Iluf

Greetings to fellow modders and Skyrim players! Here goes yet another guy looking for opinions on his creation. A bit of an introduction, to begin with. I initially started creating my own game content in Warcraft II and HoMM2 in 1997. Although I was still in my childhood, I did enjoy the process immensely, and continued my experiments by making maps in other games that followed WCII and HoMM. What I never did was publishing anything I've made to be available to a wide audience. Eventually I started participating in different activities and stopped designing anything on my own. Until Skyrim came. After playing the game with and without mods mods for 350+ hours, I have finally decided to resurrect my creative side and try making making a mod or two of my own. So, after a bit of reading up on tutorials, I started making my first module, Durd's Hideout. In its current form, it's still too raw and unfinished for me to even think of publishing it openly on Steam or on the mainpage here, but what I can do (and what I think might help me a lot with inspiration and figuring out what to do further) is advertise it a bit here and get some feedback from people who frequent these forums. Click here for the latest version of the mod. The premise of the mod: A small(ish) cave is located between Falkreath and Riverwood which can serve as a hideout for the player until getting a proper home, but comes with a twist: it is already populated by a dumb-but-tough bandit and his wife/lover. The bandit is a seasoned fighter and will be an extremely hard opponent for any fresh adventurer (i.e. straight out of Helgen). The bandit, however, has pissed off a group of guys who can also qualify as "an opposing bandit faction but is not instantly hostile because less dumb", and it just happens that these people are about to attempt a takedown on the owner of the cave as the player walks in (the woes of stupid quest design). The player is then prompted to either help the welcoming party, mind his/her own business and walk on by, or attack the strangers. http://i.imgur.com/7YXqI.png (you can also type "coc aaidurdexterior" in the console) The idea was to make this mod a bit less hack and slashey as most of the dungeon content the vanilla game has to offer: it is possible for the player to go out of the cave quite a bit happier and richer without fighting at all (which will most likely allow the player to then get a new home in a more civil way). It's also meant to be a bit more realistic than usual, since the bandits aren't actually dying in two hits, the loot chests are seriously locked using keys (still possible to unlock using lockpicks but *tough*) and the keys are not always lying right next to the chests they unlock. It's also very short and is going to take you less than 15 minutes to complete. SO! I'm looking for any feedback. Read the description, or download and play it, or dissect it in CK, but I will be a very very happy panda if you take some time to comment on it. Thank you in advance! To-Do for the time being: - Fix the scripts so the whole adventuring party behaves as intended - Voiceovers for the dialogue - Itemize the chests (empty for now, d'oh!) - Make the skeever traverse around the cave in a manner that doesn't start a local turf war

Shenk's thievery overhaul adds new types of arrows to the game among other things. Its sadly not very stable at the moment, however, because of the navmesh bug.

@Thoragoros I think I saw a mod somewhere that increased the number of missions required to advance through Companions stages, which would already make things a bit better. Probably the same can be done for every other guild out there as well. I suppose the additions I'm talking about are easier to introduce in a total conversion indeed. Well, one can hope. :P

@Citrus872 Yeah, I understand of course. That's why I liked Alexandrox' work with his WiS - Heroes and Villains mod - I even suggested for him to concentrate his work on this area which is, I think, far more innovative for Skyrim than just a regular monster/spawn point overhaul that WiS was initially. But that's just heroes and villains, doesn't stop the already present NPCs from being two-liner dummies, etc. @tiy991 Sort of yeah, if the authors decide to make something similar for Skyrim. What I don't really want though is adding something like actual strategy game elements to the game (you know, point and click). It's still supposed to be an RPG. Just the possible roles are expanded from the regular formula of "thief/mage/warrior guy" to also include things like "merchant", "crafter", "landlord" and so on. It'd actually even make skills like Speech useful for role-playing reasons.

(Crosspost with beth forums.) Okay, so I like Skyrim. And I like the level of realism one can reach in a game like this by using certain combat mods and things like Frostfall and Basic Needs. However, at its core, Skyrim remains the same old hack and slash game about killing monsters and bandits, completing fetch quests and accumulating gear. All of that in a land with a civil war raging, fortresses being captured, razed and re-captured, dragons flying in the sky, stuff like that. Meanwhile, peaceful life goes on, with all these farms and little villages and big cities with their guilds and shops and whatever. So maybe I don't want to spend all my time clearing dungeons from draugr. Maybe I've acquired an initial sum of gold through adventuring and want to run a shop now, you know, the way it usually happens with the adventurers who get tired of adventuring or take an arrow to a knee. Or, being a thane, I want to take a fort for my own (or build a new one for myself) and reinforce it with a small personal army of mine. Or I want to start a trading guild and run goods-filled caravans from Markarth to Riften. The game already allows the player to buy houses and marry someone who then opens a shop. But that's it, this spouse vendor is barely different from any other vendor out there, and after you're finished upgrading your house there's nothing else you can do with it bar stashing all your hard-earned loot. What I want is a (global, really) modification that allows the Dovahkiin to do regular things that the NPCs in the world do and affect the world in ways different than simply killing things, as described in the paragraph above. It'll probably also involve a complete overhaul of the economy system of the game (because seriously, buying a house in vanilla game after clearing two dungeons and a bandit camp ending at level 5 isn't very realistic or immersive, and neither is finding an iron helmet and 50 gold coins in a treasure chest deep inside a high-level dungeon... you know, the usual leveled loot quirks). That said, I understand that all this stuff is hard to get going. Maybe I'll see something of this sort in some total conversion of the game which will be released in 2014, I don't know. I'm already seeing mods like "plant your own tree and see it grow" appear on Steam though so I guess at least it's not impossible to make these changes. So this is a call for any willing modder out there. I'll be happy to generate some more ideas, too! Or maybe someone is already working on a mod with similar concepts in mind, then I'll be happy to follow on the development progress. Thank you for your attention dear readers, hopefully the read wasn't too long or boring.

So as everyone knows already, 1.5 screwed us with the change to smithing. I've tested it in my game running smithing overhaul + complete crafting overhaul, and yeah, it's borked. Now, wading throught different related forums, the only solution mentioned is to disable all the smithing mods and start a new game. Haven't seen any new mods or updated old ones trying to fix this, either, not yet at least. So I have three questions. 1. Does this bug also happen for vanilla characters not using any mods that alter smithing but created before 1.5? 2. Does this bug reproduce when using smithing mods but starting a new game in 1.5? 3. Is anything in the works to fix the issue for existing characters in a modded game?

For dragon attacks, a mod recently appeared called Everyone Get Inside - Dragon Attack. Early beta, but definitely worth tracking at least.

This has probably been asked for a million times already but my search skills are sadly not equal to the task of finding any results. Anyhow, what I'd really love is a mod that allows NPCs in the world to have a chance of having their weapons tempered. I'd obviously want it to be realistic, as in, a lowly bandit shouldn't be running around with a legendary ebony blade, etc. Thanks in advance to anyone who points me to one such mod if it exists or takes on the task of making one from scratch.