I don't get too attached to my Skyrim characters, or my save games. That way if modding breaks stuff and I have to start over again I am not worried. The new life mod is excellent because even though I do enjoy the Riftwood > Bleakfalls Barrow > Whiterun start a lot, it does get old.
In particular I find it frustrating just how much I level up by the time I finally get to High Hrothgar, even if I try not to. Wolves? I've seen wolves like once on the steps, every other time its frost trolls and if I'm not careful its fucking polar bears. By the time I hit the "wide open world" point I'm already becoming really powerful. It's a whole different game if you cruise into Dawnstar as a level 1 character and start to pick up quests then as a level 20.
I tried doing a mix and match and it confused the fuck out of the game
I'd use NMM or Mod Manager for anything serious though. Steam Workshop doesn't give you any real control or the popup option menus lots of mods use.
Like any sort of dark magic, the lure of great power beyond mortal men is there but so is corruption.
I don't think I've ever failed to fuck my game up eventually.
Always need just one more mod. Just one more!
And then a set of 40 mods becomes 80.
People have gotten much better at making mods. Sticking to well made ones and not having more than one mod that handles the same thing really makes truly fucking up your game pretty hard to do.
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Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited July 2014
Anyone know of a simple mod to allow werewolf looting? Unfortunately I don't think Moonlight Tales has it built in.
Werewolf Mastery does but I don't really want the rest of it's features (I remember Dawnguard makes them extremely powerful on their own) and Werewolf Loot seems to be buggy.
Dawnguard doesn't make werewolves powerful in my experience. Still zero armor, no way to recover health except for eating corpses, and no enchantments. If you start the Companions questline very, very early you might be able to level into the perk tree and get your werewolf abilities up there before you're outpaced by mobs, but if you progress into the main questline, even just enough to get your full unrelenting force, and then start the Companions, by the time you become a werewolf you're no match for anything other than a lone bandit or possibly a duo. Unless one of them is an archer, in which case not.
I don't think werewolfing is quite that dire. I mean, it's harder than running around with full enchanted armor capped gear, etc. But really, those power attacks are civilization and the new tree is pretty solid.
I just see it as something goofy to pull off once in a while now that I've maxed it. But I don't feel super gimped when I do it.
If you're a werewolf/vampire lord and make progress in the perk tree, then cure yourself, do you retain those perks should you later become reinfected?
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WhiteZinfandelYour insidesLet me show you themRegistered Userregular
My God, the 'best friend' perk in sperg is ridiculously good. That pet can hold so much loot it's not even funny.
And best of all, if the pet has issues getting to where you are, after a while they just teleport to you, which is absolutely essential in any sort of open world game if you want companions to be of any use whatsoever. I don't care if it's immersion-breaking. A teleporting dog is less-immersion-breaking to me than watching a companion facebump on geometry uselessly forever until I give up and fast travel or send them home.
-edit-
Can also confirm that werewolf perks will be saved if you get re-infected. It's stated in both wikis that it is so.
Bear in mind that you can only be cursed twice and cured twice. The second time you cure your lycanthropy it's cured for good. I imagine Aela doesn't appreciate you treating Hircine's gift like a toggle switch.
Dawnguard doesn't make werewolves powerful in my experience. Still zero armor, no way to recover health except for eating corpses, and no enchantments. If you start the Companions questline very, very early you might be able to level into the perk tree and get your werewolf abilities up there before you're outpaced by mobs, but if you progress into the main questline, even just enough to get your full unrelenting force, and then start the Companions, by the time you become a werewolf you're no match for anything other than a lone bandit or possibly a duo. Unless one of them is an archer, in which case not.
Eh I think you might be kinda off on this. Werewolf form is all about knockdowns and crowd control in general. Playing Vanilla it's basically godmode in the beginning. It doesn't scale very well at all but at the start it's pretty much the best. And I say this as someone who isn't a fan of it. But when I actually forced myself to use it a little? I was breezing through everything because nothing can kill me if it's lying on it's back trying to stand back up while I maul it. Ranged enemies are a serious problem for sure but usually you can abuse the terrain to force them to get within knockdown distance\.
