effectively no longer expire, and can be toggled on or off at will.
-And Much, Much more...
-Increasing your magic skills makes your spells stronger or last longer now, instead of decreasing their casting cost. Focus on magicka-cost reduction enchantments to offset this.
-The difficulty setting system has been reworked to be more realistic, more uniform and based more on increasing the pace of combat rather than disproportionately giving the player and other NPCs bonuses and weaknesses to damage dealt and sustained. In other words, instead of making the player stronger and other NPCs weaker at low difficulty or making the player weaker and other NPCs stronger at high difficulty, low difficulty now means all damage sustained and dealt by the players is reduced, and the reverse is also true for high difficulty. This system is designed to make you feel accomplished when you can play the game at high difficulty: you are dishing out a ton of damage and probably receiving a ton of damage in return, assuming you let them hit you. Its a catch 22, and its more fun than feeling like you've been handicapped. The new damage scaling for damage dealt to the player AND BY the player, as a function of difficulty, is as follows:
Novice 0.4
Apprentice 0.7
Adept 1
Expert 1.75
Master 3
Legendary 5
-Many enchantments and spells from previous elder scrolls games are back, and better than ever. The new version of the shield enchantment, now called 'shielding', effectively reduces damage from physical and most magical attacks at the same time, but also reduces your magicka regeneration as a trade-off. It also will not protect you from arrows, poisons, or attacks based on poison.
-Armor, resistances, and cost reductions of spells now use an exponential curve based on points, and it is no longer possible to achieve complete immunity to damage of any type, nor completely eliminate your magicka cost of casting spells. This allows for a more realistic and less broken implementation of the game's dynamics. You will be informed when these values change by a message in the upper left corner of the screen.
-Dual casting has been tweaked slightly to address an imbalance in my opinion. Dual casting cost is decreased a bit to 2.5x, and dual casting power is now also 2.5x your damage with just one hand. For reference, the vanilla cost is 2.8x and the power is only 2.2x.
-The enchanting and alchemy circle of cheatyness exploit is gone. Fortify smithing and Fortify Alchemy enchantments are gone and fortify enchanting alchemy ingredients are similarly non-existent.These effects may return later as very rare and powerful bonuses on equally rare and powerful ingredients and enchantments that cannot be disenchanted.
-The crafting of dwarven, elven, glass, and orcish armor and weapons have now been renamed to dwemer-metal, moonstone, malachite, and orichalcum, in the smithing menu in order to more logically represent the materials being used, rather than the design type of the items being crafted.
-Feather step enchantments on boots allow you to ignore damage from long falls.
-It is now possible to pickpocket with a 99% change of success instead of 95%, if your skills and other effects are powerful enough.
-The sneak attack damage multipliers have been reworked. All weapons but daggers and bows now receive sneak attack damage penalties based on weight: the heavier a weapon is, the smaller its base sneak attack multiplier. Bows are now slightly better at sneak attack damage.
-Reworked sneak attack perks and new sneak attack perks will increase the damage for weapons’ sneak attacks based on your controlling attribute for the weapon in question and your sneak focus level. Melee weapons do more sneak attack damage based on strength, bows and crossbows receive more sneak attack damage based on agility, and daggers receive both sets of bonuses. Spells receive a bonus to sneak attack damage based on agility. All of the aforementioned bonuses now come from perks in the sneak skill perk tree.
-Several powers granted by certain race choices or transformations will effectively no longer expire, and can be toggled on or off at will.
-And Much, Much more...
If you want a full list of changes, check the readme.
Required
A willingness to play Skyrim with a little more RPG in the Action-RPG, like The Elder Scrolls was originally intended to be.
Compatibility
This mod is an overhaul, and therefore it will change many vanilla records in Skyrim SE. That means it most certainly will not be entirely compatible with many other mods. Compatibility patch suggestions are welcome, and I am making compatibility patches for mods I deem to be important as quickly as possible, but be aware that I am not in any way responsible to anyone for getting them made by any kind of deadline. I have a vision of the Skyrim experience I want to create, and if another mod doesn't help me create it, I'm not going to add support for it. On the other hand, I fully support and endorse any one willing to make compatibility patches for ANY mods that may need them in order to be used with Skyrim Unlimited, and I will be happy to post them in the downloads section and even possibly keep them up to date if some one is willing to put the work into making them in the first place. There are just too many mods out there that would need compatibility patches for this mod for me to accomodate all of them, and I would never actually get around to making improvements to my mod if I tried to do that. So, I humbly ask any one to whom a compatibility patch is important, to pitch in and help.
Any other mod that uses the following actor values will conflict with this mod:
These are used by the Player and NPCs:
FavorActive-> Strength
FavorsPerDay -> Endurance
FavorsPerDayTimer -> Intelligence
FavorPointsBonus -> Willpower
LastBribedIntimidated -> Agility
LastFlattered -> Speed
Fame -> Personality
Infamy -> Luck
PickPocketSkillAdvance -> Armor Points
EnchantingSkillAdvance -> Resist magic Points
AlchemySkillAdvance -> Resist Poison Points
SmithingSkillAdvance -> Resist Disease Points
BlockSkillAdvance -> Resist Fire Points
HeavyArmorSkillAdvance -> Resist Frost Points
LightArmorSkillAdvance -> Resist Shock Points
OneHandedSkillAdvance -> Elemental Magnification Enchants
TwoHandedSkillAdvance -> Amplification Enchants
MarksmanSkillAdvance -> Cloak Damage and Resist Points
SneakSkillAdvance -> Chameleon Points
AlterationSkillAdvance -> Alteration Spell Cost Reduction Points
ConjurationSkillAdvance -> Conjuration Spell Cost Reduction Points
DestructionSkillAdvance -> Destruction Spell Cost Reduction Points
IllusionSkillAdvance -> Illusion Spell Cost Reduction Points
RestorationSkillAdvance -> Restoration Spell Cost Reduction Points
LockpickingSkillAdvance -> Shielding Points
SpeechcraftSkillAdvance -> Magic Focus Level
VoicePoints -> Sneak Focus Level
VoiceRate -> Combat Focus Level
WardDeflection -> Weakness Points
Mood -> Absorbance Points
ShieldPerks -> Shielding Level
Blindness -> Spell Absorption Points
(this does not affect the ability of NPCs to actually see, due to the magic of my scripts)
Player Uses of:
JumpingBonus -> Base Intelligence
NightEye -> Base Endurance
Aggression -> Weakness Level
WaitingForPlayer -> Chameleon Level
DetectLifeRange -> Active Spell Willpower Drain
Grabbed -> Augment Enchantments
NPC Uses of:
JumpingBonus -> Level Index and Death State Record
NightEye -> Absorbance Level
SpeechcraftMod -> Weakness Level
BypassVendorStolenCheck -> Chameleon Level
BypassVendorKeywordCheck -> Current Life Record
SmithingMod -> Force Projection Def. Index
AlchemyPowerMod -> NPC Attribute Memory 1
LockpickingMod -> NPC Attribute Memory 2
EnchantingMod -> NPC Attribute Memory 3
AlchemyMod -> NPC Attribute Memory 4
Telekinesis -> NPC Attribute Memory 5
My advice before installing: As with all mods, if you're going to install this with a current game save, do not delete that save. Just in case you don't like the mod, you can go back to the unaltered save. When installing an update, always go to an empty cell before loading the new version, and then wait or sleep for three days after installing it.
