We'll be looking at modding a few things for Skyrim right off the bat. First is going to be making the armor sets unisix. We may leave some ceremonial armor in the game, but I doubt it. I imagine we'll have to mess with some skeleton files. Did anyone here do that for Oblivion or knows a few pointers to get started? I imagine we'll have to sort out the files piece by piece, but is it possible to just modify female character skeletons to use male sets of armor? I wonder the potential detection issues on certain pieces (armbands having a chunk of empty space between the arm and the piece of armor, etc...)

The second project we'll be working on will be damage modifiers. The intent is to bring about a realistic nature to weapon damage. The hardest part here will be armor modifiers, of course. But we may leave those alone for now. This is going to make the world of Skyrim much more lethal.

And, of course, the economy. While I think a living economy mod is too ambitious as of yet, we'll be looking at reducing currency availability and price (two gold coins are going to be hard to come by, but they will buy you a weapon or some armor). We'll also be looking at fleshing out the barter system to the point where traders might actually prefer real goods over currency.


One of the other issues we have right at the start are the shouts. We're looking into what ways we could mod them to absolute minimal availability without affecting the main quest. If you have any ideas you'd like to see, let us know.

This is a long-term mod project, and we intend to get these done in modular fashion, so there won't be a "all or nothing" type of project. We have some more ideas for down the line, but those will come out when they come out.

If you're looking at joining our team, let me know.

One easy mod that I made to Oblivion and plan to make right out of the box is a simple buy/sell mod, where the price differential is much more in the merchant's favor. That, and a loot leveling mod to reduce the amount of loot. Between the two it makes cash much harder to come by and it does so without messing too much with the underlying game mechanics.

Similarly, I did a "steel hurts" mod that rebalanced weapon damage. That one was a pain because you have to rebalance every weapon/claw/fang/spell in the game. Worth it in the end. That is something that I would not want to get into until I have played for a bit, as there is no guarantee that damage mechanics are anything like Oblivion.

Yeah, there are a lot of items in the game so modding the economy will take us a while. I think we'll release this in modular fashion as well, doing weapons first, then armour, etc.. etc...


Did you run into any universal modifier, though? I wonder if modding the difficulty will take care of the realism damage we're looking for without the painstaking task of going through each weapon and piece of armor (though I guess we can double up the modding with our plans for the economy here).

People that have played the game so far have said that money is fairly difficult to come by already. Haven't played it myself, so take that with a grain of salt.

Hehe... that's good to hear, but I doubt it.

If there's a way to make copious amounts of money in a short time without cheating, I'll find find it. In other words: challenge accepted!

Yeah it's actually easy to come by. Perhaps they're not looting much?

Levantine: to answer your question - no. I did a painstaking piece by piece revamp of every weapon in the game, using some basic rules.
Steel - with damage adjusted upwards, is the baseline.
- Iron does less damage than steel, is a bit heavier, and is more brittle. It is a poor man's steel.
- Silver is heavier, more brittle,and does less damage than steel. It's value is being able to hit "magical" creatures.
- Elven is lighter than steel and does more damage - it is the rich man's steel.
- Glass does more damage than Elven but is more brittle.
- Ebony does more damage than glass, is very durable, and a bit heavier than steel. It is very, very rare.
- Daedric is not used by humans. It is tremendously heavy and does great damage. Alternative - make it the same as ebony with more damage.

I made steel plate much more effective, much more expensive, and much more rare.
Chain was the most common heavy armor, followed by iron (only because that's what the guards wore).
Leather was the most common light armor.
Glass and up was very, very rare.

Accomplishing this took many dozens of hours of modding the weapon tables, armor tables, loot tables, and character inventories.

I went further, modeling and inserting about 15 historically accurate weapons into loot tables and character inventories. Each of these weapons had different characteristics in terms of damage, reach, and speed. That immediately added a huge variety to the stock steel weapons. I did not do any armor sets. Not sure if the work that I did will carry over into Skyrim.

Then I went further and modded the AI to produce varied reactions in humanoids.

My best suggestion: before you touch anything decide where you want to go and create the rules to get there. In my case I hated that there was such a huge differential in damage from steel up, couldn't tolerate the fact that weapon weight increased proportionately to damage, and really disliked bandits in glass.

Yes, it should be hard to hoard wealth later in the game.