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About this mod
Spellsiphon - Shout And Bind is an add-on to the Spellsiphon mod by Arctal that allows you to Bind directly after Shouting. If Individual Shout Cooldowns or similar mods are not working for you, or you feel mods like that break the balance of shouting, this is the mod for you.
- Requirements
- Permissions and credits
- Changelogs
Spellsiphon - Shout And Bind
Do you use Spellsiphon? Do you ever find your Binding being blocked by your own shouts? Have you tried Individual Shout Cooldowns, but are you unsatisfied with it or find it can't work for you for whatever reason?
Then this is the mod for you!
Spellsiphon - Shout And Bind is an add-on to Arctal's Spellsiphon that allows you to Bind as much as you want, regardless of your shouts. However, unlike similar mods like Individual Shout Cooldowns, your shout cooldowns are NOT discrete on a per-shout basis. What this means is, the shout cooldown affects you for any regular shouts, but not Bind.
Why this, instead of Individual Shout Cooldowns?
Individual Shout Cooldowns is a great mod. For the most part, it does what it sets out to do beautifully. However, it has a couple fatal flaws - one a bug, one a feature.
- While it works great for most, I personally have been affected by a bug where switching shouts would reset the cooldown, and it wouldn't return to the correct value when you switch back. I've seen others mention this issue as well. This effectively gives you infinite shouts, and I felt this would give me too much power if I used shouts. However, I really wanted to use shouts - they're so powerful and you often can't get similar results elsewhere in the game (There's no Unrelenting Force enchantment, after all!). Unfortunately, the author hasn't seemed to use Nexus Mods in years, so it's very unlikely this will ever be fixed.
- I have also seen many people say using Individual Shout Cooldowns breaks the balance of the game for them. While it's not as bad as no cooldown, the shouts are balanced to only allow you to use one at a time - this mod allows you to throw out all your shouts at the beginning of the fight and obliterate anything in your way.
Spellsiphon - Shout And Bind doesn't have these problems.
- While I won't go into ISC's bug here (but my hypothesis for the cause is down below), it essentially has to do with how it keeps track of time. In certain cases, this system breaks down and doesn't track it correctly. Spellsiphon - Shout And Bind avoids these problems by using magic effects, those conditions your character gets from some potions, spells, and enchantments. Magic effects keep track of time in-engine, and they don't break down in certain situations (or at least, if they do break, it's much less easy to do than breaking ISC's system).
- The balance of the game is preserved due to Spellsiphon - SAB's mission. While ISC has its place, there should also be an option for Spellsiphon users to use balanced shouts.
Installation
- Obviously, install Spellsiphon. Although, you wouldn't be here if you weren't using that anyways, would you?
- Install SKSE at skse.silverlock.org. If you're on Special Edition, install SKSE SE (also known as SKSE64). As of this writing, it is the second listed build, on the fourth line. If you're playing in VR, install SKSE VR, the next one down.
- Install powerofthree's Papyrus Extender. Choose the correct file for the version of the game you're playing. Be sure to install all of its requirements as well!
- Install this mod with the mod manager of your choice. The most popular are Mod Organizer 2 and Vortex. I don't recommend using Nexus Mod Manager - that's very old and isn't supported anymore.
- You're done!
Compatibility
Mostly, this mod should work fine with anything else, with a few special mentions and caveats:
- This mod should be compatible with any shout, either vanilla or mod-added, as long as they use the vanilla shout system.
- It should be compatible with mods that change shout cooldowns. I haven't tested these, but feel free to let me know if it works with these.
- It should be compatible with Skyrim VR. I haven't tested it, though - let me know if there are any problems!
- This mod is inherently incompatible with Individual Shout Cooldowns. It does check if ISC is loaded and disables itself if so. (If you've renamed IndividualShoutCooldowns.esp, Spellsiphon - SAB won't be able to detect it. Any behavior in this case is undocumented and unsupported. I've done everything I can.)
- It's also inherently incompatible with Individual Shout Cooldown Remake, or any other individual shout cooldown mods. I haven't added a check for any mods other than ISC, so don't use this mod with any of those.
Bug Reports
This mod has not been tested extensively, although I have played with it on my own machine, and it seems to work fine. However, I am not a veteran modder by any means. Bug reports, suggested bug fixes, and suggestions for optimization are welcomed, appreciated, and requested.
Other Notes
Take note, how this mod works normally is kind of incompatible with Become Ethereal (as well as any similar mechanics in mods), but it still supports it, just differently from any other shout. Most of the time, you'll be able to see the shout cooldown as an effect, but if you're ethereal, you won't be able to. It's still tracking it, and if you switch off of Bind the cooldown will still come back.
My hypothesis for Individual Shout Cooldowns:
Spoiler:
Show
As far as I can tell, Individual Shout Cooldowns's bug comes from how it keeps track of time. It keeps track of time by using the in-game day count. If you've played on one save enough, your day count will get so big, the computer can't keep track of it all. Any extra data is cut off, and only the truncated data remains. Sure, that'll never happen in normal play, but if you've used the console to skip forward hundreds of days to reset the world, well... While I don't see anything in vanilla Skyrim that breaks due to this, if you, for instance, added the shout cooldown (in days) to the day count, the shout cooldown would be cut off due to the inherent imprecision of the medium. (This is called floating-point imprecision, and it is a very annoying thing in computer science.) If the day count gets big enough, the imprecision would get to the point where the entire shout cooldown is cut away, leaving no cooldown remaining.
Credits
Thank you to:- Arctal for his wonderful Spellsiphon mod
- The SKSE team for their incredible work on the game
- Powerofthree for their great papyrus functions
- Bethesda for making this game!