Things on the Horizon and a few notes to those who follow this mod and appreciate it
I love you guys. If you play this mod, you want more out of your Skyrim play through. You like an elder scrolls experience that wants to tell you a great story with memorable characters that are all well-written and believable. You respect the times and the ways the Elder Scrolls were absolutely outstanding games, and you think Skyrim, while amazing in its own right, could benefit from some of the old Elder Scrolls magic back from Morrowind and Oblivion. To all of you whom that last paragraph applies to, my message to you is this: I aim to deliver all of that back to you and then some.
Right now my main concern with this overhaul mod is putting all of the fun and interesting gameplay mechanics I think the game needed in its vanilla play through experience into the game. In addition to many new and original mechanics never seen in an Elder Scrolls game, those also include just about all mechanics that were taken out of the elder scrolls in the transition from TES4 to TES5, and many of the mechanics that were lost from TES3 to TES4, as well. Of equal concern to me is the effort of making sure those mechanics are interesting, don't break or invalidate any current gameplay styles in the game, and extend the replayability of the game. I tenderly refer to this stage of my modding experience with Skyrim as the corrective and enhancement stage.
The next stage will begin my real work, and will involve adding brand new quest lines into the main quest and most guild quests, with new and interesting voice-acted characters for all of them. In particular, I plan to make quests that provide new challenges to players who have already completed guild questlines. Its too soon to give away all of my plans, but suffice it to say, maybe the 'end times' aren't culminated in the battle with Alduin. That could be just the beginning... a herald of even darker things to come. I think I speak to a lot of other players when I say the final battle of the main quest in vanilla Skyrim was less than spectacular. It need not be then end of the story, however.
Lastly, Skyrim Unlimited is relatively balanced, but the pursuit of balance is a never ending one. If you see something that looks broken or OP, tell me. I am also working furiously on updates and compatibility patches on a regular basis. Stay tuned for more.
Installation
(assuming you aren't using a mod manager)
1. This mod comes in a standard 7z file that will require a utility like peazip to open.
2. Once unzipped, drop the BSA, BSL and ESP files into your /data folder of the Skyrim directory.
3. Enable the esp and any applicable compatibility esp files through the game launch menu or in a utility like wrye bash.
4. Enjoy!
Installation
(assuming you ARE using a mod manager)
Follow the directions of your mod manager, which may or may not be easier than simply copying and pasting from one folder to another. This mod is so easy to install that even a mod manager shouldn't be able to screw that up.
Uninstallation
(assuming you ARE using a mod manager)
Follow the directions of your mod manager, which may or may not be easier than simply copying and pasting from one folder to another. This mod is so easy to install that even a mod manager shouldn't be able to screw that up.
Uninstallation
The safe method: If you have played any game save with SU active in your load order, you will need to stop the SU scripts which constantly run during the game. You must first read the book titled "Uninstall Skyrim Unlimited" on Farengar's desk in Dragonsreach and select the option to stop SU scripts when prompted. Wait 8 seconds, and save your game. Then, disable or delete the files you moved into your /data folder during installation and you may now resume your game from that game save.
The not safe method: Disable or delete files from SU without first deactivating scripts on any game saves you created while SU was installed, if you intend to continue with any of those game saves. I will not provide support if you cannot follow the directions in the 'safe' method of uninstallation.
If you enjoy the mod, please endorse! If you find bugs, please tell me!
Latest Changelog Updates
1.23 "The Spell Burst Update"Latest Changelog Updates
-The Spell Burst is, in my opinion, by far the most interesting new mechanic in this update. It allows you to supercharge most fire and forget spells into more powerful versions, which I call 'spell bursts'. Important exceptions include any effect that is concentrated firing mode or cast from a staff. Viable spells can include anything from fire bolt to arcane singularity, or fortify agility or feather spells for example, but not flames or shock beam, for examples. You can charge spells simply by holding a charged spell in either or both hands. After about two seconds, you will notice some new FX effects around your character, which indicates a buildup of energy. Your magicka level must remain constant during charging, or charging will not happen: this means you cannot cast a concentration spell or use magicka potions during charging, for example. Your intelligence directly determines the maximum charge level, and your willpower directly influences how quickly you will charge spell bursts. The color pallette of the FX effects will gradually change to indicate the charge level and will progress from red, which indicates a charge level between 0 and 25% greater magnitude, to green, then various shades of blue and then purple, and finally, white, once you exceed 200% burst charge. A fresh character with a willpower and intelligence of 20 will likely be able to reach 20% charge in about 20 seconds of charging, which means that when he or she releases a fully charged firebolt for example, that firebolt will do 20% more damage than normal and its lingering effects will last 20% longer. For comparison, a 10 second charged spell burst at 200 willpower and intelligence will likely become more than 100% more powerful! The maximum burst charge depends only on your intelligence attribute, and thus it has no hard limit. When a spell burst hits a target, you will receive a notification message similar to the sneak attack damage multiplier notification, which will tell you how much extra magnitude it had. Better yet, the damage bonuses from spell sneak attacks and spell bursts are multiplicative, offering the potential to deal massive damage in a very fulfilling way before your enemies even see you. You can even 'hold' a spell burst charge for a few seconds after charging and change to a different fire and forget spell to use the charge with. The time you can hold it before dissipation is equal to 1 + your magic focus level. You can even charge up a spell burst in one hand and use a spell in the other hand to apply it.
-Several new 'Augment' enchantments have been added, and offer some very interesting alternatives to spell charging for several different playstyles. Each augment is only placeable on an armor or clothing item that fits the chest (cuirasses and shirts). Each augment is also mutually exclusive: if you try to put multiple augments on the same item, none of them will work. You will get the same FX effects as spell charging on your character to indicate your charge level, for augments that use a charge level. I will go through an overview of each augment.
-The Concentration Augment Enchantment trades the ability to do spell bursts with fire and forget spells, with the ability to build up damage every second on concentration spells, as long as you successfully hit a target every second. Applicable spells include flames and lightning storm, to name just a few examples among many. This is great for the playstyles that prefer beams and waves rather than bolts and explosions. It gives spammy weak spell magic users a reason to actually hold down the mouse button and perma-fire the spell instead of doing that somewhat awkward sporadic firing mode. For example, any veteran SU player and magic user knows that weak concentration spells work very efficiently in sporadic firing patterns instead of constant focus fire in vanilla skyrim: it saves magicka, and the enemy cooks, chills or electrocutes from lingering damage even while you save your magicka for the next attack. That play style is all well and good, but frankly, I often find myself just wanting to really lay on the hurt with a constant and ever growing stream of damage, rather than dancing around the target and tactically saving my magicka. The concentration augment enchantment therefore specifically makes it more efficient to focus your wave and beam spells and never let up.
