MULTI The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (+ Special Edition) (1 Betrachter)

BTB's Game Improvements - MAIN README

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

1. MOD DESCRIPTION
2. TECHNICAL INFO
3. CONFLICTS & COMPATIBILITY
4. CREDITS & CLOSING

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1. MOD DESCRIPTION




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The purpose of this mod is to radically change several aspects of the game that I felt to be highly imbalanced: birthsigns, racial bonuses, skill progression rates, spell effects, and the premade spells. I've since expanded it to deal with alchemy ingredients, potions, equipment, enchantments, and other game settings, as well. The result is a game that's hopefully more rewarding due to a better sense of balance and progression in addition to a much better sense of replayability due to the more pronounced effects that your initial choices of character selection should now have.

BTB's Game Improvements is largely based on the well-known "Wakim's Game Improvements" mod, as you might have guessed from the name. The alchemy module, in turn, was conceived as the spiritual successor to its direct counterpart in HotFusion's "Economy Adjuster" mod. Many of the changes made by this mod are either inspired by or taken directly from the above-mentioned ones, and I thus prefer to think of my work as a continuation of what was started by Wakim and HotFusion - what started as a few tweaks to Wakim's Game Improvements quickly grew so large in scope that it evolved into what you see here.

Taking a hint from both Wakim's Game Improvements and Economy Adjuster (and about a few dozen other mods since), I've broken my mod up into five separate modules that can be used independently from one another so that players can choose which of my changes they want to use. Of course, just so you know, I'll be deeply offended and hurt if you don't use all of them. Really.

The five plugins that make up BTB's Game Improvements are:

• The "Character" plugin: edits the game's birthsigns and races. It also includes a script that allows stat bonuses provided by birthsigns to extend beyond the 100-point limit.

• The "Spells" plugin: edits magic effects and pre-made spells, sets new starting spells, and adds several new NPC-only spells.

• The "Alchemy" plugin: edits the effects, values, and weights of alchemy ingredients and the pre-made potions, as well as renaming the pre-made potions to a more standardized format. It is one of the two modules that require both expansions.

• The "Equipment" plugin: reduces the value of the game's most expensive items, adjusts the armor ratings on most of the game's armor for better balance amongst the three types, tweaks a few other settings for various pieces of equipment, and edits the enchantments on the majority of the game's items, scrolls, artifacts, and unique/magical equipment. It also disables bartering with Creeper and the talking Mudcrabs. This is the other plugin that requires both expansions.

• The "Settings" plugin: edits game settings (GMSTs) and skill progression rates, as well as repair items and soul gems/paper. It also adds soul gems to some merchants and adds new guards.

All of the changes made by each plugin are listed in their respective "Changes" files, and that's pretty much all you really need to know here. If you'd like to know more about the reasoning or motivation behind the changes I've made, keep reading. Otherwise, just go check out the changelogs.

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"CHARACTER" PLUGIN:

Essentially the flagship module of my mod, the "Character" plugin is the one that sort of started it all by aiming to make all of the game's birthsigns actually useful, while also doing the same thing to the selection of races. The overall goal was to make character creation a process which has a much more lasting impact throughout the entire game rather than a handful of minor bonuses and/or setbacks that won't really matter a few hours (or, in some cases, minutes) in to it. Inspired by such games as the original Final Fantasy, where vastly different experiences could be had depending on your decisions at the outset of the game, I set out to take the high replay value that comes along with such a concept and add that value to a game whose replay potential was already through the roof.

For birthsigns, my focus was largely on making them all not suck. It bothers me that most of the signs conveyed bonuses that would quickly be obsoleted, rendering only a few of them actually useful. One of them - The Atronach - stood head and shoulders above all the others. The "drawback" of stunted magicka could easily be worked around by most players, and the defensive bonus that it conveyed was such that one could simply walk into Mordor at the outset of the game. So, using The Atronach as a benchmark of awesomeness, I set out to make all of the game's signs useful and appealing.

My goal then became to allow each birthsign to convey a bonus that remained useful throughout the entire game, but without being too overpowered. My first tool in this endeavor was a script provided by SpcetaclesOfDoom, dubbed "Level-Up Birthsign Remover". It is so named because it removes your birthsign just prior to leveling up and then adds it right back immediately thereafter, therefore allowing stat bonuses provided by birthsigns to carry over the 100-point limit. Even with this script, however, the stat-boosting birthsigns don't become truly useful until you factor in the changes made by the other modules, which make it harder to abuse stat-boosting spells and potions (the "Spells" and "Alchemy" plugins) and tone down the insanely overpowered stat-boosting items (the "Equipment" plugin).

Taking an idea from Wakim, I also added stat boosts to The Lord, The Thief, The Warrior, and The Mage. Changing The Lady's endurance boost to willpower then provided us with a full set of birthsign bonuses to every attribute. As a rather interesting result of these changes in particular, the three "ruling" birthsigns (The Warrior, The Thief, and The Mage) now offer the simplest, most straightforward bonuses. This is just one of many changes made by my mod that ended up being surprisingly lore-appropriate.

All of the negative birthsign effects save the The Atronach's stunted magicka were removed, as I felt that birthsigns should be a bonus to your character, not a penalty. This change is very pronounced in several of the signs: The Lord, which is no longer gimped to the point of making you worse off for choosing it; The Apprentice, whose magicka boost was actually lowered to compensate; and The Serpent, whose barely-recognizeable Star-Curse now more closely resembles the Imperial Star of the West power.

Another sweeping change is that all of the spells provided by birthsigns (and also by races) have been converted into either powers or abilities. This helps to make their benefits more distinguished from the myriad of regular spells you'll encounter in the game, as well as allowing them to be more powerful since, in the case of powers, their usage is more limited. Blood Of The North and Star-Curse are both examples of spells that were made into much more potent powers, while Beggar's Nose is an example of a spell that was deemed better suited as a permanent ability.

I also wanted to make other signs able to directly compete with The Atronach in terms of magic defense, hence the new Wizard's Brand power on The Apprentice and the 50-point reflection effect on Mara's Gift. On the physical defense side of things is The Shadow, which is the only sign that now actually becomes more powerful as the game progresses, due to the exponential nature of the unarmored skill. A GMST edit in the "Settings" plugin adds more punch to it by raising the unarmored skill's overall effectiveness, but I'll talk more about that when we get to the section for the "Settings" plugin.

