SSE New or Old Equipment with appropriate appearances

[DivineAurora]

This is less of a request and more of an idea, partly because I'm not confident about the exact style of how things might be done by a particular mod author fitting how I'd want it, but I thought I'd share the idea anyway.

 

Much of the vanilla equipment looks old and worn, with stains, scratches, dents, rust, etc., even if your character just made it in at a forge or you just bought it from an NPC vendor that presumably makes or gets new things.

 

My idea here is to have two versions of most non-unique items, a 'new' and an 'old' version. Whenever you craft things yourself, you'll always get the new version, and most shops sell the new versions primarily (some might sell a mix of new and old, or only old, depending on the lore of the particular shop). Dungeon loot would generally be 'old' versions. NPCs might carry/wear new or old gear depending on who they are, their relative wealth, faction, and various other lore aspects, for instance, most wealthy NPCs in cities would wear new clothing, but might carry and odd old heirloom item or two, such as a weapon or piece of armor, while most bandits would primarily have 'old' gear. If it's possible, this might also affect the underwear textures of NPCs, with NPCs living in cities and settlements being more likely to have cleaner versions of underwear textures, while people like bandits might be more likely to have more worn versions of such, although I suspect this might not be possible without a lot more work and might involve creating race variants or something.

 

The new versions of things would generally look brand new, metal still shiny and fresh from the forge, no dents, scratches, or rust, cloth closer to it's original dyed colors and lacking in stains and less wrinkled and stuff, and so on. Old versions would have all sorts of signs of wear and tear, stains, rust, dents, scratches, tears, fading dyes, and so on. Some vanilla gear would be more the basis of 'new' versions, while some would be more the basis of 'old' versions, but generally speaking most gear would have two texture versions, one 'new' and one 'old' and possibly slightly different models in some cases. In some cases the vanilla versions would be in-between the two versions, and two entirely new versions would be created, one older looking than the vanilla version, and one newer looking than the vanilla version.

 

This idea isn't involving things actually wearing down over the course of gameplay, or if it does, the wear and tear wouldn't happen to enchanted gear over the course of gameplay, or would happen more slowly to enchanted gear than non-enchanted gear.

 

This system could potentially be made in a way intended to allow patches for newly added gear from other mods to work with this system or help you pick where alternate textures or models you use might apply (if they replace old or new versions of things)?

 

Perhaps for role-play purposes there could be a system to turn 'new' equipment into their 'old' versions (rolling it across rocks and dipping it in mud a bunch? A new spell?) or maybe the reverse (repair/maintenance using smithing skill or a spell?), although I think keeping such systems optional installs might be a good idea.