Skyrim Unlimited

Because as good as the base game is, the opportunities and challenges of Vanilla Skyrim are far too limited!


Version 1.23 Released!
The update is finally finished! I want to extend a heart-felt thank you to all of the fans of Skyrim Unlimited for waiting patiently while it was developed, and I hope you all will derive as much enjoyment from playing it as I do. Please keep an eye out for bugs and report them to me in private messages, as that would be immensely helpful for making a better Skyrim experience for all of you.
My immediate plans involve creating many compatibility patches in order to make this newest version of SU as friendly towards playing with other mods as possible, as soon as possible. This version includes a great deal of potential for future mod content, and is designed to put tools in the hands of other players and modders alike which they have never had before. For starters, this includes an inventory leveled list system that allows precise control of what every single NPC wears, has in their inventory, or drops upon death. A potentially even more powerful addition is the ability to change NPC vital statistics such as life, stamina and speed for future areas, in-game using the 'choose attributes' lesser power. This can be found in the options sub menu.
After many compatibility patches are complete, I will work on a new and improved enchanted item update which will include vast numbers of new enchanted armors, followed by an alchemy update designed to work well with alchemy mods currently on the nexus.
As usual, the latest change log updates can be found at the bottom of this mod description. Keep the constructive feedback coming and I wish you all the most amazing and fun adventures in Tamriel!


Full Feature List Overview
This is a melding of the best parts of forgotten elder scrolls game dynamics and a substantial overhaul of many game dynamics, both blended with the awesomeness of Skyrim Special Edition. This includes classic elder scrolls attributes for the player and NPCs, a complete overhaul of NPC leveling and abilities, overhauled vanilla perks, dozens of new perks, dozens of new enchantments, thousands of new enchanted items, over fifty new spells, magical sneak attacks, many new challenges, and much more!

At the Heart of Skyrim Unlimited: Classic Elder Scrolls Attributes
What attributes will you use?

Gain more power in totally new ways for Skyrim, through the reintroduction and lore-friendly reimagining of the basic attributes of Strength, Endurance, Agility, Speed, Intelligence, Willpower, Personality, and Luck. The new system makes the game more interesting, challenging and truer to the classic Elder Scrolls style. Increase your health to new heights with the endurance attribute as well as the normal method of increasing it. Deal more damage with physical blows and increase your carry weight with the strength attribute. Augment the agility attribute to increase your stamina and more skillfully aim your strikes to ignore the enemy's armor . Run faster and swing your weapons more swiftly by increasing your speed attribute. Increase your intelligence to gain more magicka, increase your maximum spell burst charge and improve your enchanting and alchemy skills even further. Improve your willpower to recharge your magicka more quickly, charge up powerful spell bursts more quickly and make your spells and alchemy effects last longer. When you need to haggle for lower prices, sell your own wares at higher prices, or just be better at persuading others, develop your personality attribute. Finally, your Luck attribute has many possible effects, ranging from increased loot to better critical attack damage, and all of them are unlocked with new perks in several different perk trees.
This is just the tip of the iceberg: these attributes do much more when you unlock new perks and modified versions of old perks designed to use them. NPCs will use the new attributes as well, and they receive the same bonuses you do from them. All changes are balanced, as lore friendly as possible, and guaranteed to give you a more interesting play through. Your starting attributes depend on your race and gender. Orcs and Redguards generally start with higher strength and/or endurance, high elves start with higher intelligence, wood elves start with higher agility, and so on and so forth. This is arguably more lore-friendly, immersive, and fun than making all characters exactly the same in terms of vital statistics. Having to make choices about how to build your character is a wonderful and badly needed thing in vanilla Skyrim.
Attributes can be improved in several ways. For every level you gain, you can use the new "Choose Attributes" lesser power to allocate 10 attribute points to any attributes you choose. You will receive this power after loading the game with SU installed. Additionally, increasing your skills will grant you some passive gains for the attributes closely related to the skills you focus on, and these increases will also occur after gaining levels. Finally, if you need to increase your attributes as far you can go, invest perk points in new attribute perks in the perk trees of your choice. Every perk tree now has attribute perks that will increase the most appropriate attribute for the skill in question. You will get a notification in the upper left side of the screen every time an attribute increases, including derived attributes of health, stamina, magicka and carry weight. Each basic attribute's current level can be viewed in the active magic effects tab of the magic menu. There are enchanted armors and jewelry that will now appear in loot and merchant's inventories that will increase your attributes. They are disenchantable and you can put the enchantments on any type of armor or jewelry.
If choosing attributes after every level isn't for you, maybe because it breaks the immersion for you, be aware you can also set up an auto-attribute system which will take care of your attribute points for you, based on your selections at the start. You can enable this feature in the options menu of the 'choose attributes' lesser power. Using this feature means you effectively may only need to choose attributes once.
New attributes aren't enough for you? Don't worry. There is so much more ahead.

What will your focus be?
Why be a pure warrior, pure mage, or pure sneak? In Vanilla Skyrim there was no reason to be any of those things. In Skyrim Unlimited, there are more interesting choices to make. Focus points give bonuses to many related abilities for either Warrior, Sneak, or Mage abilities. Your magic focus improves the power of all your spells. Your Sneak Focus improves many abilities from your damage with daggers, lockpicking prowess, pickpocketing and of course your sneaking abilities. Warrior Focus does one thing and one very well: augment your damage with physical weapons.
Focus points are gained by increasing the skills most closely associated with each type, by completing important quests in the main storylines of Skyrim, including the DLC quests, or by converting Dragon Souls with the 'convert dragon soul' power you will receive at the start of the game. You can view your current focus points, along with your attributes, in the active magic effects menu.
If you don't ever want to a pure warrior, sneak, or mage, don't worry. You definitely can avoid focus points all together. That's the beauty of Skyrim Unlimited: it doesn't penalize you for choosing one path or another, but it does give you dramatically improved depth of choices to your character development. Focus point enchantments can be found on enchanted necklaces and amulets late in the game, too. They are disenchantable and chances are, no matter what character build you're going for, these can help you do something you like, better.

My Notes on Attributes
I designed Skyrim Unlimited to provide much needed depth to the character progression system, but with only the most appropriate, balanced and integrated changes to the system used by vanilla Skyrim. Furthermore, it needs to be noted you will not be penalized forever by choosing to raise one or two particular attributes at the expense of other attributes falling behind: if you play long enough, you can increase all of your attributes to their maximum possible levels. It will defintely affect your playthrough in interesting ways if you focus on a few attributes at a time, however. That having been said, there is no ever lasting opportunity cost of choosing one attribute over another. You can be the ultimate super attribute god dovahkin by the time you reach level 100.
Attributes make the game much deeper and more involved, primarily by providing bonuses that reward you for choosing to increase them and by training skills that are more closely related within each class. There is synergy in using combat skills, and the same can be said of magic and sneak skills. Most attribute increases occur after gaining levels.

Here is a breakdown of only the most basic effects of each attribute:

Strength
Carry Weight (5 x strength)
unarmed damage
1/3 stamina regeneration
with perks:
melee weapon damage

Endurance
Health (5 x endurance)
1/3 stamina regeneration
with perks:
blocking effectiveness

Speed
walking and running speed
melee weapon speed
Ranged Weapon Draw Speed
with perks:
pickpocketing
sneaking

Agility
stamina (5 x agility)
1/3 stamina regeneration
with perks:
ranged weapon damage
lockpicking
sneaking

Intelligence
Magicka (5 x intelligence)
Spell Burst Maximum Charge
with perks:
enchantment potency
potion potency

Willpower
Magicka regeneration
Spell Burst Charging Rate
Offensive Spell Force Projection
with perks:
spell durations
potion effect durations

Personality
with perks:
persuasion success
intimidation success
vendor prices
player reputation
bribery cost

Luck
with perks:
critical hit chances of weapons
critical hit damage
chance to find additional loot


NPC Attribute Customization
Play with characters the way you want them by customizing NPC statistics to whatever your heart desires! The 'Choose Attributes' lesser power's options menu can be used to change the vital statistics of essentially every character in the game, including their life, stamina, speed, strength, etc., to whatever you please. If you don't like the way NPCs move faster at high levels of speed, change it. If you think NPCs aren't giving you enough of a challenge at higher levels, change it. Please be aware that funky settings like 0% speed or strength are possible, but not recommended. That is recommended only if you need to laugh, or possibly crash your game. Or both. You take your quality game time into your own hands if you go down that road, but I also doubt you will ever find another mod which gives you, the player, this choice and option.

Eight New Weapon Enchantments and Thousands of New Enchanted Weapons
Literally thousands of new enchanted weapons have been added into leveled lists of loot, vendor inventories, and yes, even in the hands of some NPCs. The new enchanted weapons include 8 new enchantment types and range from enchantments that weaken your target to enchantments that poison them for a slow death. Better yet, sooner or later you will come across powerful weapons with two or even three enchantment effects at once and of comparable power to the weapons you could be making yourself with a high enchanting skill. Use them to dramatically boost your damage potential or sell them for a lot of coin at the nearest blacksmith. There is no longer a drastic need to focus on enchanting as a skill in order to create the most powerful weapons.

Reworked NPC Vital Statistics
NPC levels, attributes, and corresponding abilities have received a substantial overhaul. Instead of remaining at stagnant levels throughout Skyrim, they now vary to a subtle degree in level and generally gain levels at various rates as the game progresses. For example, regular, run-of-the-mill bandits in vanilla skyrim never exceeded level 1. The next tier of bandit was a hard coded level higher than that, and so on, and so forth. Boss bandits generally were never much stronger than you, and typically in the late game were at an unimpressively lower level than you. I remember the first time I played Skyrim, and by the time I was level 25 nothing could touch me. In Skyrim Unlimited, typical NPC levels can be anywhere from 1 to as high as your level, and bosses very often will be even higher in level than you! The rates NPCs gain levels are carefully balanced to respect the vanilla power distribution for all NPCs. If an NPC was weak compared to another NPC in vanilla skyrim, it will still be weak to that same NPC now.
NPCs are now sporting more appropriate levels, skills, and perks which suit their faction, job, and level. Expect high level NPC's to surprise you if you've never played SU before. High-ranking guild or main quest characters in particular are now considerably more competent across the board. I do not recommend starting a fight with the companions or the mages at the college of winterhold at the start of the game, for example. For even more hilarity, attack characters like daedric lords or the few existing aedra in the game and see what happens. I highly recommend saving your game first.
NPC attributes can be viewed with the new "Dragon Sense" lesser power, and I recommend using it to judge how much stronger and tougher the NPC will be compared to in Vanilla Skyrim. You will receive this power after loading the game with SU installed. For example, a strength value of 100 means the NPC will do 2x the normal damage with melee weapons that it would be dealing in vanilla skyrim.
This is all part of an on-going effort to make the world of Skyrim less bland, less predictable, and more challenging in fun ways. The balance of power between the player and NPCs has been tweaked so that you shouldn't get too comfortable at high levels. Your enemies will make you regret it if you do.

A Vastly Improved Magic Paradigm
Skyrim Unlimited adds over fifty new spells into Tamriel, and some of them open up the potential for entirely new mage builds focused around illusion, alteration, or even restoration. Each new spell is unique, integrated into leveled lists and spell tome lists, and both your allies and enemies alike will use them too at some point during your adventures. They are balanced on the player side and the NPC side.
All vanilla and SU fire and forget spells can be charged up for a spell burst. Spell bursts are supercharged versions of offensive or defensive spells which improve both the magnitude and duration of spells. You can charge spell bursts simply by holding a charged spell in either or both hands. After about two seconds, you will notice some new FX effects around your character, which indicate a buildup of energy. Your magicka level must remain constant during charging, or charging will not happen: this means you cannot cast a concentration spell or use magicka potions during charging, for example. Your intelligence directly determines the maximum charge level, and your willpower directly influences how quickly you will charge spell bursts. The color pallette of the FX effects will gradually change to indicate the charge level and will progress from red, which indicates a charge level between 0 and 25% greater magnitude, to green, then various shades of blue and then purple, and finally, white, once you exceed 200% burst charge. The maximum burst charge depends only on your intelligence attribute, and thus it has no hard limit. When a spell burst hits a target, you will receive a notification message similar to the sneak attack damage multiplier notification, which will tell you how much extra magnitude it had. Better yet, the damage bonuses from spell sneak attacks and spell bursts are multiplicative, offering the potential to deal massive damage in a very fulfilling way before your enemies even see you. You can even 'hold' a spell burst charge for a few seconds after charging and change to a different fire and forget spell to use the charge with, or transition to another area and fire a maximum strength burst at any enemies waiting for you there. The time you can hold it before dissipation is equal to 1 + your magic focus level. You can even charge up a spell burst in one hand and use a spell in the other hand to apply it.
No matter what kind of offensive spell you use, you can now project force onto your target and knock it away when you deal enough damage and if you have enough willpower. As you increase both your willpower and the damage inflicted by your spells, you will be able to fling your targets away at impact as if they were rag dolls.
For the Destruction mages that are tired of using only flame, frost, or shock spells, try the new arcane damage type! Arcane damage is pure magical essence that has not been channeled into an elemental affinity. Arcane spells can typically be cast very rapidly, and they incur no damage penalty against any race. However it should be noted that Arcane spells also have no special effect (like enduring flames, slower movement speed, etc) and more importantly, magic resistance effectively counts twice against arcane damage. Each spell fits nicely in the vanilla schema that Bethesda used for spells. In addition, I would like to introduce my new beam spells, which can hit at extreme ranges and come in heat, cold, shock, and arcane variants. They are inspired by ideas from spells in Midas Magic.
Over twenty new Conjuration Spells have been added into Tamriel. These are my new Familiar spells and undead summoning spells, and are designed to work in exactly the same manner as the vanilla familiar spell. However, now you can potentially summon 21 kinds of 'spirit' animals instead of just the one, and you can summon five different types of skeletons with different modes of attack, ranging from swords, to bows, to spells, or warhammers in the case of the dreaded skeleton warlord.
Playing as a summoner has never felt this good, as summoning skills are now much more interesting across the board. Potent Atronachs are nice and all, but lets be honest, what you really want are Ascendant summoned creatures. All atronachs, familiars, and summoned undead can now become Ascendant when you choose the right conjuration perk. Additionally, new perks in the conjuration skill perk tree allow you to increase the vitals statistics of your summoned creatures based on your conjuring skill, your intelligence attribute, and your magic focus level.
Have you ever wanted to use Force Powers like a jedi in Skyrim? Now you can. Have you ever been attacked by a guard and thought "I really just want you to go away". Now you can make it happen. Three new alteration spells specialize in not only dealing damage, but projecting force in a way that pushes or even blows targets away. Look for force bolt, force push, and force blast to satisfy your need to use lethal force.
Feather spells and unlock spells are back and are designed to fit nicely into Skyrim, almost as if they had never been absent. In addition to making your maximum carry weight increase, feather spells can also reduce or even eliminate the damage you take from long falls.
You can fortify your attributes or resistances with new restoration spells, or depending on the tactical situation, maybe you will fortify your followers with the same effects using the 'endowment' versions of those spells.
Weakness spells and enchantments have been added into Tamriel, fresh from the Illusion school of magic. They not only damage your target's health by attacking the mind, they create an illusory field around the target that weakens its physical attacks, movement speed, and more. Fade, Debilitate, and Cripple, are respectively apprentice, adept, and expert spells. Be aware that at first, you will only be able to harm the living with weakness spells, but certain perks in the illusion skill perk tree can alleviate this limitation. Weakness spells can be devastating to melee characters, whose physical attack damage and speed will be dramatically but temporarily reduced while they take a fair amount of damage
Absorption spells and enchantments are back, are better than ever, and have been enveloped into a new spell archetype I call "absorbance". As the name suggests, they don't just damage your target: you steal all of the health (and later, stamina) that you can get out of them, for yourself. Absorbance typically works only on living targets, but rumor has it, gifted restoration mages can make absorbance work on the undead, daedra, or even automatons. Strictly speaking, three new restoration spells have been added: siphon, absorption, and osmosis.

Sneak Attacks with Spells!
Spell sneaking is back! All novice, apprentice, and adept destruction spells will successfully sneak attack while the caster is sneaking, undetected, and the target does not hear or see the spell coming. There are new perks available in the sneak perk tree that will increase your chances of successfully pulling off a spell sneak attack, and will increase the damage of your spell sneak attacks as well. Spell sneaking is the perfect blend of sneaking gameplay and spell casting gameplay, and will offer many hours of new, original character builds not possible with any other mod.

Create New Things with the Arcane Manipulator!
The Arcane Manipulator has been added to the world of Tamriel! This device allows for new crafting recipes of items that would otherwise be uncraftable and potentially unobtainable otherwise, such as the most powerful of spell tomes or magical scrolls, for example. It also allows you to convert rubies, sapphires, diamonds, etc., into soul gems. The list of craftable goodies will grow much larger with future updates. It resembles a smaller version of the arcane altar after a fashion, and has been placed near many arcane enchanting tables in 17 places all across Skyrim. You can most easily find them in player homes, like hjerim or proudspire, and in the study areas of important mages, like Farengar. You will only see the gem recipes in the Arcane Manipulator when you have gems in your inventory. You will only see and be able to use the recipes of spell tomes you can create when you have the mastery perk directly underneath the spell's mastery perk. For example, you can only create the fire bolt tome when you have the novice destruction perk and you don't already know the fire bolt spell. You will only see and be able to use the recipes of magic scrolls when you have the scroll crafting perk from the enchanting skill perk tree and you have learned the spell you are attempting to create the scroll version of. You will also need blank scrolls of the correct type and soul gems of sizes corresponding to the mastery level of the spell in question. Blank scrolls are available from most court wizards and college of winterhold vendors.

Stronger Werewolves and Vampire Lords
Transforming into a Werewolf or Vampire Lord will increase your abilities like never before. Both forms have received massive bonuses to attack damage, damage resistance and general attribute bonuses appropriate to each form. Several dynamics related to feeding have been modified to be more fulfilling and filling at the same time. New perks are coming for each beast form's perk trees, as well.

Viable Unarmed Combat
Have you ever wanted to be a monk who fights with fists alone in Tamriel? You can do that in Skyrim Unlimited. Your hand to hand damage increases with your strength and your one-handed skill. Your one-handed skill will also increase as you successfully deal damage with bare-handed blows. Three new and powerful perks in the one-handed skill perk tree are waiting for all of the bare-fisted Dovahkin out there. Beware however: NPCs, big or small, receive exactly the same bonuses. Brawls and feats of strength aren't going to be contests you will want to blink in while playing Skyrim Unlimited. Bare handed blows now have a whopping 5x multiplier to sneak attack damage. The new damage potential offered here opens up new possibilities for unarmed combat as a mainstream play style, and particularly when combined with the new Khajiit or Argonian claw damage bonuses of 30% or 20%, respectively, instead of a flat 12 point bonus.

Realistic Sneaking
Sneaking is now considerably more difficult in Skyrim at the start, but your new potential stealth skills and new stealth enchantments like Silence and old favorites like Chameleon can allow you to become a master of the darkness like never before if you use your potential wisely. Staying hidden is very tricky for a starting character, since light and sound have a greater effect on your stealth. Enemies will not just stop looking for you after sixty seconds, so you will probably have to put a lot more distance between yourself and your pursuers before you can regain your stealth after being discovered. It is recommended to take extra care around enemies you used to sneak around easily. Effective stealth will require careful forethought, more training with sneak trainers, more perk investments in the sneak perk tree, and well-chosen and well-developed enchantments for your apparel before you can safely and reliably sneak.

Challenging Lockpicking and Pickpocketing
Lets face it: in vanilla Skyrim, the challenge of lockpicking is a joke. Any one with level 25 in lockpicking and a handful of lockpicks could learn to open even master locks with very little effort. Its shouldn't be a breeze to get through master locks with a mediocre lockpicking skill. No longer. In Skyrim Unlimited, you will need most of the perks in the skill tree and probably some skill trainers to boost your skill level in lockpicking before you should attempt to tackle master locks, and expert locks will be very tough. The loot of containers will more properly scale upwards with each higher lock placed on them.
Pickpocketing has been revamped a bit. Pickpocketing gold is going to be twice as hard, item weight makes a bigger difference, and the victim's skills make a much bigger difference now. On the flip side, you can get much better at lockpicking if you use the right attributes and perks!
Hint: lockpicking and pickpocketing potions and enchantments aren't almost pointless now, and if you really want to excel in both, invest focus points into your sneak focus level.

Staffs Worth Using
Staffs in Tamriel, to me, have been very boring since as long as I can remember. Not any more. Now, staffs have considerably bigger advantages over normal spellcasting. The new synergy perks in every magic skill perk tree boost the damage of all staff magic effects when you dual cast with two staffs. In addition, staffs now last longer before needing to be recharged. The total number of staffs in Skyrim have been doubled, and as a general rule, there are staffs for every offensive spell in the game, including spells from Skyrim Unlimited. Be wary, Dragonborn: your enemies may occasionally use these new staffs, as well. It may be possible to craft master level destruction spell staffs at the Arcane Manipulator... Only a master of a destruction magic with many spells learned may be able to determine this.

Potions and Ingredients Worth Investing Time In
Skyrim Unlimited adds 40 new alchemy ingredient effects and over two dozen new ingredients, with more incoming in planned future updates. Many of the effects will look and feel very familiar to fans of elder scrolls games from the past, but a few of them are very new and very powerful. Please see the readme and changelog for more details. New ingredients include alchemical dusts of many common metals and new varieties of hearts from many different animals, to name just a few. They can be found in all of the same common places you already habitually find loot on a regular basis, but you'll need to invest in three new alchemy perks in order to be able to find and collect them. Alchemy effects added include:

Shielding, Spell Absorption, Frailty, Thorns, Chameleon, Debilitate
Fire Cloak, Frost Cloak, Shock Cloak
Fire Damage, Frost Damage, Shock Damage, Arcane Damage
Fortify Armor Rating, Candlelight, Burden
Fortify Agility, Fortify Intelligence, Fortify Personality, Fortify Speed, Fortify Willpower, Fortify Endurance, Fortify Luck, Fortify Strength
Damage Agility, Damage Endurance, Damage Intelligence, Damage Luck, Damage Personality, Damage Speed, Damage Strength, Damage Willpower
Drain Agility, Drain Endurance, Drain Intelligence, Drain Luck, Drain Personality, Drain Speed, Drain Strength, Drain Willpower

In vanilla Skyrim, potion users and food collectors (you know who you are) may be aware that when in danger, the Dovahkin could essentially spam health, stamina or magicka effects from potions, food or ingredients to stay in the fight at will. In other words, in its vanilla state, the game more or less supports you with "Don't worry, if you get into trouble in the middle of a fight, you can freeze time and eat a ton of cheese wheels you stole out of sheer kleptomania and regain all of your health immediately, constipation not withstanding." This, in my mind, is a cheat. If you don't see why, this mod probably isn't for you. Going into a fight knowing you can essentially regenerate your health, stamina and magicka at will for as long your stores of potions hold out is tantamount to knowing the enemy has to one-shot you in order to be a threat if you bring enough potions. I fixed this.
In Skyrim Unlimited, most consumables that restore health, magicka or stamina now restore the same amount, but over five seconds. This means you will probably have to use some strategizing where you didn�t before. Even better, with a high willpower attribute, you can extend the duration further with the right perk, which means that if you put some more thought and effort into how you play, potions can potentially be much more powerful than in vanilla Skyrim.