If anything I found that the biggest drawback to werewolf form isn't combat, it's everything else.
I'll have to try low level werewolf some time maybe. I've never done it, my experience is all later on when it falls very far short of what you can do with like, orcish gear, let alone gear beyond that.
I've never had any issues with brawling with SPERG. I don't think I have a patch for it, either.
That's swell. But it's a known issue, and I'm experiencing it.
I assume you have the Brawl Bugs Patch installed and it's still happening, because the same thing happened to me. I read in the comments for that mod and I saw someone post a modified file for it. I downloaded that and installed it, and the problem was solved. The post is right here
The person does say that it basically disables everything that causes a brawl to turn into an actual assault and fight, but it's better than brawls not working at all and we've already covered in this thread how it's easy to avoid cheating by simply not cheating.
Tried brawling with this re-patch last night and it worked. I am finally able to brawl now. The issue seems to be that the more recent revisions of the brawl bugs patch tried to "fix" their own fix to make it more restrictive (to keep people from cheating) and in the process made their own brawl patch junk, apparently unless every mod maker sets up their mod to to follow the brawl bugs patch code, the brawl bugs patch will call any persistent perk effects (which the game considers spells by default) cheating.
The re-patch basically tells the brawl bugs patch to stop being a fucking busy body and just do its job.
I don't get why anyone would cheat at a brawl. It's basically the easiest thing in the game. Just back up out of their reach then move in and punch their face. Even if you have no health and do crap punching damage it'll just take time rather than be at all difficult.
I guess "solving a problem that doesn't exist" is pretty much the M.O. of fan patches in general.
From what I've searched for the popular alternate start mods that skip the Helgen sequence are Alternate Start - Live Another Life and Skyrim Unbound. Any recommendations of which to use or others?
I'm guessing that installing any kind of alternate start mod would mess up any existing saves so I'm going to play my current character a bit more before starting a new one with an alternate start mod.
Alternate Start basically doubled my play time with the game.
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Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
Alternate Start is usually considered the best but I don't like it's how messing with Helgen these days.
Usually it would just throw up the message about hearing about dragon attacks and to go to whiterun but now it does this whole thing where you have to go back to Helgen and it apparently causes problems with Helgen Reborn now.
From what I've searched for the popular alternate start mods that skip the Helgen sequence are Alternate Start - Live Another Life and Skyrim Unbound. Any recommendations of which to use or others?
I'm guessing that installing any kind of alternate start mod would mess up any existing saves so I'm going to play my current character a bit more before starting a new one with an alternate start mod.
I use the 'Live Another Life' mod and I think its great. While it doesn't directly provide a lot of quests and dialogue, it does a wonderful job of starting you out. In order to get the full experience of each 'new life' requires some personal roleplaying on your part though. If you just use the mod and proceed that way, it just lets you skip the intro and starts you in different locations with different gear. But the opportunity to create characters whose paths diverge greatly from a vanilla Skyrim playthrough is substantial.
As far as Helgen Reborn goes, that mod says right in the opening that it doesn't play nice with the vanilla start to begin with.
You are supposed to start a new game with that mod unloaded, and then load it up some time later in your playthrough.
Just start your game with the "alternate start/new life" and don't load in Helgen until after you have progressed the new life past the point where Helgen is relevant. That should work.
-edit- from the mod page:
This mod is 100% compatible with Alternate Start - Live Another life, but again, there are a couple of things I highly suggest you do before speaking to Marcus. As with the vanilla start above, I suggest you make sure the bandits are at the fort. In addition to the bandits, I suggest you run through the keep to make absolutely certain that the 2nd rock collapse added by Arthmoor has been disabled. It should disable when the bandits show up, but I suggest you verify it first hand. So follow Arthmoor's procedure for resetting the vanilla quest, check the fort to be sure you have bandits, and check the keep for the rubble pile and you should be good to go!
tldr; Helgen Reborn is absolutely not intended to be installed when you initiate any new game, whether using alternate start or not.
