I'm just asking, really. Is it a good standard operating procedure to add appropriate keywords to all new creations? Can one add TOO MANY keywords?

Is "keywording" being thoroughly practiced in the mod community already?

What are these "keywords" used for anyway? I've never used them before.

I'm not exactly sure what ALL they are used for. I know you can use them in conditions for perks/effects/enchantments, etc.

Personally, I'm trying to write a script to apply specific damage effects depending on what weapon hit a target.. I'm using keywords to determine what that weapon is. The same is true for the armor that is being hit.

In fact, some effects have conditions (such as bleeding) that only happen if the target does NOT have the keyword "ActorTypeDwarven" or something like that. The weapon Trollbane applies extra fire damage ONLY if the target has the keyword "ActorTypeTroll"

Oh, those keywords. I was thinking of something else.

I know about them and use them and it is a standard I believe. Who would want modded armour if every NPC thought you weren't wearing any clothing?

An item recipe has a "workbench keyword" property. Any workbench that has this keyword in its keyword list will then have this recipe in game.
Weapons have a WeapMaterial* keyword. This is how the UI sorts different weapon recipes into different material categories.
Vendors have a VendorItems* list which is just a list of keywords. For example, the VendorItemsFletcher list contains the VendorItemArrow keyword. All standard arrows contain this keyword, so can be bought from Fletchers.

I'm new to this community but just as a small hint: I follow the rule to prefix the EditorID of anything new I add with an abreviation of the modname followed by a underscore. Like for example "AAS_". This way I can easily find my stuff, avoid ID-Conflicts and it eases up reuse of my work for others as they don't have to go about the object window and look for anything marked with a *.

Generally keywords are a good thing. They allow for easy extensibility; scripts can be generic and don't have to be modified every time an item is added. Also, what Jason Parker said.

If a vanilla Keyword is relevant to the thing you're adding, then you should always add it. Keywords have the potential to be a great thing for compatibility - for example they could let me turn regular meat into cooked meat so long as the spell hitting them has the Keyword "MagicDamageFire". The only way, as far as I've been able to tell, in which Keywords are not particularly useful is if you make your own, as those will be inaccessible to other mods. If your mod is large enough, however, custom Keywords could still be quite useful.

They basically work like the reverse of a FormList - both allow you to look at a set of items, but to store them in a FormList you have to modify the FormList itself, whereas to use a Keyword you can leave the Keyword untouched.

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Is this true? I'm working on an archery mod where the base esp contains the new recipes, content, and workbench, and the second esp just adds the workbench to various locations in cities and elsewhere. The second esp can see the objects from the first, so wouldn't it also see keywords? Clearly this would create dependencies, but so long as load order is correct, wouldn't one mod be able to use content from another mod?

Yes, it would, but in terms of aiding compatibility in general, custom keywords would only be particularly useful to the community at large if they were bundled in an omnipresent COBL-like project.

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