Realistic Vendor Prices and Inventory
You have the ability to drastically reduce your buying prices and increase your selling prices for all vendors by focusing on your personality attribute and your speech skill. However, vendor selling and buying prices are now more realistically cutthroat and they will rip off unwary customers without mercy. If you have a low speech skill and none of the right perks or a high personality attribute, prepare to pay an arm a leg for their wares. On the flip side, vendor inventories have been deleveled. Merchants now realistically have nearly the full potential inventory they can have, regardless of your player level. You can even find weapons with three enchantment effects on them in vendor inventories at level 1. Being able to afford them that early in the game is another matter. This gives you a much better reason to focus on speech as a skill.

Other Changes
-Increasing your magic skills makes your spells stronger or last longer now, instead of decreasing their casting cost. Focus on magicka-cost reduction enchantments to offset this.
-Many enchantments and spells from previous elder scrolls games are back, and better than ever. The new version of the shield enchantment, now called 'shielding', effectively reduces damage from physical and most magical attacks at the same time, but also reduces your magicka regeneration as a trade-off. It also will not protect you from arrows, poisons, or attacks based on poison.
-Armor, resistances, and cost reductions of spells now use an exponential curve based on points, and it is no longer possible to achieve complete immunity to damage of any type, nor completely eliminate your magicka cost of casting spells. This allows for a more realistic and less broken implementation of the game's dynamics. You will be informed when these values change by a message in the upper left corner of the screen.
-Dual casting has been tweaked slightly to address an imbalance in my opinion. Dual casting cost is decreased a bit to 2.5x, and dual casting power is now also 2.5x your damage with just one hand. For reference, the vanilla cost is 2.8x and the power is only 2.2x.
-The enchanting and alchemy circle of cheatyness exploit is gone. Fortify smithing and Fortify Alchemy enchantments are gone and fortify enchanting alchemy ingredients are similarly non-existent.These effects may return later as very rare and powerful bonuses on equally rare and powerful ingredients and enchantments that cannot be disenchanted.
-The crafting of dwarven, elven, glass, and orcish armor and weapons have now been renamed to dwemer-metal, moonstone, malachite, and orichalcum, in the smithing menu in order to more logically represent the materials being used, rather than the design type of the items being crafted.
-Feather step enchantments on boots allow you to ignore damage from long falls.
-It is now possible to pickpocket with a 99% change of success instead of 95%, if your skills and other effects are powerful enough.
-The sneak attack damage multipliers have been reworked. All weapons but daggers and bows now receive sneak attack damage penalties based on weight: the heavier a weapon is, the smaller its base sneak attack multiplier. Bows are now slightly better at sneak attack damage.
-Reworked sneak attack perks and new sneak attack perks will increase the damage for weapons� sneak attacks based on your controlling attribute for the weapon in question and your sneak focus level. Melee weapons do more sneak attack damage based on strength, bows and crossbows receive more sneak attack damage based on agility, and daggers receive both sets of bonuses. Spells receive a bonus to sneak attack damage based on agility. All of the aforementioned bonuses now come from perks in the sneak skill perk tree.
-Several powers granted by certain race choices or transformations will effectively no longer expire, and can be toggled on or off at will.
-And Much, Much more...


Required
A willingness to play Skyrim with a little more RPG in the Action-RPG, like The Elder Scrolls was originally intended to be.


Compatibility
This mod is an overhaul, and therefore it will change many vanilla records in Skyrim SE. That means it most certainly will not be entirely compatible with many other mods. Compatibility patch suggestions are welcome, and I am making compatibility patches for mods I deem to be important as quickly as possible, but be aware that I am not in any way responsible to anyone for getting them made by any kind of deadline. I have a vision of the Skyrim experience I want to create, and if another mod doesn't help me create it, I'm not going to add support for it. On the other hand, I fully support and endorse any one willing to make compatibility patches for ANY mods that may need them in order to be used with Skyrim Unlimited, and I will be happy to post them in the downloads section and even possibly keep them up to date if some one is willing to put the work into making them in the first place. There are just too many mods out there that would need compatibility patches for this mod for me to accomodate all of them, and I would never actually get around to making improvements to my mod if I tried to do that. So, I humbly ask any one to whom a compatibility patch is important, to pitch in and help.

Any other mod that uses the following actor values will conflict with this mod:
These are used by the Player and NPCs:
FavorActive -> Strength
FavorsPerDay? -> Endurance
FavorsPerDayTimer -> Intelligence
FavorPointsBonus -> Willpower
LastBribedIntimidated -> Agility
LastFlattered -> Speed
Fame -> Personality
Infamy -> Luck

PickPocketSkillAdvance -> Armor Points
EnchantingSkillAdvance -> Resist magic Points
AlchemySkillAdvance -> Resist Poison Points
SmithingSkillAdvance -> Resist Disease Points
BlockSkillAdvance -> Resist Fire Points
HeavyArmorSkillAdvance -> Resist Frost Points
LightArmorSkillAdvance -> Resist Shock Points
OneHandedSkillAdvance -> Elemental Magnification Enchants
TwoHandedSkillAdvance -> Amplification Enchants
MarksmanSkillAdvance -> Cloak Damage and Resist Points
SneakSkillAdvance -> Chameleon Points
AlterationSkillAdvance -> Alteration Spell Cost Reduction Points
ConjurationSkillAdvance -> Conjuration Spell Cost Reduction Points
DestructionSkillAdvance -> Destruction Spell Cost Reduction Points
IllusionSkillAdvance -> Illusion Spell Cost Reduction Points
RestorationSkillAdvance -> Restoration Spell Cost Reduction Points
LockpickingSkillAdvance -> Shielding Points
SpeechcraftSkillAdvance -> Magic Focus Level
VoicePoints -> Sneak Focus Level
VoiceRate -> Combat Focus Level
WardDeflection -> Weakness Points
Mood -> Absorbance Points
ShieldPerks -> Shielding Level
Blindness -> Spell Absorption Points
(this does not affect the ability of NPCs to actually see, due to the magic of my scripts)


Player Uses of:
JumpingBonus -> Base Intelligence
NightEye -> Base Endurance
Aggression -> Weakness Level
WaitingForPlayer -> Chameleon Level
DetectLifeRange -> Active Spell Willpower Drain
Grabbed -> Augment Enchantments

NPC Uses of:
JumpingBonus -> Level Index and Death State Record
NightEye -> Absorbance Level
SpeechcraftMod -> Weakness Level
BypassVendorStolenCheck -> Chameleon Level
BypassVendorKeywordCheck -> Current Life Record
SmithingMod -> Force Projection Def. Index
AlchemyPowerMod -> NPC Attribute Memory 1
LockpickingMod -> NPC Attribute Memory 2
EnchantingMod -> NPC Attribute Memory 3
AlchemyMod -> NPC Attribute Memory 4
Telekinesis -> NPC Attribute Memory 5


My advice before installing: As with all mods, if you're going to install this with a current game save, do not delete that save. Just in case you don't like the mod, you can go back to the unaltered save. When installing an update, always go to an empty cell before loading the new version, and then wait or sleep for three days after installing it.

Things on the Horizon and a few notes to those who follow this mod and appreciate it
I love you guys. If you play this mod, you want more out of your Skyrim play through. You like an elder scrolls experience that wants to tell you a great story with memorable characters that are all well-written and believable. You respect the times and the ways the Elder Scrolls were absolutely outstanding games, and you think Skyrim, while amazing in its own right, could benefit from some of the old Elder Scrolls magic back from Morrowind and Oblivion. To all of you whom that last paragraph applies to, my message to you is this: I aim to deliver all of that back to you and then some.
Right now my main concern with this overhaul mod is putting all of the fun and interesting gameplay mechanics I think the game needed in its vanilla play through experience into the game. In addition to many new and original mechanics never seen in an Elder Scrolls game, those also include just about all mechanics that were taken out of the elder scrolls in the transition from TES4 to TES5, and many of the mechanics that were lost from TES3 to TES4, as well. Of equal concern to me is the effort of making sure those mechanics are interesting, don't break or invalidate any current gameplay styles in the game, and extend the replayability of the game. I tenderly refer to this stage of my modding experience with Skyrim as the corrective and enhancement stage.
The next stage will begin my real work, and will involve adding brand new quest lines into the main quest and most guild quests, with new and interesting voice-acted characters for all of them. In particular, I plan to make quests that provide new challenges to players who have already completed guild questlines. Its too soon to give away all of my plans, but suffice it to say, maybe the 'end times' aren't culminated in the battle with Alduin. That could be just the beginning... a herald of even darker things to come. I think I speak to a lot of other players when I say the final battle of the main quest in vanilla Skyrim was less than spectacular. It need not be then end of the story, however.
Lastly, Skyrim Unlimited is relatively balanced, but the pursuit of balance is a never ending one. If you see something that looks broken or OP, tell me. I am also working furiously on updates and compatibility patches on a regular basis. Stay tuned for more.


Installation
(assuming you aren't using a mod manager)

1. This mod comes in a standard 7z file that will require a utility like peazip to open.
2. Once unzipped, drop the BSA, BSL and ESP files into your /data folder of the Skyrim directory.
3. Enable the esp and any applicable compatibility esp files through the game launch menu or in a utility like wrye bash.
4. Enjoy!

Installation
(assuming you ARE using a mod manager)

Follow the directions of your mod manager, which may or may not be easier than simply copying and pasting from one folder to another. This mod is so easy to install that even a mod manager shouldn't be able to screw that up.

Uninstallation

The safe method: If you have played any game save with SU active in your load order, you will need to stop the SU scripts which constantly run during the game. You must first read the book titled "Uninstall Skyrim Unlimited" on Farengar's desk in Dragonsreach and select the option to stop SU scripts when prompted. Wait 8 seconds, and save your game. Then, disable or delete the files you moved into your /data folder during installation and you may now resume your game from that game save.

The not safe method: Disable or delete files from SU without first deactivating scripts on any game saves you created while SU was installed, if you intend to continue with any of those game saves. I will not provide support if you cannot follow the directions in the 'safe' method of uninstallation.

If you enjoy the mod, please endorse! If you find bugs, please tell me!





Change Log
1.00
-Basic, but crude attribute system implemented for the player.

1.01
-Fixed a bug where vital stats of life, magicka, stamina, and carry weight would constantly and gradually reduce after reaching level 26.
-Removed a script mechanic causing the stat reducing bug, which was originally intended to "soften" player stat consequences of choosing to raise certain vital stats constantly at level up. This mechanic is currently under review and may or may not return in another (less broken) form at a later date.
-SU will now never reduce your base maximum life, magicka, stamina or carry weight below a number equal to your controlling attribute multiplied by its modifier for each vital stat. Even if another mod changes your base maximum vital stats below their intended values, SU will attempt to keep the stats at least as high as your endurance, intelligence, and agility suggest they should be.
-Lockpicking is no longer a frustrating endeavor even on adept locks (read: not broken any more). It is balanced very finely to still be much more difficult than vanilla, but no longer almost impossible with expert and master locks. Lockpicks now last much longer with higher levels of the lockpicking skill, but you will still struggle with master locks. You should feel accomplished when you can crack open a master lock. Raising your lockpicking skill and your agility is now basically required in order to stand a chance with master or even expert locks. Hint: lockpicking enchantments and potions are worth something now.
-Temporarily removed mechanic where agility increases jump height and the height you can fall before taking damage. This script line will not work until the script extender for Skyrim Special Edition is released, and will likely be re-added when it is released.
-Player attribute growth from level 1 to 5 is now smoother and less explosive: the jump to level 2 will see less stat growth now.

1.11
-many general bugfixes and optimizations

1.12
-A new armor rating enchantment has been added to several unenchantable cuirasses. It boosts your overall armor rating, can be placed on any wearable equipment, and is partially meant to offset the drastic reduction in physical damage reduction that armor rating provides in Skyrim Unlimited.
-All of the new spells introduced by SU can and will be used by NPCs that already use magic, with very few exceptions.
-All merchant wares have been deleveled somewhat. You know how you could talk to any blacksmith at lv 1, and they might only have a hunter�s bow and no enchanted items at all, but then come back at level 30 and they have an Orcish bow and five enchanted items? That kind of merchant behavior doesn�t happen often with Skyrim Unlimited. Merchants now realistically have nearly the full potential inventory they can have, regardless of your player level. A world that doesn�t revolve around the Dovahkin is more interesting in the long run. This is a work in progress and more leveled list changes are likely incoming.
-Training is more expensive, and gets even more expensive at higher levels of skill you are attempting to train to. Now you have a very good reason to stock up on gold, and in turn develop your speech skill and personality attribute.
-Master Trainers can now train you to lv 100 in their respective skill, if you have the money for it.
-You can train, for all intents and purposes, an unlimited number of times for any skill per level of your character.
-vampire races are now supported. Due to an oversight on my part, racial bonuses and penalties to attributes were nullified when players became vampires. Now, vampire races are treated the same as their non-vampire counterparts.
-many general bugfixes and optimizations

1.13 "The Destruction Update"
-Dragonsreach now contains 100% less cheat chests that were used for testing purposes.
-stamina regeneration is now more properly dependent equally on three attributes: strength, endurance, and agility. This is more balanced for characters that like to get up close and personal with combat, using weapons that require a lot of stamina. Previously stamina was largely dependent on strength, speed, willpower, and agility, which meant warriors needed to focus on attribute they normaly would never bother with in order to regenerate stamina at a reasonable rate.
-many non-predator animals have been tweaked to move more quickly. Horses, deer, and elk for example now move with a more realistic rate of speed.
-The initial stamina regeneration rate and magicka regeneration rate, and their rates of growth with their respective controlling attributes, have been increased by roughly 20% due to being a bit too hardcore and not enough fun for new characters previously.
-Edited the positions of attribute bonus perks to be lower in the perk trees, which more clearly shows what perks they require (the basic starting perks in all cases) and give a better idea of the skill level required (starting at skill level 20 for each set).
-Attribute Enchantment placement on armors and jewelry has been adjusted. Attributes are now placeable on one less piece of equipment, for reasons of being slightly overpowered when one type of attribute enchantment is placed on every piece of gear. Each attribute lost the ability to be placed on a piece that made the least sense: for example, it seemed silly to have a speed attribute enchantment on a helmet. This trend may continue as refinements continue.
Destruction Changes:
-One thing that always bugged me about vanilla destruction spells: by the time you're flinging incinerate blasts or thunderbolts, the novice spells are basically useless due to the dps gap. I like using flames, frostbite and sparks some times, but I can't justify using them once I can use expert or master spells. I have the same issue with my beam spells, which are basically balanced as 'sniper' spells in the adept level destruction class. Consider that issue fixed. The destruction power paradigm has been reworked substantially. All but the novice spells have now been equally but lightly rescaled in power and magicka cost to be more useable at lower levels of destruction skill. Please note the spells still provide the same power/cost ratio. To counter the resulting reduction in usability against high level enemies, a new mechanic called "magic focusing" has been introduced. This mechanic is quite a departure from the vanilla design, but I think it was badly needed. You can raise or lower your "focus level" for destruction spells by a point in order to increase or decrease your destruction power and magicka useage by 50% per point. The focus level is raised or lowered by two spells, aptly named "concentration" and "restraint", and are granted by a new perk in the perk tree near the bottom. The end result is that, depending on your focus level, you can be dealing half the damage you normally deal, or 5 times the damage you normally deal. Just remember your magicka cost of spells goes up or down by the same percentage. With rescaling and focus mechanics in mind alone, master spells can end up dealing three times the damage they would in vanilla skyrim if you use maximum focus, but you would need to put all of your effort into raising your magicka reserves just to cast them once at maximum focus!
-Another note about the rescaling: Due to the fact the mastery perks in every magic school were nerfed by default to replace the flat 50% magicka cost decrease in magicka cost with a variable reduction in cost based on willpower, magic users had to focus more on raising magicka and magicka regeneration and strategizing how they would use it, which in my mind was a healthy change. After all, the introduction of the intelligence attribute made magicka gains potentially much higher with level gains. However, many adept or higher destruction spells were unnecessarily difficult to use at low levels. I felt it was necessary to rescale those spells to make them slightly less expensive to the magicka reserves, and therefore more useable, while also decreasing their damage dealt to match and maintain balance.
-Arcane spells now have their own damage bonus and added effect bonus perks akin to augmented flames, etc.
-Added new spell type bonus perks in the destruction skill perk tree. These perks boost wave spells (the novice spells), bolt spells, beam spells, and area of effect spells by up to 35%.
-Added a new perk in the conjuration perk tree: soulful destruction. It enables soul trapping effect for all vanilla and SU destruction spells besides hazards and runes.
-All vanilla and SU destruction spells except hazards and runes now have a duration of atleast 1 second, keeping their total damage values the same before the willful destruction perk enhancement. The result is each spell can be used to take advantage of the willful destruction perk to deal much greater total damage over time.
-willful destruction has been rebalanced a bit. Its increase to destruction spell duration has been reduced from 3% per point of willpower to 2%. For those that aren't aware, with this perk it was possible to double your effective destruction power for almost any spell with only about 34 points of willpower. Now it takes 50 to acheive the same bonus.
-Added Arcane Spike, the big brother to Arcane Shard. Arcane Spike is to Arcane Shard as Incinerate is to Fire Bolt. Arcane Shard's projectile was made smaller, but much faster. Arcane Spike's projectile is bigger even than Arcane Shard's previous size.
-Whirlwind cloak has now been tweaked, and essentially renamed into arcane cloak. It deals arcane damage in amounts comparable to other cloaks, in addition to occasionally bouncing melee enemies away from you like it always has.
-Fire Storm has been tweaked a bit for realism and more power. The damage tapers off more quickly in increments of 25 ft, compared to vanilla. This means you can do more damage with it, but you'll have to be closer. Also, the spell more properly lasts 2 seconds or more for all 'layers' of the fire damage, compared to vanilla.
-Blizzard has been tweaked to deal 50% more damage over time in total. It now deals 3 times more damage per second, but with half the normal duration. Note that with the willful destruction perk, blizzard can last a very long time.
-Lightning Storm damage and magicka cost have both been doubled, to keep it more in line with the casting power and costs of the other master destruction spells. Let the ash piles hit the floor.
-added arcane singularity as a master-level destruction spell. This is best described as a very powerful explosive projectile that will affect a wide area and blow everything within it away.

Alteration Changes:
-added feather spells back into tamriel. They do exactly what they did in oblivion and can be found anywhere ordinary alteration spells can be found, including vendor inventories. Dual casting increases their duration.
-general bugfixes and optimizations