Of them all, The Steed was probably the hardest sign to think of anything useful for, since there was little I could do to enhance its effects without straying into ridiculous territory - the addition of a feather ability eventually struck me as an appropriate compromise. A close second was The Tower, since I wanted to make the open effect more useful without raising the magnitude or turning it into a spell. The obvious solution at that point was to switch Tower Key to a fortify security effect. Again, the "Settings" plugin helps out by making raising your Security skill more useful than before.

For races, my aim was to make them all more distinct from each other. As with the birthsigns, I wanted each race to have at least some benefit that couldn't be replicated or rendered useless ten minutes into the game. Very few of the original racial abilities were useful enough to influence a player's decision, and the starting stats and skill bonuses were hardly noticeable at best (any deficiency could more than easily be overcome within the span of a few levels). Stats and bonuses were adjusted, racial abilities and powers were overhauled, and each race now has at least one power to call its own.

In addition to several new ones, every existing racial power has been modified to be in some way more useful than before - even the few that were toned down for being too overpowered. Voice of The Emperor got a 50-foot area of effect to compensate for the lowered magnitude, Adrenaline Rush gained two new boosts (willpower and acrobatics) to ease the mag drop from 50 to 25, and Beserk got thorough overhaul since the agility drain combined with fortify fatigue effect made it more useful as a bartering tool (more on that later) than as a battle buff. Dragon Skin is also arguably less useful now, but only to dipshits who can't see how awesome four shields at once is (also, as was the case with The Shadow and The Tower, Dragon Skin becomes far more powerful via a GMST edit made in the "Settings" plugin).

On the subject of actually making powers more powerful, I threw in a number of new effects to not only make them stronger, but also expensive enough that you couldn't just custom-build an identical spell. Thunder Fist, for example, becomes BLINDingly more powerful, and Star of the West is now more absorbant than both Charmin and Brawny. I particularly like the added silence effect to Eye of Fear, which I feel makes it a far more versatile power than it was before. The addition of an ancestor ghost summon to Ancestor Guardian was mostly for shits and giggles, and the less said about Beast Tongue, the better.

In other aspects, however, I was far less creative. Large area effects seem to be what I resorted to when I couldn't think of anything better to jack up the cost, and most of the new powers appear to be heavily inspired by Adrenaline Rush (most noticeably Black Death and Arcane Ancestry). Arcane Ancestry, in particular, was the result of attempting to make Altmers more appealing versus Bretons and the magicka-boosting birthsigns, though it's been seriously toned down from its earlier incarnations that tended to allow things like God's Fire at level 1. Then there's Eye of Valenwood, which was originally called "Eye of Legolas" (it still is in the editor) - basically, author shorthand for "insert better name here later". The name stuck until complaints starting rolling in about "LotR in my Morrowind".

One side effect of these massively more powerful powers that I should probably mention here is how they relate to a recent feature of the Morrowind Code Patch that allows NPCs to use their racial powers in battle, where previously the AI was far too retarded for them to do so. Some advice: pass on that fix if you're using this plugin. The reasons for this should be obvious enough, but if they aren't, they will be the moment you get your ass kicked five ways from Sunday by the first non-Wood Elf NPC you meet.

Also, as noted earlier, birthsigns and races no longer provide spells - they've all been converted into either powers or abilities. I bring this up now because there are two racial spells turned abilities worthy of particular note: Argonian Water Breathing and the Khajiit Eye of Night. Many players are of the belief that a permanent water breathing effect will break a certain quest in the game. It doesn't. Regarding the latter, I've put an alternate version of the "Character" plugin that omits the Khajiit Eye of Night edit inside the "extra stuff" folder for people who dislike the permanent night-eye look.

Resistances were also dealt with. Just as I did with powers, each race was made strong against at least something, the sole exception in this case being High Elves, who actually lose the only beneficial part of their AIDS cocktail. I made it a goal to balance all of the weaknesses accordingly, so that no one element was more useful than the others. Lightning damage seemed to be the most universally effective, so Imperials got a 75% resistance to it that mirrors the fire resistance of that other race which makes up 90% of the NPCs you encounter. Khajiit now resist frost with those warm coats of theirs, and Orcs gain a small resistance to both fire and normal weapons to reinforce their role as a defensive race. Straight-up magicka resistance was left alone (save Wood Elves being given an immunity to paralysis in yet another attempt to make them no longer suck) since non-elemental damage is already balanced out by being more expensive to dish out. Ditto for poison, which was more or less in the same boat.

On a somewhat-related note, I stopped just short of turning the Redguard disease resistance into a disease weakness. This was mostly due to the fact that the "Settings" plugin doubles the chances of catching disease, and I figured that anything beyond that would just be cruel. In retrospect, it was probably also a good call from a P.R. standpoint (not that I give two shits about being politically correct, but I get enough hate mail as is). I settled with just removing the disease resistance, which now exists in only two of the four races that originally had it (and it thus has more meaning now).

The combined starting stat totals for each race are now lower than before, with some attributes now starting as low as 20: enough to actually be a noticeable handicap. Aside from the obvious problem of making it (more) difficult to join certain factions right off the damn boat, a value that low for just about any stat can be a huge pain in the ass in its own right. Favored stats or birthsigns can help to compensate, of course, but at the cost of not overpowering another stat. To keep things simple, I set the same stats for both genders of each race and didn't edit the starting luck value for any of them.

To make up for for the lower overall stats, each race now has a full set of seven skill bonuses, all raised to 10 across the board (turning them up to 11, or any higher for that matter, would make it possible to start out with minor skills at higher levels than major ones). As much change as it may seem like, however, I still ended up remaining surprisingly faithful to the game's original settings.

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"SPELLS" PLUGIN:

In short, almost none of the game's pre-made spells are auto-calculated anymore. All of them are now not only powerful enough to actually be useful, but tend to cost around 50%-80% of what they would have had you custom-made the same spell. While you'll still have to go that route to get your hands on the most powerful spells in the game (for the most part, anyway), at least the ones available for purchase now have a bigger draw than simply acquiring the effect for the purposes of spellmaking or enchanting.