-For those that prefer staffs over hand-casted magic, the Staff Augment Enchantment trades the ability to do spell bursts with fire and forget spells, with a boost to all staff magic effects when it is the only equipped augment enchant.
-Fear not, there are Augment enchants to satisfy even the sneaks and barbarians among you. The Death Frenzy Augment Enchantment trades the ability to do spell bursts with fire and forget spells, with the ability to build up frenzy charges every time an NPC dies within your field of vision and as long as you have a bow or crossbow equipped. The frenzy charge level increases your damage with bows and crossbows by 5% and increases your speed attribute by 5 for every charge. Without sneak focus points, the charge can be maintained for up to 10 seconds before it dissipates. In other words you have 10 seconds to witness another death, regardless of whether you caused it or not, within your field of vision in order to maintain the frenzy charge. The time limit to charge dissipation can be extended by a value equal to your sneak focus level. For example with a sneak focus level of 10, the time limit is extended to 20 seconds. This gives anyone that likes to dish out their death-dealing at long range an exciting new option when it is the only equipped augment enchant. You will receive special notifications when you reach high numbers of slain enemies for the charge duration.
-The Death Fury Augment Enchantment is very similar to the Death Frenzy enchantment, but is designed for melee carnage instead. It trades the ability to do spell bursts with fire and forget spells, with the ability to build up fury charges every time an NPC dies within your field of vision and as long as you have only melee weapons equipped or are bare-handed. The fury charge level increases your damage with those attack types by 5% and increases your endurance attribute by 5 for every charge. Without warrior focus points, the charge can be maintained for up to 10 seconds before it dissipates. In other words you have 10 seconds to witness another death, regardless of whether you caused it or not, within your field of vision in order to maintain the fury charge. The time limit to charge dissipation can be extended by a value equal to your warrior focus level. For example with a warrior focus level of 10, the time limit is extended to 20 seconds. This gives anyone that likes to get up close and personal with their death-dealing an exciting new option when it is the only equipped augment enchant. You will receive special notifications when you reach high numbers of slain enemies for the charge duration.
-Thorns is a new enchantment only for the torso (cuirasses and shirts) which inflicts a percentage of melee damage back at aggressors, although the user still takes full damage.
-Charging is a new enchantment type for guantlets/arm coverings that buffs the maximum charge of enchanted weapons and staffs, allowing you to use them for longer without recharging them.
-Silent Casting is pretty self-explanatory from its name: all spells you cast while wearing guantlets/arm coverings with this enchantment are silent to others.
-Silence is a very helpful new enchantment for sneak characters which will reduce the noise you make when you move, since muffled movement will no longer completely remove the sound of your movement.
-Night vision has been added to helmets/head coverings and is very standard for elder scrolls games at this point. It functions the same as the vanilla night vision effects in the game.
-Force projection from spells has been overhauled again for much better balance, more satisfaction, and better responsiveness. All offensive spells can now project force on impact with a target character without any prerequisite perks and will do so with almost no noticeable delay after impact, assuming your force projection score is greater than the enemy's defensive score. Force projection scales with the willpower attribute and the damage output of the spell being used, and NPCs now have more reasonable resistance to force projection based on their current life. Spell force projection becomes possible for most spells once your willpower reaches 40 and your spells are capable of dealing atleast 70% of the enemy's total health. Force spells from the Alteration school of magic are the exception here: they can project force regardless of your willpower attribute value and only require a damage versus target life percent of 60%. Force projection now accurately takes into account enemy resistances of all kinds, so you will have a harder time pushing high level enemies and high-resistance enemies around with your spells.
-The mechanics surrounding attribute choices with the 'choose attributes' power after the level up event have changed to allow for more freedom, precision, and ease of use when it comes to attribute allocation. Instead of choosing three attributes to increase by 3 points each, you will now receive 10 attribute points after each level up that will allow you to increase any attribute you choose by 1 point each. You can also now spend a maximum of 5 points on a single attribute per level gained. I think everyone will enjoy the increased range of freedom this will grant to players. Lastly, you no longer need to recast the 'choose attributes' power in order to select the next attribute point: the menu will stay open until all points have been assigned or until you select 'cancel', and it will inform you of how many points you have remaining for assignment.
-The choose attributes power has also had a huge new update in the form of an options menu that allows one to, among other things, edit all of the vital statistics of NPCs! This is for the players that have been complaining about NPC abilities being to overpowered in SU, but that also want to keep all of the cool stuff in SU without removing the mod: you can simply change them to have vanilla life, resistances, and speed if you want. Simply use the 'choose attributes' power (given to you when starting a new game), select 'options', and then 'NPC Globals'. From there, you can change the percentages of life, magicka, stamina, movement/weapon speed, intrinsic attributes, or physical/magical/poison resistance values which SU grants. By default, all values start at 100 percent, which represents the SU default values that many of you have been enjoying. If you would rather take away those bonuses and play a more vanilla NPC experience, simply change the ones you don't like to '0'. If you want an even easier time, you can reduce life, magicka and stamina to negative values, all the way to -90 percent if that's how you want to roll. There is no upper limit on attribute percentages, but I do not recommend increasing any of them beyond 200% unless you want some funny bugs all the way up to possibly game-breaking crashes.
-I'm excited to announce a new auto-attribute system has been introduced which gives the player the option of never having to use the choose attribute power at all, once they make their preferred selections. This is done by setting a certain percentage of new attribute points which will be automatically allocated to whichever attributes are chosen every time the player character gains a level. This can be enabled or disabled in the new 'options' menu when one uses the 'choose attributes' power. It is designed for players who think it breaks immersion when they need to use a lesser power and navigate through some menus to use their leveling rewards every time they gain a level. On the other hand, I know some people also really enjoy the selection process, so if you happen to be one of those players, you can leave these options off and make your selections manually. By default, the auto attributes and auto focus points are both turned off.
-Menus which appear after using the 'choose attributes' power are now easier to navigate forwards and backwards, rather than forcing you to recast the power in order to make additional changes.
-Focus Points are now accumulated in three entirely different ways from increasing willpower, which is no longer used at all to achieve focus points. Instead, players permanently attain a new intrinsic focus point in the specializations of warrior, sneak, or magic by either gaining ten skill level increases for pertinent skill types, completing any of the main quests (read: anything having to do with eventually challenging Alduin, Harkon, or Miraak) or converting dragon souls with the dragon soul conversion power. Thirty points for each of the specialties can be gained from skill increases, for a total of 90, but these will only be granted after achieving the next level. Be advised that the crafting skills of smithing, alchemy and enchanting do not count towards your pertinent skill increases for the purpose of focus point gain. Thirty-two gainable focus points are possible from the main quests, and you can use the choose attributes power to assign those. Finally, another sixty are possible from converting dragon souls, or twenty per specialty, and those are assignable via the dragon soul conversion power. The maximum limit of intrinsic focus points per specialty is now 50, for a total of 150, but you can always increase your focus points through enchantments, too.
-After heavy consideration, I decided to remove the ability to reassign focus points at will. This was largely due to the fact there is a great temptation to simply reassign all focus points to the task at hand, whether its sneaking or casting spells or whatever, which results in overpowered use of focus points in general and grindy gameplay of the not-fun variety.