1.14 "The Enchanting Update, Part 1"
-Huge and exciting news! I have successfully prototyped and implemented a system of giving classic elder scrolls attributes to ALL NPCs in the game! Currently, most bandits up to level 10 and most of the unique NPCs in whiterun are using the new system. Just like with your character, their attributes depend on their skills and their level, and boost almost all of the same abilities. The system works cleanly and silently in the background and should not introduce any performance hit into the game. The system is designed to have subtle effects on NPCs at low levels, but those effects gradually increase in impact at high levels. NPCs at levels lower than 5 will show barely any difference in strength or toughness. You will notice NPCs are a bit tougher at level 10, considerably more challenging at level 20, quite threatening at level 30, and deadly at level 40 or above, once the system is implemented on more high level NPCs. There is no hard cap on power. NPCs that can get higher in level will keep getting even stronger after level 100. This is intended to fix the issue of a massive power gap which naturally develops between the player and NPCs as the player levels upwards, and this allows for the reintegration of interesting attribute dynamics between the player and NPCs from previous elder scrolls games.
-A new power has been added into the game and is currently available for any new characters you make after installing this update: Dragon Sense. As a Dragonborn, you have the innate ability to sense the attributes of any NPC you aim at when you use the power. The 'resist' values are in percentage, to give you an easy idea of how tough they are to certain kinds of attacks.
-The difficulty setting system has been reworked to be more realistic, uniform and based more on increasing the pace of combat rather than penalizing or enhancing the damage dealt by the player relative to NPCs. The new damage scaling for damage dealt to the player AND BY the player is as follows:
Novice 0.4
Apprentice 0.7
Adept 1
Expert 1.75
Master 3
Legendary 5
-Your natural health regeneration has been disabled by default, but can return if you choose a new perk in the restoration skill tree now called "Regeneration". The old regeneration perk was renamed to "Healer", which is a better description of what it actually does in my opinion. This means by default when you take damage from any source, you will no longer naturally heal to 100% life over time without a potion, magic effect, power or perk of some sort in the mix. This will no doubt make a deceptively subtle change to your game play. You will have to give some thought into using restoration magic or healing potions more often. As a consequence, the argonian hist skin power is much more useful now. This change will only affect new characters.
-Arcane Damage enchanted weapons have been added for nearly every vanilla weapon type. They can be disenchanted and the arcane damage enchantment can be then be placed on any weapon. These weapons have been placed into leveled lists and will appear occasionally in loot, vendor inventories, and rarely as equipped weapons by NPCs.
-The "Feather Step" enchantment was created and placed on many boots in the game, and will occasionally appear in vendor inventories or in loot in atleast level 17 areas. It gives you complete immunity to damage from long falls. Items with the enchantment are disenchantable, and the enchantment can be placed on boots.
-Due to rightful and popular demand, most of the starting tiered perks in nearly every perk tree that were basically just better versions of themselves incremented every 20 levels of skill, have simply been nixed and made into a single starting perk that provides the total bonus all up front. For example, instead of 5 perks of juggernaut providing better and better bonuses to heavy armor rating from endurance, you only have to pick the first perk and you get the whole potential bonus. This is mainly to address the issues of perk bonuses being bland, boring, and a bit unfriendly to players on a perk budget in previous versions.
-The spell magnitude scaling bonuses from magic skills have been moved from the novice magic perks. Now the player gets those bonuses from skill levels for free and without spending perk points in the novice perks. I am currently looking into finding ways to increase the bonuses provided by those perks without breaking the game balance. Suggestions are welcome. I am looking only for balanced and interesting enhancements here. (read: not overpowered or horribly unoriginal)
-Armor skills now boost your armor rating for any qualifying piece of armor by 2.5 times more than in vanilla skyrim, and enhancing armors via smithing is 25% better now. This is part of an ongoing mathmatical refinement on the vanilla skyrim armor protection system. General armor protectiveness was nerfed in a hardcore way in earlier versions: the actual damage reduction percentage granted by a given armor rating in skyrim unlimited is roughly 15% of its corresponding vanilla value. The new, higher boosts to armor rating granted by armors from respective armor skills and the smithing skill is meant to offset that nerf somewhat. Combined with the reduction from blocking attacks, damage reduction can potentially still be increased to the levels of vanilla skyrim, but you will have to work at it, and therein lies the challenge. If you absolutely need more physical damage reduction, there are my new armor rating enchantments and the tried and true alteration protection spells to get your damage reduction even higher.
-To further counter balance the affects of lower damage reduction in Skyrim Unlimited, the maximum potential damage reduction for blocked attacks is now 95%, up from 70% in vanilla, but this amount of reduction is a bit harder to get (keep reading).
-Shieldwall has been reworked. Instead of a tiered and stacked set of five perks which provide set bonuses, it now provides scaled bonuses from endurance and strength, the two attributes that make the most sense with shields. Those bonuses are provided by two perks that are no longer stacked on the perk tree. The bonuses provided will start at about the same level as they do in vanilla skyrim, but can become twice as powerful if you focus on your endurance and strength attributes.
-The enchanting and alchemy circle of overpowered buffing, using fortify alchemy enchanted items and fortify enchanting potions, basically destroys any semblance of a balanced game when used to the fullest (which grants essentially god like power in-game). If left in the game, the temptation is to use this exploitable exploit of exploityness and the temptation will probably win sooner or later. Furthermore, an argument can be made that allowing other crafting disciplines to boost any crafting ability is overpowered by itself. It is my intention to make each crafting discipline more unique and interesting all by themselves, while also removing any dynamics that allow one crafting discipline to boost the others, so that a player need not specialize in every crafting discipline in order to achieve greater abilities. I have a great number of ideas on how to acheive this, and they will be implemented in later versions. At the moment however, it is necessary to replace any effects in each discipline that pertain to the other disciplines where balance must be served. To that end, all alchemy ingredients which previously used the fortify enchanting and fortify smithing effects now have had those effects replaced with fortify attribute effects which seemed like fitting replacements for each ingredient. Fortify Smithing and Fortify Enchanting potions were changed into fortify endurance and fortify intelligence potions, respectively. The fortify smithing enchantment was replaced with the new fortify armor enchantment on every peice of enchanted armor using it in the vanilla game. The fortify alchemy enchantment was replaced with the fortify intelligence enchantment in the same fashion. I know some of you may be feeling uncomfortable or worse about these changes, but believe me when I say they will be more properly replaced later with new dynamics which do much the same things and that are far less exploitable in extremely broken ways. Also, keep in mind that while I have removed the offending effects from gameply in enchanting and alchemy, they will probably return later in far less exploitable ways (read: not disenchantable fortify alchemy and fortify smithing enchantments on very rare items and extremely rare fortify enchanting and fortify smithing ingredients.)
-Due to pickpocketing being quite a bit too easy in vanilla, and also in the spirit of balancing the potential boosts to pickpocketing abilities given in Skyrim Unlimited, pickpocketing has been made more challenging. First, the target NPC's pickpocket skill is twice as important in determining your pickpocket success: higher NPC skill in pickpocketing will decrease your chances of success even more now. Second, pickpocketing gold is going to be twice as hard. Third, the weight of items stolen now decreases your chance of success 25% more.
-The Light fingers series of perks has been reworked substantially. Instead of providing a flat and tiered bonus to pickpocketing ability, one perk now provides a bonus based on your speed attribute. Like most other perk mechanic overhauls in this mod, the bonus can potentially become much more powerful than it can in vanilla skyrim if you increase its respective attribute.
-Agile lockpicking has been reworked. It is now called clever lockpicking, and provides a boost to your lockpicking sweet spot size based on your intelligence attribute instead of your agility. The agility bonus was moved to the light touch perk.
-The light touch series of perks has been reworked and the first one was inserted into the skill tree of the lockpicking skill. Interestingly, these perks exist in the vanilla game but were unused. The first perk now provides boosts to lockpicking based on your agility attribute.
-Extra Pockets has been enhanced and turned into a tiered set of three perks. The total carry weight bonus provided is now 500 instead of just 100, if you invest three perks into it. This was to make the perk(s) more competitive with strength training perks, which essentially offered the same bonus of carry weight, or close to it, but with added benefits of more melee damage, which made them obviously more beneficial to choose.
-The quick pickpocketing perk has now been reworked and renamed to Distraction. Instead of using speed as the attribute providing a bonus to pickpocketing success, personality is used. The idea is the player will automatically distract npcs prior to picking their pockets. The speed bonus was moved to the light fingers series of perks.
-The personality bonus to buying and selling prices was moved from the bartering perk to the haggling perk, and replaces its native vanilla bonuses.
-The bartering perk was reworked and renamed to Upselling. The perk now affects selling prices thusly: it increases the prices of any items you sell by a percentage equal to 25% of your intelligence attribute.

Enchanting Changes
-the enchanting magnitude bonus from your enchanting skill has been buffed across the board to address some imbalances. In vanilla skyrim, your enchantment ability at lv 100 of enchanting was only roughly 25% greater compared to level 5 of enchanting. Now, the bonus is a full 100%. If you think this might be unbalanced, keep reading.
-Why do all of the dedicated mages in Skyrim not wear armor? The game mechanics suggest they would only be tougher for doing so, yet very few of them do. The answer is, of course, the lore: mages wear mage robes because their magic is stronger and able to be casted for longer while wearing enchanted mage robes. Okay then. Why don't they just enchant some armor with exactly the same enchantments they have on their robes? The game mechanics suggest that would provide the same bonus to magical casting abilities. It doesn't really make sense, does it? I fixed that. Enchantments on clothing (not armor) can now become 50% more powerful when you choose two new perks designed for them in the enchanting perk tree. If you think this might be unbalanced, just keep reading.
-Plus, in order to really make the point plain, I'm bringing back casting penalties for worn armor, like we had in oblivion. Don't worry too much if you happen to be very fond of wearing a full suit of heavy armor and casting destruction spells as your main method of attack: you can now choose a new perk in the heavy or light armor tree that will nullify the penalty for those respective armor types, and they require level 50 in their respective skill trees. For characters without those perks however, wearing armor now justifiably reduces the magnitude of all spells you cast by 3% per worn peice of heavy armor and 2% per worn peice of light armor.
-Jewelry in vanilla skyrim feels a little bit pointless except to have a couple of extra bits of equipment to put enchantments on. If that's all they're good for, why not make them stand out a bit more in that regard, atleast? In that spirit, two new perks in the enchanting perk tree have been added which can potentially double the power of enchantments on jewelry. If you're noticing a lot of enchantment mechanics buffing here, rest assured that balance will be served in the end.
-New perks have been added which boost arcane damage enchantments and resist magicka enchantments.
-New perks have been added which boost attribute enchantments.
-Most attribute enchantments are now 50% better by default.
-The elemental resistance enchantments have been rebalanced in order to prevent players from becoming virtually immune to certain elements through enchanting far too soon.
-All existing perks that boost enchantments of a particular type, like fire enchantments or skill enchantments, have been given an extra tier of perks and can potentially enchance their respective enchantments by 50% rather than the 25% in vanilla Skyrim. Now we finally come to the crowning enchantment mechanic overhaul to bring it all back to "way more interesting and still balanced"...
-Extra Effect now works differently, and in a much more intuitive and less broken way. In vanilla Skyrim, it bothered me how suddenly, from picking one perk at the end of the enchanting perk tree, my enchanting power was basically doubled. It felt like a cheat, not to mention weird and unsubstantiated. Now, the extra effect perk gives you two new lesser powers. These powers allow you to CHOOSE how many enchantments you want to put on items. Using one ability increases your enchantment placement mode, while the other decreases it. Furthermore, you can use those powers to give yourself the ability, or remove said ability, to put two enchantments on an item, but with half power for each enchantment. If you think this results in a nerfing of enchanting all together, you haven't been paying attention: your enchantments can become slightly more powerful than in vanilla oblivion from the new bonus perk mechanics in Skyrim Unlimited, even with the reduction in power from using two enchantments at once per item. Like everything else in this mod, you just have to put more thought and effort into how you'll get there.
-Extra Effect now has a second tier! Following the precedent set by my change to the first tier of extra effect, the second tier allows you to use your new lesser power of enchantment manipulation to put three enchantments on any item with one third the power for each enchantment.
-general optimizations


1.15 "The Conjuration Update, Part 1"
- Vast portions of Skyrim are using Classic Elder Scrolls Attributes now! Almost every follower and leveled NPC has been updated to use CESA, and this includes every single animal, creature, dwarven automata or daedra, to the best of my knowledge. If you find one that hasn't been updated (i.e. it has '0' for any of its CESA attributes when you use the Dragon Sense power on it), do be a pal and let me know. The NPC attribute mechanic has gone through some refinement, and I'm happy to report the results are very pleasing. As a general rule, NPCs will get stronger in a way that makes them a match for you at any level instead of falling behind now as they level up, and it is highly recommended to view their attributes with the Dragon Sense power when given the opportunity before you start a fight. You generally should avoid fighting anything at a level higher than 5-10 levels beyond your current level. The new attribute system will be added to Uniquely named and/or non-respawning NPCs gradually throughout later updates, and eventually I plan to have every single NPC in the game using Classic Elder Scrolls Attributes.
-A couple of hilarious but ultimately immersion-breaking bugs were corrected with the latest version of the Classic Elder Scrolls Attributes mechanic on NPCs. There shouldn't be any more NPCs with extreme amounts of health running around at extreme speeds. If you still see some after this update, you should leave the area, find a small cell with no NPCs in it, like a player home, and sleep or wait for atleast three days. This should reset the cell with the offending NPCs. If not, just avoid the cell for a few more days. They will disappear eventually.
- The Dragon Sense Power has been tweaked and should no longer compromise your stealth or initiate aggression against certain enemies. If you don't already have that lesser power, you will need to start a new game to get it or add it with the console.
-The Arcane Manipulator has been added to the world of Tamriel! This device allows for new crafting recipes of items that would otherwise be uncraftable and potentially unobtainable otherwise. With it, you can craft a number of magical items, and the list of craftable goodies will grow much larger with future updates. It resembles a smaller version of the arcane altar after a fashion, and has been placed near many arcane enchanting tables in 17 places all across Skyrim. You can most easily find them in the player homes, like hjerim or proudspire, and in the study areas of important mages, like Farengar. At the moment, it allows you to convert rubies, sapphires, diamonds, etc., into soul gems and it allows you to create new spell tomes. You will only see the gem recipes in the Arcane Manipulator when you have gems in your inventory. This wonderful new device will allow me to add some very interesting new game dynamics in the future.
-NPCs with Classic Elder Scrolls Attributes now receive resistance bonuses to all types of damage based on their levels and their attributes. As with the other attribute bonuses, they scale in such a way that NPCs at low levels will not be much tougher and you will likely only start to see a difference between level 5 and 10. None of them can become immune to any type of attack, but against level 40 and above enemies you will need to bring your "A game" to deal big damage. The Dragonborn need not fear: some new dynamics have been introduced to help you deal with that.
-To help you cut through the damage resistance of NPCs at levels exceeding 40, you will need perks that you were likely already using, only for new reasons. The Lucky Swing, Lucky Blows and Lucky Strikes perks were renamed to replace "Lucky" with "Nimble" in every case and now provide additional bonuses. Weapons appropriate to each perk now ignore 1% of a target's armor for every 4 points of your Agility attribute. The bonuses to critical hit chances provided by the same perks were rebalanced a bit. In the case of the Bone Crusher series of perks, the bonus to maces' ability to ignore armor is multiplicative with the bonus from the Nimble Blows perk, meaning maces can basically ignore armor almost all together when all relevant perks have been chosen.
-A few Boss NPCs have been buffed with new spells and weapons, including Ancano. I won't spoil any surprises for you. You can expect them to give you a more serious challenge now. This is a work in progress.
-Many animals, creatures and a single surprise dwarven automata have been tweaked to receive additional innate speed bonuses beyond their new attributes, based on more realistic speeds they should be moving with. Hint: When you see a sabrecat, you should now consider the fact you probably will not be able to outrun it, and jumping around natural barriers or other obstacles may only get you so far ahead.
-Many NPC magic users now use Arcane magic spells in addition to the magic they used before, including Vampires, Thalmor, random humanoid mages of most kinds, and Falmer. In the case of the Falmer, I think this change is especially well suited for them.
-The lore friendly Argonian Immunity to poison has returned from the classic elder scrolls game mechanics, but in a diminished form. I'm not sure why this innate ability was removed from Argonians in Skyrim, although the best reason I could come up with is, it would make them nearly invulnerable to chauruses and a few other creatures. Since I think it makes sense and a more interesting game to preserve lore with an eye towards realism at the same time, Argonians are now NEARLY immune to poison: their racial bonuses were modified to give them a 95% percent resistance to poison. This means they only take 1/20th the damage from any poisons inflicted on them.
-Expert level Destruction Bolt spells have been given a significant buff in the form of an extra layer of damage that lasts 4 times as long as the damage each spell already does. The end result is the spells do about 50% more damage over a longer time period. The damage is heavy at first and then tapers off. These spells needed something to make them more than "just better apprentice bolt spells, but too expensive to be worth the upgrade".
-Fixed a bug where your attribute increase readout messages would not take your perk bonuses to attributes into account when displaying a current attribute level.
-The Intelligence and Willpower bonus perks' names were changed to use the word 'Development' instead of 'Training'. I don't know of any one that 'trained' for better intelligence or willpower, in so much as they took time to 'develop' it.

Conjuration Changes
-20 New Conjuration Spells have been added into the world of Skyrim. These are my new Familiar spells, and are designed to work in exactly the same manner as the vanilla familiar spell, but now you can potentially summon 21 kinds of 'spirit' animals instead of just the one. This was badly needed in vanilla Skyrim in my opinion: there are basically only four types of summonable creatures used by most NPCs in the vanilla game, and that's a far cry from the number of creatures summonable in previous Elder Scrolls games. Also, why would there be only one type of familiar? Did some mage a thousand years ago just pick a wolf and say "we shall only use this animal as a familiar, for ever and ever"? The perplexing part is that I literally fixed this issue in about 10 hours of modding. Each spell has been added into the leveled lists for spell tomes and are used by NPCs as well. They are balanced on the player side and the NPC side.
-Several Conjuration perks now apply the same bonuses to familiars that were previously applied only to Atronachs.
-All familiar spells can be acquired through crafting recipes at the Arcane Manipulator. You will need grand soul gems, some species-specific ingredients, and you must possess the next lowest mastery perk appropriate to the spell's casting perk. For example, when you grab the Apprentice Conjuration perk, you will then be able to see all Adept-level Spell Tome recipes as options in the Arcane Manipulator, like the Bear Familiar. Master Level Familiar spell tomes are only available through this mechanic for now, and naturally become visible once you grab the Expert Conjuration perk.
-general optimizations

1.151
-hotfix for the stubborn NPC attribute bug which results in NPCs getting stronger and stronger every time the cell they are in loads, since the attribute changes were being reapplied every time on top of the previous changes. This problem should be eradicated now.

1.152
-more hotfixes for some unforeseen bugs. Send the previous 1.5x versions to the recycling bin.

1.16
-By popular demand and in the spirit of classic elder scrolls attribute dynamics, every time you gain a level, you can increase the attributes you want to specialize in. A lot of people have been lamenting the fact this was absent in an otherwise awesome mod about classic Elder Scrolls Attributes, including me, and now its here! Use the new 'Choose Attribute' lesser power to increase an attribute by three points, and you can do this for three attributes for every level you gain. Luck is the only exception to this rule: it can be increased by one point per level. It is now possible to get any attribute except luck all the way up to 200 points when you put your attribute points into raising it after every level increase. Luck can be raised to 100. You will also still get the passive attribute growth dynamics from skills that affect their governing attributes.
-Attributes can also still be increased by selecting the appropriate training/development perks to give them a boost. In order to make those perks a little bit more interesting and competitive with the attribute bonuses from gaining levels, any attribute bonuses you get from perks will allow you to exceed the normal attribute maximum of 200. In other words, the attribute perks are now the only way to get your intrinsic attributes beyond 200, and potentially as high as 300. Naturally you can also wear enchanted items that will magically increase your attributes beyond either limit, and there is no hard limit for how high your 'modded' value of any attribute can get.
-Every NPC in Skyrim is now using a completely bug-free version of Classic Elder Scrolls Attributes. They do damage and move at speeds which gradually increase, compared with vanilla, as they gain levels. This dynamic will improve with each release of the mod.
-You will need to start a new game in order to get the new lesser power and for the attribute dynamics to work correctly. There is no way to avoid this issue when I add powers to the player or make changes to core scripts. These kinds of changes are normally rare and it is likely a new game will not be necessary for most future releases.
-general optimizations and bugfixes



1.17 "The Conjuration Update, Part 2"
- Random Encounter NPC levels and corresponding abilities have recieved a substantial overhaul. Instead of remaining at stagnant levels throughout Skyrim, they now vary to a subtle degree in level and generally gain levels at various rates as the game progresses. For example, regular, run-of-the-mill bandits in vanilla skyrim never exceeded level 1. The next tier of bandit was a hard coded level higher than that, and so on, and so forth. Boss bandits generally were never much stronger than you, and typically in the late game were at an unimpressively lower level than you. In this latest update, typical NPC levels can be anywhere from 1 to as high as your level, and bosses very often will be even higher in level than you! The rates NPCs gain levels are carefully balanced to respect the vanilla power distribution for all NPCs. If an NPC was weak compared to another NPC in vanilla skyrim, it will still be weak to that same NPC now. This dynamic replaces the changes that were intended with the overhauled encounter zones in previous versions. This is part of an on-going effort to make the world of Skyrim less bland, less predictable, and more challenging in fun ways.
-NPCs receive small, but gradually increasing resistance bonuses to certain damage types as their levels increase. This mechanic is all but unnoticeable at low levels, but gradually becomes more pronounced. As a general rule it may be noticeable by level 15. The types are physical, magical, and poison, and the resistances are applied in such a way that each NPC is more resistant to the damage types it tends to inflict most often.
-Many non-humanoid NPCs now receive appropriate bonuses to the most appropriate attributes. For example, sabre cats and bears now receive bonuses to strength, endurance, and speed, while spriggans and wisps receive bonuses to willpower and intelligence. If it looks like it should be really tough and strong, it probably will be both, now. If it looks like it should be fast, it probably will be. If it looks like it should be a powerful spellcaster, it probably will be.
-NPC Character Classes recieved a significant overhaul as well. Every NPC now has more realistic, diverse, and effective skills and attributes appropriately for each class. As a general rule, NPCs will also increase their skill levels for all skills at a slightly higher rate as they gain levels. Even skills that didn't increase before will increase very slowly now. Also, I fixed some oversights in vanilla classes. Browsing through the character classes, I found some odd inconsistencies like trainer classes not having high skill level tendencies for the skills they were supposedly training others in.
-All follower NPCs will no longer stop gaining levels with you after somewhere between level 40 and 60, which is where most of them were set to stop gaining levels in vanilla Skyrim. In skyrim Unlimited, all of them will be the same level as you, regardless of how high your level becomes.
-The Stealth and Swift Stealth perks have been buffed to provide twice the bonuses to your stealth abilities they used to provide.
-Fixed a bug where the Lucky Stealth perk actually boosted sneak attack damage rather than sneaking ability. There shouldn't be any more crazy sneak attack damage multipliers after you pick this perk.
-Focused destruction has been nerfed somewhat. The damage bonus provided in previous versions was admitedly excessive, and it has been dialed down a bit. Each level of focus now increases damage by 20% instead of 50%, while keeping the magicka cost increase the same at 50%. I think this makes for a much less overpowered and more interesting dynamic. Also, be aware that magic using NPCs have been recieving a similar bonus based on their willpower, for at least two previous versions by now. Any criticisms about focused destruction being overpowered are no longer warranted.

Conjuration Changes
-Now you have better reasons to use bound weapons exclusively if you happen to really appreciate that look, like I do. Soul Stealer has been buffed and changed to soul binding. In addition to allowing bound weapons to cast soul trap on enemies from regular attacks, it now provides a bonus to all bound weapon damage dealt by a percentage equal to your conjuration skill. This addresses an imbalance between bound weapons and non-bound weapons in vanilla Skyrim: bound weapons cannot become as strong as non-bound weapons with enchantments and smithing enhancements. With this change, bound weapons are more attractive and you have a reason to keep using them after you get daedric weapons, as long as you keep raising your conjuration skill.
-Conjured Wrath is a new perk which was added to the Conjuration Skill tree, and boosts all damage of your conjured creatures' attacks (read: atronachs and familiars) by a percentage equal to your conjuration skill. It requires the adept conjuration perk and a conjuration level of atleast 55. My plan is to have this effect apply to raised creatures as well, in a future update.
-Conjured Resistance is another new perk in the Conjuration Skill tree, and it boosts the resistances of all conjured creatures to all damage types by a percentage equal to your current intelligence attribute. "Current" means your modded intelligence values increase their resistances even further. It requires the expert conjuration perk and a conjuration level of atleast 80. My plan is to have this effect apply to raised creatures as well, in a future update.
-Oblivion Binding had its conjuration skill requirement changed to 60 from 50, since it is quite powerful against familiars.



