LE Core mod resources

[crysthala]

I use both Eat, Drink, Sleep and Be a Milk Drinker. Both are great mods, but no matter how much milk I drink, I'm still dying of thirst. This is because these two mods can't talk to each other. I thought, why not give modders a standard library that they can use to make mods a little more chatty? I remember Oblivion having a really excellent resource called Cobl, which added a whole host of really cool goodies, from fixed alchemy activators to ingredient storage and sorting to a grab bag of new ingredients and foods. It was dead useful. I think something like Cobl would be awesome for Skyrim, too, and Skyrim is much better equipped for that sort of thing.

 

Let's say we have an .esm with a collection of keywords in it. The .esm itself doesn't actually apply these keywords to anything; they just sit quietly in a corner and pretend they don't exist until someone uses them. One of these keywords is, let's say, "liquor." So I come in with a mod that adds mazte from Morrowind to Skyrim. I tag the mazte with the "liquor" keyword from the .esm; the "I need to eat or drink" mods can then look at the brew, see it's tagged with "liquor," and know that it should make me less thirsty. And different mods could use these keywords in different ways. So, for instance, Eat, Drink, Sleep could just register the liquor tag just as something that makes the player less thirsty, whereas Imp's More Complex Needs would see it as making the player less thirsty and a bit drunker. Meanwhile, Frostfall knows "liquor" as temporarily good for exposure points, but bad in the long run. So, a mod-added item can then be used independently by three separate and completely different mods, each in the way they intended, none of which were designed specifically for that item.

 

Cobl, as I mentioned, also had resources for people like me, who suck massively at scripting. Without Cobl, I ended up with lots of little redware pots in my houses, which I then had to sort ingredients into individually. With Cobl, click boom done, I had an automatic ingredient sorter. Vanilla Skyrim already has this idea in place with those weapon racks and mannequins. This could be extended to lots of things: sorters for ingredients and crafting materials, script templates for things like portable crafting equipment or moveable furniture, and those sorts of commonly used but incredibly finicky things.

 

tl;dr An .esm containing a set of prefabricated scripts and keywords to make modding easier, more universal, and more compatible. I dabble in lots of aspects of modding, but I'm not an expert in any of them. Is this idea remotely feasible, and would anyone actually use it?