The shift away from auto-calculation also has a second, less-obvious purpose. Certain NPCs (okay, most NPCs) have the ability to cast any spell that's flagged as "auto-calculate", which in the default rules is pretty much all of them. Thus, as a direct result of providing better spells for the player to use, I've also gotten rid of the shitty spells that auto-calculated NPCs were actually supposed to use.

Confused? Under the default rules, thanks to nearly everything being auto-calculated, both the player and most NPCs had access to just about the exact same pool of worthless pre-made pells - the ones that weren't underpowered enough to be shitty were overpowered enough to be impossible to cast. By removing the auto-calculation from these spells in order to make them more useful to the player, I've also removed them as random spells to be cast by random NPCs. NPCs can still cast any spell that's been speficially assigned to them, auto-calculated or not, but most just aren't given any.

In response to this, taking yet another idea from Wakim, I've created a few dozen new auto-calculated, NPC-only spells. They span every school of magicka (except Conjuration, since most of its spells are actually still auto-calculated) and range in cost from 15 magicka to 60. Technically, several of these "new" spells are just existing spells that aren't available to the player, though I've also gone and edited quite a few non auto-calculated spells used by certain creatures (but not the player), as well. The line that separates old from new is rather blurry, and actually quite irrelevant - all you really need to know is that enemy spells have received the exact same treatment as yours.

Make no mistake: there is a significant difficulty factor at play here. The new/edited NPC-only spells are of a much higher caliber than what you're probably used to having thrown at you, and every one of your brand new roster of kick-ass spells is a kick-ass spell that at least one NPC knows. Thus, with the great power of spells that no longer suck will come the responsibility of learning how to use them effectively in battle, lest we end up cleaning a very nasty stain off of the wall that used to be you.

Of course, all of this doesn't necessarily mean that every peasant and two-bit thug will be busting out with God's Spark on your ass. Since the "always succeeds" flag is unchecked for every spell that I've edited, NPCs will only use spells that they have both sufficient magicka and a reasonable enough skill level to cast. In most cases, it's going to be that second requirement which keeps your enemies in check. However, now may be a good time to mention that the "Settings" plugin increases the amount of magicka available to all NPCs, which will have a rather obvious impact on their ability to use their shiny new toys. Also, the improved damage/drain magicka spells in this plugin were made assuming the changes made by the "Settings" plugin, and so will probably seem a tad bit overkillish without it.

On a sort of flip-side to the edits I make to existing NPC-only spells, this plugin also edits several unused spells and makes them available to the player. And it does so the only way I know how: by giving them to various spell merchants to sell. I tried my best to pick ones that nobody would ever want to edit, thus avoiding conflicts with other mods, but you never know. So, I've listed all of the NPCs edited by this plugin in the "conflicts & compatibility" section at the bottom of this readme as a handy reference just in case somebody else gets the same bright idea that I did and uses Random Joe Blow (note: not an actual NPC) as a point of insertion for their edits.

One special case that bears a quick explanation before moving on is what I did with the Shockball and Greater Shockball spells. Both are identical in the default rules due to Shockball obviously mistakenly being given the same settings as its more powerful counterpart. But since just regular Shockball is the one that all of the big baddies have, I didn't want to nerf them by weakening it. So, I swapped their names and lowered the effectiveness of Greater Shockball, instead. As noted in the changelog, this directly contradicts the Morrowind Patch Project, which just weakens the regular Shockball spell.

The cost of spell effects has also been changed pretty much across the board. Underused effects are now much cheaper, while some of the more abused ones have been royally jacked up to prevent cheese abuse. In extreme cases (chameleon, fortify attribute, etc.), enchanting and/or spellmaking privileges have been revoked. The removal of auto-calculation helps to enforce these changes by allowing me to provide the player with reasonably priced spells that are useful without being overpowered, while at the same time making overpowering them on your own much more difficult (or, in same cases, impossible).

Restore attribute will probably seem to most like the harshest of my changes, since the effect cost has been jacked up to a comparatively pricey 1:1 cost to magnitude ratio. This was specifically to do away with players making one of those spells that restores all attributes by a few points for only one or two magicka, rendering the entire effect next to meaningless. I made the pre-made spells cheaper to compensate for this, doing my best to hit that "sweet spot" where they're useful enough that you'll actually use them, yet anyone but an experienced restorationist will probably reach for a potion first.

Slowfall may also seem ludicrously overpriced at first until you remember that it's just as effective at a magnitude of one as it is above it, thus rendering the 30-point magnitude of the pre-made spell entirely meaningless. The drain health/fatigue/magicka/attribute spells are also very good examples of whoever having made them clearly not being aware of how they actually work, given that both the spells and effect costs appear to suggest that the magnitude is cumulative over time. And as I'm sure we're all aware by now, it isn't. In order for drain fatigue or magicka to be of any use at all, I had to raise the spell magnitudes drastically and tank the effect costs. So I did.

Drain health, however, was actually already quite useful - too useful, in fact. What made it unique amongst the drain effects is that it was the only one that could be truly effective at a duration of one (as a sufficient magnitude would still prove lethal), thus allowing very effective custom creations that cost next to nothing to cast - especially if the effect cost was set to match its intended use. There was nothing I could do to make drain health anything other than a cheaper, always-preferable alternative to damage health, so I edited the pre-made spells to reflect how the effect is supposed to work and then barred it from custom spells and enchantments. I went ahead and lowered the effect cost, as well, so that it would work as originally intended in potions.

Fortify health, on the other hand, was perhaps the most special case of all, again because of how shittily it's hardcoded to work in the game. While the Morrowind Code Patch fixes it to not actually make you worse off for using it, it's still an effect that essentially just gives you health and then takes it right back away. For it to be of any use at all, I have scripted the three pre-made fortify health spells to prevent the loss of current health when the effect wears off, thus allowing them to actually give you health (with a higher spell cost than a comparable restore health spell for balance).