As far as Helgen Reborn goes, that mod says right in the opening that it doesn't play nice with the vanilla start to begin with.
You are supposed to start a new game with that mod unloaded, and then load it up some time later in your playthrough.
Just start your game with the "alternate start/new life" and don't load in Helgen until after you have progressed the new life past the point where Helgen is relevant. That should work.
-edit- from the mod page:
This mod is 100% compatible with Alternate Start - Live Another life, but again, there are a couple of things I highly suggest you do before speaking to Marcus. As with the vanilla start above, I suggest you make sure the bandits are at the fort. In addition to the bandits, I suggest you run through the keep to make absolutely certain that the 2nd rock collapse added by Arthmoor has been disabled. It should disable when the bandits show up, but I suggest you verify it first hand. So follow Arthmoor's procedure for resetting the vanilla quest, check the fort to be sure you have bandits, and check the keep for the rubble pile and you should be good to go!
tldr; Helgen Reborn is absolutely not intended to be installed when you initiate any new game, whether using alternate start or not.
Alternate Start is great. One caveat, one of the starts (necromancer or something, not thrall) is in a hut in Blackreach. I stepped outside and a dwemer automaton slaughtered me. I tried most of the starts briefly and didn't run into that issue with any of the others—I was also running Duel so that may have made it worse.
Overall, though, awesome mod. I hate sitting through Oblivion and Skyrim's prisoner intros (Morrowind's, on the other hand, was blissfully short).
Alternate Start is great. One caveat, one of the starts (necromancer or something, not thrall) is in a hut in Blackreach. I stepped outside and a dwemer automaton slaughtered me. I tried most of the starts briefly and didn't run into that issue with any of the others—I was also running Duel so that may have made it worse.
Overall, though, awesome mod. I hate sitting through Oblivion and Skyrim's prisoner intros (Morrowind's, on the other hand, was blissfully short).
In the readme file it mentions under the necromancer start that there is a dwemer sphere nearby and you must be prepared.
Interestingly, I tried the 'thrall' start briefly and despite the warnings in the readme file I found it totally easy to slaughter both necromancers with my level 1 character and then take all their stuff.
-edit-
To be clear: I think what he's getting at with the "be prepared" is actually "be prepared to run past it". Like the dwemer sphere in Cinda Mine, it's basically impossible to fight it under most circumstances but anyone can outrun it.
Alternate Start is great. One caveat, one of the starts (necromancer or something, not thrall) is in a hut in Blackreach. I stepped outside and a dwemer automaton slaughtered me. I tried most of the starts briefly and didn't run into that issue with any of the others—I was also running Duel so that may have made it worse.
Overall, though, awesome mod. I hate sitting through Oblivion and Skyrim's prisoner intros (Morrowind's, on the other hand, was blissfully short).
This does happen. I AM NECROMANCER
HELLO I AM DWEMER CENTURION
*unending screams of pain*
Bless your heart.
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Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
Pretty much a perfect first person beast mode, finally got it after all this time. No problems so far.
Some neat other stuff aswell.
How does this compare to Immersive First Person view? I tried that and while I liked it, it was very tedious to setup and I still couldn't get comfortable with things like sneaking.
Pretty much a perfect first person beast mode, finally got it after all this time. No problems so far.
Some neat other stuff aswell.
How does this compare to Immersive First Person view? I tried that and while I liked it, it was very tedious to setup and I still couldn't get comfortable with things like sneaking.
I just installed it via nexus mod manager and it set itself up fine.
You can also disable things like head bobbing and whatnot via the mod menu.
Pretty much a perfect first person beast mode, finally got it after all this time. No problems so far.
Some neat other stuff aswell.
How does this compare to Immersive First Person view? I tried that and while I liked it, it was very tedious to setup and I still couldn't get comfortable with things like sneaking.
It doesn't compare at all. Immersive First Person view is complete trash compared to it. How Enhanced Camera does what it does without any scripting I don't know, but it works beautifully in every situation.
