About this mod
Greatly expands on Mage Clothing Expansion's color palettes through texture swapping vanilla and ACE assets, and broadly distributes them across the world conflict-free via SkyPatcher.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
This mod consists of a couple of SkyPatcher-reliant modules united under one goal: to create more palettes of Hornclonic's Mage Clothing Expansion mainly through vanilla and ACE's assets, and seamlessly blend them into the game's leveled lists and College of Winterhold NPCs.
All enchanted copies of the robes obey the vanilla Novice/Apprentice/Adept/Expert/Master tiers, and can be found at the usual level 1/8/16/24/32(/40) and 1/10/20/30/40 blocks.
Unenchanted versions of all newly added variants can still be crafted at a tanning rack with three scraps of Leather.
All enchanted robes obey WACCF's reduced gold values by default, but still weigh 1 unit each. WACCF/ACE compliance stops here unless you're using the ACE add-on, detailed below.
Vanilla Base
By default, this mod re-routes all of MCE's initial variants to utilize texture swapping, and additionally adds another texture swap for Robes 1-4 and the Apprentice robes. Note that since male Robe 4 utilizes Expert/Master robe textures, male Robe 4 Variant 2 will appear identical to Robe 4 Variant 1.
Similar to Ennui's Expanded and Skypatched mod, all variations have pre-enchanted Magicka regen copies that have been injected into CoW shop, Necromancer, and Warlock leveled lists, so you'll be able to find them in the College's merchant inventories, Necro/Warlock loot containers and on some of those hostile mages after level 8.
Unlike Ennui's mod, I've made liberal use of sub lists to prevent these robes from drowning out other robes in the Necro/Warlock leveled lists. My leveled list injection is also much more conservative as I've only put these sub lists once in each of the MagickaRegen/MagickaRate leveled list's relevant brackets (1/8/16/24/32 for College merchants, 1/10/20/30/40 for Necro/Warlock lists, and 1/5/10/20/30 for Robes 5's hoods). Lastly, the pre-enchanted Novice robes are now distinct items from the original unenchanted robes so that you're still able to put your own enchantments on the mod's robes if so desired.
Vagrant Robes
This module uses CC Fishing's Vagrant Robes assets to create (enchanted) Robes 1, 2, and 4; Apprentice, and Brelyna variants, and distributes them to the Vampire robes' Destruction, Conjuration, and MagickaRate leveled lists. These pre-enchanted Destruction and Conjuration robes follow the Minor/Standard/Major/Eminent/Extreme/Peerless enchant strength tier and nomenclature unlike ACE's robes; more on this later.
Unlike the other modules, I've needed to make separate BodySlide projects for these robes to forward the original Vagrant Robes' mesh settings to MCE's robes in order to address texture and lighting issues that become immediately apparent with the vanilla textures even inside NifSkope. If you use Xavbio's Robes Retexture, these shouldn't be an issue as the copper highlights are not metallic with his textures; at any rate, these meshes are kept separate to maintain compatibility for users that don't use these textures for one reason or another.
You will need to build these meshes through BodySlide if you want to use this module. I've made a HIMBO Mage Clothing Expansion category with the original and Vagrant HIMBO BodySlides included, and a separate Mage Clothing Expansion 3BA - Vagrant category for 3BA with just the three variants (Uniboob Robes 4 included).
These BodySlides are made for HIMBO and 3BA using the original mod and Imp's refits, respectively. I don't plan to fully support base CBBE for this module.
Keep in mind that MCE's Male Robes 4 uses Expert/Master robe textures, which don't exist for Fishing's Vagrant Robes. I've compromised by making Vagrant Male Robes 4 look identical to the variant Male Robes 4 as it still sports a vampire-aligning red and black palette; and given the weird harem society of Skyrim vampires where all hostile male vampires are dungeon bosses, these specific robes shouldn't spawn too often on them anyways.
Unenchanted Distribution
This module consists of two SkyPatcher inis that inject unenchanted robes to the general Necromancer/Warlock (and Vampires in Vagrant's case) leveled lists so you'll be able to see these robes on hostile mages even at level 1. They're still not terribly common at this stage as the single sublist entries are mostly blotted out by the vanilla robes.
If you are using the ACE add-on below, these will be included in the Necro/Warlock leveled lists as well.
Downscaled Textures
These are optional downscaled (via CAO) textures to decrease MCE's custom texture files to 2K, or even 1K if you're looking to squeeze every last drop of FPS with MCE and this mod.
ACE Add-on and Distribution
This is the main reason I wrote this mod.
By itself, this module creates ACE variants for each of the four original MCE Robes, then distributes pre-enchanted versions to the College merchant, Necromancer, and Warlock's respective school leveled lists. I've also added appropriate armored clothing values and keywords to the base robe variants and hoods. The ACE variants already come with these changes by default.
Disclaimer: I've cheated a bit with the Necro/Warlock lists and used the same College-minted Novice/Apprentice/Adept/Expert/Master tiering instead of using the six hostile mage tiers like with the Vagrant add-on. Thus, you'll see Master sublists entered twice total for levels 32 and 40. I've thought of keeping the enemy tiers consistent with the Vagrant robes above, but considering even Summermyst below mostly relegates the Amplify School enchants to shop and loot tables and doesn't use the six enemy tiers for them outside of Vampire LLs (and it's just Conjuration + Destruction, at that), breaking my back in xEdit to add another 120 entries (and again for the Summermyst patch proper...) to address this consistency issue is very low in my priorities.
