[LE] Hardcore Economy and Attributes mod - what is possible?

[asterlacnala]

Hello! I always enjoy playing with hardcore realism mods, making frequent use of Frostfall, iNeed, and Bathing in Skyrim to make daily living take time; Vigor to make stamina a factor; and Time Flies to make crafting and such take time. I also use Morrowloot Ultimate Simplified, and Scarcity, to reduce loot, and a mod (can't recall the exact name, recently found it) to reduce the gold given from quests. Also a bunch of unrelated mods... which got me working with TES5Edit, and I have recently started working on my own mods. I'd like to delve into scripting more in the future. But I did have a few questions before I get too far, because I don't want to spend too much time on something only to find the engine makes the idea impossible. *I'm not looking for specific implementation, I just want to know a yes/no before I head down a dead end.* That said, if you want to provide some implementation tips, feel free!

 

One of the first mods I created lowered the player's health regen down to .0005. I use a timescale of 6, so at this rate there are 201600 real time seconds for two weeks in game; the idea was if you stumbled into town at 50% health you'd need a week of convalescing to get back to full. (Still faster than reality, but I like challenge, not insanity!) It should probably be even lower, but with sleeping giving a heal rate bonus. One thing I found, though, was that a night's rest cured it all anyhow. At that heal rate, an 8 hour rest should only cure 2.4% of your health. I'm assuming that sleeping just heals you completely. However, I understand Requiem gets rid of this feature, so I assume it is part of one of the default scripts rather than baked into the engine. This leads to my first question:

 

1) Is it possible for me to read the player's health just before they rest, then when they wake up set their health to what they should have had from that much sleep?

 

Since magical healing makes the above a trivial challenge, I wanted to alter the way magic works to something a little more like a D&D sorcerer. The idea being that it takes a full 24 hours for your spell pool to recharge from empty to full. This meant setting magicka regen to .007 (again, at time scale 6). However, this would seriously nerf mages - at 1st level, a Conjure Familiar spell, for example, is basically the only thing you can cast all day. To counteract this I decided what needed to happen is that mages needed to be able to cast a lot more spells with their more limited pool, such that in a fight they can cast about the same as before - but if they "nova" that's all they do for the rest of the day. If you spend all your spells on healing you have none left for combat. My first thought was to make spells about 50x cheaper, but it seems the game engine doesn't allow magicka costs in fractional amounts. The alternative, then is to increase the scale of the mana pool.

 

2) Is it possible to seperate the scale of the HMS attributes, so that health starts at 100 and goes up by 10 for each point put in it, but magicka starts at 5000 and goes up by 500 for every point in it? Including how NPC classes handle this?

 

If I can do the above for magicka, I should also be able to do so for stamina. I want to set the regen to .014 so it should take 12 hours to regen from empty to full. I know Vigor allows for stamina use when attacking and jumping, and I know of the global variables controlling it for shield bash and power attack stuff. I'd also like to use stamina as a resource for walking and running, and have your speed greatly reduced/damage greatly decreased if you are out of stamina.

 

3) Can I make walking and running cost stamina, instead of just reducing the regen rate?

4) Can I change walk/run speed and weapon damage (probably by a percentage) based on stamina?

 

The above also should impact swimming. Drowning can kill you, but nearly drowning shouldn't lead to two weeks recovery the way punctures and blunt force trauma does. The ideal would be to have drowning damage stamina, which would be more serious with the changes from above.

 

5) Is it possible to make drowning damage stamina *instead* of health?

6) Is it possible to make the player die from hitting 0 stamina, but *only* if they are swimming?

7) Alternatively, is it possible to track the amount of health damage done by drowning so that you can heal the player by that much - and no more - after leaving the water?

 

The other thing I want is a hardcore income mod to go with some of the pricing mods. The idea is that a 10 hour work day, 5 days a week, should get you about what you need to survive. (Yes, historically peasants worked for longer, more days per week, and barely got by. I'm okay with a 50 hour work week because again, I want a challenging game, not insanity.) I'm going to ignore a few centuries of economics research to make things easier, so I'll be adopting the labor theory of value. This means if a basic meal (including food and drink) costs about x, and a night's stay at an inn costs about y, then an hour of work should get you (.45x+.15y) income. This should increase with level - and with rarity of the task - but generally not exceed about five times this at level 50. There are several things I know can be done on this front - for example, changing item prices so that an iron ingot is worth 3 iron ores plus a markup for smelting time - but some I'm less sure about.

 

8 ) Does the ingredient harvesting menu work as a looting menu, internally? Or more specifically, if I write a procedure similar to time flies, can I make harvesting ingredients take longer, and a different time than looting?

9) Can I make time pass while harvesting crops, even though there isn't even a loot menu? Can I make those crops give multiple copies of each item? (EG, pick a potato, it takes 15 minutes and gives 3 potatoes.)

 

The last question would make things easier, but can be bypassed with a lot of work. It's just an ease of use thing.

 

10) Can I make recipes that use keywords instead of specific ingredients, so you can craft with any item using that keyword? (EG, instead of a recipe that calls for red apples or green apples, I can have one that calls for apples and have it accept either.)

 

Thanks in advance for any help that can be given!

Edited December 11, 2017 by asterlacnala