For more information and to join our community, please see our website here.

Somnium is a total and complete visual and gameplay overhaul for Enderal SE, installable with the Wabbajack tool. It does to Enderal what Enderal did to Skyrim: where Enderal took Skyrim’s gameplay and transplanted it into a masterfully-crafted world and storyline, Somnium takes Enderal’s setting and transplants it into an entirely new gameplay experience. 

Playing Somnium does not require knowledge of Enderal or its story. Somnium is designed as a complete standalone experience, making it a good choice for new players and old Enderal fans alike. 

The culmination of thousands of hours of development work, Somnium combines massive amounts of entirely custom content with the very best assets the modding community has to offer, turning Enderal into an action-adventure-horror experience fit for the modern era.







But what exactly is Somnium?

To demonstrate what we’ve tried to achieve, it’d be best to reveal some of the core design philosophies that we’ve kept in our minds when designing and developing Somnium:

• Intertwining Enderal’s themes and messages with the player experience through gameplay mechanics. This is the main inspiration behind most of what Somnium offers. Enderal tells a compelling story of loss, heartbreak, and the darker sides of life on Vyn, and we’ve tried to bring these themes into the gameplay of Somnium. For one example, you will notice the idea of losing your true self, whether to Arcane Fever, to Ambrosia addiction, to a lack of Humanity.
• Introducing a deeper and more impactful storytelling through the visuals and atmosphere of the game and through various changes to Vyn and its people. Despite the myriad (and relatively dark!) themes and stories Enderal tackles with its quests, the visuals of Enderal remained very similar to Skyrim itself. Somnium, however, expands these ideas into a comprehensive horror framework for the game, and it makes a number of changes to the lore of the setting. Arcane Fever is now a centerpiece of all game mechanics, and as your Arcane Fever worsens, the saturation will fade out, and more and more manifestations of the Sea of Eventualities will appear in front of you. At high AF numbers, the game will feel grim, unsafe, and detached from reality. We expand on this in the next point.
• Tying most of the new content to revolve around one variable: Arcane Fever. In vanilla Enderal, what was described by Jespar as causing a "[proneness] to nightmares" on top of other effects turned out to be a simple debuff, and you often ignore it as you play the game. In Somnium, we rethought the entire concept of AF. Now, every single system in the game either impacts or is impacted by your current level of Fever. This allows us to accomplish two goals:
  
  • The current status of your character and what you should expect from the game is as clear as possible. At any point while playing, you are always sure of one thing: The higher your level of AF goes, the less predictable and lucid your experience will be. It serves as an "anchor" of sorts, which you can always rely on to be prepared for the horrors that await you. 
  • As a result of everything relying on your AF level, Somnium provides an incredible variety of player experience, which wouldn't be achievable otherwise. A good example of this is in our dynamic music system, new to the 1.1 update. As your fever grows, more and more ambience and combat tracks get replaced by the wonderful tracks of Nyghtfall (though at 0 AF, all tracks come from Enderal). In how we’ve implemented them, they do not feel out of place in comparison to the Enderal music, but they feel different enough to provide a sharp contrast and bring a sense of worry to the player. Combined with the many other changes of this form – visual effects, sound effects, a complete Entropy rework, you name it – you will notice the game transition seamlessly from an adventure to a horror game and back, as your Fever rises and falls. 
    

With this in mind, let’s get into the details. Every single mechanic and gameplay aspect has been entirely reworked, but here is a small sampling of them:

• Dying and Respawning. Manual saving no longer exists! The “save” and “load” buttons have been removed from the menu, with just a "continue" button left, which will load the last autosave created (they are created every minute you aren’t in combat). Also, any time you die, you will respawn at the last Earthen Reliquary you have used – akin to Dark Souls’ bonfires, these have been hand-placed throughout the world. But don't worry, no progress will ever be lost. After you respawn, everything in the world will remain exactly the same as before. Even the enemies' health, which you can use to your advantage.
• Firearms. Firearms are totally new, and we've spent dozens of hours tuning 3rd person shooter mechanics to make them as seamless as possible. They are entirely lore-friendly in the Somnium world, being designed to fit the game and its setting perfectly. In particular, we've reorganized the combat skills into Pistol, Marksmanship, and Fencing, with all-new talent trees to match.
• Vancian magic. Spells require preparation, which costs a certain amount of Arcane Fever. Also, there are entirely unique ways for each of the schools to deal with AF – for instance, elementarists can unlock the ability to attune to a random element, allowing the casting of that element without preparation; however, if you mess up the element, it costs even more AF.
• Horror. We won't go into a lot of detail about this (to avoid spoiling gameplay), but, as stated before, the game is all about Arcane Fever. The more it rises, the more unhinged the game starts to become. But it is not just these horror aspects that you need to be scared of. There aren't a lot of ways you can lower AF. Ambrosia is difficult to find, and can cause addiction, and smoking peaceweed only provides a temporary relief. So rather, you will also be scared of the Fever itself, and every additional point you gain. Scared for yourself, your sanity, and your life.
• Age-of-Sail setting. We've hand-replaced every single outfit and weapon in the game, as well as the majority of the other assets, to best achieve a more modern view of the Enderal worldspace. Not only a visual improvement, these changes amplify the different strata of Enderal’s society: walking around, you can feel the difference between the rich and poor, or feel how different members feel about their various factions. This contributes to the feeling of loneliness and the harshness of the world, which flows naturally with Somnium’s themes.
• Story and atmosphere re-imagining. Also not going to go into a lot of detail on this, but for instance, the last fight of the game is now replaced with a much more morally grey decision you have to make, and the whole scene is streamlined without cutting out the quality of the dialogue and exposition. Also, a lot of factions and people are re-interpreted here, as you'll notice as soon as you step into Ark.
• Hand-made art and music. Starting with the animated main menu and newly composed theme, you'll notice the work of SRG's artists and designers spread all around Enderal. Custom retextures and assets, tons of unique sound effects, and other artistic touches dot the landscape and bring the Somnium vision to life.
• Total overhaul of the Entropy mechanics (new in 1.1!). Summons are no longer brought forth with specific spells, but by knowing where and when to find them – and they offer Sinistropes new bonuses depending on what summons you find. Entropy now offers a range of spells for interacting with your summons: granting them extra lives, teleporting them around the battlefield, absorbing damage they take, and many more. Bound weapons use entirely different mechanics from summoning now, with a unique Kingsglaive-style system of dynamic casting and a range of special animations for each.
• Tons more. Werewolves (now Mutagenists) are outfitted with a number of new syringes you can inject into yourself and others (for many different effects!). Melee weapons have been recategorized into piercing, curved, and straight swords, all with unique animations, combos, and perks to go with. Animations and combat mechanics across the board have been designed to work seamlessly together and create a sort of pseudo-Souls combat experience, including tuned flinching, dodging, grip switching, and more. In general, every mechanic that exists in Enderal has been revisited, and has received a fair share of changes. 
  

‍Installation.

Thanks to the hard work of the Wabbajack team, Somnium is a breeze to set up and install. Please follow our instructions on our ReadTheDocs page here. 


Support and our Discord community.

If you have questions about the installation process or about Somnium, or are just looking for a friendly community to talk with, feel free to visit our Discord server. Our team (and our larger community!) is dedicated to helping you out with our projects, or just chatting with you about the Somnium experience! And if you would like to add some additional mods to the game, we'll also be able to help you with that in the #somnium-going-rogue channel. 


System Requirements.

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1660
Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-9400F CPU @ 2.90GHz
16 GB of RAM

With these system specs, on 1440p and the low ENB preset (there isn't a large visual difference between the different presets) the game runs very smoothly at a stable 40-50 fps. If your resolution is 1080p, it will likely run on nearly anything. Somnium is designed to offer impressive visuals, but also to be naturally performance-friendly and to give enough options to customize the performance for any machine. 


Scenic Route Games (and more information on our projects).

Scenic Route Games (us) is a volunteer development team focused on creating new and unique experiences not often seen in gaming. Somnium is our second project, while our first – Librum for Skyrim SE and VR – is a fresh take on Skyrim survival, filled with low-fantasy elements, magic that needs to be discovered and a harsh respawn system. We don't develop the games you expect to see, or maybe even the ones that you want to see, but we'll certainly come up with something interesting along the way. That being said, we still pay very close attention to the player feedback, as our developers spend a lot of time chatting with and listening to the users. You can find our website here, our Reddit page here, and our Discord community, which is the main hub of our interaction with the players, here. 


Credits.

First of all, I (Apoapse) could never have pulled this project off without my wonderful team behind me. In particular, I’d like to extend a huge thanks to our senior developers, EllieMental, Primeval, PrivateDelta, and Tixor, for their incredible work in organizing the project, leading development and testing efforts, and keeping our development in touch with the community at all times. I’d also like to thank our moderators, writers, artists, programmers, 3D modelers, web developers, and content developers for everything they’ve brought to the project – there isn’t one person on the team who didn’t make a substantial mark on Somnium, and I’m grateful they’ve stuck with me for so long!

Secondly, Somnium is fundamentally a project built on community assets, and we’re very grateful for the Skyrim and Enderal modding community and all the work they’ve made available to us.

Lastly, we would like to thank Bethesda and SureAI for Skyrim and Enderal respectively. It is needless to say that Somnium would not exist without their incredible work.