-NPC attributes will now update naturally in real-time every time you gain a level and just from looking at the NPC you want to update for a few seconds. This also fixes a bug that causes NPC derived attributes to reset to their vanilla values after you gain a level. Initiating an NPC update is as easy as looking in the general direction of the NPC. After your level increases and you leave the perk menu after selecting health, magicka or stamina at the level up event, look directly at whichever NPC you want to update for about 2 seconds, and its attributes will be recalculated in about 2 seconds after that. Simple, huh?
-Another pass was made on improving NPC attributes, and this time with an eye toward adding perks to NPCs for realism and uniqueness for each character with respect to an NPC's job and race. Many NPCs that should be sporting more advanced capabilities due to their job, outfitting, and vanilla levels have been updated to be more capable. A great example would be many of the main and guild quest characters having substantially improved abilities, with characters like Ulfric, Tullius, Baalgruf and Irileth having substantially improved attributes and perks. The mages of winterhold, warriors of the companions, thieves of the thieves guild and assassins of the Dark Brotherhood are not exactly pushovers any more, either. The creatures of Tamriel also have more nuanced attributes now. There will be quite a few suprises, and most of them pleasant and interesting. Barbas, the daedra in the form of a dog, is going to be more fun to work with for example. Try using the dragon sense power on the few daedric lords you may encounter in the usual quests, like Sanguine or Sheogorath... for some pain, attack them randomly and without backup. The rest I will leave to you to discover.
-Shielding effects have been added into Tamriel. Shielding is a modified version of the shield enchantment from previous Elder Scrolls games. This is a rather complex mechanic to explain, even though it is very simple once you understand the basic idea: shielding causes a variable percent of most damage to deplete your magicka and then your stamina, once magicka is depleted, instead of your health. It replaces some effects from spells and perks that previously provided a flat physical damage reduction modifier, like the Warrior Stance shield perk. Shielding definitely provides an interesting new dynamic for all character types: it provides unmitigated damage reduction from melee physical attacks, including their stagger effects, and most common magical attacks at the same time. However, this powerful defensive bonus also comes with some additional important caviats and tradeoffs. First, shielding will NOT provide additional protection against damage from arrows or crossbow bolts; small projectiles pierce the magical barrier of shielding easily. Second, if your magicka is depleted, the remaining damage will drain your stamina at double intensity and finally, if both your magicka and stamina are depleted your shielding will be greatly diminished and you will take about 75 - 80% damage you would take without the shielding. Third, Shielding also reduces magic regeneration by the same percentage with which it reduces incoming damage and hostile spell magnitude. Finally, shielding has no effect on poisons or attacks based on poison. For example, shielding will give you very little protection against chauruses, frostbite spiders, spriggans, and perhaps least of all, vampires and their lordly leaders. These consequences serve multiple purposes of giving a new defensive option to all characters, particularly melee and sneak characters, as well as effectively increasing the viability of bowman and poison attacks in the late game meta and ensuring shielding is not overpowered, in general. One more minor point: shielding only protects against magic that belongs to one of the five recognized schools of magic, such as Destruction and Alteration for example. There are many characters in the game which use magic attacks that technically aren't counted as one of those types of magic. Your shielding level depends on the number of your shielding points. Currently, shielding points can be granted by blocking (with revised perk bonuses from Warrior Stance), revised armor spells like oak hide after you get some alteration perks, a new type of high level enchantment, and a few surprise items you will have to discover for yourself. Many characters (particularly mages) will likely find magic resistance effects to be more favorable, depending on the situation, but there will always be situations where you can expect to take large amounts of melee or mainstream magic damage and Shielding may be useful as a result. Lastly and as far as the math is concerned, it will take many more shielding points to increase your shielding percentage than magic resistance points would increase your magic resistance percent. Like most other resistance calculations in Skyrim Unlimited, the relationship between shielding points and shielding percentage is exponential and more points will be required for each additional shielding percent. Also like other resistance calculations, it is not possible to reach 100% shielding, but you can keep getting closer and every additional percent helps. Constructive feedback on this new mechanic is welcome.
-Armor spells no longer provide a flat bonus to all physical damage reduction without any perks, but rather they gain shielding point bonuses equal to a percentage of their base armor bonus magnitude after you invest perks in the 'mage armor' series of perks. This means that armor spells are slightly weaker in the beginning of the game, but can become stronger than before as you develop your alteration abilities. Their armor bonuses remain unchanged.
-Several new changes have been made to hand to hand combat in the ongoing quest to make that combat style a viable and rewarding playstyle. First of all, all hand to hand attacks for every playable race, either beast form or not, will now grant experience for your one handed skill. Second, hand to hand perks were modified in a big way. The basic hand to hand perk now allows all bare-handed attacks to also damage stamina, which is a capability vanilla Skyrim lacks for the most part, with the notable exception of frost spells. Opponents with low stamina are deterred from doing power attacks. A new perk has been added, called 'martial stagger', which gives your one handed power attacks an additional stagger chance dependent on your strength and it has a level requirement of 60. The master pugilist perk now gives your hand to hand attacks force projection capabilities, also dependent on your strength, and it has been given an appropriate level requirement of 100 to represent true mastery of hand to hand skills. Next, all enchantments, spells and alchemy effects that boost your damage with one handed weapons now also boost your hand to hand damage. Because hand to hand damage can become much greater now, I had to consider balance toward one handed weapons at the start of the game too, and so the starting unarmed damage for playable races (not including werewolves and vampire lords) was changed from 10 to 8. That value is before strength and one handed skill bonuses, mind you.
-Argonians now receive a hand-to-hand damage bonus of 20%, similar to the 30% bonus for Khajiits, on account of their claws.
-Your current focus points and unarmed (bare-handed) damage values will now be displayed in the active magic effects menu along with your other attributes' current values.
-Attribute changes from all magic effects are now instantaneous after the effects become active.
-The math behind maximum life, magicka, stamina and carry weight contributions from primary attributes for your character and NPCs have been modified in several ways. This new change is complex and has many consequences, but the idea behind it is simple: when a controlling attribute for health, magicka or stamina is reduced by a certain percentage, the attribute it affects will now be reduced by the same percent. This gives the choices you make about increasing derived attributes like life and magicka at the level up event, and the choices you make about increasing primary attributes like endurance and intelligence, several more synergistic benefits and consequences. Your intrinsic controlling attributes and base derived attributes of life, magicka, etc are now linked together in a way that makes more sense logically. I will use Endurance as an example. Raising your intrinsic Endurance with the choose attributes power or increasing your life at the level up event increase the 'baseline' value of your life. This is not new. However, when a magic effect is in play on any character that increases or decreases their endurance, the percent change of maximum life for that character exactly matches the percent change in maximum endurance in most situations. If that character's endurance is damaged somehow below their intrinsic value, their maximum life will also be reduced by the same percent. Likewise, if their endurance is modded by an enchantment or beneficial spell, their maximum life will be boosted by the same percent as the percent to which their endurance is boosted beyond its intrinsic value. It is important to note however that in the case where attributes are boosted beyond their intrinsic value, the bonus tapers off per point of life increase, down to the baseline of 5 additional life per point of additional endurance. This occurs around 100 additional endurance. This same mechanic applies to the bonuses to maximum magicka, maximum stamina, and maximum carryweight from intelligence, agility, and strength, respectively.
