Citrus

[Reserved for the family album]

Well, this hasn't been touched in what, 8 months? It was on hold, almost indefinitely, but now it's back. The goal of this mod is to add some consistency to the world of Skyrim; I use "consistency" the same way other people use the term "immersion": your mileage may vary. Basically, I aim to de-level some of the levelled things in Skyrim, things I believe should have never been levelled in the first place, along with ironing out a few kinks here and there. All these tweaks are listed below. It'll cover unique NPCs, some levelled lists and ultimately the fabled daedric armor and weapons and other high-quality gear that should just be laying around or be the property of poorly-equiped and ill-prepared highwaymen. It does not intend to be exhaustive in its approach; things like potions and alchemical ingredients will stay in levelled lists just like they were because I find it conceivable to find them inside a tomb, but an Orcish Battleaxe in every other tomb... well, not so much. Skyrim will be covered in first place, then Dawnguard, then Heartfire, then Dragonborn. They will all be independent from each other so people can mix and match. I'll start with individual NPCs (I'll scour this whole list), then move up to levelled lists and then take care of the hand-placed loot and everything related. Individual NPCs: Dawnstar: Silus Vesuius now wields an Ebony Dagger of Winnowing instead of a levelled dagger; Erandur's level capped was bumped to 60 and he now wields an Elven Mace of the Blaze; Riften Mjoll now carries a simple Dwarven Battleaxe to fill in for Grimsever and has no level cap; after all, she's just like you, or used to be... Unmid Snow-Shod no longer hates elves but wears their armor - it's now steel and iron; Riverwood: Delphine's elven dagger and orcish bow were swapped to more sensible weaponry: enchanted steel dagger and hunting bow; Solitude: Swapped Bolgeir Bearclaw's vanilla sword for a Steel sword; Whiterun: Lydia no longer has a level cap; she now wears banded iron armor with steel gauntlets and perfers 2H weapons; Hrongar can now live up to his statements... Farkas now wears full Wolf armor as everyone else in the Circle (besides Aela, I know...); Aela now has steel arrows and has no level cap; Athis now wears heavy armor (full iron armor) to go along with his class and the level cap is now at 60 (for being an expert trainer...); Torvar now wields a Skyforge Steel War Axe to go along with his comments (he says he prefers axes and maces to swords, yet yields one on vanilla); Ria and Torvar are now slightly more useful due to having an upped level cap (40); Ria also wears a mix of iron and hide armor to better go with her class; Njada has the level cap set to 60, for the same reason as Athis; Kodlak is now a true bona-fide badass as one would expect - minimum level of 20 and no level cap. Still on the fence about giving him a weapon... Commander Caius no longer has access to daedric weaponry! Just steel for you, but enchanted. He now levels up like all guards do; Same for Sinmir... an enchanted steel battle axe and levels up till he hits 50; Maurice Jondrelle is now essential, just in case...

Auriel's Bow, definitely. The Fang of Haynekhtnamet would be nice to see as well. I loved it in Morrowind.

So I heard a certain someone was born 19 years ago. guess it's time to wish you a Happy Birthday, DaMage.

If someone could close this thread, I'd be very thankful. I have decided to do something else with this mod... You'll see what when this is closed.

Steam has a lot of bad things with pricing being the worst but I think it doesn't track anything else besides your game time and the kind of hardware that's on your computer (if you choose to let them do it), among other surveys. It does allow you to link your Facebook profile to your Steam account and that's it. If it allows you to play Skyrim offline, the better. I have never had problems with Steam so far, besides the usual crashes but that's bound to happen. Then again, I restrict my Steam usage to GE:S and the HL series (I won't touch TF2 with a ten-foot pole now, even after spending money on it and some quality time in the beginnings). With that being said, their privacy policy statement is really confusing in some parts, as you guys have pointed out. I have never tried playing a Steam game in Offline mode but I will and then I'll report back. A couple of hours of Portal should suffice. EDIT: It doesn't seem to log your offline gaming time. I played Portal for a while and it didn't record anything on the recent gaming stats.

