Immersive College of Winterhold; I am Utterly Confused

[Moldy]

First and foremost; The mod is properly installed. The changes to the College have been made,and everyone's throwing around Potent Atronachs like it's going out of style.

 

My issue is,rather... How does this all work? I've seen the lessons,and I have absolutely zero clue how they work. I tried asking in the comments section for the mod,but I got no help. Furthermore,I know that the classes are suspended until the completion of the questline after a certain point,but I don't know what that point is; I want to use the College's classes to improve my magic skills before I'm locked into the crusade to feed Ancano his own (Absolutely fabulous) hair.

 

The information on the mod page is... Rather vague,on these topics,sadly. So,can anyone help me understand this otherwise wonderful mod?

[panurgy]

It's really just an atmosphere mod. It adds a lot of decorations, pumps up the stats for college members (less for the students), adds a bunch of AI packages to everyone at the college, etc. Vanilla college NPCs have around 2 AI routines. ICoW gives most NPCs 10 or so, so you get more sophisticated sandbox behavior with schedules, going to eat lunch, etc.

 

If you walk around and click on displays, books, and similar, you sometimes get a description and an appropriate type of XP for it (alchemy, enchanting, etc.). And it adds a guard or two and I think a couple of small new areas. It also makes the archmage quarters nicer, as well as giving the option to set Tolfdir as the Archmage at the end of the questline. IIRC, you can even set Tolfdir as Archmage and take over later if you want.

 

Oh yeah, and it adds a new alchemy master with dialogue (pieced together from other conversations in the game). The vanilla college doesn't have one.

 

If you want more playable content, you could try Winterhold Expanded Ruins. WER is compatible with ICoW, adds atmosphere to the area around Winterhold and has a line of quests. I'm about to give it a try for the first time, so I can't speak to the quest quality, but the ruins around town are well done, and it's a cool view from the college.

[Moldy]

I was under the impression that the lessons were actually functional. Damn. I guess it's time for me to drop unreasonable amounts of gold on training,then...