1.18 "The Smithing Update"
-A new spell, "Blink" has been added. This is an adept-level alteration spell that teleports you to the targeted location within a relatively long range (about the distance from one side of whiterun to the other). You can find the spell tome for it wherever you can find other adept level alteration spell tomes, including vendor inventories. I will be adding expert and master level variants of this spell type that will do slightly different and more powerful things, later.
-A new Daedric artifact has been added into the game. "Hermaeus Mora's Holding" is an ethereal, weightless satchel that can contain all of your items while you travel, and basically allows you to circumvent your carry weight limit entirely. This little item with a big impact takes some work to acquire however, so don't start thinking its a cheat. To use it, you simply activate it in your inventory to temporarily equip it, and its inventory opens for you. Interestingly, when dropped into the world, it simply hangs weightlessly in the air and is not affected by forces around it... except when a Dragonborn takes it. I won't tell you too much about how to get it, other than it IS a daedric artifact after all, and you might have good luck in Solstheim.
-Several new compatibility patches have been created for several mods. These patches were requested, were relatively easy to make, and include the Inigo and Sophia follower mods and Immersive Sounds compendium.
-Gold rewards from quests, loot, and general coin leveled lists now scale upwards a lot more with level, difficulty involved, and the type of enemy you face. Bandit loot and thieves guild rewards in particular will be laden with gold more fervently, as is realistic, and bandit bosses especially are going to be more loaded than usual. This change will be virtually unnoticeable at levels below 5, but by the time you are getting loot and quest rewards at level 50, you're going to start enjoying these rewards more, and not less. This is partially meant to offset the high prices you will encounter if you choose not to invest any time into raising personality or speech. On the other hand, why should you receive the same monetary reward for carrying a macguffin somewhere as you would from clearing out a bandit den, and why should you only get maybe a couple more hundred more coins doing it at level 100 versus level 1? You shouldn't. Now you won't.
-Dragons have received some pretty powerful attribute bonuses this time around. Alduin himself actually has an even bigger bonus than other dragons. The final fight might be a little different this time around. The bonuses are mainly to keep them as powerful as they should be versus all other NPCs, and give them a little extra punch. Dragons in vanilla skyrim were a little too soft in my opinion. In fact, I don't recommend melee fighting with a dragon unless it is already near death... Since I'm all about that balance, I want to add in something that will make those dragon souls more valuable, and seem more worth the extra diffculty...
-A new lesser power, "Dragon Soul Conversion" has been added. This will allow you to convert two dragon souls to a perk point when you use it. If you're like me, you want all the perks without having to 'legendary' your skills, you don't really care about a lot of the dragon shouts and words of power, you tend to collect a fair amount of dragon souls, and all of that means this new power can be helpful for you. The power is added to the player when you start a new game, but if you want to add it to your character without starting a new game, keep reading.
-Since I know a lot of people don't like to start new games just to get new powers that are added in every update, I placed spell tomes of them, including every lesser power the player is supposed to have in SU by defaultcould on Farengar's table in Dragonsreach in Whiterun. If you're upgrading from a previous version, you might want to stop by and grab the "Dragon Soul Conversion" tome, if you want it.
-In the same place in Dragonsreach, I also placed a new book I wrote, called "Concerning Attributes". This explains what attributes can do and how they work in nearly full detail, including perk effects. I will flesh it out a bit more in future updates.
-Every NPC in the game is now using the new relative leveling paradigm, which was partially implented in the last update, and will provide interesting new challenges at every turn.
-Spell sneak attacks now trigger the same sneak attack damage message that other sneak attacks will, and notify you when you have actually acheived a spell sneak attack and just how big your sneak attack multiplier was.
-Sneak attack bonuses from attributes that are granted by several sneak perks have been reduced to half their previous magnitude. This was due to valid concerns about sneak characters being a bit too over-powered with those bonuses, previously.
-Most instances of the phrase 'fortify carry weight' in the game have been replaced with the word 'Feather', which is simpler and more congruitous with previous Elder Scrolls games.
-The 'ravage health, ravage magicka, and ravage stamina' alchemy effects were renamed and their descriptions were simplified. They are now 'drain health, drain magicka, and drain stamina, which is again more congruitous with previous Elder Scrolls games. To be clear, the functions of these effects have not changed: they do exactly the same thing they did in Oblivion and Morrowind even in vanilla Skyrim.
-Shrines now restore your attributes in addition to curing diseases and adding blessings.
-A new perk was added to the restoration perk tree, called "Total Recovery", which when unlocked will slightly increase your healing ability and cause your healing spells to also heal attributes by one point per second while you cast them, either on yourself or on NPCs, as is appropriate for the spell in question.

Smithing Changes
-Most lootable and all craftable weapons and peices of armor in the game can now be recycled at a smelter or a tanning rack. You will receive ingots for items made primarily of metals and you will receive leather or leather strips for items made primarily of leather. You will of course need the smithing perk necessary for crafting the armor in order to recycle it as well. The recipes will only appear when you have the appropriate perks and when their respective items to recycle are in your inventory, so as not to clutter the crafting menu where possible. This dynamic is not yet finished for ars armorum items, but will be implemented in a future update.
-Smithing perks received a significant overhaul this time around. Each perk was renamed to more logically represent the material it affects, rather than the design type of the crafted items it controls, and now provides a variable bonus to your smithing ability for a particular material type that is based on your endurance attribute. This means as you raise that attribute, your smithing ability also increases. Once your endurance attribute increases beyond 200, you will be smithing items with greater finesse than you would with the same smithing skill level in vanilla skyrim, as long as you have the appropriate smithing perk. Some of you may be thinking: but I don't like using Endurance, and I like to do smithing, so why are you making me use it now? To that I say, "Have you ever worked in a forge? If there is any discipline that requires endurance, its that one." In keeping with the common theme of Skyrim Unlimited, you get better rewards for more effort, forethought, and dedication.
-Many of the perks and smithing recipes for amor and weapons have changed to be more logical. First, advanced armors was split into two new perks: quicksilver smithing and corundum smithing. This was to fully separate light armor perks on the left side of the perk tree from heavy armor perks on the right side of the perk tree. A heavy armor specialist shouldn't have to invest perks in light armor materials, like elven smithing, just to get to advanced armors in order to make plate steel. Now, corundum smithing is on the right side of the perk tree and gives you access to plate steel armor. As a general rule, light armors are based on leather, moonstone, quicksilver or malachite (glass), while heavy armors are based on steel, dwemer-metal, orichalcum, or ebony. For example, in addition to their regular vanilla requirements, Dragon Scale now also requires quicksilver ingots and the advanced smithing perk, while Dragon Plate now also requires ebony ingots and the ebony smithing perk. This means you don't get both armors just by getting the Dragon Smithing perk, and that makes sense if you get to the dragon smithing perk from one side or the other: you're either investing your perks in light armor or heavy armor. Either one is what you'll get when you start making dragon armor, but not both. Of course you can simply get all the smithing perks to get both. Scaled armor is now made from quicksilver-infused moonstone, instead of steel, which makes more sense for light armor. Stalhrim weapons and light armor require malachite (glass) smithing, while Stalhrim heavy armor requires ebony smithing. Nordic armor and weapons require ebony smithing instead of advanced armors. As a general rule, iron has been removed from or replaced with steel in any smithing recipes that aren't actually iron weapons or iron armor. Take it from an engineer: when you have steel available, there is almost no reason to use iron in any construction of any kind. Also, why would a helmet require three ingots of something, but two gauntlets together only require two ingots? Now, gauntlets also require three ingots. A handful of other changes like this one have been made to quantities of required ingredients where interests of logic had to be served.
-The smithing skill requirement of the arcane blacksmith perk was reduced to 40, because its just annoying not to be able to enhance enchanted weapons and armor before skill level 60. By the time you acquire skill level 60 in smithing you've probably already had a full set of enchanted armor and weapons that you haven't even been able to improve at the smithy for maybe 10 levels and counting.



1.2 "The Big Update"
-A newer, more intuitive, cleaner, safer, and more fleshed out system of scripts will be handling the attribute system from this point onward, and this is what will make many of the future new alchemy effects and new enchantment effects possible. This has multiple beneficial effects now and massive potential for expansions of the system in future updates. The alchemy update is still forthcoming, since I had more ideas for it than one single update should encompass. This update is already big and I had to draw a line in the sand somewhere between my ambitions and the volume of material that is prudent to include in the latest release.
-Completing many of the main quests or faction quests will now reward you with bonuses to your attributes. Faction quests will provide predetermined bonuses to certain attributes, such as thieves guild quests boosting agility, speed and luck, while companion quests boosting strength and endurance. The civil war quests and main quests of vanilla skyrim, dawnguard, and dragonborn however, will give you a new form of perk point, called an 'attribute per point', which you can spend with the 'choose attributes' lesser power. When you spend it, you will be able to choose which attribute you will spend your new attribute perk point on, and you will be immediately granted one of the attribute bonus perks in one of the appropriate perk trees. Veteran players of Skyrim Unlimited may recall that those perks are the only way to increase intrinsic attribute values beyond 200, so spend them wisely, Dovahkin. You will recieve a message when you have recieved new attribute bonuses from faction quests or attribute perk points from any of the main quests. There are 32 attribute perk points available and many, many more faction bonuses available. So, what are you waiting for? Get out there and do some questing!
-Three new, higher tiers of each of the following encounterable creatures were added: wolves, ice wolves, boars, bears, cave bears, snow bears, sabre cats, snowy sabre cats, trolls, frost trolls, ice wraiths, frostbite spiders, all types of spriggans, hagravens, atronachs, chauruses, wisp mothers, and Gargoyles. Each tier will have a new descriptor at the beginning of its name. For example, the second tier of wolf is "Alpha Wolf". The tier names vary for the first two tiers, however the final tier is almost always named with the word "Legendary" added to the regular name. All dwarven automata also recieved an additional tier, denoted as "Legendary" in their names. Each tier of all the creatures can now be encountered throughout Skyrim, and they get progressively meaner and tougher as you gain levels. Each tier will have progressively better alchemy ingredient drops for most creatures. They typically look identical to their less vicious cousins, so you have new reasons to be careful when adventuring in the wilderness. You definitely don't want to mistake a regular run of the mill creature for a legendary. Don't worry too much, since the strongest ones won't start appearing until after you exceed level 45, and then they will be rare until you start getting even higher in level. If I were you, I would not readily engage a legendary (anything) at any level without foreplanning.
-Several conjuration changes were made that I think most people will love. To sum up those changes, the atromancy, elemental potency, and twin souls perks were renamed and received a second tier each, while almost all creatures you can summon can now become 'potent' or even 'Ascendant' versions of themselves, which is the second tier after 'potent' now. 'Ascendant' means they get stronger as you level up. Atromancy is now 'stabilization', elemental potency is now just 'potency', and twin souls is now 'multiplicity'. Ascendant familiars, Ascendant Atronachs and Ascendant Summoned Undead can tear all but the toughest enemies apart, but beware: many of the other mages in Skyrim can and will eventually use them too!
-Compatibility patches for Beyond Skyrim: Bruma and Helgen Reborn have been added to the compatibility folder. They add SU attributes and SU's relative leveling pardigm to all NPCs in each of those awesome mods.
-There was a surprising lack of undead summoning in Vanilla Skyrim, Solstheim not withstanding, and I fixed that. Raising the undead is ok and all, but its not as flashy as summoning them, is it? I added a basic summon skeleton spell for novice conjurers, and especially for the conjurers among us that are attracted to that undead vibe. I didn't stop there however. The summon boneman, summon mistman, and summon wrathman spells have been renamed to more closely resemble what they actually summon, and are now known as summon skeleton archer, summon skeleton mage, and summon skeleton warlord. Better yet, all three of them are now sold anywhere apprentice, adept, and expert conjuration spell tomes can be found, respectively. Summoning or Raising Undead is now more common throughout Skyrim too, particularly with vampire NPCs and Dragon Priests, and they will very often summon Skeletons to do their bidding.
-Vampires now receive attribute bonuses comparable to the bonuses they received in Oblivion: All normal vampires recieve a +10 bonus to strength, agility, speed, and willpower.
-When you transform into a werewolf or vampire lord, you will receive new attribute bonuses that will sweeten those deals, as well. Werewolves naturally recieve a +30 bonus to strength and endurance, and +25 to speed, while vampire lords receive double the bonuses normal vampires receive, or +20 to strength, agility, speed, and willpower.
-Werewolves have recieved substantial additional bonuses. New bonuses now apply to both physical damage dealt and physical damage mitigated, in addition to their new attribute bonuses. This is in order to keep them relatively powerful compared to other characters after their attribute bonuses are put into effect. Instead of recieving a predetermined damage bonus based on level, they now receive a hefty bonus to their damage dealt based on their base strength attribute. This bonus stacks with the normal bonuses to unarmed damage from strength and from perks in the one-handed perk tree. Additionally, the werewolf feeding effect now heals 30% of your maximum base life, rather than a fixed 50 - 100 points, which as you can imagine became rather useless when you had a lot of life. If you get the werewolf gorging perk, it will heal 60% instead. Vampire Lords will receive new bonuses as well in the next update. Let the enemy tremble before your inner beast.
-Attributes no longer are reduced when you 'Legendary' a skill. The new attribute system no longer measures your attribute growth contributions from any skill as the current value of any given skill, but rather as the number of times you have increased the skill. Now, making your skill legendary will conceivably allow you to increase your attributes all the way up to the soft cap of 200, by continuing to gain skill increases in any skill. This also provides for almost total compatibilty with other mods that edit starting skill values, like Character Creation Overhaul.
-The speed attribute actually makes you swing weapons faster now, as it was intended to all along. The bonus your speed attribute provides to weapon use speeds, like swinging your swords, axes and maces and drawing your bow, has now been moved to an innate ability you get without having to invest any perk points. This also fixes a bug that caused these bonuses almost never to be realized to begin with. To accomodate this change, some bonuses from perks in the one handed, two handed, and archery perk trees were shuffled around and modified for better balance, to make better bonuses available sooner, and to make the perk descriptions easier to read.
-Unarmed Damage recieved a significant overhaul in this version of SU. It is my intention to make one handed combat viable. The bonus your strength attribute provides to unarmed combat damage has now been moved to an innate ability you get without having to invest any perk points, and NPCs get the same bonus. Your unarmed damage scales with your one handed skill and your strength attribute equally. For reference, your unarmed damage with 20 strength and a skill of 15 in one handed will be roughly the same as it would in vanilla skyrim . However, by the time you get to 100 strength, your strength multiplier is now 2 and by the time your one handed skill reaches 100, your one handed multiplier is now 2. These multipliers are applied one after the other, meaning your total damage bonus to one handed will be 2 X 2 = 4 times as much damage. This bonus naturally only gets bigger as you increase your strength and your one handed skill. The two perks in the one-handed perk tree that deal with damage buffs to unarmed damage have now been reworked to provide percentage-based bonuses. The khajiit claw damage bonus was reworked to boost unarmed damage by a global 30% as well, which will keep that racial ability more substantial at high levels of strength and one-handed skill. Be aware that NPCs got the biggest gains this time around with a buff, but only since most humanoid NPCs were doing a paltry 4 points of unarmed damage per hit in vanilla skyrim. Now they do the same base damage as the player, to say nothing about multipiers from skill and strength. Winning those fist fighting contests aren't going to be as easy any more. Also be aware that ALL NPCs using unarmed damage as a primary method of attack get this same bonus as well, and most non-humanoid NPCs have much higher base unarmed attack values. Case in point: if you see a dwarven centurion or dragon with a ton of strength and a high one handed skill, it can probably crush you easily in close-quarters combat if you don't have a very high armor rating and/or armor spells.
-A new perk was added into the Destruction Perk Tree, called "Elemental Fury". This perk adds temporary resistance-damaging effects to many of your destruction spells. It requires skill level 80 in destruction and the Expert Destruction perk. When the new perk is acquired, fire spells damage fire resistance, frost spells damage frost resistance, shock spells damage shock resistance, and arcane spells damage armor resistance. This means that while your damaging effects from one spell of a single element are actively damaging a target, another spell of the same elemental type will do more damage. This provides an incentive to mix and match spells or attacks of other kinds, but of the same element, during combat to take advantage of temporary weaknesses.
-The luck attribute now provides some very interesting effects in conjunction with the Golden Touch and Treasure Hunter perks on the amount of loot you find in the world. This is in terms of the amount of gold and items in containers you find throughout tamriel. These perks can make you very rich now, which adds to their overall attractiveness in a much needed way.
-Two new armor perks have been added into the Heavy and Light Armor perk trees. They are Fortitude, for heavy armor, and Nimbleness, for light armor. Each perk increases your armor rating by an amount equal to your Strength and Agility attribute, respectively. You can use both if you wish, but keep in mind the opportunity costs of the perk and attribute investments involved to get the full potential out of both choices.
-The vanilla schema for enchantment mechanics was changed considerably in a much-needed way in order to boost variety and diversity among enchantments and to give several special items greatly needed boosts in attractiveness. Many enchantments were renamed slightly to denote what exactly they do without getting verbose. Most vanilla skill enchantments were split into two different types: vanilla enchantments were changed to boost skill level, rather than a skill 'mod', while several new enchantments boost skill 'mod' values, and were placed on special items throughout skyrim to make them feel more valuable and rewarding. For example, 'fortify one handed' is now 'fortify one handed skill', and doesn't just flatly boost damage with one handed damage, but raises your one handed skill level: this accomplishes essentially the same thing as before, but is arguably a more easily understandable method of increasing the player's abilities. As an example of some of the 'new' enchantments, you may notice that most dragon priest masks and a couple of college of winterhold quest items will have new effects added to them. Better yet... many of them will come coupled together with new 'replica' items that look exactly the same... and are disenchantable! This will make those victories even sweeter. All of the new enchantments are balanced according to the effort the player must put into acquiring them and will make you feel proud of your accomplishment, but not overpowered. Naturally, you can place a maximum of three of any Dragon Priest mask enchantments on your headgear at once when you have the appropriate enchanting perks. In short, you have several great new reasons to seek out those ancient enchanted artifacts now, and this trend will likely continue as I 'glorify' a few more artifacts in future updates.
-Four new types of enchanted necklaces were added to tamriel. They are elemental necklaces that boost all fire, frost, shock, or arcane damage you do. This includes damage from spells, enchantments, or potions. They have a chance to appear after level 25 in regular loot, and the chance increases as the level of the loot increases. You will know them by their names, which are aptly named as necklace of (insert one of the following here): pyromancy, cryomancy, electromancy, and arcanomancy.
-Attribute enchantments were buffed globally by 33% and several base enchantment types were buffed a bit to make them more competitive with attribute bonuses. Feather enchantments are 3.33 times stronger now, fortify armor enchantments are 33% stronger now, and health, stamina, and magicka enchantments are 50% stronger now.
-As part of an on-going effort to de-level merchant leveled lists and some loot lists, spell tome leveled lists have been changed significantly. Basically, your skill in any magic discipline does not have any effect on the spell tomes you may find in vendor inventories now. You can find expert level spell tomes in vendor inventories for sale even at level 1 and even if you have all magic skills at less than 25 now. You probably won't have the gold to buy them or the magicka reserves to use them or put them to really significant use that early in the game, but one or two will be there for you to save up for. That being said, many spell tomes recieved a drastic and much needed reduction in frequency of appearance, as well. You won't be going to farengar's room to find he has every single novice and apprentice spell tome, now. It stands to reason that not every vendor is going to have every single common spell tome you will need, so you'll just have to keep your eyes peeled for the ones you want if you don't see them on any given trip to the local magic shop. Familiar spell tomes in particular are going to be more rare, so you have a new reason to use the arcane manipulator to obtain them.
-Many new arcane manipulator recipes were added. Nearly all Destruction Spell Tomes can be crafted with the appropriate number of filled grand soul gems and elemental salt ingredients appropriate to the spell in question, now. Arcane spells require filled black soul gems. You will only be able to see recipes for spells one mastery level above your current level. To illustrate, you won't be able to see the firebolt spell tome until you have the novice destruction perk, and you won't be able to see the fireball spell tome until you have the apprentice destruction perk. Also, recipes for spell tomes will dissappear once you have learned the spell in question, so as not to clutter the menu with essentially useless recipes. Several new recipes will also allow you to convert flawless gems into common, lesser, or petty soul gems. You can also craft black soul gems with the manipulator now, and each requires one grand soul gem and a daedra heart.
-Many players of SU may have noticed that with a high willpower attribute, magicka regeneration is so plentiful that there really isn't a need to budget your magicka useage. I have targeted and nearly destroyed this issue in the latest update. This involves a series of nerfs and corresponding buffs to some mechanics that will make them more interesting. Allow me to explain with the following two most substantial examples:
-Many cast and forget timed duration spells, like conjured creatures, weapons, feather spells, Armor Spells, etc. have been changed to use a brand new mechanic that is intended to balance out the magicka regeneration mechanic from the willpower attribute. This will be a controversial addition to be sure, but it will make so many aspects of the game more interesting that I ask for some indulgence from those who enjoy this mod. From now on in Skyrim Unlimited, these spells will reduce your magicka regeneration by a set amount while active. However, the mastery perks in each appropriate school will reduce the magicka regen penalty for qualifying spells dramatically. For example, having a frostbite spider familiar active will cause your magicka regeneration to decrease by 0.5 per second. However, if you have all of the conjuration mastery perks, the reduction will be only 0.125 per second. This not only balances the magicka regeneration mechanic from willpower, it makes the mastery perks more valuable and they should feel less like a necessary evil that is needed only for getting to better perks later. Again I want to emphasize that I KNOW this may be jarring to some people, but I ask for some trust and consideration of what I'm proposing here, because I think adding some extra challenge and nuance to the mage mechanics, the way I have done here, is exactly what the game needs. In fact, most spells that use this mechanic have been buffed a bit to balance out the new mechanic slightly. I will detail many of those changes.
-The armor spells from the alteration school of magic recieved some serious buffs this time around. First of all, armor spells work a bit differently now. They have two effects instead of one. The first effect is of course an increase in your armor rating (which in itself has been buffed considerably). The second effect is now a flat reduction percentage to all physical damage, regardless of if you are wearing armor or not. This flat reduction starts at 15% for Oak Hide, and goes all the way up to 65% for Dragonhide. By "flat", I mean this damage reduction bonus cannot be mitigated by any effects, like the ability to ignore armor from Agility. This makes armor spells a bit more attractive to wearers of armor, even though non-armored mages will naturally still get a much higher armor rating bonus out of them. The armor rating bonus perks for the spells have also been buffed a bit.
-The focused destruction perk bonus has now been redesigned to give the player a bonus based on the willpower attribute instead of a flat bonus. The new bonus is a percentage equal to 20% of the willpower attribute per level of focus. This was done because the set bonus provided previously could be considered slightly cheaty, allowing players at level 1 to basically pour all of their magicka into one attack to do a lot more damage than is fair at that level. This "all or nothing magicka blasting" tactic can still work, but you have to develop your willpower a bit more to make it work. The bonus can actually get bigger now in the long run, but you won't be able to do tons more damage at the start of the game by maxing out your focus level. The magicka cost increase to destruction skills per level of focus is unchanged.
-Destruction spells received an interesting rebalance with respect to the willpower boost to duration. Some SU veterans may be aware that the willful destruction perk previously increased the duration of destruction spells by a percentage of your willpower attribute. All destruction spells dealt their entire damage amount over a duration instead of instantly, which could be boosted dramatically by the willpower bonus. This resulted in a slightly overpowered boost from willpower. Most Destruction spells now have had their damage split into two different parts: the basic part with no duration, and a new part with a certain base duration that is typically 25% more damage over a certain duration. This has two consequences. It slightly buffs some destruction spells by a net 25% at the start of the game, but the progression in power as you increase your willpower is not going to be so dramatic, so end game levels of destruction power will be more tempered.
-Four new alteration spells have been added to Tamriel, and they are based on the idea of projecting force in much the same way as the unrelenting force shout. I'm very excited about these new spells, since they open up the possibility of a purely alteration mage build: a mage character that doesn't even need to focus on Destruction magic to inflict actual damage. They are Force Bolt, Force Push, Force Blast, and Force Grip. They are apprentice, adept, expert, and master level spells, respectively. The first three not only push actors away, but deal damage comparable to Destruction spells in the same mastery tier. The force they apply increases with your alteration skill and your willpower attribute! You can be flinging NPCs across a room if you work at improving those characteristics. Force grip basically is telekinesis that works on actors, keeping them immobile, but at a very high magicka cost. Due to the extra power and battlefield usefulness from the force effects, they are more expensive to cast and take longer to charge up for release by comparison to Destruction Spells. Spell tomes for them can be found wherever alteration spell tomes can be found, and several enemies and alteration mages in Skyrim will be using Force Bolt.
-Wards received a big buff this time around in the form of a percentage boost to protectiveness equal to your restoration skill, a large boost (200%) to the armor bonus they provide, and finally a new ward spell: Superior Ward. While most spells in the game have been getting a percentage-based bonus from their governing skills in SU for quite some time now, the wards' magnitudes curiously were set up not to be boosted by any external effects in vanilla Skyrim, which has been rectified. The skill bonus and the new armor bonus provide a much needed boost to the protective ability of mages, in lieu of Skyrim Unlimited's physical protection rework and the larger maximum power offensive spells can achieve. The new Superior Ward Spell is 25% more powerful than greater ward, is an expert-level restoration spell, and can be found wherever other expert-level restoration spell tomes can be found. Many mages in Skyrim will also be using the new ward. Finally, I have often found it a bit frustrating to see mages in Skyrim using a ward, but I have no way to tell what kind of ward they are using. Now wards actually have a color shader that is applied to the player or actor using them. Red is for lesser, Green is for steadfast, Blue is for Greater, and Purple is for Superior. Besides allowing you to see which ward is being used, it looks pretty neat.
-In vanilla skyrim, the skill bonuses to one handed, two handed, and archery based weapons from their respective skills have been granting only a 0.5% increase in damage, per level of skill. Now in Skyrim unlimited, the bonus is doubled. In other words, previously you would only do 50% more damage with a sword when your one handed skill was 100 versus when it was 1, and now it will do 100% more damage instead. This more logically makes the damage bonus you receive per point of governing attribute equal to the the damage bonus you recieve per point of governing skill, for any weapon you use.
-The bonus to carry weight from your strength attribute has been reduced to 5 from 10. This was mainly a balance thing, since a lot of people, including me, noticed it was a bit too easy to get a bit too much hoarding ability just by increasing the strength attribute.
-I am very happy to report resistance effects, weakness effects, and magical spell cost reduction enchantments received a substantial overhaul that will lead to more interesting and less overpowered versions of the aforementioned mechanics. I had several deep-seated issues with the lackluster way certain mechanics in the vanilla game allowed the player character to become too powerful, and chief among these were the way resistances to magic and other elements, as well as magicka cost reductions for spells from enchantments, were calculated. In short, it is no longer possible to get an immunity or near-immunity to any element, magical attack, poison, or disease and it is not possible to gain 100% spell cost reduction for any school of magic. In addition, effects that cause weaknesses have the potential to become much stronger. The math is set up now so that getting closer to immunity to a particular element or damage type or 100% magicka cost reduction is almost always possible, but you can never achieve them completely. You will recieve a message in the upper left hand corner of the screen every time a resistance level or magicka cost reduction percentage changes, and to what and from what levels they have changed. What follows here is a detailed description of this new mechanic. All types of percentage-based resistances and spell cost reduction mechanics in the vanilla game were replaced with point-based resistances and point-based cost reductions that are used to calculate your resistances to magic, fire, frost, shock, poison, and disease and your spell cost reductions. The calculation is as follows: resistance % or spell cost reduction % = 100 * (1- e ^ (- Points / Constant)). The constant is different for each thing being calculated. This simple equation means you can increase your points as much as you want, but you'll never get to 100% resistance or cost reduction: you'll just get closer and closer as your points grow, kind of like accelerating to the speed of light. Some of you may be thinking this is a huge nerf to resistance effects and spell cost enchantments, and while it is a nerf, its not as much of a nerf as you may think. For example, lets consider the case of magic resistance. Ten points of magic resistance is still basically going to equate to 10% magic resistance. The new math doesn't start becoming noticeable until you get to about 20 points of resistance. When you get to very high restance point values, this mechanic still works beautifully in terms of logic: with 90% resistance to magic, which is still achievable with a lot of effort, you will still be taking twice the damage from spells you would receive if you had a 95% resistance to magic, which is the maximum. When your resistance to an element is at a high level, every additional percent reduction makes a bigger and bigger difference. Therefore, you still have plenty of reasons to keep working on your resistance levels when they are at 90%, especially when mages are inflicting hundreds of points of elemental damage. The same logic work for the new magic cost reduction mechanics. On the flip side, this new mechanic also means that any negative points, i.e. a weakness effect, make your resistances or cost reduction percentages react more and more negatively, and this too has interesting consequences. For example, a weakness to fire effect that decreases your fire resistance points by 50 will actually make you take 72% more damage from fire, if your resistance points were already at 0. This mechanic works the same for all NPCs as it does for you. As the point reduction gets bigger, the effect gets bigger even faster. There is one caviat to this, however. The few creatures in the game that are immune to certain elements, like atronachs for example, cannot have their resistance to the element in question decreased at all. A flame atronach is immune to fire for life, unless you cheat with the console or something like that. For the moment, there are no effects in the game that will cause you to have negative spell cost reductions, which would effectively increase the magicka costs of your spells.
-Many of the most powerful characters in the game, including Dragons and many bosses, have received new damage resistance bonuses to most types of damage. The most noteworthy bonuses were granted to Dragon Priests, Dwarven Centurions, Giants, Falmer bosses, Hagravens, Spriggans, and Wisp Mothers. You have been warned, Dovahkin.
-A new, significant overhaul of NPC attributes was accomplished. Most NPCs will now be sporting more appropriate attributes for the damage type they deal: melee, missile, or magic, or a mix of any of the three. Futher, most humanoid NPCs have recieved a damping mechanic which kicks in after an attribute exceeds 150 and will keep their attributes from surpassing the intrinsic cap of 300. Keep in mind I said HUMANOID NPCs: non-playable actors have no such restriction.
-Due to the more efficient scripts being used, Attributes are able to be updated more frequently and with less script load on the game engine. The old update time was 8 seconds at maximum, while this new one is 5 seconds.
-Attribute bonuses from skill increases will be applied only after the level up event from now on, which means after you select health, magicka or stamina to increase in the perks menu. This will make the level up event feel even more rewarding.
-You will be alerted to changes in your base values of health, stamina, magicka and carry weight from attribute updates more often now through messages in the upper left corner of the screen. Health, magicka, and stamina will now also never appear in green numbers in the perk tree menus from attribute effects only: the green color is now reserved specifically for effects that only fortify them directly.
-A new set of global values in Skyrim Unlimited can be used by other modders to add values to player attributes as they see fit in mods of their own. Message me on the nexus if you are interested in making a mod that does this, and I'll explain how.
-Several creatures, including Dwarven Automata, Giants, Mammoths and to a lesser extent, Falmer and Draugr, have received some impressive and appropriate new attribute bonuses.
-A new system of attribute perk bonuses was implemented on NPCs. The new system makes many NPCs deal and receive more believable and more realistic damage, respective of the attributes they possess, and irrespective of whatever level the player may be at or whatever the NPC in question may be aiming at. Vanilla Skyrim uses a system of perks to buff or nerf the damage dealt or recieved, as necessary, by many, many NPCs in damage from bows or melee weapons. However, this system gives many NPCs damage buffs or nerfs specific to the player only, meaning they sometimes do much more damage to the player than they do to other NPCs, or they take drastically reduced damage from other NPCs compared to the player. In many cases, this mechanic is warranted, i.e. a quest scene may require a character to take excessive amounts of damage or almost no damage in order for the scene to play out right. However, I found the vast majority of instances where this mechanic was used could have been accomplished with less 'behind-the-scenes' trickery, for the players' benefit, on the part of the developers. Case in point: guards and soldiers typically do a lot more damage than their attributes would suggest they should be doing, sometimes only to the player, and these abilities cannot be sensed by the player with the Dragon Sense power. While it makes sense the guards should be doing a lot of damage, being trained soldiers in most cases, it doesn't make sense that the dragon sense power wouldn't show you that ability. It also doesn't make sense that soldiers would do more damage to the player than anybody else. Finally, with recent changes to NPC attribute mechanics, some of them might be doing too much damage. I fixed or mitigated all of these issues. This is an on-going development however, and will probably be tweaked in future updates.
-The 'Clever Lockpicking' perk was changed to 'Lucky Pick', which now provides a boost to your lockpicking finesse equal to 50% of your Luck Attribute. This bonus makes more sense in terms of game mechanics and lore than the previous bonus from Intelligence. After all, the thieves guild story makes it very clear that Luck is a thief's best friend.
-Luck now also provides a bonus to pickpocketing abilities equal to your Luck Attribute, as well, through the 'Lady Luck's Touch' perk. This perk was placed into the pickpocket perk tree with a skill level 40 requirement.
-Smithing perks now use your base endurance attribute to calculate your smithing ability for any given material, rather than your current endurance attribute. This was done for the same reason your base intelligence and not your current intelligence affects your alchemy and enchanting abilities: it isn't possible to cheat with attribute enchantments and potions in smithing, and this prevents people from going nuts making lots of fortify endurance enchanted armor just to be better at smithing.
-A bug that made the dual wielding one handed perk allow the player character to swing weapons far too fast was corrected.
-Lasting Effect had its duration bonus to potion effects cut in half. This bonus, when used by mages particularly, could become so powerful you never needed to use more than one potion of a single type in a single dungeon, or any cell for that matter. Now its a little more balanced.
-Dragon Soul Conversion has been buffed: it now costs only one dragon soul to purchase a perk point, which means the conversion is now one-to-one. Skyrim Unlimited adds over 90 perks to the game, and adds more for every update. It is most likely a serious step towards balance to make this change with the dragon soul conversion power, since there is no way the player can acquire even a quarter of the perks in vanilla skyrim and SU with leveling as the only source of perks.
-Several armors and weapons from the DLCs now receive the correct smithing bonuses from SU perks.
-Arcane Spells have been rebalanced slightly, so that enemies will not always be staggered without fail. The stagger rate is high, but you won't be able to use them to keep strong enemies staggered indefinitely any more. Arcane Orb in particular will no longer knock all actors down all of the time.
-NPC classes were tweaked a bit more, so that they tend to have slightly higher skill values where their actual combat effectiveness would be most improved.
-For those that may want to uninstall Skyrim Unlimited in the future without any risk of orphaned scripts continuously running even after the mod is removed from the /data folder, there is a new book in Dragonsreach, on Farengar's table, that will stop all continuously running scripts from Skyrim Unlimited when you read it. After reading the book and waiting until you see the uninstall notification messages, you should save your game. You can then safely remove all files from your game folder related to Skyrim Unlimited and resume your game from the last save file.
-general bugfixes and optimizations



