Skyrim Special Edition

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JaySerpa

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jayserpa

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About this mod

See your character perform context-aware animations when interacting with the world. Animated greeting of NPCs, pickpocketing, lockpicking, and more!

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IMMERSIVE INTERACTIONS

Those that know my previous mods know I'm a sucker for realism and making your characters feel more alive. 

I approached this mod with a clear goal: Increase immersion by seeing your character perform context-aware animations when interacting with the world organically. Organic here meaning: without menus, spells, etc: Simply as a natural part of your gameplay adventure.

Most animations work this way: If your hands are free (no weapons/magic/fists), activating items in the world will play a short animation.

Huge Thank you to FLipdeezy for his help making this mod possible. If you haven't already, check out some of his gems. Animated Eating Redux SE edition and SkyJack Simple Woodcutter are great companions of this mod and they never leave my load order.

Also big thank you to Tsaxaman, a very talented animator that helped with the most complex animations in 1.20. The update wouldn't be possible without him. He has some amazing DAR animations that are not so well known, so check out his profile cause you're missing out on some cool animations like those in UNDERDOG! An amazing mod, check it out and give the author some love!


These are some of the animations included - There are almost 30 different animated interactions

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Main Features of Immersive Interactions:

  • Highly Customizable: Enable or disable interactions via the MCM!

  • World interactions have more weight and feel more real: Similar to RDR2, things don't just teleport to your inventory, your character must perform an animation before the activation happens. Harvesting, pickpocketing, lockpicking, activating standing stones, opening doors, picking up objects... 

  • Mod adapts to the narrative in your game: Being a Thane means guards of your Hold will salute you respectfully, if you join a side in the CW, you will salute your superior generals, etc.

  • Bring more life to your NPC interactions: Pet your dog/horse, hug followers, applaud bards, wave hello to children, etc.

  • Compatibility-friendly: Fully compatible with Skyrim Souls, compatible with Simply Knock, auto detection and compatibility with a couple of mods... In general, the customizable nature of this mod, paired with the fact that my mod will never trigger if you draw your weapon makes it so compatibility shouldn't be an issue at all. 

HeavyBurns helped testing the mod. Redirect all technical and bug complaints directly to him
(just joking, please don't)

Heavy Burns was amazingly kind to provide an amazing mod showcase you can watch above. I consider him the best when it comes to Skyrim video content, so if you're not following him already, you're really missing out.

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Requirements:

  • FNIS or Nemesis
  • Dynamic Animation Replacer
  • Dynamic Activation Key (For 1.70 and above!)

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List of Quick Interactions

  • Mourning Friends: When a follower (or someone with great relationship rank with the player) dies, your character will take a moment to mourn their friend. After this, the body can be looted as usual.
  • Touching Standing Stones: Standing stones must be physically touched now before they activate. Just a short animation before they do their thing.
  • Knock on doors: If you have Simply Knock installed, you will now visibly knock on doors.
  • Pet Horse: Pet horses! Activated via SHIFT + Activate key.
  • Pet Dog: Pet those doggos! Activated via SHIFT + Activate key.
  • Applaud Bards: Activated via SHIFT + Activate key.
  • Pray at Shrines
  • Salute Jarls respectfully
  • Guards salute their Thane: As a Thane, guards of the region you're a thane of will salute you with the respect you deserve.
  • Salute Civil War Commanders: If you're a stormcloak or imperial, you will salute your commanders before talking to them. Each faction has a different salute (Imperial is more formal, Stormcloak is more casual)
  • Wave Hello to Children: You will look down and playfully wave hello to children before interacting with them. Kids will respond with 4 different possible reactions (animations). Some kids are excluded. (Ghosts... Aventus...) Toggled with Shift + Activate.
  • Open Containers: Slow and realistic, or fast. Configurable via MCM.
  • Harvest flowers/ingredients - Two options: Fast harvesting or slower (alchemy-level based)
  • Reading Books (Sitting Down + Standing) and Notes (Standing Only) - This will only work if you have Skyrim Souls.
  • Give Gold to Beggars - Activated via dialogue as usual - Included a personal change: 1 Gold increased to 10 Coins, cause 1 Gold feels petty.
  • Open Doors: Fast animation that allows movement courtesy of FLipdeezy.
  • Loot Animals: An animation with a knife will play for a couple of seconds. If Hunterborn is installed, nothing plays as HB takes over. Again, thanks to FLipdeezy for his work here.
  • Loot NPCs: You will visibly loot NPCs for a couple of seconds. If Skyrim Souls is installed, you will continue looting the NPC until you exit the menu.
  • Pickpocket NPCs: You will play a short animation before attempting to pickpocket enemies.
  • Lockpicking: Animation plays when lockpicking a lock.
  • Pick-up Items: Detects the location of the item. Player will extend their hand high or lower depending on the location of the item.
  • Follower Interaction: If you are not in combat and have no weapons unsheated, your follower will briefly salute you as if saying "I'm behind you, boss". There's a tiny possibility your follower might give you a quick hug, cause the world needs more of those.
  • Spouse Interaction: When interacting with your spouse, you might occasionally hug (Originally, you'd be able to kiss them. But DAR doesn't support paired animations yet. I'll restore the content when DAR gets the update, which might be soon.)
  • Tomb Raiding Animation Bundle: Several animations for Puzzle pillars (Wale, Snake, Etc.), Claw Door Puzzles (5 different animations), Levers, Barred Doors, Pushing buttons and more.
  • Poisoning your weapon: Short animation for this, but still be careful when timing this during combat.
  • Coughing: Ingesting disgusting ingredients might make you cough.
  • Milking cows: Moooo, where did you think milk came from, milkdrinker? SHIFT + ACTIVATE a cow to get some milk after a short animation.
  • Sitting down or lying down while in "wait menu". Install "TAKE A SEAT" for extra variety for you and NPCs when sitting.