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Fleebhas all of the fleeb juiceRegistered Userregular
To be clear: I think what he's getting at with the "be prepared" is actually "be prepared to run past it". Like the dwemer sphere in Cinda Mine, it's basically impossible to fight it under most circumstances but anyone can outrun it.
Yep, I actually enjoy that about what little I've seen of Alternate Start: you're just thrown into the world and there's a much bigger sense of danger than playing thru the regular start for the 15th time. Escaping Blackreach is scary (especially if you're not sure which way to leave) and you need to run for your damned life from that sphere. Preferably with some kind of minion distracting it.
From what I've searched for the popular alternate start mods that skip the Helgen sequence are Alternate Start - Live Another Life and Skyrim Unbound. Any recommendations of which to use or others?
I'm guessing that installing any kind of alternate start mod would mess up any existing saves so I'm going to play my current character a bit more before starting a new one with an alternate start mod.
Skyrim Unbound is definitely the better one. They seem to have similar options, but Unbound ties into the main quest far more organically and lets you have dragons flying around right from the beginning if you want. You can even turn off soul absorption, so you can be just some dude running around Skyrim instead of the dragonborn (you can also turn it on whenever you want).
I'll have to try low level werewolf some time maybe. I've never done it, my experience is all later on when it falls very far short of what you can do with like, orcish gear, let alone gear beyond that.
Oh yeah it's crap later on. I could see it as being sorta viable if you'd picked up most of the perks and really mastered the knockdowns maybe? But you'd be playing a very high risk game because you can't take many hits at all so your survivability would be pretty much 100% making sure everything is CC'd until dead.
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Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
Also, heres a review for Enhanced camera that goes over the differences between it and IFPC.
Pretty much a perfect first person beast mode, finally got it after all this time. No problems so far.
Some neat other stuff aswell.
How does this compare to Immersive First Person view? I tried that and while I liked it, it was very tedious to setup and I still couldn't get comfortable with things like sneaking.
It doesn't compare at all. Immersive First Person view is complete trash compared to it. How Enhanced Camera does what it does without any scripting I don't know, but it works beautifully in every situation.
It's not really that simple. Enhanced Camera is an enhanced vanilla camera, and it's going to be preferable for the majority of people because it's less finicky. Immersive First Person View, however, is something else entirely. It's capable of feeling a lot more natural once you're past the wonkiness. It's mostly a question of how much effort you're willing to put into setup, because IFPV takes a lot of fiddling.
I spent a lot of time with IFPV, and it was never anything but wonky for me. The way it implements the changes, it just puts the camera in the head of the third person model then vanishes the head. The problem is the third person animations weren't meant to be seen from that angle so it looks like crap. Anything with a weapon or magic drawn just looked terrible, so I ended up just using vanilla first person in those situations. That ended up being about 75% of my playtime because Skyrim is mostly combat, and so I was wondering why I even had the mod installed at all.
Enhanced Camera just works right off the bat and looks great no matter what, because it just takes the first person view of the hands and arms and keeps them in the view while also rendering the body underneath you.
Trying out the enhanced camera, it may be what I was looking for. I have been trying to play in 3rd person more because I want to actually see my character, but it's super horrible for pretty much everything.
MongerI got the ham stink.Dallas, TXRegistered Userregular
IFPV is best used with modded animations, and it takes a bunch of tweaking to get the camera positioned correctly. By default, it's pushed too far out, among other problems. Again, a lot of fiddling.
Personally, I prefer third person weapon animations to having my hands glued to my face. It did take some time to adapt to the change in visual feedback, sure, but looked and felt completely natural once I did. Headbob that's accurate to third person movement is also a big deal for me, though it's also heavily dependent upon mod settings, custom animations, and how prone you are to motion sickness (I'm not at all).
The only thing that I couldn't work around with IFPV is helmets. Some helmets cause problems. Most everything else is fixable with enough tweaking or a matter of taste.
Dr. ChaosPost nuclear nuisanceRegistered Userregular
edited July 2014
You know what I miss from Oblivion (and thats not something you'll ever hear me say except for once or twice)?