1.21 "The Big Little Things Update"
-Focus point levels have been introduced into the game, giving new usefullness to your willpower attribute regardless of whether you're a mage, a sneak, a combat specialist, or any thing in between, and can dramatically affect the way you play in interesting and new ways. The "choose attributes" lesser power can now be used to add or subtract focus points into your Warrior Focus Level, your Sneak Focus Level, or your Mage Focus Level. Those levels naturally increase warrior abilities, sneak abilities, or mage abilities, respectively. Be advised that all bonuses come from perks you can select in the appropriate perk trees. Many perks have been changed to use the new focus points to provide similar bonuses compared to previous boosts, or provide entirely new bonuses. You can have a total number of assigned Focus Points equal to your base willpower attribute / 10. For example with a willpower of 100 you can have up to 10 total levels of focus in any of the three fields. Bonuses range from greater magnitude for your spells to more damage with your weapons, or even more effective sneaking, lockpicking and pickpocketing. I can already hear the naysayers now: "But Ikthelius!! Willpower is a mage attribute! Why would you make warriors and sneaks focus on a mage attribute!? This isn't fair! sniff sniff snivel snivel" If that's you, calm down, pay attention, and give me a little credit for putting some thought into this. The goal here is to make a metagame where the sneak, warrior, and mage classes are balanced roughly in terms of power with each other, but still provide interesting and unique abilities beyond what they had in vanilla skyrim. The logic behind this change is simple and easy to demonstrate. First of all, this opens up new options for increasing the power of your dovahkin in interesting ways. Second, when you're a pure warrior or a pure sneak, you previously only needed to care about your strength, endurance, agility and speed attributes in order to excel. While it still makes sense to focus on those attributes, at least at first, you now have reasons to consider willpower as an alternative sooner or later regardless of the path you choose. Willpower was important only for mages, which isn't quite balanced and doesn't jive right with my sense of realism. This is part of an on-going campaign to make each attribute useful in different but balanced ways, no matter how you like to play, with interesting tradeoffs to consider along the journey. NPCs use focus levels too, but for now most "normal" npcs, meaning anything that isn't a dragon, will not have any more than 10 focus levels in any specialty. Finally, focus point enchantments for each class have also been added to many helmets and will begin appearing in blacksmith inventories and in loot leveled 20 or higher. They are disenchantable and the enchantments can be placed on helmets, hoods and circlets.
-All known issues with derived attributes resetting erroneously after loading a game save have been fixed. All known issues with player character resistances being incorrectly calculated have also been fixed. For those that aren't aware, the game engine resets certain variables on your character that it tracks separately from my scripts, every time you load your game. These include carry weight, magicka regeneration, stamina regeneration, character movement speed, and unarmed damage. Now SU will automatically correct these issues in 2 seconds or less after loading a game. Please note that because of a limitation of the game engine itself, your actual applied movement speed does not update until you 'sheath' or 'unsheathe' your weapons or spells.
-The armor protection system in SU has been overhauled dramatically. Previously, worn armor in SU may as well have been paper thin in actuality, since changes to game dynamics drastically reduced its effectiveness until your skills and attributes were much higher than at the start. This was frustrating to many warrior-minded players that wanted a challenge, but not an unending streak of getting owned by the NPCs while they developed their skills and attributes. In this new version, the protection you recieve per point of armor you have is based on a exponential curve rather than the linear one in vanilla skyrim. This basically means armor makes a much bigger difference on your damage resistance at lower levels of armor coverage, so that you don't feel like armor is crap at the beginning of the game. Quite the contrary: armor can and probably will save your life even if all you have is your modestly improved steel or leather armor. This is the same solution I used to make resistances to magic and the elements more balanced. The new maximum armor rating cap in SU is 10000, at which point your physical damage resistance will be 99%. This is NOT the same as the total of your 'armor' provided by every peice of equipment you are wearing. Rather, your armor rating is calculated from your total armor, any spells or perks that may apply, and several other variables. Remember though: the higher in level you become, the more enemies you will face whose attacks ignore your amor rating by a percentage dependant on their agility attributes. Blocking with a shield or using shield spells will help dramatically with that issue, however.
-The chance of meeting an NPC that can instakill or kill you in two hits at low levels is now much lower. Unarmed damage base values have been tweaked for many NPCs, and a new damping mechanic has been introduced that will limit the damage many NPCs deal based on your level. This mechanic protects you the most at level 1, but gradually decays as you gain levels. By the time you are at level 40, it won't protect you at all. Some NPCs were doing extreme damage even at low levels, which was not entirely intended. In particular, dragons, bears, sabre cats, chaurus reapers and a few mages were frequently getting one or two-hit kills on my character even when I focused on endurance throughout the game. This mechanic is meant to make the game a bit less hardcore when you're just starting out.
-Magicka and Stamina Regeneration have been reworked to be more useful at low attribute levels and far less overpowered at high attribute levels. For those that aren't familiar, magickarate and staminarate are the actor values that control your magicka regeneration and stamina regeneration, respectively, and are the percent of your maximum magicka or stamina you regenerate per second, without any enchantments or magic effects active. The new calculation of these actor values is approximately of this form: rate = 20(1-e^(-controllingattribute/190)). This means your magicka regen (without any enchantments or magic effects in play) at a willpower of 30 will be the same as in vanilla skyrim, or 3% per second. Your stamina regen likewise will be about 3% per second when the average of your endurance, strength and agility attributes is 30. The key changes to note here is that in general, increases in willpower when your willpower is low will more dramatically affect your magicka regeneration, while increases when your willpower is above 300 will be gradually more or less inconsequential, and the same is true for stamina regeneration in relation to the average of your strength, endurance, and agility attributes. Both rates by themselves cap at a base value of 20 now, but this is saying nothing about what regeneration enchantments can do for you.
-Spells that reduce magicka regeneration while active have been rebalanced and should be less intrusive on your play style. This mechanic now uses magicka regeneration percentage, rather than magicka rate straight up.
-Several destruction perks were reworked for greater balance and less clutter in your routine of destructiveness. Basically, the mastery perks and the focused destruction perk have effectively switched places. The mastery perks have been reworked to add damage to each class of spells they affect by an amount equal to your magic focus level instead of reducing their magicka cost by a calculated percentage using your willpower. The old focus level system, along with the concentration and restraint spells, are no longer used and the bonuses they provided are gone. If you still have those spells you can ignore them without consequence. Instead, the Focused Destruction Perk now adds points to your destruction spell cost reduction equal to 10% of your willpower.
-Destruction Bolt-Type spells like firebolt and icy spear can now also project additional force onto your targets, pushing them even further, with the force projection alteration perks. These are the same perks that increase the force projected and the damage dealt by alteration force spells based on your alteration skill and your willpower attribute, and the bonus to force projection is now the same for bolt-type destruction spells.
-Four new adept level Destruction spells were added into the tamriel. They are immolation, chilling, electrocution, and decay. These spells are specialized in damaging enemy resistances to a particular element for the duration of the spell itself, as well as dealing low damage constantly over a long duration to the target. This is meant to be a new tactical option for spellcasters when faced with enemies whose magic resistances or elemental resistances are very high, but are not still not immune to the element in question.
-Daedric weapons have been buffed slightly. In general, all daedric weapons are now the strongest in the game, which fits because Daedric Armor is already the strongest armor in the game, atleast in the heavy armor category. The daedric and dragon smithing perks have been adjusted in their skill and perk requirements and in their positions in the smithing perk tree. I never really liked the way dragon weapons were made better than daedric weapons in vanilla Skyrim, considering it has always been more or less the best of the best with very few exceptions, although making the dragon weapons have a drawback (being heavier), was a nice touch. I admit this is a matter of taste, but hear me out on this. When I'm forced to ask myself "If equipment base stats aren't an issue, which weapons and armor do I feel most like a badass with when I use them", I inevitably answer myself with "Daedric" in five seconds or less. There's just no other set of equipment that looks that good in vanilla skyrim, period.
-Development on de-leveling merchant inventories has progressed a bit further. This time, all weapons you find in vendor inventories are de-leveled, which means your level has no effect on the weapons you will find for sale from any blacksmith. The process of deleveling certain aspects of the game world for realism's sake is a lengthy one and will not be completed in any one udpate. This process involves creating many, many, many new leveled lists that take skyrim unlimited's sensibilities into account, and this takes a great deal of time. This is also made all the more arduous because much of the work is going into creating new leveled lists for NPCs as well, since I saw no reason to tackle each leveled list update separately. The new leveled lists for NPCs will not be used until a future update.
-Some oversights with some NPC attributes exceeding their maximum intended levels were corrected, and the attribute capping mechanic for NPCs was tweaked to make it more soft and gradual. All NPCs now have soft attribute cap mechanics applied if their attributes get high enough.
-NPC resistances were tweaked again, and this time I'm very happy with the results. In short, NPCs will have less dramatic and more nuanced resistances, especially at low levels.
-Movement speed and attack speeds of your character will now receive diminishing bonuses after you exceed a speed attribute of 200, as a soft cap. The hard cap for movement speed is now 400 and it is 4 for your weapon attack speeds, but reaching those values will take continued investment of your attribute points and attribute perks.
-The dragon sense power can now be used to add attributes to NPCs that do not already have them. This is mainly meant for followers added by mods I have not yet added compatibility patches for, especially since I cannot possibly add compatibility patches for every mod that adds new NPCs into the game. Just use the dragon sense power while they are in your target sight, just as if you were going to sense their attributes normally, and attributes will be added to them before the normal readout of attributes. You will get a notification if attributes were added.
-Many minor bug fixes and balance tweaks.