"So I just read all of that and I have no idea what you just said. Break it down, please." If that is you, keep reading.
1. Increasing your life, magicka, or stamina during the level up event has a much bigger potential impact on how high those attributes can get when you use fortify endurance, intelligence, agility, or strength effects, respectively. For example if you've been increasing your life at every level up for the last ten levels, a fortify endurance effect will increase your maximum life much more than it would have if you had chosen to increase magicka instead. This bonus tapers down to 5 life per point of endurance once you exceed 100 additional points of endurance.
2. The reverse is also true, however. Whereas in previous versions, you could have your Endurance damaged all the way to 0 and still have a lot of life if you had been increasing your life at every level up event, now if your endurance is damaged to 0 your maximum life will literally be reduced to 1. This is much more logical. The same goes for the relationships between magicka and intelligence, stamina and agility, and carry weight and strength.
3. Increasing your intrinsic values of Endurance, Intelligence, Agility, or Strength beyond 100 will give you a 0.5% increase to maximum life, magicka, stamina or carry weight per point that exceeds 100. For example, increasing your intrinsic strength to 150 will give you a 25% greater carry weight than it would in previous versions. This bonus is global, meaning it is multiplicative with the bonus to increasing carry weight from level up events and the base strength bonus of 5 per point. It is actually possible to achieve a maximum life of 5000 at level 100 if you have been investing attribute points into endurance and increasing maximum life at every level up event.
4. NPC life, magicka, et al. are now treated exactly the same way as the players' with respect to their controlling Attributes, with two exceptions. First, NPCs with a hardcoded derived attribute greater than that which SU calculations yield will instead use the higher version. Second, NPCs between the levels of 1 and 15 which normally would have a lower value of life, magicka, et al than in SU, will have a tiered nerf to maximum values in the opposite direction. A great example here would be tier 1 and tier 2 bandits. In that case and at those low levels, their life slowly progresses from completely vanilla calculations at level 1 to completely SU by level 15. In previous versions of SU, they were receiving a somewhat out of place buff to life, magicka, et al that gave them higher attributes than made sense in many cases, but now the math behind their attributes is approximately the same as the math behind the player's attributes beyond level 15.
-Any and all Heavy armor now realistically reduces movement speed by 20% for all characters unless the conditioning perk has been attained.
-Stagger effects from spells were rebalanced and added back into the game in a more interesting form. All bolt type destruction spells can now stagger enemies when you get the impact perk, just like before, but only if your willpower attribute is greater than the strength attribute of the target. Furthermore, stagger from spell hits is heavily affected by armor, magic resistance, and shielding. Force spells can stagger enemies without dual casting and do not require any special perk to do so, but they have the same willpower and strength requirement.
-Several new spells have been added into Tamriel that are basically aimed projectile versions of several current beneficial spells and are designed to give you tactical support options for friendly NPCs. These include attribute fortification spells, resistance fortification spells and armor spells. These new spells were named similarly with their self-applied counterparts, but with the added suffix of "endowment" in their names to indicate they are casted upon others instead. Spell costs are the same for the new endowment spells when compared to the non-endowment versions, and they are also affected by all of the same perks. These spells are ideal for buffing your followers in preparation for a tough fight, for example.
-Attribute bonuses from quests now also boost your soft cap for the attributes in question by the same amount they increase the attributes. For example, doing many quests for the companions before this update would often increase your endurance and strength attributes before, but now, your maximum soft cap for both attributes are increased by the same amount. This effectively means it is possible to increase your intrinsic attributes beyond 200 (or 100 in the case of luck) even without the attribute perks. Maximum bonuses from quests vary from attribute to attribute, but generally stay around 50 for all attributes except luck, which can be increased by up to 30.
-Several perks were modified and added in each magic skill perk tree to provide new bonuses to spell magnitude and duration from magic focus points. Basically, the perks in each tree that boosted the durations of spells based on willpower were all renamed to "improved (insert magic skill name here)" and they each received a second tier. For each magic focus point you have, the second tier perk boosts the magnitude of spells by 5%, the duration by 4%, and the casting cost by 2%. In essence, this means that as you gain more magic focus points and use your time investing perks and skill development in a particular school of magic, you will be able to channel more of your magicka into boosting the power of spells from that school of magic.
-Two new perks have been added to the Heavy and Light Armor perk trees. These perks do the same thing, but only for their respective armor types: they provide a new type of physical damage mitigation called 'Aegis'. Aegis protection is a separate physical damage reduction that is applied after your armor, and like shielding, it cannot be reduced by enemy abilities or attributes, such as an enemy's agility allowing a percentage of physical damage to ignore your armor. The new perks are naturally quite powerful, and therefore have been given high skill requirements of 70 in either perk tree. They are called 'Collosus' and 'Blur'. The new damage reduction acts almost identically to your armor's damage reduction in terms of the math, in that it basically gives you a separate armor type that is a certain percentage of your normal armor. I will go into some detail about the math behind this new mechanic. Selecting either perk allows the player to essentially get a new damage reduction modifier for all physical damage, at the equivalent percent of 10% of what your currently worn armor would provide, as long as you are only wearing the appropriate armor type. For example the collosus perk bonus, which is the heavy armor version, will disappear if you equip any light armor. But wait, there is more to this than just more damage mitigation. Once you select either perk in either perk tree, you will be able to use the choose attributes lesser power to increase the percentage of aegis protection you get from your worn armor, but at a price: every percentage point above 10% aegis will also reduce your movement speed and stamina regeneration by the same percent. This provides a great new mechanic for speedy and/or high stamina characters that would rather trade away some of their speed and stamina regen for higher physical defense in combat. The notification messages that inform you about changes in your physical damage reduction will now notify you of Aegis damage reduction changes as well. Your armor rating displayed in your inventory will not change to reflect Aegis updates, since that number is purely a measure of your normal armor protection.
-Four new master level Destruction spells have been created and are available exclusively from the Arcane Manipulator in the late game meta. They are Inferno, Glacial Surge, Lightning Blast, and Arcane Annihilation. These spells are designed to offer heavy hitting power that did not previously exist in each of the repertoires of the Fire, Frost, Shock and Arcane mage, respectively. Inferno is similar to the fire breath shout, but it also spawns fire hazards that effectively double the damage of the attack against enemies on the ground. Glacial Surge offers unprecedented frost damage projection across the battlefield, and is best compared to Ice Storm, but if the spell were firing multiple super-charged shots per second as a concentration spell, and the projectiles cause frost explosions when they hit enemies. Lightning Blast is a very powerful ranged attack that is best described as a love child between Arcane Singlularity (the grand master version) and Thunderbolt, and it will cause an impressive shockwave at very impressive range. Finally, Arcane Annihilation is like arcane spike, but it fires several shots per second as a concentration spell. Imagine a magical arcane machine gun and you are close to picturing Arcane Annihilation. Each spell is obtainable at the Arcane Manipulator once you have the master destruction perk, you have completed the master destruction spell ritual quest, and you have learned the novice, apprentice, adept, and expert spells in the element of your choosing. There will be more spells like these coming later.
