» Mon Feb 18, 2013 4:55 am In a mythic age long past, I released a paltry scrap of a mod called http://skyrim.nexusmods.com/mods/2585. I was wary of dedicating untold hours to the Skyrim mod scene, as I had with Oblivion; but this seemed like such an easy fix to two huge problems with the casting role (abysmal high-level scaling, and the 100%-cost-reduction enchanting exploit) that I went ahead and cobbled it together with TESsnip.
A few unique item descriptions needed editing, and I tweaked the skill-based cost reduction values a bit since the vanilla high-level skill costs seemed way too high without some reduction. Because spell power was now something you wore all the time, instead of an occasional boost from a potion, it quickly became apparent that a great many constant, passive effects were, quite inappropriately, scaling with whatever spell power you had at the moment they were applied. This was also a reasonably simple fix: strip the spell school and they stop scaling. So, still in TESsnip, I did that too.
That was the final version of tSSSSS. It was hacked together with primitive tools. It caused odd conflicts with other magic mods. It edited far more magic effects than it needed to, because I had no way of figuring out what most of them did so I just snipped the school from everything I didn't recognize as a spell. And I'm quite certain it broke a few things outright.
A year passed and, indeed, I avoided the temptation of modding. Mostly, I did this by not playing Skyrim. I'd suppressed so many ideas during my first playthrough, I knew I wouldn't be able to hold back if I were in this game when the CK was released. Dawnguard and Hearthfire passed uneventfully... I bought them, but never once launched the game. Dragonborn was the most alluring yet, but I was steeled to resist even the siren song of netches and bonemold armor. Unfortunately, I didn't anticipate Hermaeus Mora conspiring with my wife. It seems that playing through the Apocrypha is mandatory to my continued domestic tranquility. So, with heavy heart, I held my breath and fell off the wagon.
And hey, if I'm gonna I do something, I don't hold back. I dove into the mod forums before starting a new character, scanning the first dozen pages for anything interesting, and following secondary leads from those threads. I put together a small but focused load list. But in the process, I made a discovery: tSSSSS is still in use, even still recommended by some people. This was simultaneously flattering and horrifying: it was a quick-and-dirty stopgap, I expected it to be replaced by something clean and focused within a week of the CK's release!
So, the first thing I did was go through all those effect edits which weren't actually part of the mod's function, figure out which ones were genuinely necessary, do them properly in the CK, and submit them to Arthmoor for inclusion in the USKP where they actually belong. (In the process I found and fixed some issues with poison resistance, too.) The current betas of USKP and UDBP have those fixes, and the next UDGP should have a couple as well. So if you happen to be one of those folks still using tSSSSS: the "minimal" 1.4 version, plus the latest USKP beta, is now recommended over the "final" 2.02 version.
Moving forward... well, here we are. As mentioned above, I had quite a few ideas back then. Borealis was the name I had assigned to a more in-depth revision of both alchemy and enchantment, absorbing tSSSSS (which already affects both). It turns out that Phitt had almost identical ideas for alchemy, and he's given me his blessing to pillage his Alchemy and Food Overhaul. The enchantment side will be a very similar set of changes. Mysty's Balanced Magic, which was an ambitious young project when I left, has grown to be quite impressive, and it appears to live up to its name; as it's still in active development, I hope to build around it rather than compete or duplicate her work. And of course, my thoughts have also revisited the biggest topics I addressed in Oblivion: races, birthsigns (here, stones), and the leveling system.
As always, I've got one eye scanning between diversity and fun, and the other fixed on balance. One of the biggest things I learned from my time modding Oblivion is just how fragile balance can be in a big, complex system. A tiny change in one place can have massive consequences elsewhere. Heck, just look at tSSSSS: it's a massive change to the spellcasting system... which doesn't actually touch the spellcasting system. In a vacuum, it's got zero net effect on the overall power of either alchemy or enchanting, or their balance with each other; but in the big picture, the results are huge. Because of this, I've decided that Borealis will not attempt to be a small, focused mod. Instead, it will be the family name for all my Skyrim mods that might affect balance outside their scope. In Oblivion, I tried to assume that for any given mod, everything else was vanilla. Here, not so. While I'll still try to break them up as much as possible for compatibility reasons, the assumption will always be that if you're using one, you're using them all.