1.22 "The Enchanted Weapons Update"
-Compatibility patches for Interesting NPCs and Sewers of Skyrim have been added, adding skyrim unlimited's attribute systems to the NPCs in both mods. Next up, I tentatively plan to make a compatibility patch for ordinator for the next update.
-Over 15000 new enchanted weapons have been added to Tamriel. That was not a typo. Many improvements have been made. The biggest change is that now enchanted weapons you find can have up to three enchantment effects at once, instead of just one. The second biggest change is that there are several new enchanted weapon effects you can find, and those will be covered in more detail later in this version update entry. There are now 9 possible levels for every basic vanilla enchantment and the new enchantment effects, instead of the 6 possible levels in vanilla Skyrim. Every weapon can now have almost any weapon enchantment, rather than a small subset of the possible enchantments. This vastly increases the potential loot one can find and the value of weapons one can find for sale at vendors. In short, it is possible to play the game and get great enchanted weapons without resorting to becoming a master enchanter. The player shouldn't be forced into developing enchanting and smithing skills in order to improve gear, and I'm working on a method of fixing the smithing issue as well.
-Staffs have received a vast update. New staffs have been created and added to leveled lists wherever staffs existed before, and include most of the offensive magic effects added by SU so far. The number of staffs in Tamriel is almost double what it used to be. Each new staff also can be crafted the same way other staffs are crafted. All staffs have received a global update in enchantment amount of an additional 150%, allowing them to be used for longer before running out of charge. All staffs, both new and old, now have more or less the same effects that their matching spells have in each case. They also receive all of the same bonuses to damage that their respective non-staff spells do. There are a few important exceptions, however. Staffs that summon creatures will do so without incuring any magicka regneration cost on the user, which I'm sure will be a huge bonus to conjuration fans. If a spell seems like its far too expensive in terms of coin or magicka cost, and you come across an interesting staff with that spell's effects, you will be able to use the exact same spell without either problem interfering with your fun. Staff effects now take twice as long to charge up for release now, however. The reason for this last change to balance them a bit in lieu of the next new bonus they recieve that I haven't mentioned yet. You can expect both warlocks and Falmer to be occasionally using the new staffs as well.
-New staff synergy perks have been added to each perk tree representing a school of magic. They can be found in the position which used to be occupied by the dual casting perk in each tree (more on that next), and confer some new bonuses with great nuance and potential for magic staff users. They work like this: when you have the staff synergy perk for a particular school of magic, and you are dual wielding with two magic staffs, and one of the staffs has magic effects from the school you have a synergy perk in, ALL of the staff effects you cast from both staffs gain a 15% magnitude, duration, and cost reduction bonus. The really neat part is, this bonus is multiplicative with any bonus your other staff may get from its own synergy perk. This means there is a powerful new advantage to using staffs from two different schools of magic, beyond diversifying the effects your attacks have on your enemies. For example, using a staff of fireball and a staff of fade at the same time, while you have both the destruction and illusion staff synergy perks, will result in both staffs being roughly 30% stronger while you have them equipped! The idea here is to offer new incentives to mix up your routines of destruction, alteration, conjuration, illusion, or even restoration.
- While the Dual Casting perks in every magic perk tree have been repurposed and renamed into the Staff Synergy Perks, dual casting for each school of magic is now granted by the novice mastery perk in each tree instead. I think dual casting any magic is so fundamental, that it should literally be part of the first thing, or the first perk, that you get in any school of magic. It kinda sucks that a mage has to learn 10 perks in vanilla skyrim in order to dual cast any commonplace spells in any school. Now its just 5 novice mastery perks, and those are perk points well spent for any mage.
- Several more perks in the two handed, one handed, archery and sneak perk trees have been modified to grant additional damage bonuses to weapon damage respective to each perk governing a specific weapon type. These perks include the limbsplitter, deep wounds, skullcrusher, bladesman, bonebreaker, bladesman and critical shot series of perks. The new damage bonuses are based entirely on focus levels. Two handed weapons and Bows/Crossbows received the biggest bonuses, followed closely by one handed weapons, and daggers received the smallest of the new bonuses. This was largely done to address an imbalance I noticed towards overpowered one handed weapons, and especially daggers, when I began compiling a new spreadsheet of potential damage values for each type of weapon. I will go into more detail about that later in this update.
- Many new spells and enchantments have been added. Some are old favorites from past Elder Scrolls titles, like chameleon and unlock spells. Of particular interest are the new Illusion and Restoration spells with effects that actually deal damage, allowing the possibilty for a completely illusion or completely restoration mage build. I've been unsatisfied with the selection of Illusion and Restoration spells since launch day of Skyrim, and I disliked the fact that any mage that actually wanted to hurt a target directly, inevitably had to use destruction spells to do so. That is unbalanced and doesn't really do the other magic schools any justice. Worse still, so many interesting spell effects were removed in the transition from Oblivion to Skyrim. I made great strides in fixing those issues in this update. Keep reading to see how.
- The Chameleon effect has returned, in a modified and balanced fashion for Skyrim. A Chameleon spell and enchantments have been placed into leveled lists and onto several different rings, respectively. The rings can be found anywhere other enchanted rings can be found, and they are disenchantable. The Chameleon effect is a wonderful tool for thieves from the Illusion School of magic, and it renders the user harder to detect visually, and thus it is easier for the user to maintain stealth. Remember that it does not make the user completely undetectable, even at 100% chameleon. Hostile NPCs can still hear you when you move and will be drawn to the sounds of your actions, like swinging weapons and casting spells. Like magic resistance, the more chameleon points you have from various effects, the higher your percent chameleon level will be. Also like magic resistance points, the chameleon level is exponentially related to chameleon points: it takes more and more chameleon points to get each higher level. Getting to 10% requires only 10 points. On the other hand, 100% requires nothing short of 600 points. I decided not to go with a straight up "see through" effect with the FX on this particular chameleon version, since honestly that's just distracting and makes it harder to tell what the heck is going on in third person view, especially when your view is zoomed out a bit. Instead, I chose a ghostly shader that makes the wearer look slightly more ethereal, but not to a point that you can't see yourself.
- Resistance spells were added into adept, expert, and master level restoration spell tome leveled lists. You can only have one active at at time, and they afford you increased resistances to fire, frost, shock, poison, or magic. The first three are available as adept spells, while the later two are expert and master level spells, respectively. You will not be able to obtain the resist magic spell through any ordinary means, however. If you focus on obtaining the other spells, you may have some success at the arcane manipulator...
-Unlock spells have returned to Tamriel from Elder Scrolls stories of old. There are five tiers of them, and naturally there is one for every lock difficulty. Each higher tier will make you temporarily capable of opening locks without lockpicking that tier or any lower tiers. For example the "Open Expert Lock" spell will allow you to open any locks except master locks, simply by activating them as if to open them normally. This works almost identically to the way the tower stone power works, but is not limited to a single use per day: just activate the lock normally after the spell is cast and you will see a new option to "magically unlock" it. The danger in making unlock spells overpowered compared to lockpicking in general was foremost in my mind when I designed these spells. To that end, I made some interesting tradeoffs to consider in using unlock spells versus lockpicking. First of all, the spells are extremely expensive to cast and last only a few seconds. You will not be able to cast the apprentice spell with a fresh character until you gain more magicka. Secondly they are only dual cast with the ritual spell casting animation and the charge up time for the spells are very long and get longer for each higher tier. You will therefore be vulnerable and immobilized for progressively longer periods while you cast unlock spells for more and more sophisticated locks. Finally, unless you have any perks that muffle the sounds of your spells sufficiently, any hostile NPCs in the vicinity will notice the sound of the spell when it is cast and start moving toward you. Unlock spells have been done before in other mods, but in my opinion my method of implementing the spells in Skyrim is more balanced with traditional lockpicking and less OP in general. To summarize, the idea behind these unlock spells presented is to provide an alternative to lockpicking that is interesting with its own set of pros, but has a set of cons that make staying undetected difficult. Constructive criticism is welcome.
-Weakness spells and enchantments have been added into Tamriel, fresh from the Illusion school of magic. They not only damage your target's health by attacking the mind, but they create an illusory field around the target that weakens its physical attacks, movement speed, and more. The new spells have been added to vendor inventories and into the arcane manipulator's spell tome recipes. They are Fade, Debilitate, and Cripple, and are respectively apprentice, adept, and expert spells. Each higher tier in the series adds a new effect in the weakness spell category, making each one progressively more useful. Weakness spells can be devastating to melee characters, whose physical attack damage and speed will be dramatically but temporarily reduced while they take a fair amount of damage. Initially they will only be effective on living targets(read: not daedra, undead or automata). A certain perk in the illusion perk tree can invalidate this limitation. Mages that should be using illusion spells will now be sporting these beastly new spells. Beware, warrior archetypes: they will ensnare you easily without a plan of attack.
-All hail the power of the... Restoration Mage? Yes, you heard that right. Absorption spells and enchantments are back, are better than ever, and have been enveloped into a new spell archetype I call "absorbance". As the name suggests, they don't just damage your target: you steal all of the health (and later, stamina) that you can suck out of them, for yourself. Even better, they inflict absorbance points on your enemies, temporarily transfering a percentage of their attributes to you. Strictly speaking, three new restoration spells have been added to vendor inventories, enemy spell loadouts, and into the arcane manipulator's spell tome recipes: siphon, absorption, and osmosis. They are respectively apprentice, adept, and expert spells. Old school Elder Scrolls fans may be aware that in previous games, there were absorption spells and enchantment possibilites for every single attribute, either basic or derived, in Tamriel. In Skyrim Unlimited however, they have been combined into one spell type: absorbance. This makes the absorbance attack archetype much more useful and pertinent than 15 different kinds of absorption spells. Be advised however, that absorbance has some drawbacks. Due to the effort required to redirect energies from your target to yourself, absorbance attacks do not deal as much outright damage as some other attack spells. Initially they will only be effective on living targets (read: not daedra, undead or automata), but this limitation can be lifted with new perks in the restoration skill tree. Also, you can only have one active absorbance effect per target at any one time. In other words, absorbance effects do not stack on a single enemy, but you can have an absorbance effect active on every single NPC loaded on the grid, if you're good enough to hit them all. Be advised that last limitation does not apply to the health absorption of the new spells: that works all the time no matter how many times you've cast it on an enemy. Ofcourse, restoration mages in Tamriel will also be using these new spells, so beware: your own power can be turned against you.. unless you turn their power against them first.
-Spriggans now use absorbance effects as well, in their bug swarm attack. In addition, they have been buffed a bit to make them slightly more powerful adversaries. Think twice now about pissing off walking trees.
-The ward absorb perk has been modified and renamed to "frequency shift", and now it not only allows your wards to partially absorb the magicka of incoming spells, it causes the wards to act like regular shields against physical melee enemy attacks. This basically means that wards can be used in place of normal shields, and for most intents and purposes they behave the same way: reducing damage from melee attacks in a way proportional to your block skill and appropriate attributes, making enemies recoil slightly from hitting the ward, raising your block skill when an enemy hits the ward, and even slowing time during an enemy power attack if you have the right block perk. In addition, wards will have two new intrinsic advantages over shields: you can cast a spell while the ward is active, something you cannot do while blocking with a corporeal shield, and you will not move more slowly with the ward active. HOWEVER, there are some important drawbacks to consider as well, and they keep this new mechanic balanced. Aside from wards being a very heavy magicka drain (which gets even worse if you cast an offensive spell in the other hand), they cannot deflect arrows. A skilled marksman is still the bane of any wizard, ward or no ward. Wards also get very few bonuses from most of the block perks, unlike corporeal shields. The frequency shift perk now has a level requirement reduced to 50 from 60, to make it more attractive for new mage builds.
-Grand Master versions of the master level destruction spell tomes were added to the arcane manipulator recipes. They will teach you four new versions of the same master level spells you know and love, and they have two potentially very powerful advantages over the non-grand versions: they can be cast with one hand, and you won't be immobilized while you charge up the spell for casting. However, in order to even be able to see the recipes for the spell tomes at the arcane manipulator, you will need to have the master desctruction perk and you must have learned the non-grand version of the spell you are attempting to make. Now you have better reasons to go all the way to skill level 100 in destruction. I will be looking into creating more 'grand master' versions of spells and spell tome recipes for them in the future, and better yet, I also plan to create hybrid spells from two or more schools or elements.
-The quest to delevel merchant inventories is more or less complete: all merchants should now be sporting weapons, armor, and crafting materials in their inventories that do not depend on your character level. It is now possible to find nearly any vanilla skyrim or DLC weapons and armors in merchant inventories that aren't dragonbone or daedric, regardless of your character's level. As veterans of Skyrim Unlimited may be aware, vendor prices are much more realistically expensive, which means that just because you may have high-tier items available at the start of the game from vendors, that doesn't mean you will be able to afford them. This makes gold more valuable and gives you new reasons to work on your speech skill and personality attribute, which both affect your buying and selling prices at vendors. I find this dynamic much more interesting than making vendors treat you like a novice with only novice inventory available at the beginning of the game. Real life vendors normally only treat you differently based on how much coin you have to spend on their wares, and I may be looking at finding a way to reward the player with a special vendor relationship bonus for frequent shopping in the future.
- Eight new weapon enchantment types have been added into tamriel: Immolation, Chilling, Electrocution, Decay, Sun Bane, Command Daedra, Debilitate, and Absorbance. The new enchantments will have a chance of appearing in blacksmith vendor wares at any level. Naturally, higher level loot will have higher level enchantments. The new enchantments are of course disenchantable and can be placed on any type of weapon. I will give more details for each in the next few update entries.
-Immolation, Chilling, Electrocution, and Decay enchantments are designed to temporarily decrease a targets' resistances to fire, frost, shock, and physical damage respectively, and are named identically to the magic spells I previously added which have the same effects. As you might imagine they are essentially useless by themselves, however when combined with a spell or other enchantment which deals damage of the type the enemy is now weak to... well I'm sure you get the idea.
-Command Daedra is basically an upgrade to the 'Banish' enchantment: it turns an enemy Daedra into your ally! The best part is that you will inherit the conjuration effect that called the creature, but not the magicka regen penalty of it. The only drawback to it is that it is easier to get a high level banish enchantment than a high level command daedra enchantment. The 'level' here determines what daedra NPCs the effect will actually work on. If the NPC is a higher level than the enchantment, it will resist the effect.
-Sun Bane has been added to many enchanted items throughout tamriel and is now even more effective against the undead (read: draugr, skeletons and vampires).
-The Debilitate Enchantment is basically the new weakness effect from illusion, but in the form of an enchantment. Unlike the weakness effects from the new spells however, it does not deal damage directly and does not have as many effects on various NPC abilities, but it will nevertheless provide some very powerful tactical 'high ground' against melee enemies.
-The Absorbance enchantment works nearly identically to the absorbance spell effects from the new restoration spells added in this update, except that it only absorbs attributes.
-The infamous mechanic where your speed suddenly goes to slug hell when your inventory weight exceeds your carry weight has been around in Elder Scrolls for a while now. Honestly, while its necessary to have some kind of game mechanic to limit the player from filling up his or her inventory to infinity, its about time it was changed to be slightly less abrupt in the effect it has on your speed. I attempted to do that in this latest update for SU. Basically, the transition from running at full speed to "holy crap that mudcrab is moving faster than me" is less like a two second stop to pick up a flower and more like a very, very gradual transition. You may notice you'll be moving barely more slowly when your inventory weight exceeds half your carry weight. This is natural and realistic. In case you can't tell, you will receive messages letting you know when your speed drops below certain values, starting at 80% speed. The reduction effect will get more pronounced as you increase your inventory weight even more. By the time your inventory weight is 75% of your carry weight, your speed will be roughly half, and it gets exponentially worse still until you finally exceed your carry weight. This mechanic works the same way for NPCs: any effect that increases their inventory weight will have the same gradual reduction on their speed. As a great side effect here, feather spells are now more useful for negating this speed reduction, atleast temporarily. Naturally when you exceed your carry weight, you'll be moving at the same speed you would be in vanilla Skyrim. The difference here is, you probably won't be in the middle of a fight with a draugr lord or gods forbid a dragon when you suddenly notice that you verily have a full inventory and you can't stop that killing blow aimed at your face because you just looted a corpse randomly in the middle of the fight. It will have been very, very clear to you long before then that "hey, maybe I should drop some stuff before I go get thrashed badly". Yes, I loot corpses in the middle of fights. Its completely normal in an elder scrolls game for ... reasons.
-Cloak spells have been buffed a bit. I fixed a vanilla issue where Cloak spells did not scale in power from vanilla elemental damage bonus perks in the Destruction Perk Tree. I also went a few steps further. First of all, cloak spells now benefit from all of the normal damage bonuses that other Destruction Spells were already enjoying in SU, like greater damage as your Destruction skill increases. Secondly, they now provide minor resistance bonuses to the appropriate element when you get a new perk in the Alteration Skill Tree called "cloak resistance". There is a good reason for this last change. Some of you may recall that in Oblivion, there were no cloak spells per se, but we did have elemental shield spells that were completely defensive instead of offensive. Since there is no analog to this ability in Skyrim, but the elemental shield spells seem to clearly be the spiritual successors to Cloak Spells, and since the jump from being completely defensive to entirely offensive is somewhat odd, I decided to give the cloak spells some of their old functionality back in addition to fixing some inconsistincies with the new functionality.
-Feather spells can now grant you partial or even full immunity to damage from long falls when you invest in the 'feather weight' perks, in addition to the bonus they already provide to magnitude for feather spells. They also now provide a bonus to the duration of feather effects, by up to 100%. Finally, the second feather weight perk has been given a new alteration skill requirement of 55, to keep this sweet deal a bit more balanced in terms of effort vs reward.
-All magic effects that decrease resistances to various things have been modified to work differently when resistances are decreased below 0%. First of all, negative resistance now works much the same way that positive resistance does, instead of increasing exponentially in a way that is incredibly unbalanced. Secondly, it is capped at a maximum negative resistance value appropriate to each type. This is because in the previous version, it was possible to give enemies insane weaknesses to different elements with the new enchantments I have introdued in this version. Resist fire, frost and shock cannot be decreased further than -300, while resist magic, resist poison and resist disease cannot be dereased further than -200.
-Burden effects were added to force spells, and these work identically to the way they worked in previous elder scrolls games, except now they aren't quite as useless. Since NPCs are subject to the same speed reduction mechanic as you are from inventory weight as of this update, burden now slows your enemies down. This slowing effect from burden will not be as dramatic as the weakness effects, but if you can put enough burden points on an enemy (which gets much easier as you increase the magnitude and duration of your force spells), you can eventually make them look like they're almost running in-place. Naturally however, enemies that use force spells will also be inflicing burden effects on you, too.
-Force projection effects (sans burden) were extended to almost all destruction spells and bolt type spells, including the ones that explode. When dual cast, force projection on spells that have it now increases in a way comparable to the damage increase from dual casting. The force projection effect itself received an overhaul designed to balance it a bit. The amount of force that spells project onto your target is now heavily subject to the target's magic resistance, level and current health, among other appropriate statistics. You will find that as you decrease a target's health, its resistance to force projection will decrease. Lingering damage effects for alteration force spells were nerfed a bit, and the magic cost of each spell was modified as well. You will find targets like giants and mammoths much harder to push away. Changes to force spell power and applied force are balanced with the bonuses from willpower and alteration skill: if you increase those values substantially, you can still toss a few of the heavier targets around with force blast. For fun, go try the master level destruction spells out now when you have the impact and force projection perks, and watch NPCs and things fly.
-The impact and arcane force perks now grant additional force effects to destruction spells, which means it is no longer required to get the force projection perks in the Alteration skill tree in order to give your destruction spells some punch. Be advised however, that the bonus to destruction spells' force applied from the alteration perks only increases as you use higher tier destruction spells. Also, the difference between force projection of a master destruction spell with those alteration perks and one without them is huge. In summary: you don't have to get alteration perks now to give your destruction spells force projection effects, but it definitely helps a lot.
-Arcanomancy, Pyromancy, Cryomancy and Electromancy were modified and renamed to Fire/Frost/Shock/Arcane Magnification and they can now be placed on rings as well as necklaces and amulets. The renaming was to make it more clear what the enchantments actually do. The modification is that now, each enchantment will only work if it is the only elemental magnification enchantment equipped on your chracter. This is clearly noted in the enchantmet effect description text for any one to see. The reason for this change is because previously, these enchantments were basically holding four different actor values all to themselves, and with so few actor values to work with, I decided to use only one actor value for all four in order to allow other effects to use the other three actor values. For example, the amplification series of enchantments now use one of the other actor values.
-Several new 'amplification' enchantments have been created for gauntlets, gloves, and rings, and they provide very specific mutually exclusive bonuses to certain types of magic. The enchantments have been placed on various gauntlets throughout skyrim and into various leveled lists. They are naturally unenchantable, as well. You can use them to either boost the power of your summons, absorbance spells, weakness spells, or force spells. The enchantments only work if you have only one type of amplification enchantment equipped on your hands at a time, so don't bother trying to use more than one on one pair of gauntlets or gloves. For example, if you have gauntlets that have the summoning amplification and force amplification enchantments on them, neither enchantment on the guantlets will actually work. This limitation is clearly indicated in the enchantment effect description text, so it should be hard not to notice. Please note amplification enchantments and magnification enchantments do not cancel each other out. You can have one magnification enchantment and one amplification enchantment equipped at any one time, and still receive bonuses from both.
-If you are using any mod that increases the maximum possible skill level beyond 100, skyrim unlimited will now detect this and apply a soft scaling mechanic to NPC skill levels, starting at level 50. The maximum possible skill level they can attain is directly depenent on the the maximum skill level you have attained. For example, if you exceed a base skill level 100 in any skill, NPCs will get skill modifier bonuses starting at level 50 and increasing up to 2x their normal skill level (200) by the time they reach level 100. Please note I said 'base' skill level: enchantments that increase skills do not count, since they only increase the 'modded' value of skills.
-The Rune Master perk has received a second tier, which will now allow placement of runes up to eight times farther away. The first tier now allows placement up to four times farther away.
-Many Destruction spells, and in particular the beam spells, which were giving too much experience for casting have been rebalanced to be closer to vanilla skyrim values.
-The market values of several weapon types were adjusted to more closely match the damage values they now have relative to other weapon damage values as of the last update. Specifically, carved nordic weapons were increased in value substantially and dragonbone weapons were decreased in value slightly.
-Most mages in the college of winterhold are now sporting more appropriate levels, spell loadouts, and attributes for their positions and masteries.
-Health, Stamina and Magicka Absorb enchantments on weapons were rebalanced in lieu of the fact they are clearly superior to elemental enchants in every regard in vanilla skyrim, and players tend to replace elemental enchantments with absorb enchantments on weapons as soon as they are obtained. They have effectively been reduced in power by 40-50%, depending on the enchantment. Absorb is still great at what it does, but now you have to consider the extra damage potential of elemental or arcane enchantments on weapons. This is especially true when you consider the potential combo of an elemental damage enchantment and a matching elemental weakness enchantment from among the ones I have just added in this update.
-The choose attributes power will now more properly ignore your attribute bonuses from perks when considering whether to allow you to increase your intrinsic attributes beyond 200.
-Corrected an issue where some armors did not have the correct keywords for cold weather survival. This is not the same thing as a compatibility patch with survival mode, but its pretty close.
-To prevent confusion between different kinds of 'nordic' weapons from the Dragonborn DLC and ars armorum, nordic weapons from the dragonborn expansion have had the 'carved' prefix added to their names in almost every instance of importance. This also makes the carved nordic weapons more consistent with the carved nordic armor items, which already had that descriptor in their names.
-Sneak attack multipliers for daggers have been scaled back a bit, both in intrinsic sneak attack bonus and in the bonuses from the assassin's blade perk. Daggers were doing extreme sneak attack damage, so this change was probably for the best. Please note daggers are still far superior to other weapons for sneak attacks. This change is NOT meant to nullify the sneak damage bonus to daggers, but merely bring them more in line with what seems fair. That bonus needs to be high to reward the player for the difficulty of sneaking and creating a sneak character to use daggers, in general. Rather, average damage values before sneak attack bonuses were the only ones considered. I took into account the fact two handed weapons require both arms, no shield is equippable, etc., et. It was quite clear to me that some sort of balancing method had to be devised, and I chose what I think is the lesser of all potential evils. If there are any constructive critiques of this change, please let me know.
-The force grab spell tome recipe has been disabled temporarily until I can find a way to make the spell not unbelievably cheaty or at least very hard to get. This should prevent the spell from becoming the almighty spam hammer against targets that would otherwise be very difficult to deal with, or at least make it feel like you earned it.
-general bugfixes and optimizations