The function of the script is simple: when a fortify health spell ends and takes away your maximum and current health, the script adds the current health back. The problem comes if your health falls below the magnitude of the fortify health spell - under normal circumstances, you would die from the effect ending even if the health was added back a split second later. So, my script also checks to see if your character is in the "danger zone" and, if so, gives some (or all) of the health back early. This extra health isn't technically accurate - it's merely "borrowed" health to counteract the health loss that will occur when the spell ends. Furthermore, to avoid this "borrowed" health allowing players to stay alive beyond the point that they should have died, the script kills you if you enter the danger zone again after all of the "borrowed" health has been given. Functionally, it is completely fair and works as described in the above paragraph. The flaw is that the "borrowed" health is health that shouldn't be there, which will likely make you think that you have more than you really do.

Another technical problem with my script is that it turns fortify health spells into "one shot" effects that for all practical purposes end when you sustain damage equal to your normal maximum health, as you will be treated by the script at that point as if your maximum health has returned to normal. I still say that this is preferable to the spell ending when your health is too low and you die for no apparent reason, but the point is quite arguable. Then again, if you don't like the way I handle fortify health spells, just shut up and go make your own. With blackjack. And hookers. In fact, forget the spells.

Open was a real tough nut to deal with, as well. This is because open spells are extremely susceptible to save scumming (saving and continually reloading until the desired outcome is achieved). The default effect cost allowed for a 100-point open spell (essentially a skeleton key) at mere 30 magicka to cast, so a little patience would easily get you just about anywhere. But I knew that if I made the effect cost too expensive, it would just either encourage this type of behavior even more or cause players to simply defect to security, instead. I eventually settled of tripling the effect cost and introducing a wider array of progressively more effective pre-made spells. The magnitudes are variable, but hopefully of a narrow enough range to avoid at least a greater amount of reload abuse than with lockpicking.

And then there was bound equipment: a beast that managed to somehow combine being insanely underpriced with several different effects of wildly varying usefulness all having the same spell cost. Why anybody at Bethesda saw fit for a set of bound boots to cost just as much to conjure up as a bound cuirass or a bound battle-axe of painful doom, I'll never know. I'm guessing that somebody in quality control just really wanted to get the hell out of the office one Friday afternoon.

Silence had its effect cost lowered greatly to help it compare more favorably to both the sound effect and the clearly-superior paralyze. The paralyze spells were set to be balanced versus other similar effects, such as burden and drain/damage attribute, while the cost of the effect itself has been tanked in order to balance it out as an alchemy effect. I then disabled it as an effect from custom spells and enchantments because the assholes who made this game didn't give us a way to edit alchemy effect costs independently from spells and enchantments. Other effects to suffer the same fate as paralyze (and for the same reason) were dispel, drain fatigue, invisibility, and poison.

I should probably also explain all of the other cases where spellmaking/enchanting is now disallowed:

• Absorb magicka is off-limits for enchanting for the same reason that restore magicka always was.

• Chameleon was for reasons that should be painfully obvious to anyone who's ever played this game before. Constant effect cheese aside, this is one of the most easily exploitable and broken effects in the game, particularly for players wishing to steal shit without the pesky side effect of being caught.

• Charm was so as to not completely replace the need for personality and speechcraft. It's also one of those effects, like most of ones listed here, that's really hard to enforce with a high cost, since you can just minimize the duration on custom builds to crank up the magnitude. Both pre-made spells with this effect were given set magnitudes rather than variable ones because, as I discussed with the open effect above, these are the sort of spells that would otherwise invite heavy save/reload abuse.

• Command humanoid was because the ability to screw with just about any NPC in the game was incredibly game-breaking, to say the absolute least. The pre-made spells remain effective against slaves, however, which is the one thing that they were legitimately useful for.

• Cure paralyzation has been removed entirely. It was pointless as a spell effect to begin with since you can't cast spells or use enchanted items when you're paralyzed, so I retooled Free Action into a resist paralysis spell, instead. The cure paralyzation effect is only actually useful in the form of a potion (which curiously can be consumed while paralyzed), which in turn has the polarizing effect of rendering all resist paralysis effects useless. This is why the "Alchemy" plugin also does away with cure paralyzation altogether and compensates for it by making the resist effect easier to come by.

• Drain health, as discussed above, basically just becomes a cheaper version of damage health when it gets used in any kind of a custom build, and it becomes downright evil if the effect cost is lowered to reflect its actual purpose. In addition to removal of spellmaking/enchanting privileges, the effect cost has been lowered so that it will function as intended in potions.

• Drain skill was more for the effect it could have on you than on your opponents, but I can imagine variants that I'd consider whipping out on your enemies to be horribly cheap.

• Damage and fortify skill shouldn't even appear in the game in the first place, and I'm still not sure why I went to the trouble of revoking their spellmaking/enchanting privleges.

• Damage and drain attribute were for intelligence abuse issues (for those who don't know, they could be used to completely recharge your magicka).

• Fortify attribute was entirely because of fortify intelligence, which is by far the single biggest exploit in the game (and that's saying a lot), though fortify luck also has abuse potential, as well.

• Fortify fatigue was in pretty much the same camp as drain health and charm, given that things like lockpicking and mercantile are affected by fatigue, and there was no other way to stop players from cheesing 1-second builds with insane magnitudes to abuse that fact like a set of perky nipples.

• Fortify magicka, like cure paralyzation, has been removed from spells completely due to abuse issues similar those with damage/drain attribute. Barring the effect from spellmaking/enchanting was somewhat extraneous (also as with cure paralyzation) and done more for consistency's sake than anything else.

• Levitate had an abuse problem in that it could be used as an offensive effect, notably egregious in that the lower the magnitude, the more debilitating it was. And also, let's not forget how easy it is to abuse Levitation "on self" when faced with very stupid opponents with no ranged attacks.

• Lock is off-limits for spellmaking for the technical reason that it's pointless to make a lock spell once you already know one. My ulterior motive is to prevent players from creating one-point magnitude lock spells in order to make raising their security skill even easier than with the pre-made spells. Enchanting privleges remain (albeit with a higher effect cost) due to the much heavier restrictions placed on the enchanting system as a whole by the "Settings" plugin.

• Soul trap was to prevent the abuse of multiple soul trap effects to capture multiple souls from the same creature. See my commentary for the "Equipment" plugin for more information, as well as how I've dealt with the same issue there.