Going on a slight tangent here but this is quite a big thread/monologue you have. I don't mean this the wrong way. It's amusing to know about all the mods you have made and are still working on, almost all unreleased. I think it is time for a compilation... How long have you been waiting for an answer? I'd consider 15 days (unless stated otherwise) to be a reasonable time to wait for an answer. If it doesn't come, go ahead and give them proper credit. I believe most people that specify any time limits on their readmes always mention 15 days. That's what I've seen more frequently, at least, though most people just ask to be contacted, that's all. Besides Thacadian's map, I can point you towards p1p3's Color map mod. There's a Shivering isles counterpart if it interests you. Besides this one, there's the Colour Terrain map by Xessive. Or, if you fancy wrinkled maps, this one might do too. I haven't tried any of these (besides the SI one) so I'm suggesting based on the images on the mods' page. Keep in mind none of these has Elsweyr mapped.

Having bashed someone's head against a plank or not, the truth is it is perfect. You can barely notice the blood in-game but you can see it is there. I think I owe someone a certain something... Oh yes, and thank you again. This thread can be closed since all my wishes (the ones concerning this, at least) have been fulfilled.

What I want is quite simple but since I lack the skills necessary for this endeavour of sorts, I come here to humbly ask for some more help: I need a kind soul to add blood splatter, the kind of splatter that happens when you smash someone's head against a plank. I need this done on the ArenaDummy1 static, on the target area (the red circle...). It can drip a bit and maybe bleed out to the last plank before the weight (and some can drip on to the chain and the weight); this last part is up to whoever takes on this. All that is necessary is the texture; I'll link it to the model when it's finished. If pictures are needed, it's only a matter of asking. I didn't post them because 1) I'm a bit lazy and 2) this sounds like a simple enough request. Thanks in advance, El

Esbern? Is that you?

@Khettienna: if it wasn't for her hair colour, I'd say someone went back in time...

@DarkRider: I was thinking the exact same thing you mentioned near the end of your post: if paid mods came to existence, the CS, or any other SDK, would no longer be free. There could be "lite" versions to make the "lite" mods you talked about but that was it. Any hobbyist that wants to do something bigger would have to pay and that would lead to what we discussed before: teams would be formed and your hobby would either cease to exist or be turned into profit (a job of sorts). The problem with these "lite" mods is that you would only get the less complex mods, the ones that can be done for free and miss out on the big ones that would surely be commercialised. It would feel like you got the lesser version and if the commercial mods would get the "lite" versions, It would be some kind of trial version. It would feel like WinRAR forever Then again, if mods turned commercial the way you mentioned, that could make developers forget about DLC or expansions and let the community take care of it. They'd get their share, which wouldn't be small, I'm sure, and everyone would be happy. That, or we'd get thousands of Horse Armor clones... It's a perfectly understandable situation the one you illustrated with RST. Such a large work, even though it came from your free time (and perhaps sometime not so free), costed a lot of money and seeing some of the costs being covered is and interesting prospect.

Bethesda could do as Valve did with the Portal team or that guy from MINERVA: Metastasis (if you haven't played it and you own HL2, download it now. I'm dead serious) and try to hire the great talent they see in modders, provided the modders want to be a part of the videogames industry. It's a bit of wishful thinking, sure, but it's not impossible. They themselves admitted to have drawn inspiration from Oblivion mods when they were making Skyrim so we're not that far away, I think. Modding is a way of becoming known in the industry and there are many successful cases of mods-turned commercial games. The downside I see in being paid to mod is that you would essentially become another developer. I find it hard to believe they would allow one to have his or her own schedule, to make things the exact way one wants and so forth. Some of the liberty modding gives you would go away, if not most of it. We can equate the number of download to the hypothetical profit the modder would have made if mods were paid but I'm not sure everyone of the downloaders would use the mod if it wasn't free so it doesn't automatically become a gold mine. Plus, can you imagine someone buying the retail game at $50, $60, plus the official DLC and expansions and on top of that paying for mods? The bill would go way up unless you would restrain yourself (considering the current amount of mods and the amount of mods people usually have installed). They would come few and far between and one-man mod teams would practically disappear unless you were a jack of all trades. Bigger teams would have to be formed and then it would be like having a bunch of indie developers just to mod a game . That would be fun...