Scientifically proven by the Nexus team

List of Special Interactions:

Special Interactions are similar to the actions found in Dynamic Things,  but this time without editing world elements except the ones you actually activate. Hold E (or activate button) for a second when facing one of these items to activate them:

  • Woodpiles: This will play an animation where your character picks up wood. You will get more or less wood depending on the size of the woodpile. Woodpile disappears after the animation (unless it's a house-big huge woodpile, which are infinite.)
  • Kegs: This will play an animation that shows the player filling a bottle with ale. This will give you two botles of ales, keg will be empty afterwards.
  • Put Out Fires: When activated near a fire (campfire, a fire pit, etc.), player will play an animation putting out the fire. This will give you some wood back. This is useful for realism purposes: If you are using Campfire/Frostfall and you want to have a temporary base in a cave that has a vanilla fire, this feels like cheating because the fire is ALWAYS lit and never runs out of wood. If you decide to do so, you can now turn it off and create your own "mega super immersive-realist" campfire instead. This option is disabled by default because I understand it's quite niche. If you like the idea of disabling fires, you can re-enable this interaction via the MCM.
  • Pick up Straw: You can pick up straw from a bale if you hold E near one of them.
  • Practice Dummy: Hold E near a practice dummy to play a boxing animation (Thanks to the Enderal team for allowing me to use the animation here). This will do a warm up that "readies you up" for battle, giving you a small temporarily +10 boost to your health and stamina for 15 minutes.

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Performance:

Short explanation: Mod only runs when you need it, and even then, it does its thing (which is pretty lite) for a couple of seconds then disappears. No background, looped or timed scripts. Should have no performance impact at all. 

Want to have a look behind the scenes?

Spoiler:  
Show

Mod has 2 separate types of activations: special and simple interactions (both listed above in this description). For the simple interactions, you activate, an animation plays and the mod stops. This is achieved via a (hidden/dummy) perk, native engine conditions and fragments. So the animations are not too repetitive, there's a cooldown period after performing a simple interaction. Dogs and Horses use this cooldown as a separation between the animation activation and the vanilla activation. This means: First time you press E on a horse (while not in combat + not weapon out, etc.) you will pet it, but if you press E again, you will ride the horse. 

Special interactions only run when you hold E for longer than one second near the object. This way, there's no need to constantly scan every room looking for valid objects or to edit all objects causing all sorts of compatibility issues. Go near the object that should be usable, hold the activation key for one second and the mod will then check if you are close to one of the special objects (static items) marked as interactable. If one is found, an animation is played. Mod sleeps the rest of the time, so you "wake it up" on demand. This approach makes it so no objects in the world need to be edited or changed into "activator" objects, which should improve performance, compatibility with custom added spaces or objects and makes patching a walk in the park: Just add statics to the formlists I've prepared for fellow modders.

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Alternatives to this mod:

If you want to explore alternative mods to this one, check out: 

- (Super Fast) Immersive animated Looting: Very similar to this mod (they share the core code and a lot of the animations). The mod is a good alternative if you want quicker animations that don't slow down the game and not having to configure anything. Very much recommended if you find my mod too big.

- Animations: A classic. Very similar to this one too and both cover a lot of the same interactions. It's been around forever and many of us were using it for years. I found it a bit buggy, but might have been an exception. Might be a good alternative too.

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Compatibility:

The mod already comes with some compatibility patches that will auto-detect and be enabled automatically: Simply Knock / Hunterborn are automatically detected and supported. Skyrim Souls IS supported (and recommended since it enables more interactions), but you must tick the box for it via my mod's MCM to have full support.

Since most of this mod is togglable, it will be compatible with practically anything via the MCM. For example, if the mod doesn't detect hunterborn, just disable "Loot Animals", and Hunterborn will take over. Same for all the other options. An alternative way to deal with this, if you don't want to disable a feature completely is just readying your fists/weapon, which will let vanilla activations take place. 

This is coming up a lot, so I'll repeat: if a mod brings up a menu upon an activation or plays an animation at the same time as my mod, this can be problematic as my mod will want to take over. How do you solve this? You raise your fists to let vanilla activations take over, or you disable the conflicting animation via the MCM. I spent 50% of the development time of this mod (and it was months) doing the MCM. It's got plenty of options so you can customize it to your game. Don't ask me for patches, use the MCM. Thanks.

Things that might conflict are: Pet The Dog standalone (since it's part of this mod already) and the alternative mods mentioned above (since they do similar things). Dynamic Things Alternative will probably have some overlap when it comes to the special interactions, but you can decide on a case by case basis which interactions you want via my mod's MCM, so there shouldn't be big issues using both.

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This mod is now included in

🗺️ A Dynamic World - 🧙 Roleplaying - 🏹 Immersion - 🎈 Performance Friendly - 🖱️ 1-Click Installation