• Telekinesis, like chameleon, was entirely because of how easy it made stealing, even without a decent sneak skill. The Telekinesis spell was nerfed to hell to match. Note that it will remain useful versus traps, regardless of magnitude, as you need only be out of normal activation range to avoid them.

• Weakness to fire, frost, shock, poison, and magicka were because they could be put into custom spells or enchantments at a 1-second duration along with the appropriate damage effect to greatly inflate the magnitude at a fraction of the increase in spell cost, and raising the effect costs would simply render them pointless to begin with. The spells have been made more effective both to compensate, as well as to help make the Destruction skill (which is by far the school of magicka most prone to being displaced entirely by enchanted items) more worth investing in.

And finally, there's new starting spells. Unbeknownst to many (but knownst to me), the default rules actually specify two starting spells for each school of magicka. Three of them are just so ludicrously expensive that no starting player can possibly ever cast them, and the game is coded not to start you out with spells that even most level 20 characters have no hope of pulling off. New starting spells have been set that are much more reasonable for a first-level player: nothing costs over 9 magicka to cast, and they all should be useful spells for somebody who's just starting out.

Even if you take a minor and miss out on the starters, though, Arrille has you covered by now selling a wider assortment of newbie-friendly spells for each school of magicka. This is of particular importance if you're using a mod like Service Requirements that makes most of the game's spell merchants refuse service to you until you've advanced sufficiently through whatever faction they belong to. And without access to any cheap spells to practice your magic skills with, good luck with that.

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"ALCHEMY" PLUGIN:

As I stated earlier, my alchemy changes were all largely inspired by HotFusion's Economy Adjuster mod. HotFusion took issue to the somewhat random values of alchemy ingredients and underwent a painstaking process of giving them all new values based on rarity and difficulty of collection, the most prominent result being that animal-based ingredients became more valuable and that killing things for their body parts could now actually be a (sort of) profitable venture. A third factor - actual usefulness of the ingredient - was noticeably ignored. Plus, there were a few other things he missed. Still, HotFusion's formulas provided me an with excellent base upon which to start my own work.

The first concept that my alchemy overhaul takes from HotFusion's mod is the separation of plant and animal-based ingredients, which acknowledges the effort of finding and killing things versus murdering a poor, defenseless saltrice plant. All plant-based ingredients have been assigned a value, based on a combination of their rarity and usefulness, of 1, 2, 5, 10, or 15. Animal-based ingredients, on the other hand, start at 15 and go up from there. These values are, for the most part, far more generous than HotFusion's, and aim to make killing shit a much more rewarding experience than before.

I've also lowered the weight of several ingredients that seemed far too heavy for the often-meager benefits they provided. In this case, an ingredient's "benefits" refers to both its effects and its resale value, which is why animal meat and hides still weigh more on average. Even taking value into consideration, however, you should now rarely find yourself consuming or selling ingredients solely because they're too heavy to be worth lugging around.

But by far my biggest complaint of all was the halfassed distribution of effects among the ingredients in general. A large portion of them made absolutely no sense, existing seemingly only to take up space. Not even counting the ones that only appeared in a single ingredient (or in two ingredients that should never be combined in the first place), negative effects showed up so rarely in potions that one has wonder why they were even put there to begin with. Several of the "negative" effects weren't even very negative, regardless. Drain personality on a fortify agility/frost shield potion? Yeah, that's really going to put a damper in your plans. What, were you going to ask that frost atronach out on a date?

Positive effects had their own problems. Since, as we've already established, negative effects were almost never an issue under the default rules, the only thing that ever stopped you from brewing up whatever badassery you damn well pleased was difficulty finding the required ingredients. Given that the positive effects also appeared be assigned totally at random, the results were somewhat varied. It's the sort of nonsense that made restore speed potions harder to come by than a three-legged midget, while game-breaking fortify intelligence potions were practically growing out of your ass.

The ingredients added by Tribunal were a very obvious attempt to address several effects that the devs "forgot" to make more abundant in the original game, and they didn't do a particularly good job of it. Bloodmoon's ingredients were just totally fucking out there. The boys at Bethesda were clearly out of ideas by that point, and it showed. The only explanation I can think of for at least half the effects in Solthsheim ingredients is that they're there for "flavor", except in this case the flavor is ass.

And so, I've completely overhauled ingredient effects across the board. Positive effects are now more evenly distributed, both in general and between common and rare ingredients (depending on the effect). Negative effects have been set so that they will appear far more frequently in potions, and will be more appropriately negative towards the desired positive effect. Every ingredient now has only either two or three positive effects, and for every positive effect will have at least one negative effect that will be shared with at least one other ingredient carrying the same positive effect. In general, higher quality ingredients will result in potions with no (or less severe) negative side effects.

Better ingredients will also be the ones that tend to possess one or more "top-tier" positive effects, like spell absoprtion or reflect. Lower, or "shit-tier" effects like feather or detect key have absolutely no business on ingredients like rubies and diamonds, and thus have been replaced with awesomer effects more befitting of such precious rarities. The incentive to actually keep expensive ingredients like diamonds around instead of selling them then becomes that they will be the ones necessary to brew "mega" potions with multiple top-tier positive effects (and fewer to no downsides).

Regarding effect tiers, it should be noted that fortify magicka received a promotion in my changes. This is because, like I discussed in my commentary for the "Spells" plugin, a bit of saving/reloading is all it really takes for a truly determined player to cast any spell that s/he has the available magicka to cast, regardless of actual skill level. Thus, the player's available pool of magicka is the only real "hard" limit in the game as far as what you're able to cast goes, and so I felt it highly inappropriate that the effect was originally present on two of the most common ingredients in the game.

Amazingly, I ended up remaining almost completely faithful to the original settings throughout all of this madness. Despite removing several effects entirely and adding a few new ones, almost none of the other (positive) ones changed much, if at all. Most of my edits (not counting to Tribunal and Bloodmoon ingredients, which as we've already discussed were totally fucked) were to negative effects, which most players probably never paid any attention to, anyway. My changes to positive effects, conversely, were mostly to ingredients for which they were rarely ever used, like restore health on Corpus Weepings.