There are three patches of note that synergize with this ACE add-on:
- CoW Outfits: Distributes ACE variants to most NPCs in, or affiliated with the College of Winterhold. OCoW and ICNs are supported out of the box; if you don't use either/both mods, their SkyPatcher files won't do anything.
- I've used Ennui's outfits and ACE to start with the vanilla NPCs, then worked my from there with the missing apprentices, OCoW, and ICNs using educated guesses with three Modpocalypse NPCs patches and browsing UESP/their mod pages to try to make up a grasp on their personality, and which of the robes variants they'd wear without overtly favoring a specific one; all of my 1.0 choices are depicted in the image gallery. Note that there have been a couple of changes since then with MCE 2.0's additions.
- If you don't like my choices, that's OK! I've written and included a separate outfit SkyPatcher ini (all lines commented out/disabled by default) to facilitate changing their robes to another MCE variant.
- If you really don't want a specific NPC to have a MCE robe, period, you can also comment out their SkyPatcher outfit swap line in the relevant npc folder's ini; I've kept everything well-documented so all of the affected NPCs are easy to find.
- ACE'd Vagrant: Forwards the armored clothing values and keywords to the Vagrant Robes variants via SkyPatcher. I don't want to make the Vagrant Robes add-on a master for the ACE Add-on by default, so modifying the stats en masse this way is my compromise.
- Summermyst Patch: This patch adds ACE variant copies with Summermyst's Amplify School enchantments and injects them into the College merchant and Necro/Warlock leveled lists. They also obey Apprentice/Adept/Expert/Master tiering like my base ACE add-on, so you'll see Master listed twice for levels 32 and 40 in this SkyPatcher ini too.
- As with Summermyst, these sublists are added separate from the regular Fortify School cost enchanted robes in mage leveled lists, starting at level 8.
- As with Summermyst, these sublists are added separate from the regular Fortify School cost enchanted robes in mage leveled lists, starting at level 8.
Installation
All files are provided in a FOMOD; install as normal and let my mod win any file conflicts.
There is one caveat to mention regarding the addition of texture swapping from these modules: If you are using the shirt-on Males Robe 4 variant and/or Imperial2000's 3BA refit, remember to rebuild your meshes in BodySlide! I've went ahead with fixing the vest part's name in the former case, and re-ordered the 3BA body's part position in the latter's Robes 2-4 and ApprenticeAlt in order to get everything matched.
You don't need to rebuild anything if you're using the original shirtless Male Robes 4 and base CBBE BodySlides unless you're installing the Vagrant Robes module.
Compatibility
The use of texture swapping in this mod makes half of the BodySlide and mesh files for the variant robes redundant. If you want to save on some hard drive space, I've separated out the list of files that are safe to delete in the Documentation article.
This mod doesn't make any direct leveled list and NPC edits in its ESPs; many potential incompatibility causing changes are done with SkyPatcher in order to minimize conflicts. Outside of that:
Regarding ACE Robes-only mods:
All ACE modules are built to work with the original ACE mod ONLY. Things will break with HelepolisXII's and masimero's ACE Robes-only mods.
Yes, I know the WACCF requirement for ACE is an instant dealbreaker due to controversial ninja edits WACCF makes on top of it being patch hell to work with overall. I will reiterate that I've tailor-made this mod for my own LO. Making this mod took way too much time drowning in xEdit just set everything up for the original ACE, and I'm not about to adjust all of the modules' record addresses on top of maintaining them when I don't use either fork in my LO to begin with.
I've opened permissions on this mod for a reason. Feel free to untangle my xEdit and SkyPatcher vomit to patch everything for either Robes-only mod.
All pre-enchanted robes should be compatible with Thaumaturgy out of the box; I've only used vanilla School Cost enchant records across the board, and Thaumaturgy places the School Power/Duration enchants on necklaces and rings anyways.
Any body mod patches in the main FOMOD are made with HIMBO and 3BA in mind first.
A BHUNP patch is included under optional files; this simply adjusts Robes 1 so texture swapping doesn't break for it, and applies my Vagrant robes mesh changes to the BHUNP refits. These Vagrant variants are found under BHUNP - Mage Clothing Expansion (Vagrant) in BodySlide. Thanks to Saliren for providing permission to patch these refit files.
Please note that the BHUNP patch is not up to date with MCE 2.0. I'm waiting on Saliren to update it before I start forwarding Vagrant meshes changes for Apprentice and Brelyna, and checking the 2.0 BodySlides for texture swap conflicts.
The CoW Outfits SkyPatching might interact weirdly with ACE's SPID distribution ini if you're using SPID v6.8.2-. I would comment out the College Mages and Nelacar lines in its SPID file to be on the safe side if that's the case; there hasn't been any issues on newer SPID versions without forced outfit equips in my testing.
By that same token, I wouldn't pair my CoW Outfits SkyPatch with MCE's own SPID distribution if you're on SPID v6.8.2-. Pick one or the other, or use my outfits SkyPatcher ini if you want to replicate MCE's SPID choices with SkyPatcher handling the outfit application.
Credits
Hornclonic for creating these robes.
Ennui for inspiring me to build upon their Expanded and Skypatched mod and getting around to actually integrating ACE variants for MCE.
Kryptopyr, Imperial2000, Saliren, SomethingObscure, VorpalRunner, Enai, and all other MAs I might've forgot to mention for having open permissions to patch them into this mod.