Creating a spell and/or family of spells? (beginner)

[opusGlass]

Hi,

I'll be upfront, I have never made a mod and have no idea what it entails, although I am a decent programmer. How difficult would it be to make a mod that adds a spell to Skyrim? I just want a reasonable Staff of Magnus spell port (not a beefed-up one, which is all I can find). Although if it turns out to be easy I would probably do some more, possibly add an entire Magnus family of spells.

 

I would just want it to do the regular old 20pts of absorption to magicka (although it would be cool if it were levelled, making it applicable to high- and low- level mages) and belong to an actual family of magic (destruction or alteration) so that you gain experience by using it. And just have the regular animation from the staff of magnus.

 

How difficult would this be, and where do I start?

[kromey]

Not difficult at all.

 

The first step is to make a Magic Effect for your spell. The easiest way to do this is to find an existing one that is already close to what you want to accomplish -- although in your case the Magic Effect the Staff of Magnus uses is probably already exactly what you want!

 

The next step is to create a Spell that uses that Magic Effect; again, I usually start by duplicating an existing one that's similar to what I want to do. Make sure you change its Magic Effect(s) to point to the one(s) you want to use!

 

That's really it. Save your .esp, launch Skyrim, open the console, type

help "Magnus Spell" (or whatever you named it)

Make a note of the ID that shows up next to the entry preceded by "SPEL:", and then

player.addspell <ID>

 

Now cast, and enjoy!

 

Creating a spell tome is easy -- just make a book and set it to grant the spell you created above. Then you can place that somewhere in the world, and now you can find it and learn your spell without resorting to console trickery!

 

Playing around with things -- and especially looking at how other things are already done -- is the best way I've found to quickly learn things; for example, to have your spell automatically level, you could apply multiple Magic Effects, each with a greater magnitude, with conditions so that they'll only be used at a certain level, e.g. mages with less than 20 points in Destruction get a 20-point Magnus effect, while mages up to 40 Destruction get a 40-point Magnus effect, etc.

[opusGlass]

Great to hear! I'm assuming I need to use the Creation Kit to make the spell. What about adding a new skill and/or perk tree to put this spell in (with others I might make), instead of putting it as a destruction spell?

[kromey]

Yeah, don't even think about attempting that without first getting really intimate with the CK (which, yes, you need to use that, or for something this simple a tool like TESVSnip would work -- but I'd recommend the CK if you think you might possibly make more mods later). And then consider that even most advanced modders wouldn't even dare to consider this, as for all intents and purposes the skills and the perk trees are hard-coded into the game (there are ways around that, but that's going well beyond what the CK lets you do...).

[opusGlass]

Ok I'll take your word for it. Got the mod working and uploaded it to nexus! http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/30421

The spell wasn't raising the experience at all and it took me forever to fix it...turns out that 'absorption' category magic effects do not raise the user's experience, so I had to add a second set of effects. Works now though. Thanks so much for your help!

[kromey]

No problem -- and welcome to the wide wide world of modding! :)

 

I had no idea "absorption" effects didn't raise experience, that's really strange...