In fact, several of my changes are rather quite lore-friendly. For example, the poison effect now shows up in several more ingredients than before, and it does so almost exclusively in alteration-related ingredients found in or near the Bitter Coast, thus giving a significant and surprisingly appropriate advantage to Argonians in this regard. It's one thing to give a skill bonus to certain races, but quite another to make them actually better able to utilize the skill in question by allowing them to gain benefits from a wider variety of ingredients than the other races. Another example is paralyze, which is now the single most common effect in ingredients. This provides, at long last, an actual compelling reason to play a Wood Elf, provided that you're also using the "Character" plugin to give them immunity and the "Spells" plugin to make paralyze an actually noticeable effect in potions.

This brings us to yet another point: even though BTB's Game Improvements is a modular mod (shut up), it's unavoidable that the plugins all tend to be interdependent to at least some extent. That fact is perhaps the most true for this module, which tends to rely not only on the changes made by the other plugins in order to feel truly complete. For example, the magic effect cost edits made by the "Spells" plugin will allow a number of previously worthless effects (feather, swift swim, etc.) to become actually useful. Conversely, it also lowers the effect costs of drain health, drain fatigue, and the above-mentioned paralyze so that they will as devastating as they were originally intended to be.

Another important example of inter-mod relations is the two-pronged attack on the overeffectiveness of the alchemy skill overall by this and the "Settings" plugin. Here, the values of all alchemy apparati have been balanced to encourage the player to gradually move up to better equipment over time rather than just saving up for the top-tier shit right off the bat. More importantly, it lowers the qualities of the best apparati, thus narrowing the overall range of alchemy effects and allowing me to make my adjustments more globally rather than base them mostly on preventing criminally powerful potions from anyone who manages to snag a full set of Grandmaster's equipment - which just ends up screwing over the alchemist who's just getting started more than anything. The global alchemy changes I speak of, then, are made by the "Settings" plugin, which I'll discuss in further detail when we get to that section.

The interdependence of these modules works both ways, however. A lot of edits made by the other plugins also count on the changes made here to finish the job, particularly the "Spells" plugin with regards to the game's heavily-abused spell effects. Many spell effect costs were only unuseably high to begin with purely because of how badly they could be abused in potions, and so bringing them back into play will create a bit of a rift unless something stops the mad alchemists of the world from brewing up a potion of reflection so powerful that it hurls the Earth into the sun and we all die in flames. The "Alchemy" plugin also completes what its partner in crime started by nixing some of the game's most damning and blatant exploits - most notably the infamous fortify intelligence potion, which could pump your stats up to numbers that don't even exist.

In fact, now would probably be a good time to discuss the effects that have been removed from and added to the wild world of alchemy and alchemy accessories. The new effects are: sanctuary, shield, slowfall, and jump. The latter two already showed up in the pre-made potions, so it seemed odd that you couldn't make them yourself. Jump also helps by giving you something to do with Bungler's Bane and Hypha Facia (both of to which it's been added) aside from selling them to Arrille for little more than a few drakes and his eternal scorn. Sanctuary and Shield just seemed like good effects to have around, especially in the early parts of the game when everything can kick your ass - though the former is subject to a fair bit of needing the edits from the "Spells" and "Settings" plugins to keep it from getting out of hand.

And then there's the effects I've removed, along with my justifications for each of them:

• Cure paralyzation, which as I said earlier renders the resist effect useless (namely in potions, which can be consumed even while paralyzed). All instances have been replaced with resist paralysis.

• Light, because it's infinitely inferior to night-eye (as well as completely worthless in most cases). Both instances have been replaced with night-eye.

• Telekinesis, as I've already explained, was far too exploitable for the purposes of stealing shit. All instances have been replaced with sanctuary (which is itself quite exploitable, as I mentioned above, unless you're also using the "Spells" plugin to jack up the effect cost and the "Settings" plugin to deal with the overeffectiveness of potions in general).

• Fortify intelligence, which, as I've mentioned several times already, is the game's number one biggest exploit. This is because higher intelligence affects the strength of all potions that you create, and the effects of potions can be stacked.

• Fortify luck, because it has more or less the same exploitability issues as fortify intelligence does (it also affects the strength of potions, FYI), just to a lesser extent.

• Fortify fatigue, again for abuse issues that were already discussed along with the "Spells" plugin. Although you aren't able to sacrifice duration for a higher magnitude with potions - the main concern that I had for it with spellmaking/enchanting, you can still stack them (see above) to similar effect.

• Drain intelligence, yet again for abuse issues I've already discussed back with "Spells" plugin.

• Drain personality, since it was the only "drain" effect that added no actual downside to a potion (unless you were planning on getting freaky with Almalexia or something... can't say I'd blame you).

• Drain endurance, as it's basically the same as drain fatigue, but less effective due to its higher effect cost (assuming use of the "Spells" plugin, of course). Although a retroactive health mod will cause it to also lower your maximum health, it remains far inferior to drain health, which instead lowers your current health.

• Drain magicka, due to it being the only one of the actually unpleasant negative ingredient effects that was only harmful specifically to mage-type characters. For ingredients on which I wanted effects that negatively impacted a player's spellcasting abilities, I went with drain willpower or drain luck instead, as both of those also have a negative effect on non-magical combat abilities.

• Weakness to fire and frost damage, both of which appeared exclusively in Bloodmoon ingredients and not nearly enough of them to cause you any problems. For damage-related negative effects, I've stuck with drain health and poison.

• Vampirism, drain alteration, damage intelligence, damage magicka, fortify maximum magicka, and recall all appeared only once, and thus would never actually show up in any potion. Not to mention that most of them were pretty retarded effects to begin with. Quality control? What's what?

I left all of the unique ingredients (i.e. Poison, Meteor Slime, etc.) alone, since I didn't want to bother with them. The "cursed" ingredient variants are also unedited - this is because the Morrowind Patch Project (which you should be using) scripts all cursed ingredients to be replaced with their normal versions as soon as you pick them up, thus making editing the cursed variants rather pointless. It does have a somewhat-unintended side effect of making cursed ingredients easier to identify due to their different effects/values, however, though they're pretty hard not to notice either way.