The profile shot of your character you got when you brought up the menus. That and the charming sort of ye olde design of the font, interface and colors.
Skyrim has a very basic black and white setup to it. It's nice and clean but almost completely lacks any personality.
MongerI got the ham stink.Dallas, TXRegistered Userregular
Main Font Replacement helps give the interface a bit of flavor. I use Centaur. SkyUI's Celtic icon set also helps.
Not much you can do beyond that, though. Skyrim's UI was made in Flash, and very few people have had any success in editing it without completely breaking everything.
Posts
I'd use NMM or Mod Manager for anything serious though. Steam Workshop doesn't give you any real control or the popup option menus lots of mods use.
I don't think I've ever failed to fuck my game up eventually.
Always need just one more mod. Just one more!
And then a set of 40 mods becomes 80.
In particular I find it frustrating just how much I level up by the time I finally get to High Hrothgar, even if I try not to. Wolves? I've seen wolves like once on the steps, every other time its frost trolls and if I'm not careful its fucking polar bears. By the time I hit the "wide open world" point I'm already becoming really powerful. It's a whole different game if you cruise into Dawnstar as a level 1 character and start to pick up quests then as a level 20.
People have gotten much better at making mods. Sticking to well made ones and not having more than one mod that handles the same thing really makes truly fucking up your game pretty hard to do.
Werewolf Mastery does but I don't really want the rest of it's features (I remember Dawnguard makes them extremely powerful on their own) and Werewolf Loot seems to be buggy.
I just see it as something goofy to pull off once in a while now that I've maxed it. But I don't feel super gimped when I do it.
And best of all, if the pet has issues getting to where you are, after a while they just teleport to you, which is absolutely essential in any sort of open world game if you want companions to be of any use whatsoever. I don't care if it's immersion-breaking. A teleporting dog is less-immersion-breaking to me than watching a companion facebump on geometry uselessly forever until I give up and fast travel or send them home.
-edit-
Can also confirm that werewolf perks will be saved if you get re-infected. It's stated in both wikis that it is so.
Bear in mind that you can only be cursed twice and cured twice. The second time you cure your lycanthropy it's cured for good. I imagine Aela doesn't appreciate you treating Hircine's gift like a toggle switch.
Eh I think you might be kinda off on this. Werewolf form is all about knockdowns and crowd control in general. Playing Vanilla it's basically godmode in the beginning. It doesn't scale very well at all but at the start it's pretty much the best. And I say this as someone who isn't a fan of it. But when I actually forced myself to use it a little? I was breezing through everything because nothing can kill me if it's lying on it's back trying to stand back up while I maul it. Ranged enemies are a serious problem for sure but usually you can abuse the terrain to force them to get within knockdown distance\.
If anything I found that the biggest drawback to werewolf form isn't combat, it's everything else.
Tried brawling with this re-patch last night and it worked. I am finally able to brawl now. The issue seems to be that the more recent revisions of the brawl bugs patch tried to "fix" their own fix to make it more restrictive (to keep people from cheating) and in the process made their own brawl patch junk, apparently unless every mod maker sets up their mod to to follow the brawl bugs patch code, the brawl bugs patch will call any persistent perk effects (which the game considers spells by default) cheating.
The re-patch basically tells the brawl bugs patch to stop being a fucking busy body and just do its job.
I guess "solving a problem that doesn't exist" is pretty much the M.O. of fan patches in general.
I'm guessing that installing any kind of alternate start mod would mess up any existing saves so I'm going to play my current character a bit more before starting a new one with an alternate start mod.
I thought it was a nice change of pace.
Usually it would just throw up the message about hearing about dragon attacks and to go to whiterun but now it does this whole thing where you have to go back to Helgen and it apparently causes problems with Helgen Reborn now.
