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About this mod
Frost Giant and Karstaag replacer, inspired by the latter's unique look in Tes3: Bloodmoon, and complete overhaul of their mechanics, attacks, sounds, abilities, and much more.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
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Translations
- Spanish
- Changelogs
- Donations
- This mod is included in a themed pack: High Fantasy Pack (LE/SE-AE). If you downloaded the pack, you don't need or should keep this standalone mod in your load order, to avoid duplicating this mod's features in your game, whether areas, items, creatures, etc. Remove the esp of this standalone mod if you intend to install, or already installed, the themed pack where this mod is included. The action can be done mid-game without issues;
- This mod is the standalone version of my Frost Giant Overhaul, included in my Grahls and Frost Giants mod (LE / SE-AE). If you have the mentioned mod installed, you already have this creature in your game and you don't need to download this mod which only adds the mentioned creature and no other creatures contained in the bundle mod;
- Obviously you should not use this mod together with the mod mentioned above, since the latter already adds this creature to your game, and using them at the same time will double the amount of the mentioned creature in your game, in addition to other possible problems;
- If you use, like and value my work, please consider giving an endorsement. I've worked hard for years to offer you the best of me for free, and the only thing I ask in return is this gesture, which increases my relevance and engagement on Nexus, and motivates me to continue;
- I do not inspect or have any influence over translations of my mods (including those linked directly on my pages), nor do I have any power over patches or add-ons made to my content. So, before using any unofficial add-ons for my mods, make sure they conform to the latest version of my official release, and never use these if they don't. The same applies to Xbox ports;
- In addition to the Nexus, you can also find me on:
- Do you have any doubt? Read my Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ).
With this mod, you'll have access to a Frost Giant and Karstaag replacer, inspired by the latter's unique look in Tes3: Bloodmoon, and a complete overhaul of their mechanics, attacks, sounds, abilities, and much more. The highly problematic model in technical terms, visually ugly and lacking any and all kind of unique attributes/mechanics, is now replaced by one much more faithful to the original lore and with more interesting mechanics.
Lore description:
"Enigmatic creatures and rare in modern times, Frost Giants are bipedal gargantuan creatures of great strength and ferocity, but proven sentience. Scholars in consensus attribute their origin to the family that includes Trolls and Grahls, placing the Frost Giants as possibly the, or one of, the most evolved members of the family. They have bluish gray skin, and are covered in thick white fur. The heads are large, and ornamented with a pair of large horns. They have five eyes, and sharp teeth like Trolls. Like these, their feet and hands have 3 clawed fingers each, and they attack with their long arms. Frost Giants wear rudimentary clothing made of fur and leather. Their language is poorly understood, much like that of traditional Giants. These however are not related to the Frost Giants, who only have the name "Giant" because they are, in fact, giant in size as well, just like the man-like Giants commonly found in Skyrim.
It is interesting to note the use of the name "Karstaag" to refer to the race of Frost Giants as a whole, because a particularly powerful Frost Giant known simply as King Karstaag long reigned over a community of Rieklings, and was slain in the Third Era by the Nerevarine, on the island of Solstheim. Because of this, some scholars believe "Karstaag" to be the name the Frost Giants give their own race, while others believe the name refers to some sort of nobility among their peers, rather than being a common name, unique to a specific Frost Giant.
Finding Frost Giants these days is virtually impossible, but from time to time some unsuspecting person claims to have caught a glimpse of one while walking through the remote icy mountains of Skyrim."
by Beastmaster Mihail *
(*Who is Beastmaster Mihail? He is my avatar/persona within the universe composed of all my mods. He is the ingame author who writes the texts that are usually presented as descriptions for my mods. A former monster hunter, now a dedicated scholar, he is planned to be released as an NPC in late 2022/early 2023, doing the same job in-game as my descriptions do on Nexus.)