In addition to the addition/removal/changing of various effects, all ingredients have had positive effects set as the primary, the intent being that consuming them directly - as opposed to just making them into potions - should at least convey some sort of benefit. This notion is also reinforced somewhat by the "Settings" plugin, which lowers the experience gain to the Alchemy skill per potion creation from 2.00 to 1.00, while in turn raising the gain for eating ingredients raw from 0.50 to 0.60.

Because it's difficult to fully grasp the full range of changes made to the game's network of alchemy ingredients simply by looking at the changelist, I've thrown together a handy reference guide in the form of an .html file named "Ingredient Effects", and placed it in the "extra stuff" folder. I tried to make it as user-friendly to navigate as possible, but I've found that it tends to look kind of retarded if it's viewed in a retarded browser. The solution, obviously, is to not use retarded browsers.

This module now also edits the game's pre-made potions in a manner consistent with the changes made by the "Spells" plugin, which is to say that it takes the pre-made potions, most of which are completely useless, and makes them no longer useless. The default rules set a standard magnitude and duration for most potions, which logically would have resulted in wildly different results depending on the effect. But since the standard values were so low, especially for the cheaper potions, the results were often pretty much the same: totally fucking worthless. Thus, the first step of my overhaul was to create a new set of standard magnitudes/durations that would make the stuff actually worth carrying around.

Since all potions work "on self", quite a few of them got kicked off the worthwhile train right off the bat because their effects were negative. It also seemed weird to me that some of the other potions were missing either certain variants, or just had no variants at all. Then there were the spoiled potions, which just made no sense whatsoever. Because I really didn't want to get into making new potions or fucking around with the leveled lists, I did a bit of creative rearranging by converting potions with negative effects into positive ones, creating several whole new lines of potions and filling in gaps in the others where necessary. I went ahead and got rid of the chameleon, cure paralyzation, fortify luck, and fortify intelligence potions in the process - I trust I shouldn't have to explain why by this point.

While I was editing the effects (and values) of potions, I went ahead and dealt with their pointlessly long names, as well. The Morrowind Patch Project already sort of started this by renaming the potions whose names differed from the format of other potions in the same line ("Quality Potion of Fortify Speed" vs. "Exclusive Fortify Speed", for example), but for some reason just didn't finish the job by applying the same format globally, thus leaving several whole lines of potions with excessively long and/or pretentious handles (I always imagined that Rising Force potions just summoned Yngwie Malmsteen instead of anything Morrowind-related). The naming schema is now simply "(Quality) + (Effect)", where "quality" is one of the following: Bargain, Cheap, Standard, Quality, or Exclusive.

The potion-like liquors have also been addressed and given a somewhat more standard format, as well. Their formula seemed simple enough: they act like normal fortify attribute potions, except that they're cheaper, easier to come by, generally more effective, and come with negative side effects - except that some liquors (Flin, for example) didn't follow this format. And then there was the pesky issue of drain intelligence not really being a negative effect since it can be abused to hell and back. I've reworked them all to be of more hopefully appropriate use, particularly to the beginning player. This included reducing the price of the mid-range liquors (Greef and Sujamma) to make them all cheap enough to easily get your hands on early on, as well as reducing their weights enough to make you want to do so.

The issue of restore magicka potions in particular and their relative scarcity does deserve a bit of special mention here. The effect is very hard to come by in the default game, and I intended to uphold the notion behind that fact as much as possible as I went about finding various ways to ease up on it. For example, there weren't nearly enough spoiled potions for me to assign one as a variant to every line of them, nor did I particularly care to create more. So, I set them all to restore magicka along with the much heftier downside of damaging (not draining) one of your attributes. Skooma, with its newfound willpower boost, now completely tanks your intelligence to prevent you from using a Skooma high as an excuse to cast spells way beyond your means, but there is a nice (and intentional) side effect of fully restoring your magicka once you come down from it. Drugs are good, m'kay?

Also on the subject of magicka restoration is Comberries, which have had their restore magicka effect set as the primary per my reasoning given above. This makes them a very useful way to restore small amounts of magicka on the go without making the actual potions easier to come by. The effect has been added to a few more rare ingredients, but I felt it important for game balance that it remain present on only one common ingredient (Bloodmoon notwithstanding), thus requiring at least one rare one to create a potion. Besides, I would assume that anyone who thinks that a virtually endless supply of magicka isn't imbalancing would already be implementing some sort of magicka regen mod, thus making this change of little consequence to the game (which I do believe I've just lost).

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"EQUIPMENT" PLUGIN:

There are two main sets of changes that the "Equipment" plugin makes, and both aim for the same goal. In most RPGs, a sense of progression and accomplishment is gained from gradually moving to more and more powerful equipment as you can find and/or afford it. In Morrowind, a sense of pointlessness and emptiness comes from skipping right past all the low-level shit and going straight for the best stuff, all the while selling off your piles of spares for top dollar. Clearly, something needed to be done.

My first set of changes to the game's equipment address an issue with the economy that no other mod to my knowledge ever has. It disturbs me that with the prevalence of economy-adjusting mods out there, nobody has ever seen fit to deal with what I see as the legitimate source of the problem: ludicrously overvalued equipment. While several mods do try to make things like Daedric and Ebony anything more difficult to come by, can I really be the only one who found it odd that you still ended up swimming in stuff that was worth several thousand times more money than anybody ever had to pay you for it?

I've adjusted the values of the most expensive stuff in the game to be more reasonable. In this case, "reasonable" means drastically reducing their values until they're no longer beyond the realm of any monetary transaction you can possibly make. To wit, most rare and/or unique items are now worth between 2,000 and 10,000 gold, with only the rarest of the rare priced beyond that. While selling stuff is still a great (if not the best) way to make money, you no longer can trade in a single dai-katana for a merchant's entire inventory just so that you can come even remotely close to getting your money's worth.

Glass equipment was a tough creature to handle in this respect, as it's the rarest and more or less the most powerful equipment in the game that's also available for purchase. The value was lowered, but not so much that you could so easily buy it. Beyond that, I felt that its disadvantages needed to be much more disadvantageous to balance out not only glass equipment in general, but also what was easily the most powerful armor class (light armor) in the game.