I use the 'Live Another Life' mod and I think its great. While it doesn't directly provide a lot of quests and dialogue, it does a wonderful job of starting you out. In order to get the full experience of each 'new life' requires some personal roleplaying on your part though. If you just use the mod and proceed that way, it just lets you skip the intro and starts you in different locations with different gear. But the opportunity to create characters whose paths diverge greatly from a vanilla Skyrim playthrough is substantial.
You are supposed to start a new game with that mod unloaded, and then load it up some time later in your playthrough.
Just start your game with the "alternate start/new life" and don't load in Helgen until after you have progressed the new life past the point where Helgen is relevant. That should work.
-edit- from the mod page:
tldr; Helgen Reborn is absolutely not intended to be installed when you initiate any new game, whether using alternate start or not.
You've made a powerful enemy this day, Regina.
Overall, though, awesome mod. I hate sitting through Oblivion and Skyrim's prisoner intros (Morrowind's, on the other hand, was blissfully short).
In the readme file it mentions under the necromancer start that there is a dwemer sphere nearby and you must be prepared.
Interestingly, I tried the 'thrall' start briefly and despite the warnings in the readme file I found it totally easy to slaughter both necromancers with my level 1 character and then take all their stuff.
-edit-
To be clear: I think what he's getting at with the "be prepared" is actually "be prepared to run past it". Like the dwemer sphere in Cinda Mine, it's basically impossible to fight it under most circumstances but anyone can outrun it.
This does happen. I AM NECROMANCER
HELLO I AM DWEMER CENTURION
*unending screams of pain*
Pretty much a perfect first person beast mode, finally got it after all this time. No problems so far.
Some neat other stuff aswell.
How does this compare to Immersive First Person view? I tried that and while I liked it, it was very tedious to setup and I still couldn't get comfortable with things like sneaking.
Shogun Streams Vidya
You can also disable things like head bobbing and whatnot via the mod menu.
It doesn't compare at all. Immersive First Person view is complete trash compared to it. How Enhanced Camera does what it does without any scripting I don't know, but it works beautifully in every situation.
Ooo nifty. I've been using Immersive First Person or whatever it's called. This looks slightly better.
Yep, I actually enjoy that about what little I've seen of Alternate Start: you're just thrown into the world and there's a much bigger sense of danger than playing thru the regular start for the 15th time. Escaping Blackreach is scary (especially if you're not sure which way to leave) and you need to run for your damned life from that sphere. Preferably with some kind of minion distracting it.
Skyrim Unbound is definitely the better one. They seem to have similar options, but Unbound ties into the main quest far more organically and lets you have dragons flying around right from the beginning if you want. You can even turn off soul absorption, so you can be just some dude running around Skyrim instead of the dragonborn (you can also turn it on whenever you want).
Steam: MightyPotatoKing
Oh yeah it's crap later on. I could see it as being sorta viable if you'd picked up most of the perks and really mastered the knockdowns maybe? But you'd be playing a very high risk game because you can't take many hits at all so your survivability would be pretty much 100% making sure everything is CC'd until dead.
This should be listed as a feature.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.
Enhanced Camera just works right off the bat and looks great no matter what, because it just takes the first person view of the hands and arms and keeps them in the view while also rendering the body underneath you.
Personally, I prefer third person weapon animations to having my hands glued to my face. It did take some time to adapt to the change in visual feedback, sure, but looked and felt completely natural once I did. Headbob that's accurate to third person movement is also a big deal for me, though it's also heavily dependent upon mod settings, custom animations, and how prone you are to motion sickness (I'm not at all).
The only thing that I couldn't work around with IFPV is helmets. Some helmets cause problems. Most everything else is fixable with enough tweaking or a matter of taste.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.
The profile shot of your character you got when you brought up the menus. That and the charming sort of ye olde design of the font, interface and colors.
Skyrim has a very basic black and white setup to it. It's nice and clean but almost completely lacks any personality.
Not much you can do beyond that, though. Skyrim's UI was made in Flash, and very few people have had any success in editing it without completely breaking everything.
All right, people. It is not a gerbil. It is not a hamster. It is not a guinea pig. It is a death rabbit. Death. Rabbit. Say it with me, now.