Introduction: my initial plan was just to fix some animation errors that caused the vanilla Frost Giants to distort, change their proportions closer to the original ones from Tes 3: Bloodmoon, change their attacks due to the same previous objective, do a retexture for 4k resolution, and some more mechanics modifications, and adding new sounds. However, when studying the model, I saw that this would not be possible. Like many other things done in the Dawnguard DLC, unfortunately the Frost Giant was done in a hurry and without care: it is literally a kitbash of models and textures of vanilla Trolls and Giants, so it has a lot of problematic seams, fur textures that should be partially transparent but are just geometric blocks, lots of distortions, fur floating away from the body, horns sticking out of place, in addition to the already mentioned bad animations, and the textures are also very low resolution. Below you can check some examples of what I'm talking about:
(in the image above you can see that the textures are applied in a totally sloppy way to the model, even though they are derived from relati vely good quality textures such as the textures of Giants and Trolls, the poor design and production of the model made the problem irremediable. Even with the texture of the body being at 1k resolution, on the specific model it becomes very ugly, and the fur and loincloth, respectively modified from the texture of the Trolls' back and the Giants' clothing, are only at 512k, therefore being even worse.)
(as you can see above, the distribution of extra elements was not careful: the fur on the paws for example floats above the model, and the claws are distorted. On the head, the horns go beyond the place they should, clipping on top of the head, and it is possible to see the exact place where part of a Giant's forehead was cut and pasted onto a Troll's head, causing a visible separation line.)
(here you can not only see even more clearly where part of a Giant's head was cut and pasted onto the Troll's face, causing an ugly line of separation, but you can also see that they forgot to add the alphas in the image, so the fur has no transparency, from the ear to the chin, being an ugly and solid compact block.)
(you can also see above one of the many vanilla model animation bugs, which causes ugly distortions on the mouth area.)
Due to these and many other problems, it became impossible to work with this model. Other problems are, for example, innumerable, and even unnecessary, seams all over the body, some of them conveniently covered by hair yes, but a hair which is equally terrible. In addition to the biggest problem in my opinion, which is the fact that the model only has 4 eyes, instead of 5, and even the Karstaag Skull model has the correct number. So, and to my regret, I decided to scrap the vanilla model, and make a completely new one. Explanations given, check below the features of this mod:
- A new detailed model and replacement for Frost Giants and Karstaag, made from scratch and more faithful to the original Frost Giants design in Morrowind's lore and Bloodmoon DLC, with 4k textures and 2k normal maps; (check image above)
- They have a physical structure now more similar to the original Karstaag, and Trolls in general, also moving closer to the way they move. While the vanilla moved and had the proportions of a normal Giant; (images above for reference, from left to right: official Frost Giants concept art, ingame image of Karstaag from TES 3, Frost Giant replacer)
- Frost Giants now have their own race, no longer sharing the "Giant race" with vanilla Giants, thus having their own skeleton, their attacks are different, including magic skills (I'll talk about that later), they have different movement, being slower, but having heavier attacks. Moreover, they no longer suffer knockdowns, including caused by shouts like the "Fus Ro Dah", due to their stronger and bulkier build. Also, they now have a slight HP regeneration, just like all Trolls, but weaker, for balance reasons. Frost Giants' vanilla resistances were maintained (100% resistance to ice, 33% weakness to fire);
- Their static lvl 50 has been maintained, as well as 1039 of HP and 446 of Stamina. The speed was lowered from 70 to 40, and their steps were changed, being still heavy and worthy of a colossal creature, but no longer producing exactly the same sound as the footsteps of the Giants;
- Now they belong to the "Troll faction", they emit Troll breathing sound, and also Troll sounds when attacked, wounded or killed. Now they also have a unique combat language, instead of ridiculously making the same sounds as Giants. Bethesda gave unique sounds to the Karstaag added in the Dragonborn DLC, but neglectfully didn't share them with the other Frost Giants, so now both Karstaag and the Frost Giants from the Dawnguard DLC share the same unique sounds/language; (in the image above you can see that the textures are applied in a totally sloppy way to the model, even though they are derived from relati vely good quality textures such as the textures of Giants and Trolls, the poor design and production of the model made the problem irremediable. Even with the texture of the body being at 1k resolution, on the specific model it becomes very ugly, and the fur and loincloth, respectively modified from the texture of the Trolls' back and the Giants' clothing, are only at 512k, therefore being even worse.)
