Who wants to help a newbie make a simple mod?

[MisterMolecule]

I've scoured the internet, but found no satisfactory mods to change the properties of black soul gems. I want to make them way more powerful, i.e. 3 times the enchanting charge capacity, but I don't want to make them refillable or available at stores, or any of the other features that come with the mods I've found.

 

Can I simply load oblivion.esm with my tes construction set, find the black soul gem's enchanting capacity of 1600, and change that number?

Something tells me it won't be that easy...

 

Anyway, if someone could tell me where to find that setting, I'd be most appreciative. TES construction set is totally confusing to me, even with the newbie guides.

[jonesjoshuar]

I've scoured the internet, but found no satisfactory mods to change the properties of black soul gems. I want to make them way more powerful, i.e. 3 times the enchanting charge capacity, but I don't want to make them refillable or available at stores, or any of the other features that come with the mods I've found.

 

Can I simply load oblivion.esm with my tes construction set, find the black soul gem's enchanting capacity of 1600, and change that number?

Something tells me it won't be that easy...

 

Anyway, if someone could tell me where to find that setting, I'd be most appreciative. TES construction set is totally confusing to me, even with the newbie guides.

You should note, that changing the capacity would not be good, imo. I never tried it. They have preset capacities: lesser, petty, greater,grand, common etc.. if you want to see yourself its under items->soulgem and double click on black soul gem.

 

You would be better off making your own enchantment if your wanting to make an uber sword or armor.

[MisterMolecule]

You should note, that changing the capacity would not be good, imo. I never tried it. They have preset capacities: lesser, petty, greater,grand, common etc.. if you want to see yourself its under items->soulgem and double click on black soul gem.

 

You would be better off making your own enchantment if your wanting to make an uber sword or armor.

So, there's no difference between Grand capacity and Black capacity? And how would I change the value of the grand capacity? That's confusing to me, because I'm certain that Black Gems are one increment (200 charges) stronger than Grand Soul Gems in the game, but in the construction set, I can't find anything about a Black Gem Capacity.

 

Thanks for the input, but making an uber sword or armor without using a hard-to-find black soul gem and paying a ton of gold in the arcane university in character would be out of the question for me. As a role player, my goal is to improve the reward of getting a black soul gem. A simple 200 charge improvement on a grand soul gem just didn't impress me at all.

 

Now, in the mod called KrystinasEnchantmentTweaks, she's multiplied the capacity of ALL soul gems by four. A step in the right direction, but too powerful for the immersion package I'm putting together. It seems like I really need a custom job to pull this off. If only I could find out how she did that...

 

Maybe I'll email her.

[MisterMolecule]

Oh, my mistake. Apparently black soul gems do NOT have a higher charge capacity than Grand Soul gems after all. I thought I read otherwise in the strategy guide...

 

Well, they should, and I will endeavor to create the mod that makes this happen. If black gems are identical to grand in every way other than the black ability to capture humanoid souls, then not only do I have to increase the black capacity, but I should also have to increase the value of an NPCs soul to match the higher gem capacity, eh?

 

Now, how do I do that?

[MisterMolecule]

The more I look into this, the weirder it gets.

I think I can change the charge value of souls. So I could, for example, increase the values of each soul level to be as high as the value of the one above it. In other words, I could make petty souls as valuable as lesser, then change lesser to match common, then change common to match greater. Finally, I would change the value of a greater soul so that it is worth 1600, just like a Grand Soul. This is where it gets tricky. I want to greatly increase the value of a Grand Soul, and the Capacity of a black soul gem to match it. Let's call it 4000 charges.

 

If I did it this way, effectively all the non-humanoid creatures with Grand Souls would have souls way too big to fit into Grand Soul gems. I suppose a black soul gem would work, but this would be something I'd like to change. Ultimately, I want it so NPC souls are worth 4000, and black soul gems are big enough to hold them. There is no distinction between Grand Souls of monsters and Grand Souls of NPCs. I wouldn't know how to fix that, but I would like to.

