Oh, hey. It’s been a while, but I’m catching the Skyrim bug again.
Over the last few months I’ve been gradually shifting my development over to 4coder (from Sublimetext and VS Code, which are actually both pretty great) so I created Papyrus syntax highlighting and a build script. I’m sharing this stuff on GitHub, and you can read more about it on its own blog page.
Time to update my tools, get SKSE64 working, and learn about this Vortex thing.
You guys need a bath.
Some users made a suggestion that instead of awarding penalties for getting hungry and tired, I should instead award benefits for staying full and rested. I think that actually fits in better with the vanilla sleep system, so I’ve decided to add it to my mods. I am including flags to turn this feature on and off, so once (if?) JsonUtil becomes available in the future, users will be able to easily toggle benefits, penalties and animations however they like.
Super Simple Needs will include a Well Fed bonus that adds 50 to Health for 4 hours after eating. Since you stay full for approximately half as long as you stay rested, the bonus lasts half as long as the vanilla Well Rested Bonus. The Rested/Well Rested/Lover’s Comfort benefits are entirely untouched.
Super Simple Bathing will include a Clean bonus that adds 5 to Speechcraft for 16 hours after bathing. Since you stay clean for approximately twice as long as you stay rested, the bonus lasts twice as long as the vanilla Well Rested bonus. Some users also complained that Troll Fat was too hard to get at lower levels, so I’m including an added recipe that uses potatoes instead. I’ve been told potato soap is a thing, but I’m not a soap expert. If you don’t like it don’t craft it, or remove the recipe with xEdit.
I am in the process of committing these changes to GitHub. After I play with them for a few days I will start the tedious process of updating Nexus and Bethesda.net.
Super Simple Lock Bash is out. You can get it on Nexus or Bethesda.net for PC and XB1. You can find links to it here.
I created this a long time ago for the original Skyrim to use with my barbarian character and it was the first mod I started porting over to SSE. Unfortunately, I found that I relied on SKSE to get references to the lock that was being bashed and to get the base damage of the weapon being used to bash the lock. It took a while, but I managed to change that detection over to a Quest Alias. I replaced the base damage in the calculation with the weapon material of the bashing weapon to roughly equate to what it used to be.
This is the last of my existing mods that I wanted to port over the SSE. I’ll start looking at Bathing in Skyrim 2 now, but I there is a very high chance that I won’t make much progress until after SKSE64 is released.
Super Simple Needs is available now on Nexus and Bethesda.net for PC and XB1.
The space for basic needs mods is actually pretty crowded. There are some truly great basic needs out there, like iNeed, Realistic Needs and Diseases, Imps’ More Complex Needs, etc. Chesko is even making his own to go along with Frostfall.
These mods, while great, add a lot of features and restrictions that cause me to spend time managing things I don’t want to manage. They often force me to do “realistic” things that I find cumbersome. There is a lot of demand for these mods, so I understand completely why they exist. On top of that they are some of the best made mods out there. They just don’t really fit in with my style of play.
So, I made my own basic needs mod. I am not trying to compete with these mods; I just wanted a much simpler system for myself so that when I play I am hassled if I don’t take a break to eat and sleep every so often.
You can read details and find download links on the mod page here.
My first real Skyrim Special Edition mod is now released. I created a stripped down version of Bathing in Skyrim. I left out water detection to prevent conflicts with water mods. Once SKSE64 is released I will investigate recreating my water patcher to reintegrate the need to be standing in water.
Super Simple Bathing is released on Nexus and Bethesda.net for both PC and XB1. I don’t currently have an XB1 to test, so its kind of a risk. I guess I’ll learn a lesson from this pretty quickly, good or bad.
You can find download links and more information on its page here.
Next I plan to release a basic needs mods very similar to Super Simple Bathing called (creatively) Super Simple Needs that will handle hunger and tiredness. I have it complete and tested, but creating all these screenshots, titles, descriptions, etc. for the mod pages takes a lot of time.
I found a request from a PS4 user on /r/skyrimmods to make quivers invisible, so I made a mod called Invisible Quivers to test out the release process on Bethesda’s new platform: Bethesda.net.
You can find the mod here: https://mods.bethesda.net/#en/workshop/skyrim/mod-detail/3037194
Something I thought was strange was that if I want a mod to support multiple platforms I actually must upload the mod multiple times (once for each platform) and they are treated as totally unrelated mods. Even more strangely, there doesn’t seem to be a way for users to tell what platform a given mod supports at a glance; you have to actually navigate all the way into the mod page to find out what platform it’s for.
I see that some mod authors have started to help users out by prefixing mod names with the platform, like as [PS4] or [XB1]. Some have gone further and include a platform stripe as part of the box art image for the game tile.
I couldn’t find where people were getting these images from, so I made some myself. They are 65×260 which is 1/4 of the horizontal space used by the box art tile. Feel free to use them if you want. I also made some 65×65 icons.
Now that I have access to the new CreationKit, I’ve rewritten and compiled several scripts to work with Skyrim Special Edition.
Something that has always irked me is that the Papyrus compiler adds your Windows account name and PC name strings to compiled pex files. You can view these strings in a hex editor, and they get spit out by the decompiler.
It isn’t a huge deal, I just don’t really like it; so I wrote a program to cover up the strings in the compiled files. I call it AnonPex and you can find more information about it on this page: http://www.mzin.moe/?page_id=170
It doesn’t do anything fancy. No code is compiled/decompiled. It just reads the binary and changes the two strings. The string lengths are preserved, so the output should be identical to the compiled Papyrus except that all of the characters in the Windows account name and PC name fields will be question marks.
I’m super hyped about getting Skyrim Special Edition, so I wanted to make a post about it!
My ambition is to port Bathing in Skyrim 2, Poser Hotkeys, and some of my unreleased mods to the new Special Edition for everyone to use. If possible, I would love to make versions for consoles as well.
I’d like to release mods on both Skyrim Nexus and Bethesda.net.
Since it is likely that I’ll need to strip out some functionality to get these working on consoles, I will probably release two separate versions with two different feature sets.
Unfortunately, I have to wait until next week for the new Creation Kit. Today I started to look at my scripts to identify SKSE dependencies which need to be addressed. There are more than I thought there would be…
I expect to port some of my unreleased mods ahead of Bathing in Skyrim since they are much smaller in scope with less complex dependencies. This will also give me a chance to catch any new gotchas with the new system.
Here’s to another 1800 hours of Skyrim!