(as you can see above, the distribution of extra elements was not careful: the fur on the paws for example floats above the model, and the claws are distorted. On the head, the horns go beyond the place they should, clipping on top of the head, and it is possible to see the exact place where part of a Giant's forehead was cut and pasted onto a Troll's head, causing a visible separation line.)
(here you can not only see even more clearly where part of a Giant's head was cut and pasted onto the Troll's face, causing an ugly line of separation, but you can also see that they forgot to add the alphas in the image, so the fur has no transparency, from the ear to the chin, being an ugly and solid compact block.)
(you can also see above one of the many vanilla model animation bugs, which causes ugly distortions on the mouth area.)
Due to these and many other problems, it became impossible to work with this model. Other problems are, for example, innumerable, and even unnecessary, seams all over the body, some of them conveniently covered by hair yes, but a hair which is equally terrible. In addition to the biggest problem in my opinion, which is the fact that the model only has 4 eyes, instead of 5, and even the Karstaag Skull model has the correct number. So, and to my regret, I decided to scrap the vanilla model, and make a completely new one. Explanations given, check below the features of this mod:
- A new detailed model and replacement for Frost Giants and Karstaag, made from scratch and more faithful to the original Frost Giants design in Morrowind's lore and Bloodmoon DLC, with 4k textures and 2k normal maps; (check image above)
- Frost Giants now have their own race, no longer sharing the "Giant race" with vanilla Giants, thus having their own skeleton, their attacks are different, including magic skills (I'll talk about that later), they have different movement, being slower, but having heavier attacks. Moreover, they no longer suffer knockdowns, including caused by shouts like the "Fus Ro Dah", due to their stronger and bulkier build. Also, they now have a slight HP regeneration, just like all Trolls, but weaker, for balance reasons. Frost Giants' vanilla resistances were maintained (100% resistance to ice, 33% weakness to fire);
- Their static lvl 50 has been maintained, as well as 1039 of HP and 446 of Stamina. The speed was lowered from 70 to 40, and their steps were changed, being still heavy and worthy of a colossal creature, but no longer producing exactly the same sound as the footsteps of the Giants;
- In vanilla skyrim they gave Frost Giants a Giant Club, out of sheer laziness. They even made a stronger one with ice damage, even using the same model, but they didn't even end up giving them that one. Frost Giants were designed (and implemented in Morrowind) to attack with claws, so now they attack with claws instead of clubs. The method to make this possible was to assign them an invisible club, and only leaving available attacks that don't clearly show that they are using an invisible club, which worked very well. I used the damage initially intended for their unused club, and it deals cold damage, and the same setting applies to attacks from the other hand that has no club at all. Also, I modified the sounds so that they make claw sounds when hitting the opponent, not the sound of a weapon. To prevent them from using the shoulder club idle when not in combat, I added an AI package that makes them always have their weapon ready for combat, thus giving the right pose for a creature that uses its claws for combat, even when they are not in aggressive mode; (if you spam one using console command for a video showcase, remember to activate the AI, to avoid them reverting to the classic shoulder club pose) (last note: TES Legends features them using a club, but this discontinued game is famous for constantly breaking lore, and having almost no consistency)
- They now have ice magic, albeit less powerful than Karstaag's. Common Frost Giants are now wrapped in a powerful frost cloak when they enter combat, and blue markings appear on their bodies when their blood freezes and turns blue (more details about their blood will be given later). Their claws then deal cold damage, and their stomps cause ice blasts;
- They no longer drop Giant Toes, now dropping Troll Fat, in addition to materials found in the Forgotten Valley, such as the skins of animals native there;