-Several changes were made to resistances against various magical effects. Fire, Frost, Shock, Magic and Poison resistances now also reduce the durations of appropriate effects as well as their magnitudes. I have been hearing a few justified complaints regarding the fact there are no additional ways to resist non-elemental magic like arcane, weakness, force, or absorption effects besides magic resistance, and that has been fixed. First of all, magic resistance now effectively counts twice in the case of Arcane magic effects, only. In other words, if you have 50% magic resist, hostile arcane effects will be reduced in magnitude AND duration to 25% effectiveness. Next, the willpower attribute also grants all characters, including the player, resistance to force, weakness and absorption effects equal to 1% for every 10 points of your willpower attribute. Astute players may have noted these changes will have the interesting side effects of making non-destruction effects less effective against mages, who typically have high willpower attributes.
-The snakeblood perk and the final tier of the magic resistance perks were both augmented to give additional potential bonuses to poison and magic resistances, respectively. Snakeblood now grants poison resistance points equal to 30% resistance, but it has also gained a new bonus that potentially surpasses the 50% bonus it used to have. Snakeblood and Magic Resistance also now grant an additional poison or magic resistance modifier equal to 1% for every 10 Agility or Willpower you have, respectively. These bonuses also apply to the durations of incoming magic or poison effects, respectively.
-Most melee attacks with either weapons or bare hands will now drain your stamina slightly when you hit a target. This is an important first step in making stamina a more useful and realistically used resource. The new stamina drain mechanic is balanced well with the stamina usage mechanic already in place for power attacks in vanilla skyrim: bare handed attacks drain a constant 6 stamina per blow, whereas attacks with one handed weapons will drain 12 and attacks with two handed weapons will drain 18. I know this is likely to feel like a new damper on the fun aspects of melee combat to some, but this move is necessary in order to make Stamina actually matter as much as it should. Additional interesting stamina mechanics are incoming, and they will feel less like rain on your parade and more like cake on your birthday.
-The Werewolf transformation is now not only much more viable in the late game, but worth sticking with even after vampire lord form is an option if that isn't your preferred style of play. It grants the greater of either a fixed boost, or a percentage boost to endurance, strength, and speed. Previously the boost was always fixed at about 30 strength, 30 endurance and 20 speed.
-The vampire's sight power effectively no longer expires, and can be toggled on or off at will.
-Physical damage resistance and other resistances can now reach a maximum value of 99.99 percent. All notifications about damage reduction and resistance changes will now display your new resistance values to the second decimal.
-Blessings from Altars of various Aedra and Daedra have been modified so that there are now bonuses to each of the 8 primary attributes in Skyrim Unlimited among them, instead of, or in some rare cases in addition to, their previous bonuses. The bonuses are percentage boosts of your intrinsic attributes, which means the shrine bonuses will remain useful throughout the entire game instead of primarily in the beginning, only.
-Five new diseases have been added to five different NPC races, and all diseases now inflict a percentage based penalty to appropriate intrinsic attributes rather than fixed amounts of derived attributes. Bone Break Fever, for example, now reduces Endurance by 25% instead of Health by a fixed amount. This means even at level 100 and with nearly 5000 life, getting infected by that disease will be something you will want to fix as soon as possible, rather than simply ignoring it until it is convenient to visit a shrine or get a potion for it. By extension, this also makes disease resistance and races with built-in disease resistance more helpful. This feature is not yet compatible with survival mode, so you will want to load SU after that add-on if you want this feature to work.
-It has come to my attention that maybe I made lockpicking a bit too hardcore in previous versions. For that reason, lockpicking for Master, Expert, Adept and Apprentice locks was modified very slightly to be more forgiving. Master locks got the biggest change, as it is now approximately twice as easy to unlock those now, but for new players, you should be aware that picking those locks is still very difficult, and should be difficult. In addition, several perks in the lockpicking perk tree have had their level requirements reduced somewhat to make them more attractive. If you still have a personal issues with lockpicking expert and master locks in SU after this update, remember that lockpicking potions and enchantments could be your new favorite tools until you get all of the perks in the lockpicking perk tree, which naturally will make the experience much, much easier. Also, be aware that there are other reasons for investing perks into lockpicking: the loot perks can make you very, very rich.
-Alchemy effects that fortify aspects of destruction, conjuration, illusion, alteration or restoration have all been buffed: they now not only boost magic spell magnitude or duration, they boost both. In the case of conjuration spells, duration is still increased and the damage dealt by your conjured weapons and the attributes of your conjured creatures are increased, as well. Each alchemy effect is now named with the same affix: potency.
-Many beneficial spells you can cast on yourself or others have been modified in two ways. First, many limitations on the number and types of beneficial spells you can have active at once have been lifted. For example, previously it was not possible to have multiple resistance or attribute fortification spells active, but now all resistance spells can be active at once and one of each attribute can be fortified by a single spell at one time. Second, spells that drain your magicka regeneration now do so through draining your willpower, rather than your magicka regeneration percentage actor value. This basically means your willpower is also now a measure of how many and how powerful your beneficial spell effects are that you can cast on yourself. If you reach 0 willpower you will no longer be able to cast spells that require atleast some willpower maintenance until one ore more of your current spells that are draining willpower, expires. If you don't like magicka drain mechanics, remember that staffs and scrolls in SU do not have magicka drains and can be more powerful, so you might consider switching up your routine. Bonuses from magic mastery perks toward reducing magicka drain have been rebalanced.
-There is a very minor bug that arises when you cast a spell which completely drains your willpower, which causes the willpower display in your active magic effects menu to show a crazy high number when its actually a negative number. It returns to normal when the spell expires, however. This bug will be fixed in a future update after a ton of work is done on the backend of the script system for willpower maintenance.
-Many more NPCs now carry gold, which makes the concept of pickpocketing much more rewarding and worthwhile. More affluent NPCs will naturally be carrying more gold than others, giving thieves some badly needed and appropriate better reasons to focus on the richest vistims they can find.
-Many spell tome recipes have been added to the arcane manipulator, particularly in the categories of conjuration, illusion and restoration. This brings its repertoire of spell tome recipes up to nearly every spell tome in vanilla skyrim, all official DLCs, and Skyrim Unlimited. Certain exceptions were made for many master spells and a few others that are acquired through special means.
-Summoned skeletons were rebalanced and a new skeleton is now available at the lowest tier, in the form of the generic naked skeleton. The four previous tiers were essentially bumped up one tier, so that now there is a skeleton for each of the five mastery levels of conjuration magic. The original basic skeleton is now called the 'skeleton legionary', in keeping with the fact it wears armor seemingly indicating its involvement with an ancient nordic military order. The skeleton warlord spell is now available exclusively from the arcane manipulator, and its spell tome recipe requires that you have learned all four of the other skeleton summoning spells in order to see it while having the expert conjuration perk.