The first thing I did was played up the inherent fragility of glass by greatly lowering its durability. I tried to not be too extreme with this, but I'm sure that any of you who have ever heard of the SaGa series might be familiar with a certain glass sword that dealt insane amounts of damage, but also had an unfortunate tendency to break after a single use. It was a great idea then, and it still is today. This change, I feel, makes at least glass weapons much more balanced against other options, especially given how easy they are to find. Glass armor, on the other hand, still needed a bit more nerfing.

Because glass armor is (arguably) the best armor in the game, there are those who feel that the health reduction alone is too harsh due to how less able it becomes to withstand the game's toughest battles. However, it actually makes quite a bit of sense if you think it through. A warrior-type character using light armor would be likely to maintain a high skill in Armorer, and thus would be able to keep glass equipment in shape. A mage-type character would be likely to supplement their defenses with a high unarmored skill and/or bound armor. A stealth-type character, finally, would be most likely to rely on skills that help to avoid getting hit in the first place (that and the fact that nobody ever actually plays stealth-type characters in Morrowind).

Also note that even with the reduction, there's still a noticeably large gap in durability between glass armor and every other piece of light armor in the game. Even larger and more noticeable was the defensive gap, which ultimately contributed more than anything to medium armor's massive inferiority complex. I nerfed the defense rating of glass armor from 50 to 40, and on top of that made most of the best medium armor a little bit better at what it does. I also addressed the rather large gap in the heavy armor ratings with a bit of tweaking and filled in the rest of the holes by making the assorted wolf and bear armor from Bloodmoon actually worth the trouble to acquire. Light armor is still probably the best choice overall, but at least now not ridiculously so.

That brings us to the other half of this module's changes, which are concerned with just how easy it is to get your hands on ridiculously overpowered (and also ridiculously underpowered) equipment. Just as the "Spells" plugin put the clamp on everything that could be abused like a redheaded stepchild and then did everything in its power to make everything left over not suck like a Brazilian prostitute on shore leave, so does the "Equipment" plugin with the enchantments on the vast majority of the game's magical/unique equipment and artifacts. Also, scrolls. Because they're sort of like equipment.

Before we begin, let me reiterate the "just how easy it is" portion of the above paragraph. Of all the nerfs made by this plugin, the harshest of them went to items that could be found relatively early on in the game, and with little to no effort if you knew where to look, whereas items from Tribunal and Bloodmoon have retained much more of their power (though, to be technical, they sorta also lost more). Keening, Sunder, and Wraithguard, notably, have all remained quite powerful when compared to the rest of the game's equipment. For best results, combine my mod with one such as Darknut's Greater Dwemer Ruins, which makes the final portions of the game's main quest appropriately more difficult.

Right off the bat, the Ebony Arrows of Slaying and Black Hands Dagger deserve very special mentions. The latter can possibly be attributed to the fact that whoever made it just didn't understand how the absorb health effect works, because we've already established that at least somebody involved with the game design (probably the same dude, actually) had no clue how any of the drain effects work, either. As for the Ebony Arrows of Slaying, I'm at a total loss. Typo, maybe? Perhaps somebody meant to type out "100" and instead accidentally ended up with "5000". Those keys are like, right next to each other.

It's also important to note how my enchantment edits relate to the changes made by both the "Spells" and "Alchemy" plugins. Both removed access to a number of highly-abuseable effects in their respective fields, and it's now up to the "Equipment" plugin to finish the work they started by dealing the final blows to these quality control rejects and finishing them off for good. While I haven't really removed any effects here entirely, since even the game's most broken effects can have at least some legitimate use when paired with appropriately rare equipment, there's been a considerable amount of nerfing to the list of usual suspects: charm, chameleon, fortify (anything), and especially telekinesis (remember that the most legitimate use of telekinesis - disarming traps - still works even at a pisspoor magnitude).

Unlike the "Spells" plugin, just about every enchantment has been set to auto-calculate in this module. This was done more for simplicity's sake than anything, since the few enchantments that weren't already set to autocalc to begin with were being deliberately fucked in the charge department to compensate for being way too overpowered (Vampiric Ring, Ring of Equity, etc.). And seeing as how that's no longer an issue, I saw nothing wrong with autocalculating across the board.

Another thing that I talked about earlier along with the "Spells" plugin that should be brought up here is that that the "Settings" plugin increases the amount of magicka avilable to all NPCs. As with the changes made by the "Spells" plugin, any of the enchantments I've edited here that deal with damaging or draining magicka are assuming those new values, and so will probably come off as a bit overpowered to anybody who isn't also using the "Settings" plugin alongside this one. Additionally, the changes made by the "Settings" plugin to the enchant system as a whole tie in very closely with the edits made by this plugin to all of the game's pre-set enchantments, namely in that a lot of the game's equipment becomes far more desirable due to the difficulty (or outright inability) of duplicating their effects.

The fortify health effect, which required a specialized script in the "Spells" plugin to make it of any use at all, is treated a bit differently here. This is because scripts are able to determine active spell effects on a player, but not active enchantments, thus forcing me to take a different approach. So, I ammended all non-constant effect fortify health enchantments with a drain health effect of equal magnitude that would act as a delayed restore health effect to counteract the loss of current health just before the fortify health effect wears off, coupled with an immediate restore health effect to counter the initial drain health loss. The reason that I didn't just do the same thing with the spells is that it would have placed a destruction effect into what should be purely restoration spell(s).

Soul trap is a special case, as well, as I also mentioned earlier when discussing the "Spells" plugin. The changes I've made to it here are entirely to prevent the abuse of multiple soul trap effects to capture multiple souls from the same target. This meant augmenting all soul trap enchantments with a 100-point dispel effect to remove any existing soul trap effects (which also had the nice side effect of making soul trap enchantments a bit more versatile) and by shortening the duration of the soul trap effect to 1 second so that you have no time to follow up by casting the titular spell. This does add a certain degree of strategy to trapping souls, as any enchanted item used to such effect must deal the killing blow in order to work. A 1-second drain health effect was added to the enchantments on items that were otherwise harmless (the Amulet of Gem-Feeding, for example) so that this would be possible.