- The way Paragons used in the quest to Auriel Shield were assigned to Frost Giants was problematic, causing the changes applied in this mod not to be applied to the paragons' Frost Giants in parts, reverting them back to vanilla, so I modified this, putting new entries of Frost Giant npcs in place of the originals, and disabling the vanilla ones. The only problem this can cause you is if you have already defeated and looted the vanilla ones, you will find new Frost Giants there, which will be carrying paragons again. But, as in the vanilla game, Frost Giants are still unique and do not respawn, being now marked as Protected, to give you the opportunity to kill them yourself, since they are unique experiences, that is, they can take damage from any individual , but only you can strike the final blow;
- The Karstaag Skull, originally in 512 x 512 resolution, now has textures in 4k and normal maps in 2k; (image above)
- The "Castle Karstaag Ruins" in the Dragonborn DLC had planned a unique map icon for it, but it ended up being
discarded in favor of the common cave map icon, however it was kept in the archives. Now it has been restored:
(image bellow for comparison)
- The vanilla inventory model for Karstaag's summon spell was the same as the Daedra summons, so I changed it to
the proper model, used in other vanilla spirit summons. The spell's other effects are correct, so they were kept.
(image bellow)
- An important and final note about the blue blood attributed to Frost Giants in the lore: my initial wish was to make them produce blue blood when attacked, instead of red, but not only would I be required to remove the ability for their blood to stain weapons (since they only react to red blood in their default settings), this would also require creating a new entry of a new type of impact material in addition to the existing ones, and for some reason this has always been buggy and problematic. So I came up with the lore-friendly explanation that their blood starts to turn blue only when they enter combat and activate their ice powers, expressed in the frost cloak that forms around them and the runic markings on their bodies, as a reflection of the magical cooling of the blood, which occurs gradually, justifying that they still have part of the blood in red color, during combat;
- Finally, I want to share with you the fact that the initially planned version was even more similar to Karstaag from TES 3, with bigger whiskers, and more hair on the head, but unfortunately I didn't like seeing the ingame result at the end, so I removed some of the features. I could have applied this model at least to Karstaag, but I really didn't think it was worth it. However, the discarded model is functional and is included in this mod's archives, so you can replace it for personal use if you want. So, I decided to find a middle ground between the design of Morrowind and that of Skyrim, including taking some inspiration from TES Legends, despite all the problems of that game. (comparative images below, from left to right: Morrowind's design, my non-used initial design fully inspired on it, the concept art from Tes Legends, my final design with some inspirations from Tes Legends, but sill based on the look of the species on Morrowind)
The mod is not compatible with other mods that modify the textures, models, skeleton, attributes, etc., of vanilla Frost Giants and Karstaag. If you have one installed, or think you might have one, put this mod below it/them in your load order. If you are asked about files overwriting those of other mods, press "Yes to all".
(OBS- If by chance when installing several of Mihail's mods at the same time you are asked about files overwriting those of other Mihail mods or other authors mods, don't worry because they are just the same files shared between mods. I recommend that on these occasions always give preference to the files contained in my mods, and among mine always give preference to the mod you are installing last.)
The Mihail Monsters and Animals series aims to create and make available to the community the most complete set of creatures for TES 5: Skyrim, implemented in an immersive and unique way, with respect to the pillars of lore. Instead of pathetically just throwing models and textures in the game reusing 100% vanilla mechanics, the creatures made by Mihail have uniqueness and extreme zeal in their idealization and implementation, which will provide you with an experience that you have never had before in this area.
- The last Skyrim Update
- DLC Dragonborn
- DLC Dawnguard
- DLC Hearthfire
Mod Author:
Mihail- models, textures, animations, effects, spells, sound and game implementation.