-A new legendary draugr tier has been added to leveled character lists and will begin appearing at level 50, with spawn rates increasing as you gain more levels. Like all other legendary creatures, engaging them is an option that should be considered carefully.
-A water walking spell has been added into apprentice alteration spell tome leveled lists. There may not be many opportunities to use it in Skyrim, but it is such an easy and lore friendly option, I didn't want the game to go without it.
-Some mysterious characters and super bosses like Alduin are now immune to the Dragon Sense power. Instead of displaying attributes, you will see a message indicating the NPC's abilities are mysteriously hidden from you. You may not really know what you’re getting into until you engage them…
-Most leveled item death lists for all characters were overhauled to add new alchemy ingredients, more variety, and less nonsense. Most higher tier creatures now drop higher amounts of alchemy ingredients than their lesser kin. In the case of the nonsense, a great example would be the removal of random jewelry and gold from creatures that have no business carrying that stuff anyway, like Wolves.
-A light pass was made on rebalancing leveled character lists to avoid shockingly painful encounters at low player levels. As a general rule, the highest encounterable tier of most leveled characters will not be appearing until you reach atleast level 40, and some of the more powerful creatures, like vampires, have their highest tiers not appearing until level 70.
-Characters that have defensive magic spells such as armor spells or elemental cloak spells will now use them much more often.
-I addressed a somewhat superfluous mechanic with beneficial spells as well, in dual casting. All beneficial spells that drain magicka while active now are dual-casted with the ritual spell effect animation only as of this update. To be fair however, I was careful about making this change balanced. The magicka cost of the spells have not changed and the duration is nearly the same as it was before dual casting was factored in. In other words, you get the dual casting bonus without the increase in casting cost. There are two reasons why this was deemed necessary. Fortification spells shouldn't be something a mage would find easy to cast in the middle of a fight, but rather the mage would want to cast it before battle whenever possible. Think about this. A warrior is charging at a mage, and the mage just flicks one hand and boosts their magical armor to godlike levels before the warrior can get close, all the while blasting the warrior with an offensive spell in the other hand. This is slightly silly and overpowered when you think about it. The mage should atleast be immobilized and unable to do anything else while the spell is being cast. Second, dual casting these spells prior to this update was just a way to increase duration. This means that every atleast competent mage, everywhere should be dual casting beneficial spells instead of single-casting, right? It only makes sense. If you don't like the way this change sounds, I wouldn't take it too harshly: remember skilled alteration mages shouldn't need to be recasting armor spells very often if they have the enduring alteration perk, anyway. The impact on your play style should be minimal.
-All offensive spells are now back to using completely non-instantaneous damage modes, meaning that most spell effects that causes damage now do so over a base duration of atleast one second. There are two reasons for this. The main reason for this was to eliminate bugs with the force projection mechanics while they were attempting to run on actors that die too quickly for the effects to actually kick in. The second reason is to restore a badly needed boost to spell power in lieu of the fact the durations of many magic effects are now reduced dramatically against enemies with high resistances. For those that are not aware, this is a big boost to spell power because now all offensive magic effects can benefit from anything that increases spell duration.
-Due to balance issues and certain bugs that proved unsquashable for the time being, attribute absorbance has been removed from absorbance spells, including Siphon, Absorption and Osmosis. They are still very interesting spells, mind you, since they not only deal damage but you steal health equal to the damage you inflict with them. In addition, the absorbance enchantment has been replaced by a new enchanted poison damage enchantment. This last change is potentially a very important consequence for any character with high shielding, since poison ignores shielding. Absorbance will return when I find a way to make it less buggy.
-The perks which boost the durations of spells based on willpower have been nerfed to boost duration by 1% for every two points of your willpower attribute. This is in order to balance them with the new 'improved (insert magic school name here)' perks. The total effect on spell duration from all relevant perks is an increase in spell duration, so there shouldn't be a relevant complaint here.
-Added a menu option to the SU uninstall book in Dragonsreach in order to prevent players from accidentally uninstalling SU simply by reading it out of curiosity. It will now display a message asking if the player really wants to uninstall SU. For new players, if you should ever want to uninstall SU, the uninstall book on Farengar's desk in dragonsreach will allow you to safely shut down SU scripts before removing the mod.
-The calculation of movement speed and weapon usage speed via the speed attribute has been modified a bit so that changes are now slightly more gradual, and there will be far fewer NPCs zipping around at hardly believable speeds.
-Weakness points no longer affect movement speed or magicka regeneration, which leaves only their effects on physical attack damage and stamina regeneration. This was a balance issue fix due to synergy potential with burden effects from force spells, which when combined with weakness spells, could essentially almost stop enemies in their tracks.
-Grand Master variants of the vanilla master destruction spells were rebalanced to have the same magnitude and casting cost as their vanilla counterparts when dual cast, which means that casting them with a single hand is now reasonably less powerful than before.
-The atronach perk has been balanced/nerfed slightly from 30% magicka absorption to 20% magicka absorption, considering new alchemy ingredients will soon allow spell absorption to go higher.
-Fixed some bugs from vanilla skyrim and the DLC content where some leveled character lists were set up so that only one type of npc ever spawned. For example, only one type of hulking draugr was spawning in some instances in Dragonborn.
-Fixed a bug where dragons and werewolves were receiving insane bonuses to their melee attack damage.
-Fixed a bug where the bonus to armor from the fortitude and nimbleness perks were only applied when the attributes governing them changed. Now, the bonus is immediately applied if it was not already active.
-Draugr and skeletons now have a slightly increased death loot chance for bonemeal, including a small chance of two bonemeal.
-A legendary tier of dwarven ballistae was added. As usual, be careful when deciding whether to engage legendary creatures.
-The Alchemy skill now plays a much greater role in increasing your overall alchemy ability. At a skill level of 100 alchemy, your ability as an alchemist will be about 33% greater than it would have been at the same skill level before. Alchemy effectiveness at a skill level of 15 has been effectively reduced by 25%, however.
-Every magic scroll in the game that can cast a spell was overhauled for greater usability and less discrepancies from their spell counterparts. First, everything that can boost the magnitude, duration or some other property of a non-scroll magic effect will also boost the same properties on the scroll version of that effect when in play. For example, the summon wolf familiar scroll will summon potent or even ascendant wolf familiars when you have the appropriate perks. Like staffs, scrolls no longer have any magicka regen maintenance by comparison to the spells they are based on. This makes scrolls potentially more favorable than their spell counterparts that require a magicka regen maintenance, like in the cases of conjuring atronachs and familiars. Next, all spells cast from scrolls now have a casting time of 0.5 seconds. Finally, three new perks have been added into the enchanting perk tree that will potentially boost the magnitude of magic effects when cast from scrolls by 200%. This is a prelude to a much more substantial expansion and update to scrolls in a future update.
-Scroll crafting is now possible at the arcane manipulator. Currently all regular (meaning non quest or specialty scrolls) can be crafted. All scrolls require blank scrolls of the correct type, soul gems of varying sizes, and the scroll crafting perk from the enchanting perk tree. The new blank scroll items can be bought from court wizards or vendors in the college of winterhold. More powerful scrolls naturally require more powerful soul gems.