 

 

now that I think about it, it might be easier to just rename the souls with lower names. Rename Lesser as "Petty", rename the Lesser soul gem as "Petty soul gem", then just get rid of the original petty souls and soul gems. If I did that, I could get my way. I just need to learn how to change the soul value of all creatures with grand souls down to greater souls, so that NPCs are the ONLY creatures with Grand Souls.

 

So, here's my new plan: Reduce the soul value of all non-NPC creatures by one increment. That way, only NPCs will have Grand Souls. Then, increase the values of all soul units by one. This way, Petty souls will become as valuable as lesser souls, and lesser souls be will the new common soul. Common souls will be as strong as greater souls, and Greater Souls, the new highest soul rank for non-NPCs, will be 1600, just like the old Grand Soul.

 

With this system, no soul will be as worthless as the original petty soul, and the higher end of the spectrum will be unchanged. Whatever creatures used to have Grand Souls will now only have greater souls, but my new greater souls will be equal to the old grand soul. All of this will create a higher soul level, the new Grand Soul, which only NPCs will have. If I do matching renaming to the Soul Gems, everything will be groovy except for Grand Soul gems, which can never be filled with Grand Souls because only NPCs have grand souls and only Black Soul gems can contain NPC souls. These are ugly blemishes that I would like to do without, (especially because I need a Filled Grand Soul Gem to get one of my favorite Midas spells) but this is the only way I can think of to change the Soul Gem system within the existing structure of the oblivion.esm.

 

Ultimately, all I want is a higher Black Soul Gem capacity and a corresponding higher NPC soul value. I imagine that the enchanting alter would automatically detect the increased value of the new black soul gem and adjust the price of enchantment to match.

 

I guess I could just increase the value of Grand Souls and gems and ignore the fact that Grand Souls from creatures and NPCs are identical.

 

Very n00b question: saving my changes to a .esm in the TES Constructor creates a .esp?

[SirMagus]

n00b answer: Yes it does.

 

 

If that change would be possible, I would vote for a high quality humanoid soul, like a City Guard or something like that.

 

It has to be a little hard to get, instead of just walking in the woods to find a lonely man, and steal his soul.

 

Has to be something you have to risk a little for. But then again, that's my opinion.

[MisterMolecule]

If that change would be possible, I would vote for a high quality humanoid soul, like a City Guard or something like that.

 

It has to be a little hard to get, instead of just walking in the woods to find a lonely man, and steal his soul.

 

Has to be something you have to risk a little for. But then again, that's my opinion.

 

 

How about the Temple Primates? And Martin. That should be about enough to fill all nine or so Black Soul Gems in the game (that I can find).

 

I'm working with mod sets that make crime very difficult to get away with, and I think a guy alone in the woods might be all I could get away with. Combined with Prometheos' Consequences of Evil mod, and coming from the Buddhist perspective that a priest and a peasant are equally sacred, I think I could safely group all NPCs into the same soul level.

 

It would be great to have SuperSouls, though. Like NPCs above level 20. If only there were a way to add additional levels to the soul hierarchy...

 

Would be possible to just take away lesser the same away I took away petty, freeing up a slot for a supersoul.

 

Anyway, I just looked at the list of monsters whose soul values I would have to readjust one by one and got pretty discouraged from that plan.

[Boss171]

thinking about it, its perfectly justified that they should have the same charge as grand. after all, whats harder to kill, a dremora valkynaz or a beggar?

[MisterMolecule]

thinking about it, its perfectly justified that they should have the same charge as grand. after all, whats harder to kill, a dremora valkynaz or a beggar?

 

Oh, I hear you. But with only 9 or so soul gems in the game, its not the difficulty of the monster that seems unbalanced to me. Killing a beggar is an evil and illegal act, and those are the kinds of prices one should pay to fill a Black Soul Gem.