Custom-Made Crafting System for Mages

[Epyrion]

So I am very, very new to modding. In fact, I started out this week.

 

The reason why I got so interested is this mod here: http://www.nexusmods.com/skyrim/mods/67432/?

 

The idea of a mage researcher touched deep into my black and withered heart and I decided that I wanted to make that mod better. I talked to the owner and it seems like he is not very fond of keeping it maintained, so I thought I could take the mantle at some point.

 

So I started my quest and needless to say, stumbled upon a number of difficulties.

 

You see, in my "re-thinking" of that mod, instead of earning experience in the schools of magic by reading the item you crafted, you would get the experience as you craft it. You would open a crafting menu, much like the Enchanting one, and you would pick the Spell Tomes you want to use in your study, from none up to four of them (all from a single school). Based on the number of tomes, the level of the spells in each tome and your own skill and perks in the school in question, you would either produce Study Notes (and then gain experience) or Scribbles (and gain nothing) and then the game time would be advanced several hours and you'd lose a random number of paper rolls (four to eight, and an inkwell. And all of that would be activated by a quill.

 

It looked the perfect plan in my mind's eyes, until it made contact with the enemy. :wallbash:

 

The quill doesn't respond to either OnActivate or OnEquipped events, so I had to put the effect on a power and have it check for the presence of a quill in the inventory, but then you can't ask it to look for a "quill", it has to be some abstract "form" object that has to be passed because Papyrus can't read directly from the data files. The same problem also happens with inkwells and paper stuff which I gotta check to see if there is enough and all that. But nevermind that. None of that is a problem, not a hard one at least. I can kinda see possible solutions looming in the horizon for those issues, they are just regular stones on the way.

 

The real problem is that recipes seem to be all deterministic and furniture objects do not have native functions which would allow to intercept crafting events so I can't make a script that would return a non-deterministic item as a result of a crafting requisition. Like trying to make a sword and having a chance to receive a "torn piece of iron" when you have too low of a smithing skill, instead of making a regular iron sword every time.

 

Is there a way to do that? Is there a clever way to script a probabilistic element into Skyrim vanilla crafting? I am totally lost into that problem, which seems to be kinda hard.

 

Please, enlighten me until wisdom pours out of my every orifice. :armscrossed:

Edited November 27, 2015 by Epyrion