-Potions that buff attributes were given a boost to magnitude to make them more useful, and a fifth potion tier labeled with the affix 'supreme' has been introduced for each of the attributes.
-Spells no longer become cheaper to cast as their governing skills grow. This is largely because of the incredible potential for increasing magicka that SU offers with respect to the intelligence attribute and also because magic skills are already boosting the magnitudes or durations of many effects where appropriate.
-The worn armor penalties to spell power have been increased to a maximum of 20% reduction for heavy armor and 15% reduction for light armor.
-Elemental cloak spells were rebalanced a bit and their maximum range now increases with the usual character values, like destruction skill, magic focus points, etc.
-The agile strikes perk has been renamed to penetration and its bonus to armor ignorance was changed to depend on strength instead of agility. This was primarily due to logic: arrows or bolts with more inertia behind them (which translates to requiring more strength from the bowman) will go through armor more easily. Balance was also an issue: archers previously only had to focus on one all-empowering attribute.
-Sneak attacks with spells which can project force will project more force proportional to the sneak attack multiplier for the spells.
-The spell sneak attack multiplier bonus from the stealth mage perk was changed to depend on agility instead of intelligence. This was primarily due to the logic of a spell sneak attack in my mind and balance issues as a secondary priority.
-Sneaking has received a well deserved update in the form of two serious buffs to your visual and auditory evasion. Your sneak skill and other attributes, when you have the right perks, will now more directly reduce the light and sound coming from you. When you enter sneak mode now, you will get a message giving you an update on your visual and auditory detectabilty in percentages. In the case that you have no magic effects increasing your sneak abilities and you don't have a sneak skill higher than 15, you may see no message because there was no change. Finally, it is very important to note changes to evasion values from skills, focus points or other attributes only kick in while you are in sneak mode.
-Several perks in the sneak perk tree were overhauled to provided additional bonuses to your stealth capabilities as you gain relevant bonuses from attributes, alchemy effects or enchantments. The perks include stealth, muffled movement, swift stealth, lucky stealth, and silence.
-The muffled movement perk was changed to agile stealth, and now grants a new bonus while you are sneaking to not only your movement noise reduction, but your visibility reduction as well. The new bonus is based entirely on the agility attribute and becomes more pronounced as that attribute improves.
-The muffle enchantment now reduces all sound you make by 25% and the effect itself is now only available from enchantments, since the muffled movement perk was reworked. The silence perk adds an additional 25% reduction with or without a muffle effect active.
-A new enchantment has been added called silence, which adds silence points that do exactly what you might expect: they reduce the sound of your movements.
-Sneak attack bonuses were overhauled again and now sneak attack damage from spells or weapons are affected by more than just one or two attributes. Your sneak skill, sneak focus level and sneak potions can now also provide bonuses to sneak attack damage. The new bonuses are balanced in such a way that beginning values are almost the same, but if you focus on all of the relevant sneak attack variables, you can increase your sneak attack damage multipliers considerably higher than before.
-Three new alchemy perks and several new alchemy ingredients have been added into tamriel, with many more ingredients incoming in future updates. The new perks are: Harvester of Death, Alchemical Dusts, and Expert Harvester. Each perk allows you to collect or craft new ingredients from dead creatures, gems and ingots of many materials, or plants, respectively.
-The new ingredients in this update also have no less than 40 new alchemical effects for Skyrim. Many of the effects will look and feel very familiar to fans of elder scrolls games from the past, but a few of them are very new and very powerful. Effects added include:
Shielding, Spell Absorption, Frailty, Thorns, Chameleon, Debilitate
Fire Cloak, Frost Cloak, Shock Cloak
Fire Damage, Frost Damage, Shock Damage, Arcane Damage
Fortify Armor Rating, Candlelight, Burden
Fortify Agility, Fortify Intelligence, Fortify Personality, Fortify Speed, Fortify Willpower, Fortify Endurance, Fortify Luck, Fortify Strength
Damage Agility, Damage Endurance, Damage Intelligence, Damage Luck, Damage Personality, Damage Speed, Damage Strength, Damage Willpower
Drain Agility, Drain Endurance, Drain Intelligence, Drain Luck, Drain Personality, Drain Speed, Drain Strength, Drain Willpower
Please be aware these effects will be rare until I can find the time to add more ingredients to use them, but rest assured there are atleast two ingredients that have each of these effects in SU, currently. The ingredients are also not yet complete, as many of them have only one or two effects. I ask you all to be patient while I work on this.
-Generic enemy skeletons you may encounter can now be any one of 6 new tiers in addition to the basic skeleton, including a new legendary variety.
-general bugfixes and optimizations
Exciting news for modders and fans of SU:
I'm very excited to announce this latest version of skyrim unlimited features a substantial 'under-the-hood' rework of death item lists, inventory lists and outifts for all NPCs in the game. Currently it is only used to provide some new alchemy ingredients harvestable from dead NPCs, like hearts, but its future potential is staggering. This new framework will allow for many new features in later releases and it can be used as a powerful tool by other modders.
A vastly expanded Outfit System
As a general rule, every NPC will have a unique outfit, named almost exactly the same as the NPC it belongs to in most cases, that will essentially by a copy of its original outfit. This will allow any NPC to have its outfit edited by either SU or other mods with SU as a dependency, without editing any other NPC's outfits. Basically, we're talking about potentially much finer and more nuanced control of what NPCs wear.
This is a necessary first step to a future update on NPC outfits, where they will receive massively increased variety in apparel they can be equipped with. This will be done with an eye towards greater variety, more realism, and more interesting and appropriate apparel. NPCs will be using enchanted equipment more often in rare cases, and they will occasionally be wearing rings and amulets. The chances of any of that appearing on an NPC's worn equipment will increase with NPC level and tier. NPCs that should be wearing armor named after their particular race will more often be wearing those types of armor, where it wouldn't conflict with their faction or occupation (case in point: orcs more often wear orcish armor). Why should the dovahkin be the only one with interesting armor, after all? Boss NPCs may even be equipped with dragonbone or even daedric weapons and armor very late in the game (lv 60 or above).
An extremely powerful inventory leveled list system:
Every NPC (with the exception of summoned NPCs for the time being) will have a new leveled list added into its inventory. Most of them are completely empty for the time being, but some of them actually move things from death lists into active inventory. Why should gold appear on bandit bodies after they die, for example? The system uses hundreds of derivative lists unique to factions, combat types, tiers, etc., et., and every NPC gets a combination of bundled leveled lists inherited in its uniquely named leveled list. This new system is potentially very powerful because it allows items to be placed in one leveled list in the CK, and then potentially dozens or hundreds of NPCs will get that item in their inventory where it is appropriate. You can give all bandits, or all dark brotherhood agents, or college mages items unique to them. You can even give commoners more gold, or give vampires blood potions, for more examples. The possibilities are huge. Exceptions to this rule include summonable characters.
Completely Overhauled Death Item Lists:
As of this moment, almost all creatures and many humanoid NPCs are using a reworked death item list system that has the potential to do many of the same things as the new inventory system I mentioned above, but for death items only. Exceptions exist mainly for immortal characters or summonable characters.