1.23 "The Spell Burst Update"
-The Spell Burst is, in my opinion, by far the most interesting new mechanic in this update. It allows you to supercharge most fire and forget spells into more powerful versions, which I call 'spell bursts'. Important exceptions include any effect that is concentrated firing mode or cast from a staff. Viable spells can include anything from fire bolt to arcane singularity, or fortify agility or feather spells for example, but not flames or shock beam, for examples. You can charge spells simply by holding a charged spell in either or both hands. After about two seconds, you will notice some new FX effects around your character, which indicates a buildup of energy. Your magicka level must remain constant during charging, or charging will not happen: this means you cannot cast a concentration spell or use magicka potions during charging, for example. Your intelligence directly determines the maximum charge level, and your willpower directly influences how quickly you will charge spell bursts. The color pallette of the FX effects will gradually change to indicate the charge level and will progress from red, which indicates a charge level between 0 and 25% greater magnitude, to green, then various shades of blue and then purple, and finally, white, once you exceed 200% burst charge. A fresh character with a willpower and intelligence of 20 will likely be able to reach 20% charge in about 20 seconds of charging, which means that when he or she releases a fully charged firebolt for example, that firebolt will do 20% more damage than normal and its lingering effects will last 20% longer. For comparison, a 10 second charged spell burst at 200 willpower and intelligence will likely become more than 100% more powerful! The maximum burst charge depends only on your intelligence attribute, and thus it has no hard limit. When a spell burst hits a target, you will receive a notification message similar to the sneak attack damage multiplier notification, which will tell you how much extra magnitude it had. Better yet, the damage bonuses from spell sneak attacks and spell bursts are multiplicative, offering the potential to deal massive damage in a very fulfilling way before your enemies even see you. You can even 'hold' a spell burst charge for a few seconds after charging and change to a different fire and forget spell to use the charge with. The time you can hold it before dissipation is equal to 1 + your magic focus level. You can even charge up a spell burst in one hand and use a spell in the other hand to apply it.
-Several new 'Augment' enchantments have been added, and offer some very interesting alternatives to spell charging for several different playstyles. Each augment is only placeable on an armor or clothing item that fits the chest (cuirasses and shirts). Each augment is also mutually exclusive: if you try to put multiple augments on the same item, none of them will work. You will get the same FX effects as spell charging on your character to indicate your charge level, for augments that use a charge level. I will go through an overview of each augment.
-The Concentration Augment Enchantment trades the ability to do spell bursts with fire and forget spells, with the ability to build up damage every second on concentration spells, as long as you successfully hit a target every second. Applicable spells include flames and lightning storm, to name just a few examples among many. This is great for the playstyles that prefer beams and waves rather than bolts and explosions. It gives spammy weak spell magic users a reason to actually hold down the mouse button and perma-fire the spell instead of doing that somewhat awkward sporadic firing mode. For example, any veteran SU player and magic user knows that weak concentration spells work very efficiently in sporadic firing patterns instead of constant focus fire in vanilla skyrim: it saves magicka, and the enemy cooks, chills or electrocutes from lingering damage even while you save your magicka for the next attack. That play style is all well and good, but frankly, I often find myself just wanting to really lay on the hurt with a constant and ever growing stream of damage, rather than dancing around the target and tactically saving my magicka. The concentration augment enchantment therefore specifically makes it more efficient to focus your wave and beam spells and never let up.
-For those that prefer staffs over hand-casted magic, the Staff Augment Enchantment trades the ability to do spell bursts with fire and forget spells, with a boost to all staff magic effects when it is the only equipped augment enchant.
-Fear not, there are Augment enchants to satisfy even the sneaks and barbarians among you. The Death Frenzy Augment Enchantment trades the ability to do spell bursts with fire and forget spells, with the ability to build up frenzy charges every time an NPC dies within your field of vision and as long as you have a bow or crossbow equipped. The frenzy charge level increases your damage with bows and crossbows by 5% and increases your speed attribute by 5 for every charge. Without sneak focus points, the charge can be maintained for up to 10 seconds before it dissipates. In other words you have 10 seconds to witness another death, regardless of whether you caused it or not, within your field of vision in order to maintain the frenzy charge. The time limit to charge dissipation can be extended by a value equal to your sneak focus level. For example with a sneak focus level of 10, the time limit is extended to 20 seconds. This gives anyone that likes to dish out their death-dealing at long range an exciting new option when it is the only equipped augment enchant. You will receive special notifications when you reach high numbers of slain enemies for the charge duration.
-The Death Fury Augment Enchantment is very similar to the Death Frenzy enchantment, but is designed for melee carnage instead. It trades the ability to do spell bursts with fire and forget spells, with the ability to build up fury charges every time an NPC dies within your field of vision and as long as you have only melee weapons equipped or are bare-handed. The fury charge level increases your damage with those attack types by 5% and increases your endurance attribute by 5 for every charge. Without warrior focus points, the charge can be maintained for up to 10 seconds before it dissipates. In other words you have 10 seconds to witness another death, regardless of whether you caused it or not, within your field of vision in order to maintain the fury charge. The time limit to charge dissipation can be extended by a value equal to your warrior focus level. For example with a warrior focus level of 10, the time limit is extended to 20 seconds. This gives anyone that likes to get up close and personal with their death-dealing an exciting new option when it is the only equipped augment enchant. You will receive special notifications when you reach high numbers of slain enemies for the charge duration.
-Several new enchantments were added for testing purposes, and may or may not stay in this version by the time of the beta release:
-Thorns is a new enchantment only for the torso (cuirasses and shirts) which inflicts a percentage of melee damage back at aggressors, although the user still takes full damage.
-Charging is a new enchantment type for guantlets/arm coverings that buffs the maximum charge of enchanted weapons and staffs, allowing you to use them for longer without recharging them.
-Silent Casting is pretty self-explanatory from its name: all spells you cast while wearing guantlets/arm coverings with this enchantment are silent to others.
-Night vision has been added to helmets/head coverings and is very standard for elder scrolls games at this point. It functions the same as the vanilla night vision effects in the game.
-Force projection from spells has been overhauled again for much better balance, more satisfaction, and better responsiveness. All offensive spells can now project force on impact with a target character without any prerequisite perks and will do so with almost no noticeable delay after impact, assuming your force projection score is greater than the enemy's defensive score. Force projection scales with the willpower attribute and the damage output of the spell being used, and NPCs now have more reasonable resistance to force projection based on their current life. Spell force projection becomes possible for most spells once your willpower reaches 40 and your spells are capable of dealing atleast 70% of the enemy's total health. Force spells from the Alteration school of magic are the exception here: they can project force regardless of your willpower attribute value and only require a damage percent of 60%. Force projection now accurately takes into account enemy resistances of all kinds, so you will have a harder time pushing high level enemies and magically-inclined enemies around with your spells.
-The mechanics surrounding attribute choices with the 'choose attributes' power after the level up event have changed to allow for more freedom, precision, and ease of use when it comes to attribute allocation. Instead of choosing three attributes to increase by 3 points each, you will now receive 10 attribute points after each level up that will allow you to increase any attribute you choose by 1 point each. You can also now spend a maximum of 5 points on a single attribute per level gained. I think everyone will enjoy the increased range of freedom this will grant to players. Lastly, you no longer need to recast the 'choose attributes' power in order to select the next attribute point: the menu will stay open until all points have been assigned or until you select 'cancel', and it will inform you of how many points you have remaining for assignment.
-The choose attributes power has also had a huge new update in the form of an options menu that allows one to, among other things, edit all of the vital statistics of NPCs! This is for the players that have been complaining about NPC abilities being to overpowered in SU, but that also want to keep all of the cool stuff in SU without removing the mod: you can simply change them to have vanilla life, resistances, and speed if you want. Simply use the 'choose attributes' power (given to you when starting a new game), select 'options', and then 'NPC Globals'. From there, you can change the percentages of life, magicka, stamina, movement/weapon speed, intrinsic attributes, or physical/magical/poison resistance values which SU grants. By default, all values start at 100 percent, which represents the SU default values that many of you have been enjoying. If you would rather take away those bonuses and play a more vanilla NPC experience, simply change the ones you don't like to '0'. If you want an even easier time, you can reduce life, magicka and stamina to negative values, all the way to -90 percent if that's how you want to roll. There is no upper limit on attribute percentages, but I do not recommend increasing any of them beyond 200% unless you want some funny bugs all the way up to possibly game-breaking crashes.
-I'm excited to announce a new auto-attribute system has been introduced which gives the player the option of never having to use the choose attribute power at all, once they make their preferred selections. This is done by setting a certain percentage of new attribute points which will be automatically allocated to whichever attributes are chosen every time the player character gains a level. This can be enabled or disabled in the new 'options' menu when one uses the 'choose attributes' power. It is designed for players who think it breaks immersion when they need to use a lesser power and navigate through some menus to use their leveling rewards every time they gain a level. On the other hand, I know some people also really enjoy the selection process, so if you happen to be one of those players, you can leave these options off and make your selections manually. By default, the auto attributes and auto focus points are both turned off.
-Menus which appear after using the 'choose attributes' power are now easier to navigate forwards and backwards, rather than forcing you to recast the power in order to make additional changes.
-Focus Points are now accumulated in three entirely different ways from increasing willpower, which is no longer used at all to achieve focus points. Instead, players permanently attain a new intrinsic focus point in the specializations of warrior, sneak, or magic by either gaining ten skill level increases for pertinent skill types, completing any of the main quests (read: anything having to do with eventually challenging Alduin, Harkon, or Miraak) or converting dragon souls with the dragon soul conversion power. Thirty points for each of the specialties can be gained from skill increases, for a total of 90, but these will only be granted after achieving the next level. Be advised that the crafting skills of smithing, alchemy and enchanting do not count towards your pertinent skill increases for the purpose of focus point gain. Thirty-two gainable focus points are possible from the main quests, and you can use the choose attributes power to assign those. Finally, another sixty are possible from converting dragon souls, or twenty per specialty, and those are assignable via the dragon soul conversion power. The maximum limit of intrinsic focus points per specialty is now 50, for a total of 150, but you can always increase your focus points through enchantments, too.
-After heavy consideration, I decided to remove the ability to reassign focus points at will. This was largely due to the fact there is a great temptation to simply reassign all focus points to the task at hand, whether its sneaking or casting spells or whatever, which results in overpowered use of focus points in general and grindy gameplay of the not-fun variety.
-NPC attributes will now update naturally in real-time every time you gain a level and just from looking at the NPC you want to update for a few seconds. This also fixes a bug that causes NPC derived attributes to reset to their vanilla values after you gain a level. Initiating an NPC update is as easy as looking in the general direction of the NPC. After your level increases and you leave the perk menu after selecting health, magicka or stamina at the level up event, look directly at whichever NPC you want to update for about 2 seconds, and its attributes will be recalculated in about 2 seconds after that. Simple, huh?
-Another pass was made on improving NPC attributes, and this time with an eye toward adding perks to NPCs for realism and uniqueness for each character with respect to an NPC's job and race. Many NPCs that should be sporting more advanced capabilities due to their job, outfitting, and vanilla levels have been updated to be more capable. A great example would be many of the main and guild quest characters having substantially improved abilities, with characters like Ulfric, Tullius, Baalgruf and Irileth having substantially improved attributes and perks. The mages of winterhold, warriors of the companions, thieves of the thieves guild and assassins of the Dark Brotherhood are not exactly pushovers any more, either. The creatures of Tamriel also have more nuanced attributes now. There will be quite a few suprises, and most of them pleasant and interesting. Barbas, the daedra in the form of a dog, is going to be more fun to work with for example. Try using the dragon sense power on the few daedric lords you may encounter in the usual quests, like Sanguine or Sheogorath... for some pain, attack them randomly and without backup. The rest I will leave to you to discover.
-Shielding effects have been added into Tamriel. Shielding is a modified version of the shield enchantment from previous Elder Scrolls games. This is a rather complex mechanic to explain, even though it is very simple once you understand the basic idea: shielding causes a variable percent of most damage to deplete your magicka and then your stamina, once magicka is depleted, instead of your health. It replaces some effects from spells and perks that previously provided a flat physical damage reduction modifier, like the Warrior Stance shield perk. Shielding definitely provides an interesting new dynamic for all character types: it provides unmitigated damage reduction from melee physical attacks, including their stagger effects, and most common magical attacks at the same time. However, this powerful defensive bonus also comes with some additional important caviats and tradeoffs. First, shielding will NOT provide additional protection against damage from arrows or crossbow bolts; small projectiles pierce the magical barrier of shielding easily. Second, if your magicka is depleted, the remaining damage will drain your stamina at double intensity and finally, if both your magicka and stamina are depleted your shielding will be greatly diminished and you will take about 75 - 80% damage you would take without the shielding. Third, Shielding also reduces magic regeneration by the same percentage with which it reduces incoming damage and hostile spell magnitude. Finally, shielding has no effect on poisons or attacks based on poison. For example, shielding will give you very little protection against chauruses, frostbite spiders, spriggans, and perhaps least of all, vampires and their lordly leaders. These consequences serve multiple purposes of giving a new defensive option to all characters, particularly melee and sneak characters, as well as effectively increasing the viability of bowman and poison attacks in the late game meta and ensuring shielding is not overpowered, in general. One more minor point: shielding only protects against magic that belongs to one of the five recognized schools of magic, such as Destruction and Alteration for example. There are many characters in the game which use magic attacks that technically aren't counted as one of those types of magic. Your shielding level depends on the number of your shielding points. Currently, shielding points can be granted by blocking (with revised perk bonuses from Warrior Stance), revised armor spells like oak hide after you get some alteration perks, a new type of high level enchantment, and a few surprise items you will have to discover for yourself. Many characters (particularly mages) will likely find magic resistance effects to be more favorable, depending on the situation, but there will always be situations where you can expect to take large amounts of melee or mainstream magic damage and Shielding may be useful as a result. Lastly and as far as the math is concerned, it will take many more shielding points to increase your shielding percentage than magic resistance points would increase your magic resistance percent. Like most other resistance calculations in Skyrim Unlimited, the relationship between shielding points and shielding percentage is exponential and more points will be required for each additional shielding percent. Also like other resistance calculations, it is not possible to reach 100% shielding, but you can keep getting closer and every additional percent helps. Constructive feedback on this new mechanic is welcome.
-Armor spells no longer provide a flat bonus to all physical damage reduction without any perks, but rather they gain shielding point bonuses equal to a percentage of their base armor bonus magnitude after you invest perks in the 'mage armor' series of perks. This means that armor spells are slightly weaker in the beginning of the game, but can become stronger than before as you develop your alteration abilities. Their armor bonuses remain unchanged.
-Several new changes have been made to hand to hand combat in the ongoing quest to make that combat style a viable and rewarding playstyle. First of all, all hand to hand attacks for every playable race, either beast form or not, will now grant experience for your one handed skill. Second, hand to hand perks were modified in a big way. The basic hand to hand perk now allows all bare-handed attacks to also damage stamina, which is a capability vanilla Skyrim lacks for the most part, with the notable exception of frost spells. Opponents with low stamina are deterred from doing power attacks. A new perk has been added, called 'martial stagger', which gives your one handed power attacks an additional stagger chance dependent on your strength and it has a level requirement of 60. The master pugilist perk now gives your hand to hand attacks force projection capabilities, also dependent on your strength, and it has been given an appropriate level requirement of 100 to represent true mastery of hand to hand skills. Next, all enchantments, spells and alchemy effects that boost your damage with one handed weapons now also boost your hand to hand damage. Because hand to hand damage can become much greater now, I had to consider balance toward one handed weapons at the start of the game too, and so the starting unarmed damage for playable races (not including werewolves and vampire lords) was changed from 10 to 8. That value is before strength and one handed skill bonuses, mind you.
-Argonians now receive a hand-to-hand damage bonus of 20%, similar to the 30% bonus for Khajiits, on account of their claws.
-Your current focus points and unarmed (bare-handed) damage values will now be displayed in the active magic effects menu along with your other attributes' current values.
-Attribute changes from all magic effects are now instantaneous after the effects become active.
-The math behind maximum life, magicka, stamina and carry weight contributions from primary attributes for your character and NPCs have been modified in several ways. This new change is complex and has many consequences, but the idea behind it is simple: when a controlling attribute for health, magicka or stamina is reduced by a certain percentage, the attribute it affects will now be reduced by the same percent. This gives the choices you make about increasing derived attributes like life and magicka at the level up event, and the choices you make about increasing primary attributes like endurance and intelligence, several more synergistic benefits and consequences. Your intrinsic controlling attributes and base derived attributes of life, magicka, etc are now linked together in a way that makes more sense logically. I will use Endurance as an example. Raising your intrinsic Endurance with the choose attributes power or increasing your life at the level up event increase the 'baseline' value of your life. This is not new. However, when a magic effect is in play on any character that increases or decreases their endurance, the percent change of maximum life for that character exactly matches the percent change in maximum endurance in most situations. If that character's endurance is damaged somehow below their intrinsic value, their maximum life will also be reduced by the same percent. Likewise, if their endurance is modded by an enchantment or beneficial spell, their maximum life will be boosted by the same percent as the percent to which their endurance is boosted beyond its intrinsic value. It is important to note however that in the case where attributes are boosted beyond their intrinsic value, the bonus tapers off per point of life increase, down to the baseline of 5 additional life per point of additional endurance. This occurs around 100 additional endurance. This same mechanic applies to the bonuses to maximum magicka, maximum stamina, and maximum carryweight from intelligence, agility, and strength, respectively.
"So I just read all of that and I have no idea what you just said. Break it down, please."
1. Increasing your life, magicka, or stamina during the level up event has a much bigger potential impact on how high those attributes can get when you use fortify endurance, intelligence, agility, or strength effects, respectively. For example if you've been increasing your life at every level up for the last ten levels, a fortify endurance effect will increase your maximum life much more than it would have if you had chosen to increase magicka instead. This bonus tapers down to 5 life per point of endurance once you exceed 100 additional points of endurance.
2. The reverse is also true, however. Whereas in previous versions, you could have your Endurance damaged all the way to 0 and still have a lot of life if you had been increasing your life at every level up event, now if your endurance is damaged to 0 your maximum life will literally be reduced to 1. This is much more logical. The same goes for the relationships between magicka and intelligence, stamina and agility, and carry weight and strength.
3. Increasing your intrinsic values of Endurance, Intelligence, Agility, or Strength beyond 100 will give you a 0.5% increase to maximum life, magicka, stamina or carry weight per point that exceeds 100. For example, increasing your intrinsic strength to 150 will give you a 25% greater carry weight than it would in previous versions. This bonus is global, meaning it is multiplicative with the bonus to increasing carry weight from level up events and the base strength bonus of 5 per point. It is actually possible to acheive a maximum life of 5000 at level 100 if you have been investing attribute points into endurance and increasing maximum life at every level up event.
4. NPC life, magicka, et al. are now treated exactly the same way as the players' with respect to their controlling Attributes, with two exceptions. First, NPCs with a hardcoded derived attribute greater than that which SU calculations yield will instead use the higher version. Second, NPCs between the levels of 1 and 15 which normally would have a lower value of life, magicka, et al than in SU, will have a tiered nerf to maximum values in the opposite direction. A great example here would be tier 1 and tier 2 bandits. In that case and at those low levels, their life slowly progresses from completely vanilla calculations at level 1 to completely SU by level 15. In previous versions of SU, they were receiving a somewhat out of place buff to life, magicka, et al that gave them higher attributes than made sense in many cases, but now the math behind their attributes is approximately the same as the math behind the player's attributes beyond level 15.
-Any and all Heavy armor now realistically reduces movement speed by 20% for all characters unless the conditioning perk has been attained.
-Stagger effects from spells were rebalanced and added back into the game in a more interesting form. All bolt type destruction spells can now stagger enemies when you get the impact perk, just like before, but only if your willpower attribute is greater than the strength attribute of the target. Furthermore, stagger from spell hits is heavily affected by armor, magic resistance, and shielding. Force spells can stagger enemies without dual casting and do not require any special perk to do so, but they have the same willpower and strength requirement.
-Several new spells have been added into Tamriel that are basically aimed projectile versions of several current beneficial spells and are designed to give you tactical support options for friendly NPCs. These include attribute fortification spells, resistance fortification spells and armor spells. These new spells were named similarly with their self-applied counterparts, but with the added suffix of "endowment" in their names to indicate they are casted upon others instead. Spell costs are the same for the new endowment spells when compared to the non-endowment versions, and they are also affected by all of the same perks. These spells are ideal for buffing your followers in preparation for a tough fight, for example.
-Attribute bonuses from quests now also boost your soft cap for the attributes in question by the same amount they increase the attributes. For example, doing many quests for the companions before this update would often increase your endurance and strength attributes before, but now, your maximum soft cap for both attributes are increased by the same amount. This effectively means it is possible to increase your intrinsic attributes beyond 200 (or 100 in the case of luck) even without the attribute perks. Maximum bonuses from quests vary from attribute to attribute, but generally stay around 50 for all attributes except luck, which can be increased by up to 30.
-Several perks were modified and added in each magic skill perk tree to provide new bonuses to spell magnitude and duration from magic focus points. Basically, the perks in each tree that boosted the durations of spells based on willpower were all renamed to "improved (insert magic skill name here)" and they each received a second tier. For each magic focus point you have, the second tier perk boosts the magnitude of spells by 5%, the duration by 4%, and the casting cost by 2%. In essence, this means that as you gain more magic focus points and use your time investing perks and skill development in a particular school of magic, you will be able to channel more of your magicka into boosting the power of spells from that school of magic.
-Two new perks have been added to the Heavy and Light Armor perk trees. These perks do the same thing, but only for their respective armor types: they provide a new type of physical damage mitigation called 'Aegis'. Aegis protection is a separate physical damage reduction that is applied after your armor, and like shielding, it cannot be reduced by enemy abilities or attributes, such as an enemy's agility allowing a percentage of physical damage to ignore your armor. The new perks are naturally quite powerful, and therefore have been given high skill requirements of 70 in either perk tree. They are called 'Collosus' and 'Blur'. The new damage reduction acts almost identically to your armor's damage reduction in terms of the math, in that it basically gives you a separate armor type that is a certain percentage of your normal armor. I will go into some detail about the math behind this new mechanic. Selecting either perk allows the player to essentially get a new damage reduction modifier for all physical damage, at the equivalent percent of 10% of what your currently worn armor would provide, as long as you are only wearing the appropriate armor type. For example the collosus perk bonus, which is the heavy armor version, will disappear if you equip any light armor. But wait, there is more to this than just more damage mitigation. Once you select either perk in either perk tree, you will be able to use the choose attributes lesser power to increase the percentage of aegis protection you get from your worn armor, but at a price: every percentage point above 10% aegis will also reduce your movement speed and stamina regeneration by the same percent. This provides a great new mechanic for speedy and/or high stamina characters that would rather trade away some of their speed and stamina regen for higher physical defense in combat. The notification messages that inform you about changes in your physical damage reduction will now notify you of Aegis damage reduction changes as well. Your armor rating displayed in your inventory will not change to reflect Aegis updates, since that number is purely a measure of your normal armor protection.
-Four new master level Destruction spells have been created and are available exclusively from the Arcane Manipulator in the late game meta. They are Inferno, Glacial Surge, Lightning Blast, and Arcane Annihilation. These spells are designed to offer heavy hitting power that did not previously exist in each of the repertoires of the Fire, Frost, Shock and Arcane mage, respectively. Inferno is similar to the fire breath shout, but it also spawns fire hazards that effectively double the damage of the attack against enemies on the ground. Glacial Surge offers unprecedented frost damage projection across the battlefield, and is best compared to Ice Storm, but if the spell were firing multiple super-charged shots per second as a concentration spell, and the projectiles cause frost explosions when they hit enemies. Lightning Blast is a very powerful ranged attack that is best described as a love child between Arcane Singlularity (the grand master version) and Thunderbolt, and it will cause an impressive shockwave at very impressive range. Finally, Arcane Annihilation is like arcane spike, but it fires several shots per second as a concentration spell. Imagine a magical arcane machine gun and you are close to picturing Arcane Annihilation. Each spell is obtainable at the Arcane Manipulator once you have the master destruction perk, you have completed the master destruction spell ritual quest, and you have learned the novice, apprentice, adept, and expert spells in the element of your choosing. There will be more spells like these coming later.
-Several changes were made to resistances against various magical effects. Fire, Frost, Shock, Magic and Poison resistances now also reduce the durations of appropriate effects as well as their magnitudes. I have been hearing a few justified complaints regarding the fact there are no additional ways to resist non-elemental magic like arcane, weakness, force, or absorption effects besides magic resistance, and that has been fixed. First of all, magic resistance now effectively counts twice in the case of Arcane magic effects, only. In other words, if you have 50% magic resist, hostile arcane effects will be reduced in magnitude AND duration to 25% effectiveness. Next, the willpower attribute also grants all characters, including the player, resistance to force, weakness and absorption effects equal to 1% for every 10 points of your willpower attribute. Astute players may have noted these changes will have the interesting side effects of making non-destruction effects less effective against mages, who typically have high willpower attributes.
-The snakeblood perk and the final tier of the magic resistance perks were both augmented to give additional potential bonuses to poison and magic resistances, respectively. Snakeblood now grants poison resistance points equal to 30% resistance, but it has also gained a new bonus that potentially surpasses the 50% bonus it used to have. Snakeblood and Magic Resistance also now grant an additional poison or magic resistance modifier equal to 1% for every 10 Agility or Willpower you have, respectively. These bonuses also apply to the durations of incoming magic or poison effects, respectively.
-Most melee attacks with either weapons or bare hands will now drain your stamina slightly when you hit a target. This is an important first step in making stamina a more useful and realistically used resource. The new stamina drain mechanic is balanced well with the stamina usage mechanic already in place for power attacks in vanilla skyrim: bare handed attacks drain a constant 6 stamina per blow, whereas attacks with one handed weapons will drain 12 and attacks with two handed weapons will drain 18. I know this is likely to feel like a new damper on the fun aspects of melee combat to some, but this move is necessary in order to make Stamina actually matter as much as it should. Additional interesting stamina mechanics are incoming, and they will feel less like rain on your parade and more like cake on your birthday.
-The Werewolf transformation is now not only much more viable in the late game, but worth sticking with even after vampire lord form is an option if that isn't your preferred style of play. It grants the greater of either a fixed boost, or a percentage boost to endurance, strength, and speed. Previously the boost was always fixed at about 30 strength, 30 endurance and 20 speed.
-The vampire's sight power effectively no longer expires, and can be toggled on or off at will.
-Physical damage resistance and other resistances can now reach a maximum value of 99.99 percent. All notifications about damage reduction and resistance changes will now display your new resistance values to the second decimal.
-Blessings from Altars of various Aedra and Daedra have been modified so that there are now bonuses to each of the 8 primary attributes in Skyrim Unlimited among them, instead of, or in some rare cases in addition to, their previous bonuses. The bonuses are percentage boosts of your intrinsic attributes, which means the shrine bonuses will remain useful throughout the entire game instead of primarily in the beginning, only.
-Five new diseases have been added to five different NPC races, and all diseases now inflict a percentage based penalty to appropriate intrinsic attributes rather than fixed amounts of derived attributes. Bone Break Fever, for example, now reduces Endurance by 25% instead of Health by a fixed amount. This means even at level 100 and with nearly 5000 life, getting infected by that disease will be something you will want to fix as soon as possible, rather than simply ignoring it until its convenient to visit a shrine or get a potion for it. By extension, this also makes disease resistance and races with built-in disease resistance more helpful. This feature is not yet compatible with survival mode, so you will want to load SU after that add-on if you want this feature to work.
-It has come to my attention that maybe I made lockpicking a bit too hardcore in previous versions. For that reason, lockpicking for Master, Expert, Adept and Apprentice locks was modified very slightly to be more forgiving. Master locks got the biggest change, as it is now approximately twice as easy to unlock those now, but for new players, you should be aware that picking those locks is still very difficult, and should be difficult. In addition, several perks in the lockpicking perk tree have had their level requirements reduced somewhat to make them more attractive. If you still have a personal issues with lockpicking expert and master locks in SU after this update, remember that lockpicking potions and enchantments could be your new favorite tools until you get all of the perks in the lockpicking perk tree, which naturally will make the experience much, much easier. Also, be aware that there are other reasons for investing perks into lockpicking: the loot perks can make you very, very rich.
-Alchemy effects that fortify aspects of destruction, conjuration, illusion, alteration or restoration have all been buffed: they now not only boost magic spell magnitude or duration, they boost both. In the case of conjuration spells, duration is still increased and the damage dealt by your conjured weapons and the attributes of your conjured creatures are increased, as well. Each alchemy effect is now named with the same affix: potency.
-Many beneficial spells you can cast on yourself or others have been modified in two ways. First, many limitations on the number and types of beneficial spells you can have active at once have been lifted. For example, previously it was not possible to have multiple resistance or attribute fortification spells active, but now all resistance spells can be active at once and one of each attribute can be fortified by a single spell at one time. Second, spells that drain your magicka regeneration now do so through draining your willpower, rather than your magicka regeneration percentage actor value. This basically means your willpower is also now a measure of how many and how powerful your beneficial spell effects are that you can cast on yourself. If you reach 0 willpower you will no longer be able to cast spells that require atleast some willpower maintenance until one ore more of your current spells that are draining willpower, expires. If you don't like magicka drain mechanics, remember that staffs and scrolls in SU do not have magicka drains and can be more powerful, so you might consider switching up your routine. Bonuses from magic mastery perks toward reducing magicka drain have been rebalanced.
-There is a very minor bug that arises when you cast a spell which completely drains your willpower, which causes the willpower display in your active magic effects menu to show a crazy high number when its actually a negative number. It returns to normal when the spell expires, however. This bug will be fixed in a future update after a ton of work is done on the backend of the script system for willpower maintenance.
-Many more NPCs now carry gold, which makes the concept of pickpocketing much more rewarding and worthwhile. More affluent NPCs will naturally be carrying more gold than others, giving thieves some badly needed and appropriate better reasons to focus on the richest vistims they can find.
-Many spell tome recipes have been added to the arcane manipulator, particularly in the categories of conjuration, illusion and restoration. This brings its repertoire of spell tome recipes up to nearly every spell tome in vanilla skyrim, all official DLCs, and Skyrim Unlimited. Certain exceptions were made for many master spells and a few others that are acquired through special means.
-Summoned skeletons were rebalanced and a new skeleton is now available at the lowest tier, in the form of the generic naked skeleton. The four previous tiers were essentially bumped up one tier, so that now there is a skeleton for each of the five mastery levels of conjuration magic. The original basic skeleton is now called the 'skeleton legionary', in keeping with the fact it wears armor seemingly indicating its involvement with an ancient nordic military order. The skeleton warlord spell is now available exclusively from the arcane manipulator, and its spell tome recipe requires that you have learned all four of the other skeleton summoning spells in order to see it while having the expert conjuration perk.
-A new legendary draugr tier has been added to leveled character lists and will begin appearing at level 50, with spawn rates increasing as you gain more levels. Like all other legendary creatures, engaging them is an option that should be considered carefully.
-A water walking spell has been added into apprentice alteration spell tome leveled lists. There may not be many opportunities to use it in Skyrim, but it is such an easy and lore friendly option, I didn't want the game to go without it.
-Some mysterious characters and super bosses like Alduin are now immune to the Dragon Sense power. Instead of displaying attributes, you will see a message indicating the NPC's abilities are mysteriously hidden from you. You may not really know what you�re getting into until you engage them�
-Most leveled item death lists for all characters were overhauled to add new alchemy ingredients, more variety, and less nonsense. Most higher tier creatures now drop higher amounts of alchemy ingredients than their lesser kin. In the case of the nonsense, a great example would be the removal of random jewelry and gold from creatures that have no business carrying that stuff anyway, like Wolves.
-A light pass was made on rebalancing leveled character lists to avoid shockingly painful encounters at low player levels. As a general rule, the highest encounterable tier of most leveled characters will not be appearing until you reach atleast level 40, and some of the more powerful creatures, like vampires, have their highest tiers not appearing until level 70.
-Characters that have defensive magic spells such as armor spells or elemental cloak spells will now use them much more often.
-I addressed a somewhat superfluous mechanic with beneficial spells as well, in dual casting. All beneficial spells that drain magicka while active now are dual-casted with the ritual spell effect animation only as of this update. To be fair however, I was careful about making this change balanced. The magicka cost of the spells have not changed and the duration is nearly the same as it was before dual casting was factored in. In other words, you get the dual casting bonus without the increase in casting cost. There are two reasons why this was deemed necessary. Fortification spells shouldn't be something a mage would find easy to cast in the middle of a fight, but rather the mage would want to cast it before battle whenever possible. Think about this. A warrior is charging at a mage, and the mage just flicks one hand and boosts their magical armor to godlike levels before the warrior can get close, all the while blasting the warrior with an offensive spell in the other hand. This is slightly silly and overpowered when you think about it. The mage should atleast be immobilized and unable to do anything else while the spell is being cast. Second, dual casting these spells prior to this update was just a way to increase duration. This means that every atleast competent mage, everywhere should be dual casting beneficial spells instead of single-casting, right? It only makes sense. If you don't like the way this change sounds, I wouldn't take it too harshly: remember skilled alteration mages shouldn't need to be recasting armor spells very often if they have the enduring alteration perk, anyway. The impact on your play style should be minimal.
-All offensive spells are now back to using completely non-instantaneous damage modes, meaning that most spell effects that causes damage now do so over a base duration of atleast one second. There are two reasons for this. The main reason for this was to eliminate bugs with the force projection mechanics while they were attempting to run on actors that die too quickly for the effects to actually kick in. The second reason is to restore a badly needed boost to spell power in lieu of the fact the durations of many magic effects are now reduced dramatically against enemies with high resistances. For those that are not aware, this is a big boost to spell power because now all offensive magic effects can benefit from anything that increases spell duration.
-Due to balance issues and certain bugs that proved unsquashable for the time being, attribute absorbance has been removed from absorbance spells, including Siphon, Absorption and Osmosis. They are still very interesting spells, mind you, since they not only deal damage but you steal health equal to the damage you inflict with them. In addition, the absorbance enchantment has been replaced by a new enchanted poison damage enchantment. This last change is potentially a very important consequence for any character with high shielding, since poison ignores shielding. Absorbance will return when I find a way to make it less buggy.
-The perks which boost the durations of spells based on willpower have been nerfed to boost duration by 1% for every two points of your willpower attribute. This is in order to balance them with the new 'improved (insert magic school name here)' perks. The total effect on spell duration from all relevant perks is an increase in spell duration, so there shouldn't be a relevant complaint here.
-Added a menu option to the SU uninstall book in Dragonsreach in order to prevent players from accidentally uninstalling SU simply by reading it out of curiosity. It will now display a message asking if the player really wants to uninstall SU. For new players, if you should ever want to uninstall SU, the uninstall book on Farengar's desk in dragonsreach will allow you to safely shut down SU scripts before removing the mod.
-The calculation of movement speed and weapon usage speed via the speed attribute has been modified a bit so that changes are now slightly more gradual, and there will be far fewer NPCs zipping around at hardly believable speeds.
-Weakness points no longer affect movement speed or magicka regeneration, which leaves only their effects on physical attack damage and stamina regeneration. This was a balance issue fix due to synergy potential with burden effects from force spells, which when combined with weakness spells, could essentially almost stop enemies in their tracks.
-Grand Master variants of the vanilla master destruction spells were rebalanced to have the same magnitude and casting cost as their vanilla counterparts when dual cast, which means that casting them with a single hand is now reasonably less powerful than before.
-The atronach perk has been balanced/nerfed slightly from 30% magicka absorption to 20% magicka absorption, considering new alchemy ingredients will soon allow spell absorption to go higher.
-Fixed some bugs from vanilla skyrim and the DLC content where some leveled character lists were set up so that only one type of npc ever spawned. For example, only one type of hulking draugr was spawning in some instances in Dragonborn.
-Fixed a bug where dragons and werewolves were receiving insane bonuses to their melee attack damage.
-Fixed a bug where the bonus to armor from the fortitude and nimbleness perks were only applied when the attributes governing them changed. Now, the bonus is immediately applied if it was not already active.
-Draugr and skeletons now have a slightly increased death loot chance for bonemeal, including a small chance of two bonemeal.
-A legendary tier of dwarven ballistae was added. As usual, be careful when deciding whether to engage legendary creatures.
-The Alchemy skill now plays a much greater role in increasing your overall alchemy ability. At a skill level of 100 alchemy, your ability as an alchemist will be about 33% greater than it would have been at the same skill level before. Alchemy effectiveness at a skill level of 15 has been effectively reduced by 25%, however.
-Every magic scroll in the game that can cast a spell was overhauled for greater usability and less discrepancies from their spell counterparts. First, everything that can boost the magnitude, duration or some other property of a non-scroll magic effect will also boost the same properties on the scroll version of that effect when in play. For example, the summon wolf familiar scroll will summon potent or even ascendant wolf familiars when you have the appropriate perks. Like staffs, scrolls no longer have any magicka regen maintenance by comparison to the spells they are based on. This makes scrolls potentially more favorable than their spell counterparts that require a magicka regen maintenance, like in the cases of conjuring atronachs and familiars. Next, all spells cast from scrolls now have a casting time of 0.5 seconds. Finally, three new perks have been added into the enchanting perk tree that will potentially boost the magnitude of magic effects when cast from scrolls by 200%. This is a prelude to a much more substantial expansion and update to scrolls in a future update.
-Scroll crafting is now possible at the arcane manipulator. Currently all regular (meaning non quest or specialty scrolls) can be crafted. All scrolls require blank scrolls of the correct type, soul gems of varying sizes, and the scroll crafting perk from the enchanting perk tree. The new blank scroll items can be bought from court wizards or vendors in the college of winterhold. More powerful scrolls naturally require more powerful soul gems.
-Potions that buff attributes were given a boost to magnitude to make them more useful, and a fifth potion tier labeled with the affix 'supreme' has been introduced for each of the attributes.
-Spells no longer become cheaper to cast as their governing skills grow. This is largely because of the incredible potential for increasing magicka that SU offers with respect to the intelligence attribute and also because magic skills are already boosting the magnitudes or durations of many effects where appropriate.
-The worn armor penalties to spell power have been increased to a maximum of 20% reduction for heavy armor and 15% reduction for light armor.
-Elemental cloak spells were rebalanced a bit and their maximum range now increases with the usual character values, like destruction skill, magic focus points, etc.
-The agile strikes perk has been renamed to penetration and its bonus to armor ignorance was changed to depend on strength instead of agility. This was primarily due to logic: arrows or bolts with more inertia behind them (which translates to requiring more strength from the bowman) will go through armor more easily. Balance was also an issue: archers previously only had to focus on one all-empowering attribute.
-Sneak attacks with spells which can project force will project more force proportional to the sneak attack multiplier for the spells.
-The spell sneak attack multiplier bonus from the stealth mage perk was changed to depend on agility instead of intelligence. This was primarily due to the logic of a spell sneak attack in my mind and balance issues as a secondary priority.
-Sneaking has received a well deserved update in the form of two serious buffs to your visual and auditory evasion. Your sneak skill and other attributes, when you have the right perks, will now more directly reduce the light and sound coming from you. When you enter sneak mode now, you will get a message giving you an update on your visual and auditory detectabilty in percentages. In the case that you have no magic effects increasing your sneak abilities and you don't have a sneak skill higher than 15, you may see no message because there was no change. Finally, it is very important to note changes to evasion values from skills, focus points or other attributes only kick in while you are in sneak mode.
-Several perks in the sneak perk tree were overhauled to provided additional bonuses to your stealth capabilities as you gain relevant bonuses from attributes, alchemy effects or enchantments. The perks include stealth, muffled movement, swift stealth, lucky stealth, and silence.
-The muffled movement perk was changed to agile stealth, and now grants a new bonus while you are sneaking to not only your movement noise reduction, but your visibility reduction as well. The new bonus is based entirely on the agility attribute and becomes more pronounced as that attribute improves.
-The muffle enchantment now reduces all sound you make by 25% and the effect itself is now only available from enchantments, since the muffled movement perk was reworked. The silence perk adds an additional 25% reduction with or without a muffle effect active.
-A new enchantment has been added called silence, which adds silence points that do exactly what you might expect: they reduce the sound of your movements.
-Sneak attack bonuses were overhauled again and now sneak attack damage from spells or weapons are affected by more than just one or two attributes. Your sneak skill, sneak focus level and sneak potions can now also provide bonuses to sneak attack damage. The new bonuses are balanced in such a way that beginning values are almost the same, but if you focus on all of the relevant sneak attack variables, you can increase your sneak attack damage multipliers considerably higher than before.
-Three new alchemy perks and several new alchemy ingredients have been added into tamriel, with many more ingredients incoming in future updates. The new perks are: Harvester of Death, Alchemical Dusts, and Expert Harvester. Each perk allows you to collect or craft new ingredients from dead creatures, gems and ingots of many materials, or plants, respectively.
-The new ingredients in this update also have no less than 40 new alchemical effects for Skyrim. Many of the effects will look and feel very familiar to fans of elder scrolls games from the past, but a few of them are very new and very powerful. Effects added include:
Shielding, Spell Absorption, Frailty, Thorns, Chameleon, Debilitate
Fire Cloak, Frost Cloak, Shock Cloak
Fire Damage, Frost Damage, Shock Damage, Arcane Damage
Fortify Armor Rating, Candlelight, Burden
Fortify Agility, Fortify Intelligence, Fortify Personality, Fortify Speed, Fortify Willpower, Fortify Endurance, Fortify Luck, Fortify Strength
Damage Agility, Damage Endurance, Damage Intelligence, Damage Luck, Damage Personality, Damage Speed, Damage Strength, Damage Willpower
Drain Agility, Drain Endurance, Drain Intelligence, Drain Luck, Drain Personality, Drain Speed, Drain Strength, Drain Willpower
Please be aware these effects will be rare until I can find the time to add more ingredients to use them, but rest assured there are atleast two ingredients that have each of these effects in SU, currently. The ingredients are also not yet complete, as many of them have only one or two effects. I ask you all to be patient while I work on this.
-Generic enemy skeletons you may encounter can now be any one of 6 new tiers in addition to the basic skeleton, including a new legendary variety.
-general bugfixes and optimizations


Exciting news for modders and fans of SU:
I'm very excited to announce this latest version of skyrim unlimited features a substantial 'under-the-hood' rework of death item lists, inventory lists and outifts for all NPCs in the game. Currently it is only used to provide some new alchemy ingredients harvestable from dead NPCs, like hearts, but its future potential is staggering. This new framework will allow for many new features in later releases and it can be used as a powerful tool by other modders.
A vastly expanded Outfit System
As a general rule, every NPC will have a unique outfit, named almost exactly the same as the NPC it belongs to in most cases, that will essentially by a copy of its original outfit. This will allow any NPC to have its outfit edited by either SU or other mods with SU as a dependency, without editing any other NPC's outfits. Basically, we're talking about potentially much finer and more nuanced control of what NPCs wear.
This is a necessary first step to a future update on NPC outfits, where they will receive massively increased variety in apparel they can be equipped with. This will be done with an eye towards greater variety, more realism, and more interesting and appropriate variety. NPCs will be using enchanted equipment more often in rare cases, and they will occasionally be wearing rings and amulets. The chances of any of that appearing on an NPC's worn equipment will increase with NPC level and tier. NPCs that should be wearing armor named after their particular race will more often be wearing those types of armor, where it wouldn't conflict with their faction or occupation (case in point: orcs more often wear orcish armor). Why should the dovahkin be the only one with interesting armor, after all? Boss NPCs may even be equipped with dragonbone or even daedric weapons and armor very late in the game (lv 60 or above).
An extremely powerful inventory leveled list system:
Every NPC (with the exception of summoned NPCs for the time being) will have a new leveled list added into its inventory. Most of them are completely empty for the time being, but some of them actually move things from death lists into active inventory. Why should gold appear on bandit bodies after they die, for example? The system uses hundreds of derivative lists unique to factions, combat types, tiers, etc., et., and every NPC gets a combination of bundled leveled lists inherited in its uniquely named leveled list. This new system is potentially very powerful because it allows items to be placed in one leveled list in the CK, and then potentially dozens or hundreds of NPCs will get that item in their inventory where it is appropriate. You can give all bandits, or all dark brotherhood agents, or college mages items unique to them. You can even give commoners more gold, or give vampires blood potions, for more examples. The possibilities are huge. Exceptions to this rule include summonable characters.
Completely Overhauled Death Item Lists:
As of this moment, almost all creatures and many humanoid NPCs are using a reworked death item list system that has the potential to do many of the same things as the new inventory system I mentioned above, but for death items only. Exceptions exist mainly for immortal characters or summonable characters.


Future Updates:
--Force projection has been added to melee weapons ...
--It is now possible to reallocate all attribute points and focus points under certain rare conditions....
--Several new enchantments have been added
--Enchantment placement is such that most enchantments can be placed on three different armor types, but there are exceptions where the potential for OP gameplay would be too great, and those enchantments are placed on only one or possibly two armor types (eg thorns can only be found on or enchanted onto torso and shield items).
--NPCs have received a new update in the form of massively increased variety in apparel and weapons they can be equipped with. This was accomplished by adding literally hundreds of outfits, as well as the armor and weapon leveled lists that comprise them, and changing NPCs to use them. This was done with an eye towards greater variety, more realism, and more interesting, but appropriate nuance. NPCs will now be using enchanted equipment more often, and they will occasionally be wearing rings and amulets. The chances of any of that appearing on an NPCs worn equipment increases with NPC level and type. NPCs that should be wearing armor named after their particular race will more often be wearing those types of armor, where it wouldn't conflict with their faction or occupation (case in point: orcs more often wear orcish armor). Why should the dovahkin be the only one with interesting armor, after all? Boss NPCs can be equipped with dragonbone or even daedric weapons and armor very late in the game (lv 60 or above), so watch out! One last thing: using Ars Amorum with this version is very highly recommended: the armors and weapons it adds will be blended with SU leveled lists in nearly every instance where it is appropriate. The compatibilty patch for Ars Armorum includes these changes.

-Over 47 alchemy effects from oblivion and morrowind were added back into tamriel.
-add attribute damaging effects to npc spells and abilities
-add scrolls and staffs for familiar spells
-use 'get stamina percentage' condition to affect player movement speed.
-use 'getbaseactorvalue' to determine if attack will do something?
-'get health percentage' may also be useful
-as well as 'getactorvaluepercent'
-add new bound weapons